4 ms·

Not true. It's not each piece of land that you are optimizing, but the community as a whole. If you were to build up Central Park, yes, you could get more inco

Not true. It's not each piece of land that you are optimizing, but the community as a whole. If you were to build up Central Park, yes, you could get more income for that space. Because people get less access to things that they want, everyone would move out to CT or NJ. Less tourists would come. The surrounding land would all drop, it would hurt NYC land values as a whole. In fact, with proper zoning in place that does not incentivize scarcity, one thing we would quickly find is that middle housing would finally be able to be built, and that middle housing would then lead to less skyscrapers in all but the biggest cities and central-most downtowns.

jjav 4y ago
> It's not each piece of land that you are optimizing, but the community as a whole. If you were to build up Central Park, yes, you could get more income for that space. Because people get less access to things that they want, everyone would move out to CT or NJ. Less tourists would come. The surrounding land would all drop, it would hurt NYC land values as a whole. How do you propose finding the optimal balance, and even tricker, to encode that into the tax code for computing LVT for each lot? Let's say paving over all of Central Park with highrise apartments makes NYC less attractive (I'll agree) and that leads to people moving out and housing prices collapsing (I'm not so sure about that, people might tolerate less nice living in exchange of economic opportunity of NYC). What if only 50% of the Central Park land area is built up? Or 64%? Where exactly is the sweet spot that will extract as much value as possible while still not driving too many people away? That's all going to be very speculative, there's no way to know exactly. And to encode the optimal answer into tax law? Seems impossible. Also when you say: > It's not each piece of land that you are optimizing, but the community as a whole. Every proponent of LVT I've heard, always says that every plot of land should be taxed based on its maximum economic potential. I had not heard arguments about trying to balance it over the community as a whole. And how do you encode that balancing goal into tax law?
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  Yeah, good question. Another thing to consider here is if instead of putting skyscrapers into Central Park, what would happen if it was instead paved over into a single massive parking lot? I think one way to handle this is to treat each 'scope'(local, state, federal) of government as its own land value tax, and your taxes would go to your local community, but a piece of which would then need to pay the state tax, etc... It would be in the interests of NYC to use their land to the best use that they determine. If they choose poorly and paved over Central Park, this would meaningfully impact their finances. And what of the privately owned Bryant Park, would they need to pay the Land Value Tax despite the fact that they are just as positive externality driving as Central Park? Grand Central Station was another case of this, where the city disallowed the company that owned it to knock it down and build a skyscraper, as renting out the skyscraper would earn the company more money. Georgists care very deeply about tracking the capturing of positive externalities, but this is the opposite. This is attempting to value the release of positive externalities. I don't have a perfect answer for this, but it's clear there are 'privately-owned' places that act as publicly-owned, and thus if we exempt from taxes public, they deserve to as well. I don't like exemption, - it will surely breed corruption - but I see no real way to find out what that value really is.

jjav 4y ago

> It's not each piece of land that you are optimizing, but the community as a whole. If you were to build up Central Park, yes, you could get more income for that space. Because people get less access to things that they want, everyone would move out to CT or NJ. Less tourists would come. The surrounding land would all drop, it would hurt NYC land values as a whole. How do you propose finding the optimal balance, and even tricker, to encode that into the tax code for computing LVT for each lot? Let's say paving over all of Central Park with highrise apartments makes NYC less attractive (I'll agree) and that leads to people moving out and housing prices collapsing (I'm not so sure about that, people might tolerate less nice living in exchange of economic opportunity of NYC). What if only 50% of the Central Park land area is built up? Or 64%? Where exactly is the sweet spot that will extract as much value as possible while still not driving too many people away? That's all going to be very speculative, there's no way to know exactly. And to encode the optimal answer into tax law? Seems impossible. Also when you say: > It's not each piece of land that you are optimizing, but the community as a whole. Every proponent of LVT I've heard, always says that every plot of land should be taxed based on its maximum economic potential. I had not heard arguments about trying to balance it over the community as a whole. And how do you encode that balancing goal into tax law?

ItsMonkk 4y ago
Yeah, good question. Another thing to consider here is if instead of putting skyscrapers into Central Park, what would happen if it was instead paved over into a single massive parking lot? I think one way to handle this is to treat each 'scope'(local, state, federal) of government as its own land value tax, and your taxes would go to your local community, but a piece of which would then need to pay the state tax, etc... It would be in the interests of NYC to use their land to the best use that they determine. If they choose poorly and paved over Central Park, this would meaningfully impact their finances. And what of the privately owned Bryant Park, would they need to pay the Land Value Tax despite the fact that they are just as positive externality driving as Central Park? Grand Central Station was another case of this, where the city disallowed the company that owned it to knock it down and build a skyscraper, as renting out the skyscraper would earn the company more money. Georgists care very deeply about tracking the capturing of positive externalities, but this is the opposite. This is attempting to value the release of positive externalities. I don't have a perfect answer for this, but it's clear there are 'privately-owned' places that act as publicly-owned, and thus if we exempt from taxes public, they deserve to as well. I don't like exemption, - it will surely breed corruption - but I see no real way to find out what that value really is.