<story><title>Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/10/05/detroit-wants-to-be-the-first-big-american-city-to-tax-land-value</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Land value taxes don&amp;#x27;t factor in improvements. Improving the land results in no property tax change, so they incentivize doing more useful things with the land.</text></item><item><author>ejstronge</author><text>Perhaps someone who has thought about this more can explain how a &amp;#x27;land value tax&amp;#x27; differs from existing property tax regimes that explicitly examine the value of improvements and the value of land...&lt;p&gt;This Detroit case is interesting because there are different rates of taxation on the land, but the difference in rate could also be obtained by increasing the land component of a parcel&amp;#x27;s value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lend000</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve gone back and forth on LVT, but don&amp;#x27;t currently support it.&lt;p&gt;The problem is determining what the land is worth. If you use a periodic market-based auction system (the only known way that could possibly yield accurate prices), then you give the government and the wealthy extraordinary power to kick people out of their residences, even ones in which the tenants built the house. Good for the collective perhaps, but terrible for individual autonomy. This could be mitigated by auctioning off longer length (~say 30 year) leases, but you can end up with huge value mismatches after 30 years of change, just like today, and I suspect there would be other unintended consequences. For example, things wouldn&amp;#x27;t be built to last, they&amp;#x27;d be built to generate as much value as possible before the lease is auctioned off again.&lt;p&gt;And even then, you haven&amp;#x27;t really determined what the land is worth, since any rational auction participant is considering how much money can be made with the existing improvements on the property.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I hope they do try it in Detroit, since I have no stake in the city and it seems like it has more to gain than to lose from such an experiment.</text></comment>
<story><title>Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/10/05/detroit-wants-to-be-the-first-big-american-city-to-tax-land-value</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TulliusCicero</author><text>Land value taxes don&amp;#x27;t factor in improvements. Improving the land results in no property tax change, so they incentivize doing more useful things with the land.</text></item><item><author>ejstronge</author><text>Perhaps someone who has thought about this more can explain how a &amp;#x27;land value tax&amp;#x27; differs from existing property tax regimes that explicitly examine the value of improvements and the value of land...&lt;p&gt;This Detroit case is interesting because there are different rates of taxation on the land, but the difference in rate could also be obtained by increasing the land component of a parcel&amp;#x27;s value.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ses1984</author><text>Don’t improvements in nearby plots change the value of a plot of land?</text></comment>