Personally, I don't have a problem with land ownership, i've got a problem with speculation and rent seeking. The point of a lease is you've gotta pay rent, which to my eyes is a good, easy to implement approximation of a land value tax.
Building something from scratch whether it be a city, company, or even just an area of a city is often a risky endeavor. ROI horizons are long so there generally needs to be significant compensation for that risk.
Perhaps part of the problem in the US is it is not profitable enough to found new cities. We've capped the upside with things like statewide rent control and strict countywide zoning while also increasing costs with endless environmental reviews and the number of ways in which developments can be sued into oblivion.
If we encouraged more speculation and rent seeking we might have vibrant new cities.
However... speculation on the underlying land, which is not fungible and one of the few things on this planet earth that is actually completely inelastic with a totally fixed supply, is bad. I won't say this is a popular tax, but it's not unheard of.
I think a really great example here is Singapore, which effectively doesn't have private land ownership and has been pretty spectacularly well developed in the last few decades.
It seems we could never have LVT in the US because it would be political suicide to 10x the tax rates on granny and low-income neighborhoods.