4 ms·

To clarify, it's not a flat dollar amount per square foot, it's a flat percentage of value. An acre of land in Wyoming is not taxed the same $/sqft as an acre o

• daveguy 4y ago
  Why couldn't ther be a tax per sqft? LAT rather than LVT. Would it change incentives in the way gp hypothesizes? Seems like it would.
  • geocon 4y ago
    That would be a terrible idea, frankly, because it will cause gradients of overbuilding/land abandonment and underuse. Think about it this way: you have a city where land is worth $30/sqft/yr in the center, $10 at the edge and $20 in between. If you set the tax at $20/sqft/yr, you will not incentivize people to build enough in the center of the city. It will be just fine in the middle, but it would be impossible to earn enough money from land to pay the tax on the outside of the city, so people would just abandon the land or try to build way more than you would actually want there (in which case the supposed land tax is actually cutting in and taxing labor and property as well)
    • daveguy 4y ago
      I didn't mean there would only be a sqft / yr based on the value. I meant there would be a sqft / yr + value. So the city center would still be a higher tax than the edge. The edge would still be worth more to build on because of the lower base-dominant tax. But it does make the edge less accessible to lower incomes due to the base tax. It should probably be a max value or max sqft on a given entity than try to indirectly force that with tax values. There's a reason we have anti-trust laws.
• jeffreyq 4y ago
  How does "value" get defined here? In the context of LVT.
  • rcpt 4y ago
    The same way we've been doing property assessments for decades. Just easier because there's no structure to assess