LVT Landscape Live

In the last six months, Kentucky and Virginia passed LVT enabling legislation. And local governments are actively looking into implementation.

Join us June 3rd at 7PM ET for a webinar with the folks introducing, researching, and passing LVT legislation:

Ohio State Senator Louis Blessing, Louisville Abundance Fellow Jackson Arnold, Charlottesville Planning Commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates, and Institute for Progress Fellow Reed Schwartz

RSVP Now

Kevin Erdmann, a housing economist and fellow substacker, recently wrote a piece suggesting that property taxes are land value taxes. The basic argument is that (at least in the cases he outlines) conventional property tax falls entirely on land value anyways, so all we need to do to achieve Georgist goals is to increase property taxes.

We like Erdmann, and although we respectfully disagree with this particular take, a) Substack beefs are good for both sides’ engagement, and b) we’ve actually been meaning to talk about this exact subject for a while, so we will happily take the bait and repay our fellow housing blogger with some considered opinions about what he’s missing.

First, Erdmann’s right that the property tax contains a land value tax, and he’s certainly not wrong in endorsing property tax as a pretty good tax (something we’ve done ourselves), especially over alternatives such as sales tax, income tax, etc.

However, to suggest that property taxes are equivalent to land value taxes, or that we can achieve all our goals with property taxes alone, is wrong.

Contra Erdmann, we argue that the building tax component of a property tax is a much bigger deal than he’s giving it credit for, that it creates real distortions and disincentives to build (and therefore incentives to hoard land speculatively), and that this all becomes much clearer when you take into account the fact that the building tax applies repeatedly year over year upon the same asset.

Erdmann’s Argument

Erdmann’s article is quite short, so we recommend reading it in full, but we will summarize it here; it’s all about the mathematical incidence of taxes. “Incidence” here being a fancy tax word for “where does the burden of the tax mostly (or entirely) fall – on the building value or on the land value?”

The argument starts with a few opening premises:

• A property is a bundle of land and building that are sold or rented together as one piece.

• The rent a landlord gets from the property is fixed by local supply and demand for such land/building bundles

• Building price is fixed at its replacement cost (what you would have to pay to rebuild it from scratch today, minus depreciation).

• Land price clears based on whatever residual rent is left after the building earns its required yield

Let’s now play Erdmann’s argument out. Imagine a $600,000 home. Half of its value ($300,000) is building, the other half is land. In Erdmann’s model the building’s yield is 8% annually. Now let’s apply a 2% property tax to the whole property. What happens? Here’s what Erdmann says:

1. The rent doesn’t change, it’s a function of supply and demand and the tax hasn’t changed that. In this model, it is $2,750 both before and after the tax.

2. However, the building requires a $2,000/month return (8% of $300,000)

3. The building will keep making that return before and after the tax, the rent will stay the same, and the difference therefore comes out of the “land rent”, which also drops the land price in response:
   
   

Before:

After:

(Those are Erdmann’s charts, by the way)

The market re-equilibrates, with the same $300,000 structure now sitting on a $60,000 lot instead of a $300,000 lot. Erdmann’s conclusion: on any parcel with locational scarcity rent, “any marginal increase in property tax is a 100% land value tax.”

One Graphic Disproves Erdmann

If property taxes were truly economic equivalents to land value taxes, then the incentive systems they create would be the same. But, they are not.

Three parcels next door to each other with the same zoning all have wildly different tax bills per square foot. Under a land value tax, the per-square-foot bill would be roughly equal across the three — because the location is roughly equal across the three. Under our actual property tax, the vacant lot pays one-eighth the rate of its neighbors per square foot, because nobody has built anything on it. The system rewards keeping land unproductive.

What does Erdmann get wrong?

He makes one main mistake: he reasons only about an individual parcel in isolation, with a structure that has already been built. He never asks the question that comes before that: would this structure have been built in the first place, at this size, at this quality, on this lot, under this tax regime?

In Erdmann’s setup, the property tax shows up after the $300,000 home already exists, and the only question is how the existing rent splits between structure cost, tax, and residual land. His “100% land value tax” claim is a statement about the incidence of the tax on an already-built parcel, but not on the production margin, and the production margin is not binary.

It is not simply a question of “build or don’t build.” It is a spectrum of how much structure gets built and at what quality: A four-story building or a six-story building? A three-unit house or a single-family detached? Brick or vinyl? An ADU expansion or solar rooftop?

Every one of those margins gets compressed when the building portion of the tax rises. Erdmann shows the property tax falling on the residual at one specific parcel. What he doesn’t show is the city full of parcels where the structure that would have been built under a land value tax is smaller, lower-quality, or absent under a property tax. The parcel graphics above are precisely that city-level evidence: when you tax structures, you get less structure. The vacant lot pays one-eighth the per-square-foot rate of its developed neighbor because the system bills you on what you build, not on what the land is worth, and the developer knows this at the time they decide to build, or not.

Erdmann does attempt to treat structures as non-fixed at one point, but even there he stays at the isolated parcel level and gets it wrong at that scope too:

“If a $100,000 addition was built on the $300,000 structure above, the total rental value, whether taxed or untaxed, would increase to $3,417. However, the additional property tax would lower the residual land value by $40,000, so the net property value would only increase by $60,000.”

Erdmann presents this as fine; land value gets compressed, and the addition still gets built.

But looking closer, the owner just spent $100,000 on the addition and was rewarded with $60,000 of net property value. That is a $40,000 hole on the construction margin. Under a 1% tax instead of 2%, the hole would be roughly half the size. Under a pure land value tax with zero building tax, there would be no hole at all.

And the hole isn’t only about whether the addition gets built. It’s about how much gets built. Assume I own a parcel and I am sizing up an investment: under a 1% regime, the numbers say “build the addition.” Under a 2% regime, the same investment might still pencil but only at three quarters of the size.

Multiply across every owner in the city making decisions like that, and you get a city that builds less and builds smaller.

The Building Tax is A Big Deal

The average property tax in the United States is ~1%. That does not sound like much, when we are used to marginal income tax rates of 20% and sales taxes of 8%. However, building taxes are actually some of the most significant taxes we have, because they are an annual tax applied over and over again to the same asset.

Think of it this way. If I had to pay a huge up front one-time fee every time I wanted to build something, I would obviously build a less valuable building than I would if I didn’t have to pay that fee. Any annual recurring tax can be converted and compared to such a fee through the magic of discount rates. Let’s do this for the building component of a property tax.

Over 30 years, a 1% annual building tax has a “net present value” cost of roughly 12% to 20% of the entire investment, depending on my discount rate. A 2% tax is more like 25% to 40%. At a 5% discount rate, a 2% building tax is about a 31% tax on the original investment in net present-value terms.

This is the wedge sitting between every “build it” decision and every “build it smaller” or “don’t build at all” decision. Erdmann’s model treats it as innocuous because it gets capitalized into a lower lot price in his economic model. However, a developer can clearly see in their pro-forma, that if they build a bigger building, they will pay a higher building tax, because the building will directly add to the total property value.

This big tax has big implications. At a time with a national housing shortage, our local governments’ number one source of revenue, property taxes, are actively disincentivizing development through the packed-in building tax. If we are going to solve the housing shortage, we must decrease the building tax and offset that with an increased land tax. This may be the single, highest-leverage policy a local government can implement.

But, land taxes are annual, too?

It’s important to remind folks why land value taxes are different. Building taxes are bad because building taxes keep buildings from being built on the margin. Land taxes don’t cause land from being built on the margin, because land isn’t built, it’s already there.

You can tax the rent off a vacant lot in Manhattan at 100% and the lot is still in Manhattan tomorrow. The supply of land at any one location is fixed forever, by definition, since location is what makes land land. A tax on the rent of land cannot reduce the quantity of land, so it cannot suppress the construction we actually care about.

Instead, as the land tax is increased, the holding cost also increases, and the selling price decreases in response, but the land itself doesn’t run away.

Buildings, by contrast, do “run away” in response to building taxes. Tax the structure annually and you get less structure: smaller buildings, fewer units, deferred maintenance, abandoned renovations, or even entirely vacant lots, forever waiting for the market to “ripen.” The 12% to 40% present-value burden the table quantifies is, at the same time, the wedge sitting between many development decisions and the threshold at which they get made.

So when a property tax bill arrives, two things are happening on the same envelope. A non-distortive tax on the land portion and a distortive tax on the structure portion which is capitalized into the carrying cost of every new building.

Property taxes are not land value taxes. They contain a land value tax, and that’s good, but they also contain a building tax, and that’s bad.

Split the Rate

Erdmann’s not wrong to be a fan of property taxes in general. By all means, localities should be encouraged to drop their sales and income taxes and trade them for increased property taxes instead. However, there’s an even better policy after you’ve done that: split the property tax into two taxes, and tax the land more, and buildings less.

Lars Doucet and Greg Miller are Co-Founders of the Center for Land Economics.

• Tomorrow (Thursday May 7th), Jeff Fong, YIMBY Action Board Member and Urban Proxima writer, will be live on Substack with Ron Davis at 7PM. Ron is based in Washington State and has played a large role in passing state legislation promoting housing abundance. He was also one of the first folks I spoke with in Washington State when kicking off work on land value taxes there. Alongside Spokane city officials, namely Councilwoman Klitzke, he helped turn the idea into true political momentum. He is now running for Washington State House.

• Will you be at StrongTowns National Gathering in two weeks? If so, there will both be an LVT hangout and meetup right before the reception kickoff (register here), and there will also be a panel on LVT at the conference itself sponsored by Josh Vincent and the Center for the Study of Economics.

Loudoun County, Virginia is collecting record tax revenue while charging homeowners less every single year. The county’s residential property tax rate has dropped 30% over the past decade, even as the county budget has grown. The reason: data centers now generate most of Loudoun’s tax revenue, funding everything from body cameras for police to expanded parkland.

The data center industry in Loudoun County is so strong that one plot of land recently sold for $6 million per acre. This is not Manhattan. It’s exurban Virginia.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been at four conferences, and at each one, someone has asked me the same question: what do you think about data centers? It’s a fair question for this Substack to take on. Data centers are the most expensive land use in America right now, and they’re reshaping the politics of every community where they touch down.

My answer has three parts:

• Data centers should be developed.

• Communities should welcome them.

• Local governments should negotiate much harder to make sure residents benefit.

Data centers are coming, the revenue they generate is real, and the question worth asking isn’t whether to allow them but on what terms.

Build Them

I don’t want to dwell on this point too much. AI is a real, usable tool that has already fundamentally changed humanity. We can stop all model progress today, and we are still at the very beginnings of the way that AI has reshaped our economy.

Compute is a major bottleneck, and future systems will rely on the data centers that provide it. Of course, we will build more efficiencies into existing systems (as DeepSeek did in 2025), but compute and data storage will still be needed. If we stop that progress in the United States, we risk falling behind China at a critical moment for technology and safety.

If you hold that AI is a bubble or actively harmful, you may have reasons to disagree with the premise of this article. But I’m starting from the standpoint that AI is important, U.S. dominance in AI is important, and the data centers that enable both will get built somewhere. The question is on what terms, and localities shouldn’t be afraid to negotiate.

A few facts worth establishing up front. Concerns about data center resource use are largely overblown. Data centers don’t threaten national or regional water supply, and they’re far less damaging to the environment and local water tables than, say, growing corn for ethanol fuel. (Though local impacts can be real, which is exactly why negotiation matters.) But data centers also don’t deliver the upside people often assume. Unlike factories or office campuses, they aren’t large jobmakers. They also do not supply amenity value, such as restaurants, hotels, or even entertainment. Instead they are large, nondescript buildings that generate significant revenue per employee.

Put together: data centers are neither as bad for a local economy as resource critics may claim, nor as good as job and amenity boosters may claim. That changes what good policy looks like.

Welcome Them

In December of last year, residents in Chandler, Arizona cheered as the city council rejected a $2.5b data center development. I am from Chandler, and this made me disappointed.

The data center proposed by Active Infrastructure would have contributed significant property tax revenue to the city: $10.2m annually. Indeed, to help incentivize the deal, the developers were ready to sign commitments for every concern of the local government:

• Not enough jobs? A commitment of 750 jobs paying at least $75,000 annually

• Too much water consumption? A commitment to a closed-loop water system

• Too much electricity consumption? A commitment to their own power supply

• Too much noise? A commitment to monitor decibels to ensure noise levels were unchanged

With all these concessions, the council rejected the data center unanimously due to public pushback on environmental and anti-AI concerns. In doing so, they rejected tax revenue that could’ve helped expand fiscal capacity. Having grown up there, I watched the city become what it is today through Intel, Microchip, and the broader Price Corridor tech build-out. Investments like these data centers are the ones that transformed Chandler into a dynamic and growing economy.

Chandler’s rejection of Active Infrastructure’s development sent a signal to the market: don’t build data centers here.

The flipside is Loudoun County, where data centers dominate. For the FY2027 budget, City Journal reports data centers will generate roughly $1.3 billion, about 45% of the total county tax revenue funding everything from body cameras for police to expanded parkland, all without raising taxes on homeowners. Because of data center revenue, Loudoun has lowered its real property tax rate every year for a decade, from $1.145 per $100 in 2016 to $0.805 in 2025

Stop Subsidizing Them

In some places, local governments have actively subsidized data center development. This is a multi-trillion dollar industry exploding in value — they do not need our help.

In Columbus, Google built a $300 million data center through a shell company called Magellan Enterprises LLC. The Columbus City Council approved a 100%, 15-year property tax abatement worth roughly $54 million in exchange for only 20 permanent jobs. Months later, the city learned Magellan was actually Google. The city, of course, was on the hook for the water and electricity infrastructure that made the project viable.

State-level subsidies are even more aggressive. At least 37 states now offer some form of sales and use tax exemption or related incentive to attract data centers. These exemptions waive state sales tax on the computer equipment, servers, software, and (in some states) electricity that data centers buy typically in exchange for hitting a minimum capital investment threshold and creating a small number of jobs.

States have created a race to the bottom where without these incentives, data centers are less likely to develop in the state. In states like Virginia with a burgeoning data center industry, the financial interests are now too entrenched to overturn such a policy.

The numbers have spiraled. When Virginia created its exemption in 2008, the Department of Taxation projected an annual cost of $1.54 million. In FY2025, the actual cost was $1.6 billion. In FY2024 alone, the exemption cost Virginia $1.02 billion, and over the decade from 2015 to 2024, the state forgave $2.7 billion more than half of all economic incentive spending in the commonwealth. Texas is on a similar trajectory, revising its FY2025 cost projection from $130 million to $1 billion in the span of 23 months.

Negotiate With Them

All of which is to say: states have already given the store away. The leverage that’s left lives at the local level which is why how local governments negotiate matters more than ever.

Imagine if local governments partnered with data centers and negotiated with them. These negotiations should start with the obvious: data centers should not negatively harm residents.

Therefore, local governments should ensure that data centers supply the grid with electricity and utilize closed-loop water systems, or ensure through some other means that water usage does not impact residents.

But, local governments can and should go a step further. These data centers are large moneymakers, and the data centers are willing to negotiate to be allowed to develop. Local governments can actively ensure that local residents are positively impacted by their development. This could look like partnering with data centers to create a fund through a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) where the payment is near or beyond the typical property tax the center would pay. PILOTs are often done by local governments as subsidies, but they do not need to be.

The fund could be split-use between paying down residents’ electricity bills and funding capital projects. It appears that Cedar Rapids has already done something similar through a Community Benefit Agreement, though likely the math breaks out to still be a significant subsidy.

If cities proactively built these systems of negotiation, data centers which already spend significant time on land acquisition would actively compete to locate where the city had already handled permits and approvals through a pre-set framework. Done right, this could be a win-win: data centers face less community pushback because their investment directly lowers costs for residents, and cities get reliable operating funds.

We can have data center progress without electricity poverty. We just have to bargain for it.

Greg Miller is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Land Economics.

This is the latest article in the “Mass appraisal for the masses” series, based on an interview with Thomas Holding, an assessor from North Carolina I met at the 2025 IAAO Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Among other topics, this series previously covered the early 20th century communal system for valuing land, the simplest viable method for valuing land, and how South Korea values land.

Today’s interview turns its focus back to the US, describing the most common and established methods for valuing land that are actually in practice in property tax valuation offices throughout the United States.

NOTE: Neither the Center for Land Economics nor Progress & Poverty Substack has any business relationship with Thomas Holding and his employer, Piner Appraisal.

Thomas’ Background

LARS: Tell us about yourself, Thomas.

THOMAS: I’m a certified general appraiser in the state of North Carolina. I have a background not just in fee appraisal1, but for the last decade or so, I have also worked in tax offices2 as an appraiser in both the commercial and residential sides. Before that I worked with clients—typically law firms—that would hire our appraisal firm when contesting their client’s assessed valuations. Typically, these were commercial or industrial type properties.

LARS: Is it safe to say you’ve been on all sides of the aisle? “Defense” and “prosecution,” fee appraisal and mass appraisal, public and private sector?

THOMAS: Very safe to say. Correct.

LARS: And you’re with a company now, Piner?

THOMAS: Yes, Piner Appraisal, which has three separate entities, each offering different services related to mass appraisal. We have an imagery division, solutions division, and then we have a software division. At Piner Appraisal, we concentrate on doing mass appraisal for different counties, principally in North Carolina.

LARS: How many years of experience?

THOMAS: Total, around 30 years, in fee and mass appraisal. I’ve been an employee in three different county tax offices, all in North Carolina. They ranged from a relatively small county all the way to one of the largest counties in the state, which was Wake County.

LARS: How many parcels are in Wake County?

THOMAS: I believe there are around 430,000 now. When I was there, they were in the 350,000 range, but it is growing exponentially.

LARS: And what’s the smallest you’ve done?

THOMAS: 65,000.

LARS: So you’ve done all scales, you’ve done private, you’ve done public, you’ve done government, you’ve done not-in-government, you’ve done fee appraisal, you’ve done mass appraisal. What about sectors? Have you done residential, commercial, etc.? What sides of it have you done?

THOMAS: All of it. When I started out, I was working under the tutelage of a fee appraiser, and his specialty was in property tax assessments, challenging the valuations. Principally, that was for large commercial clients and it lasted for nine years. After that I began my governmental career working at two smaller county tax offices before moving back to Raleigh and working for Wake County. No matter the tax office, they all start you out measuring decks, working permits, and picking up new construction. In Wake County, they eventually let me work on commercial appeals.

LARS: So would it be safe to say you’ve pretty much seen it all?

THOMAS: I’ve seen a lot.

The Sales-Adjusted Cost Approach

LARS: What is the basic valuation procedure used in tax offices?

THOMAS: Ultimately, when you break down what we do in a tax office, everything is separated out between the improvements and the land. The way it is, in North Carolina at least, everything is on a cost basis.

LARS: Let’s have a quick term definition. You just said “cost basis.” By “cost,” you mean the replacement cost of the building?

THOMAS: Yes. Ultimately, you’re looking at the cost of construction; cost to construct, minus all forms of depreciation—physical, functional, and economic.

LARS: There’s three lines in your final appraisal, right? There’s your total market value, there’s your land value, and there’s your improvement value, right?

THOMAS: Correct. Because the cost is worked out in advance of valuing the land, ultimately, once you set your cost schedules, really all we’re valuing is the land.

Cost Schedules

LARS: Interesting. So you say the “cost schedules” are frozen ahead of time. Is that a North Carolina thing?

THOMAS: It might be. I know for each county in North Carolina, when you set your cost schedules for the different building types and different things, that has to be voted on and approved by the county commissioners. And there’s a public hearing too. So in theory, anybody from the public can go in there and can contest those costs.

LARS: So those cost schedules, those are all public. Can anyone get to see those?

THOMAS: Yes.

EDITOR: Here’s the Wake County, NC 2024 schedule of values.

LARS: That’s very interesting. So you’re saying in North Carolina, they’ve decided as a matter of law, that they go get the best evidence they can, gather all this construction information, then freeze it so they’re limiting the assessor’s degrees of freedom?

THOMAS: It can be limiting, however it’s not meant to straitjacket assessors. In order to comply with state tax laws, and provide ample time for local government and public input, there has to be a cut off point so that the rest of the revaluation process can proceed.

LARS: So if you’ve got this kind of a building, these are the cost books you have to use.

THOMAS: Correct.

LARS: And then you said something interesting. You said, “really all we’re valuing is the land.”

THOMAS: In a way, yes.

LARS: You’ve got these cost books you have to use, and those are frozen ahead of time. So elaborate how you get from there to the final value.

THOMAS: So in theory, if the depreciated cost of the components has been determined by your modeling in the CAMA3 system, the only unknown variable is the land value.

LARS: So when we say “replacement costs,” we mean “what would it cost if I had to replace my house today?” But then you have to subtract from that cost the other word you used, “depreciation.” Let’s tackle that first.

Depreciation

THOMAS: Correct. If you were to build it as of today, you’ve got a brand new house.

LARS: But the depreciation is—my house has had three children and one cat in 15 years. So wear and tear?

THOMAS: Well, there are various forms of depreciation. There’s functional depreciation, then there is the physical age of it.

LARS: But say, crayons on the walls? Holes in the roof? That’s physical, not functional?

THOMAS: That’s physical.

THOMAS: For functional depreciation, say you have a three bedroom brick ranch with one bathroom. In a modern marketplace, most families want a house with at least two bathrooms. You would have to sell for a reduced price, because it’s a disincentive to the market for you not having that extra bath.

LARS: So an extreme example could be that I built a ski lodge, but then all of a sudden, because the Earth’s axis shifts or something, the weather changes and now it’s at the beach. There’s not much demand for a ski lodge at the beach?

THOMAS: Now that’s what we call an external obsolescence, which is another kind of depreciation. It’s kind of like if you build a subdivision next to a garbage dump, and there’s a nasty odor throughout the neighborhood due to its proximity to the landfill. That is an external factor you cannot control. But that is a type of an externality that you have to adjust for that affects value.

LARS: Or if I have a lake house and then the lake dries up?

THOMAS: Right. It’s no longer a lake house. That’s external. Functional depreciation is to the house itself. If the typical expectation in the market is two and a half baths and your house only has one bath, but the market wants two baths at a minimum, you’re going to have to sell that house at a depreciated value relative to the rest of the houses in the market. Because that’s a market expectation. Now you have to determine the “cost to cure.” The cost to cure is to build another bathroom. Is the cost to cure or remedy that functional obsolescence greater than the cost that you’re going to receive in the market?

LARS: Okay, so let’s lay that out. The different kinds of depreciation you mentioned: physical, functional, and external.

LARS: Do all of them have a cost to cure?

THOMAS: No, you might have to judge. You can’t cost-to-cure an external one, unless you move that whole subdivision away from the garbage dump or maybe close the dump down. You can’t cure the fact that the lake dried up, but you can cure functional obsolescence by adding a new bath, if it makes economic sense.

LARS: Or replacing the roof.

THOMAS: Well, that’s more physical than functional. You’re lessening physical depreciation by putting on a new roof and extending its physical and possibly economic lifespan. As an appraiser, you’re not really looking at how long the building will physically last, you’re looking at how long the improvement will continue to add value to the parcel. This is typically determined by the market, and is referred to as a structure’s remaining economic life. When added together, if all of the forms of depreciation exceed the current depreciated cost of the improvement, then that structure will have no contributory value. If it can’t be cured by correcting the functional obsolescence and physical condition, then that improvement will have reached the end of it’s economic life. When the improvements no longer contribute to the overall value of the property, this could also be an indicator that the highest and best use might be changing to an alternate use.

LARS: So if the highest and best use here used to be, I don’t know, a fishing shack, but now it’s a big subdivision or whatever?

THOMAS: It might be, if the site is large enough, it might go from commercial to residential, or as is typical in many urban areas, a residential neighborhood might be changing to commercial.

LARS: So for example, this used to be just a little house on the prairie, but now it’s a happening business center, and highest and best use might be that we should put a three-story office building here?

THOMAS: Correct.

LARS: So first, you’ve frozen these cost tables. Then there’s the cost-to-replace-new, but then there’s also these three forms of depreciation and obsolescence to worry about. Now are those depreciation tables frozen as well, or are they specified in mechanical guidelines you must follow?

THOMAS: They are approved and set when the schedule of values is approved. Depreciation tables are meant to recreate typical economic life cycles of different property types and should represent local market norms as much as possible during a revaluation period. After testing, depreciation tables are submitted to the representative taxing board or county commissioners and are voted on as well. If approved, they are used in property analysis and do not change. As I stated before, because everything has to be presented to the county commissioners and public, there has to be a cut off point so that the rest of the revaluation process can proceed.

LARS: And so from a kind of devil’s advocate perspective, right or wrong, you don’t have a choice, but to follow those rules once they’re voted on.

THOMAS: Once they’re set, yes.

LARS: And so if there’s a problem with them, then the cure is to make better decisions before you vote on them.

THOMAS: You don’t typically have a problem with the cost or depreciation tables. Before you submit them they have been pretty thoroughly tested.

LARS: But generally speaking, are they pretty good?

THOMAS: You can get very close when modeling your cost and depreciation schedules. The IAAO has many great courses that teach how to do all these things.

Land Residual Theory

LARS: Let’s say a property sells for something that does not match the simple cost to replace it in the abstract. Is the difference typically just the land value? According to the naïve “land residual” theory at least? Or is there more to it?

THOMAS: No, not necessarily.

LARS: Let’s go into that.

THOMAS: In appraisal theory, like I said, you have three approaches to value. We have the sales comparison and cost approaches, where you analyze sales prices and the cost to build (including the land and site costs). If you have an income component, there’s also the income approach. In theory, all three methods should arrive at the same value, unless there is an imbalance in the Four Factors of Production4. Land residual theory is more of an appraisal/economic concept that says land value is what remains after the other factors of production have been paid. Under land residual theory, the income generated by the property is first allocated to non-land components like the building and the business. Whatever income is left over is attributed to the land and is then capitalized into an indication of land value.

LARS: You just listed the “cost approach” and “sales comparison” approaches as two separate things, but appraisers I talk to often say they use the “sales-adjusted cost approach.” Is that a hybrid of the sales comparison approach and cost approach together, or is it a separate term of art?

THOMAS: A sales-adjusted cost approach is best understood as a cost approach calibrated by market sales, not as a separate third approach and not exactly a full hybrid approach in the same sense as blending two independent indications of value. In assessment work, especially mass appraisal, we often build cost schedules for structures, and depreciation tables for age, condition, and quality. But those schedules cannot simply be theoretical construction-cost numbers. They have to be tested against actual market behavior.

LARS: So you’re doing a cost approach and then you’re also looking at the market sales and reconciling them?

THOMAS: Yes, in a way. That is where the “sales-adjusted” part comes in. After developing the cost model, the model is checked against qualified sales. If the model is consistently too high or too low for a neighborhood, property class, age group, market area, or building type, market-derived adjustments or calibration factors can be applied if necessary. Those adjustments are derived from sales, but the underlying valuation framework is still the cost approach. There are always things in real estate markets that are hard to gauge, and you know, the standard variations in sale price you’ll typically see out in the wild for residential housing is between 5 and 8%. These are just normal market variations. People have their preferences like, “Hey, I like that kitchen better…”

LARS: “There was a peach tree in the backyard that reminded me of my mom.”

THOMAS: Exactly. And I’m paying more.

LARS: And someone else is a hard bargain driver. And so you’ve got that central tendency that runs through it and then some people get a good deal, some people get a bad deal, some people get nostalgic.

THOMAS: But to them, it might not be a bad deal because they wanted whatever feature that was.

LARS: Do you just follow that central tendency of the market rather than any individual sale?

THOMAS: Yes, we’re reacting to where the market is going and then we’re trying to model that as best as you can within the constraints of our CAMA system.

LARS: And the market is more an overall tendency than anything reflected in any individual sale?

THOMAS: Yes.

LARS: So my next question is, now that we’ve done all the homework and explained to the lay audience, what all our jargon and our terms mean and what we’re working with and how we’re limited by the cost tables, at least in North Carolina, how do you then make up the difference and create a combined value, a full, filled out, all three lines that matches the market tendency that you’re seeing and is also well supported and defendable? How do you do that?

Location, Location, Location

THOMAS: It’s not just as simple as the remainder is the land value, because there could be other elements. It could be an external factor like we talked about that is affecting that particular property or a group of properties. They could be next to a garbage dump. So that might require a local adjustment made just for that specific neighborhood. Those houses might be tract houses in this neighborhood that are exactly the same as tract houses across the county made by the same builder and everything. But just because of an external factor that affects this group of houses, we might have to apply some type of factor to make them reflect the market in that particular neighborhood. It’s locational in effect. It’s located next to a dump. It’s hyper-local. It’s an external factor that affects that. So that’s some assessor jargon.

LARS: So an “external factor” is something that might apply to a very specific localized area as opposed to a land table for a whole area?

THOMAS: Correct. The general model should match the greatest number of parcels county wide. Then you drill down into the ones that don’t fit on the line. The hardest part to appraise is not the properties that fit the model. We spend the most time generally in looking for the ones that don’t fit and try to determine “why didn’t it fit?” Is there some factor that I have overlooked that might be affecting its value that I need to compensate for in some way?

LARS: So you’re examining the market for those factors. So you do not just do a one-size-fits-all solution? You might start with a broad brush, but then you notice that you have to dial in these exceptions?

THOMAS: Correct.

LARS: And what are those exceptions?

THOMAS: All the typical ones that apply to real estate like location, size, age, condition, quality, extra features, and economic or market conditions. A locational factor could be how close a property is to a metro station. That might be a positive factor, but if the residential property is located directly adjacent to the rail line and is subject to loud noises 24/7, then to some people this might be a negative factor. If this is reflected in the sales data of properties that have these attributes, as opposed to properties that do not suffer from the same condition, then you can usually derive a suitable adjustment factor that can be applied to those specific properties.

Land Value and Size

LARS: It sounds like you start with these cost tables, and then you also have sale prices from the market. The prices tell you where the general market tendency for an area is for a certain kind of property. But each property is unique, and has unique characteristics. You punch those characteristics into the cost tables, and you get your cost value plus depreciation, and you work out your functional depreciation and all the rest of it. And then, you have land values that you can paint across a neighborhood. However, lots can be different sizes, they can be different shapes. How do you handle that? Does each lot get a standard base value with exceptions, is it handled per square foot, per acre, how do you do it?

THOMAS: Different tax offices do it in different ways. Particularly in tract neighborhoods, they might have assigned a base lot value, which is standard for every lot in that development regardless of size. Usually the unit of measure for the land depends on several factors like its size, shape, or maybe road frontage. For residential neighborhoods, typically the lot value is used.

LARS: So within a neighborhood, the same price per lot.

THOMAS: Correct.

LARS: And is that to reflect a market where people are like, “I don’t really care how big the lot is as long as it’s big enough for a house?”

THOMAS: It might. And you tend to find that in urban areas everything’s generally a rectangle or a square, there’s not even that much of a change in size anyway.

THOMAS: You might find more variation in rural areas, or you’ll see parcels around a cul-de-sac that are pie or more wedge shaped and are larger than a typical parcel in the same development. You might have two residential parcels and one is a standard size, and one might be twice that size. But they’re zoned the same, they have the same utility, the same use. When compared to the smaller average sized parcel, the larger parcel has “extra” land. That “extra” land has to be evaluated, so as an appraiser, you have to perform a series of tests to determine what value if any the extra land adds to the overall value. You can look at the zoning to see what you can legally do to that extra land. Can it be separated from the main tract and developed on its own? If it can pass a series of tests, the appraiser can determine if the “extra” land is excess land or surplus land. This applies to both residential and commercial properties. If a larger parcel can be subdivided, then you will have to determine the highest and best use of the hypothetical parcel.

LARS: So when you say “highest and best use,” you’re really saying “highest and best legal use?”

THOMAS: That’s part of it. It might be a physical use too. If the parcel’s half an acre, it might be zoned for that, but if you can’t physically put another structure there, it’s not physically possible to do it. Land has to pass all these tests: is it physically possible, legally permissible, is it financially feasible and will it generate the highest return to the owner?

Excess Land vs. Surplus Land

LARS: You just used some terms I’d like you to define for our audience: “excess land” and “surplus land.” What is the difference?

THOMAS: Surplus land is extra land that is not currently needed to support an existing improvement, and that land cannot be separated from that parcel and have another use. Say you have zoning that’s a minimum lot size of 10,000 square feet. If you have another lot next door that’s 14,000 square feet, you can’t chop off 10,000 for one house and 4,000 for another and legally build another house on it. The 4,000 square foot portion really doesn’t have the same functionality as the other. You can’t split it off, you can’t redevelop it and put another house on it. It’s just extra undevelopable land that typically has little contributory value relative to the base lot.

LARS: I believe the way you put it yesterday was: “surplus land is just more grass to mow, but excess land is extra land you have that you could, if you wanted to, turn into its own lot or its own use.”

THOMAS: If it passes all the tests I previously mentioned, there’s a potential that’s not being met and you can develop it for a separate use. This is why surplus land is more valuable.

LARS: And you’re making those designations in the CAMA?

THOMAS: It depends on the system. In different counties where I’ve worked, that might not be noted in the parcel information. If you can visualize the parcel characteristics like size, shape, topography and zoning when you’re looking at ArcGIS or aerial photography, you usually get an indication that a parcel needs to be looked at a little more. If it’s necessary, you can always determine the value of the excess land and apply that as some type of adjustment.

How Complicated is it?

LARS: There’s this phenomenon when anything you know how to do feels easy to you, but to someone who doesn’t, it feels impossible. When I talk to people about valuing land, they sometimes say, “it’s going to be so insanely complicated, we’re going to have to hire all these people to do it. Meanwhile, I see we’ve got, what, 11,000 property jurisdictions in North America, and the staff are already there and their salaries are already being paid? There’s someone local who’s already doing it. And in your jurisdiction, that person was you. Is this actually as complicated as it sounds?

THOMAS: Not really. I found in working with the public, a lot of times the hardest part is just explaining things to property owners. “Why is my value different from my next-door neighbors?” or why, especially in commercial, are there different grades or condition ratings? As far as valuation, once you understand it, appraisal theory is appraisal theory as long as you can recognize those factors that affect the value. I guess sometimes the hardest part is recognizing those factors but a lot of that just comes with experience.

LARS: I guess people just get intimidated by the fact that there’s so many parcels that no one could possibly ever do it in a year.

THOMAS: That is difficult. If you notice in most tax offices, when you’re looking at the records going back and you see adjustments in the system for size and shape, and topography. Those usually go back many years because a lot of those factors don’t really change unless the parcel geometry changes due to a sale or a split or something like that. In CAMA systems, that data has been accumulated over many revaluation periods and so that’s why we don’t just discount it and start with a clean slate each time because generally there’s not enough staff, resources or time to individually inspect every single parcel.

Land Appraisal 101

LARS: Okay, now, break it down for me for the sake of our audience. Let’s say I’m a junior appraiser, you’re the chief appraiser, and you tell me “Lars, we’re putting together an in-house land team, you’re the apprentice, here’s a neighborhood and you’re going to value all the land in it. Here’s all your ingredients.” Lay it out for me, how do I do it? Starting with the basics and then building up little by little?

THOMAS: If you’re starting out, you’re going to have them evaluate a tract subdivision where everything is cookie-cutter, as much as possible. That’s a great way to learn, because you can see very clearly the breakout of the costs. A lot of times you go into a subdivision by a tract builder like Lennar, or one of the other nationwide builders, and they will have a component list of prices. You want a covered porch on the back of your house, they can add it for a set price of $4,500.

LARS: And you’ll have that info?

THOMAS: I try to get it if at all possible. I search out every form of data I can get my hands on. We don’t just use national cost manuals, we also use local cost sources like building supply and lumber stores, and other local market data too. Any national cost data that you get, you have to localize it to your particular market, because lumber, transportation, permitting, and labor costs can vary so much.

LARS: And from year to year?

THOMAS: Yes. Costs can definitely change from year to year.

LARS: So I’ve got the cost tables, those are frozen, I don’t have any degrees of freedom there, I just have to follow the rules. I’m going through, I’m punching them into the CAMA. What else am I doing as a junior appraiser to the point where you can feel comfortable letting me do it by myself?

THOMAS: You want to identify if there are differences in home prices in a development. If there are differences, why do they affect certain houses? Is it a difference in the lot size, quality of construction, foundation type? Some developers charge a “lot premium” for different things like a better view a golf course or proximity to the neighborhood pool or some other amenity.

LARS: And so what is the action I’m taking to make the pieces fit?

THOMAS: First, you determine what caused a difference in price, then you check and see if there are similar properties in that neighborhood that might be affected by that same condition. If there are, compare those properties with others that do not have the same condition. This is what we call “matched pairs analysis”. In theory, any difference in value can be attributed to the physical differences between any two properties. Because house types and lots are typically very similar in tract neighborhoods, it is relatively easy to isolate the different components to derive your adjustments.

LARS: Okay, so what that sounds like to me is I’m creating some tables, right? I’m creating maybe like a base value, and then I’m creating some adjustment values for certain cases and defining those?

THOMAS: Possibly, yes. If you can do that in your CAMA system or whatever that you are analyzing. We always have to remember, at least in North Carolina, everything that’s in there has to be made public. We have to be transparent and we have to be equitable.

LARS: So not just those three line items on the public card, but all my scribbles, everything.

THOMAS: Every table is made public. Every county has to publish what’s called a schedule of values, which outlines how your property is valued.

LARS: So if I have “Lars’s dirty hack to make the numbers work,” in there?

THOMAS: You probably wouldn’t want to do something like that. There has to be a way for the public to be able to see how the county calculated your value. When I was in private practice, one of the ways we would successfully challenge an assessed value is if the county utilized unpublished adjustment tables. If a county used adjustment tables or ranges that were not at least referenced in the schedule of values, it was easy to make the case that the undisclosed adjustment was likely arbitrary and a violation of state tax law.

Level 1

LARS: Let’s treat this a little bit like a video game where you start on level one and everything’s real simple and then you add one more thing at a time.

So let’s say I have my neighborhood of tract homes. I’ve got all the cost figured out, all the depreciation. I’ve tagged everything that has a view, I’ve figured out which lots are weird shapes, which ones have excess land or surplus land. I’ve got the zoning ordinance and all that context figured out. I haven’t punched in land values yet, but as far as I can tell I’ve controlled for everything but that. At this point is the difference the land value? I need to make it rise so that when I add it to my cost plus all the other stuff, that I get within acceptable tolerance of the sale prices?

THOMAS: In theory, yes, it is.

LARS: Now, do I just need to make it rise so that when I add it to my cost plus all that other stuff, that I get with an acceptable tolerance to the sale prices?

THOMAS: According to the theory, the sales price minus the depreciated value of the improvements, the remainder is going to be the land value.

LARS: So in a totally homogeneous neighborhood, with all the land the same size and shape and zoning, and all the homes built within, say, five years of each other, and they’re all more or less identical, does pinning down a base lot value get you to the end of “level one?”

THOMAS: Every appraiser wishes that the majority of the subdivisions they analyze are this homogeneous and straightforward. In theory, like I said, it should be very easy to figure out the land value in this type of development.

Level 2

LARS: What’s a complication you add that makes it a little harder?

THOMAS: I’ve run into instances where the county or the state had announced they were going to construct a four-lane road highway adjacent to an existing subdivision. Up until the date that the construction project was announced to the public, the prices of homes and undeveloped lots were consistent throughout the subdivision. After that date, the prices of homes and vacant lots on one side of the street went down $10,000 to $15,000. The proposed road had not been added to the county GIS yet so there was nothing that stood out as to why the sudden difference in sale prices. I was flummoxed so I did what everybody else does, I went to Google and entered the name of the subdivision, the street name in the subdivision, and the main public road at the entrance to the subdivision. Google returned a bunch of news articles announcing the new highway and the 20-foot sound deflecting wall that would run along all the houses bordering the new road. Other times I’ve seen sewage assessments that affect a small subset of houses within a larger development. These things do happen and you do your best to find out what’s going on. It’s like solving a mystery. There are a million different things that pop up like that, sometimes the only way you can figure it out is experience.

Level 3

LARS: What’s another?

THOMAS: You’ve got cases like in Silicon Valley, where you have a 1973, 2,800 square foot brick ranch—that same house might go for $250,000 somewhere in North Carolina. In California it’s $3 million. That’s location specific. It doesn’t have any correlation to the actual cost to build that house.

LARS: So is the difference between the North Carolina home and the California home, I mean, is that just land value premium because of the location?

THOMAS: It very well could be a location premium. It’s definitely a function of supply and demand, and this is not uncommon in other local markets either. There’s always a hot area where somebody wants to live or build.

LARS: The bigger that locational premium is, I figure the easier it is to notice it? As opposed to when the location premium is low, it’s kind of hard to separate.

THOMAS: Generally, it is. Where it can be difficult is when you’ve got adjacent areas that are closer to that high demand area. Redevelopment hasn’t quite crept out there yet, but asking prices already have.

LARS: So this was something I saw just in my own research the other day. I was working on a report for Maryland. And I noticed something—I was looking at the Bethesda neighborhood, which is kind of an upscale place. And I noticed this weirdness while I was validating vacant land sales, I noticed there were vacant land sales there, and they were going for a value that was lower than the improved sales, which is normal. But then I noticed some improved sales that were going for the same price as the vacant land sales. And I noticed they were all homes from the 1930s that were a third as large as all the new buildings.

THOMAS: And that’s the functional obsolescence that we talked about. If the existing house is below current market expectations, Is it curable? Can you add a third bedroom and a second bathroom to the structure to make it more palatable to potential buyers. If not, or if the cost to do so is too high, then the improvements might not have any contributory value.

LARS: What was interesting is that the market seemed to be pricing these things as the building basically being worth zero.

THOMAS: Yep. And that is a clue in itself. When the improvements are trending below the land value or approaching zero, that means the highest and best use is changing or the existing houses may be under improvements for that particular market. And that’s suitable for redevelopment then. That’s, that’s the big clue.

LARS: So, when you see a neighborhood, which has two kinds of building typologies and the older and smaller building typology is not selling for any more than bare sites, then that indicates that the market sees these as tear-downs?

THOMAS: I had a case recently, where a residential property owner purchased an older home that was adjacent to several commercial properties. The property was zoned as commercial, but the residential use was also permitted. The homeowners completely renovated the property and moved into it. When the property was reassessed last year, the residence itself was fully taxed as if it were a residential structure, in like new condition with a very low effective age. The county tax office also valued the land as if it were commercial use, compatible with its zoning. The renovated house might have been considered an under improvement for that lot, but the value of the land indicated a change in the highest and best use. This is not an uncommon occurrence, but it violates the Theory of Consistent use, meaning that the land and the improvements must be valued based on the same highest and best use.

You cannot value the land as though it will be used for one purpose, while also valuing the existing building as though it will remain in another use.

LARS: I see.

THOMAS: If you’re saying the highest and best use of the land is commercial, then the residential improvements have zero value.

LARS: So if you’re going to say that it’s commercial land, which is plausible because it’s zoned commercial and the market might buy that—but if you’re making that argument, the incompatible residential use is contributing nothing to that commercial value.

THOMAS: Exactly. So the county can’t have it both ways and cherry pick the highest value of each, because then you’re overtaxing the citizen in that case.

LARS: What it can’t do is basically create a layer cake of half one and half the other.

THOMAS: Exactly.

LARS: What it can do is say: here’s residential land valuation and residential building valuation, that would be this residential total value. And then, here’s commercial land valuation and commercial building valuation, and in this case the “commercial” building valuation is zero because it’s a residential home.

THOMAS: That’s right. Unless the house could legally be renovated into leasable office space, and if there’s a market for a renovated house as office space, then it could conceivably be converted to commercial use, but it has to be worth it to do so.

LARS: That’s what they would have to defend.

THOMAS: Yes, but fortunately for the homeowner, the county couldn’t defend their valuation, and the land value was reduced.

Final Boss

LARS: So going back to our little video game metaphor, what’s the final boss?

THOMAS: It’s data quality. Always. That’s the bane of every tax office, of every appraiser.

LARS: Is it lack of sales or lack of characteristics?

THOMAS: Generally, it’s lack of sales. You have to compare it with something. And in appraisal theory, if you don’t have sufficient sales in an area, you can either go back in time or you can extend your search area outward to try to find a comparable neighborhood or comparable property. Sometimes that’s easier said than done when you’re doing mass appraisal, because in a lot of tax offices, they like to stay within the jurisdiction of the county. They don’t want to go back in time prior to the previous revaluation. So you might be dealing with three or four years of sales in the county, and especially for commercial properties, you might not have had a sale of a unique property type within that time frame within the county. So you might have to search several counties over or throughout the state to try to find meaningful data.

LARS: Let’s keep it residential for now. Let’s say you’ve got a residential neighborhood and you just don’t have any sales in it, and you go back in time and there’s none recently. But you have another neighborhood that has the same kind of typology. It’s got similar land shapes and sizes and similar building sizes, types, and ages. And you notice you don’t have any land sales in neighborhood A. But in neighborhood B, you do have land sales. And you notice that these neighborhoods have similar selling prices for houses overall. Is it fair to assume they have comparable land values on the neighborhood level?

THOMAS: Yes. If that neighborhood has characteristics similar to one you are evaluating.

Open Data

LARS: So in theory, maybe I have to write some data record requests, but I should be able to go to any North Carolina county and say, can I see your tables and see if I can reproduce all your results?

THOMAS: Yes. Counties should be able to supply you with copies of any tables that were used to value any property. As I stated before, they are typically published in the Schedule of Values, and most counties have copies of those online. If cost ranges were used in the schedule of values instead of a complete table, then you can again request a copy of the complete table that is referenced in the schedule. Sometimes the online representation of what you see as your value is not the complete picture. I always recommend that taxpayers request the actual tax card to be printed out, not just what’s on the web page. The actual tax card will show data from the CAMA system and detail every adjustment that’s made.

LARS: Can you request that in bulk?

THOMAS: I don’t see why not. You might have to pay for printing costs, which would be substantial or typically you can request the information in digital format as an Excel or .CSV file. Most larger counties in North Carolina have most of this information available as a data file on either the tax website or the county GIS website for free.

LARS: Right.

Land as an Afterthought

LARS: Now, I’ve worked with a bunch of different jurisdictions, a bunch of different places, and some places struggle more with land than others, and my goal is just to help everybody learn from the best. And I’ve seen some places where land is sometimes—to kind of be polite—it’s kind of an afterthought. Because we’re taxing on the total value, and there’s no law that really cares about the land value, and so what will sometimes happen is they’ll just do the land as an afterthought, they’ll write something, anything down.

And one thing I’ve seen sometimes is that they will just do an allocation, but the way they’ll do the allocation is per parcel. They’ll have their total market value, and they’ll just be like, okay, the land is, say, 20% of whatever the total market value is.

THOMAS: You have to be careful when you’re doing something like that. If they are trying to just match the sale price, but the land is essentially identical, then this might be masking a feature or condition that has not been picked up by the appraiser. This is especially true for residential properties. Commercial properties might be different if they are income producing and the total value is based on the Income Approach. In my opinion, when residential land is valued this way, it would be much harder if not impossible to defend during an appeal by the taxpayer. It doesn’t make sense that identical lots in the same subdivision or neighborhood would have different values, and if I were a taxpayer, that is the first bit of evidence I would bring up in an appeal.

LARS: What should you do instead in that scenario? What’s the least you can do?

THOMAS: First thing is that I would review the tax cards for all the sales to try and find if the differences in sales prices are anything more than normal variances. There is so much information available on the web including Zillow, Redfin, the local MLS if available, to make sure that what is recorded on the parcel card is correct. Once I did that I would look at my available data to determine which types of analysis I can perform to try and accurately determine the land value. If you have enough improved sales you can utilize the Extraction method where you start with an improved sale and subtract the depreciated value of the improvements to isolate the land value. Like you mentioned, the Allocation method can be used but one of its greatest weaknesses is that it depends heavily on a reliable land-to-building relationship. It’s usually better suited for broad reasonableness checks than for highly precise valuation. If you can find rental information, including current income and expense data, you could possibly use the land residual method. This is an income-based method which estimates the income left over to the land after the improvements receive their required return. With so many residential properties being purchased as AirBnB rentals, data is readily available and can be supplemented with occupancy tax data if it is levied in that city or jurisdiction. Basically, you use whatever appropriate appraisal methodology you have the data for. If possible, perform multiple types of analysis and compare the results to test for reasonableness, then you decide what is the best fit.

LARS: Is it appropriate to say that all else equal, if two side-by-side lots, all the land characteristics, location, and all the characteristics, like size and shape and grading of the land is the same, regardless of the improvements, should they have the same land value?

THOMAS: Yes.

LARS: Because it would require a different characteristic, legal use, et cetera, to justify a different land value, right?

THOMAS: Correct.

LARS: So what is a way to recognize and test when land values are good?

THOMAS: If you see an assessed value that is greatly above or below an acceptable threshold for that land, or if you see what builders are paying for land and the tax value doesn’t reflect the market, then you know somewhere you’re off. As I stated previously, depending on the available data, you can perform other types of analysis besides Allocation. It’s really just a test of reasonableness. When I was taking my first appraisal courses 30 years ago, my instructor always said, “Before you sign off on any value, stop and ask yourself, what would you yourself actually pay for this property?” This goes for both vacant and improved properties. Then ask, “What would a typical person or typical investor pay for the same property?” If there is a difference between the two, you should take another look at your value.

LARS: And you’ve already talked about uniformity is another test.

THOMAS: Correct.

LARS: Thank you very much, Thomas. I really appreciate it. Where can people learn more about your work?

THOMAS: They can come to our website, pinerappraisal.co. We have our contact information on there. You can see the services that we offer.

If you are a Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Land Value Tax (LVT) advocate, you need to be paying more attention to South Korea because that country may just be the biggest opportunity in the whole world for your movement.

For UBI or LVT to succeed anywhere, they must first succeed somewhere.

Politicians are skittish, but they are also sheep—they never want to be the first to try something, but the second something new and trendy seems to already be succeeding, they all get jealous and want to copy it. Therefore, if you want UBI or LVT to succeed, you should scour the world for a place where these two policies are the most:

• Economically feasible

• Technically feasible

• Politically possible

• Socially and politically urgent

That place is South Korea.

South Korea is a Big Deal

South Korea has several features that make it uniquely suited to an aggressive and large-scale UBI pilot funded by LVT, and the political timing has never been better—or more urgent. This blog post is the result of ongoing interviews with various Korean activists—chief among them Vitnarae Kang and Jinsu Lee—working to bring those policies to life in their country; my mission is to spread their message to potential supporters internationally. Jinsu in particular works for the Land & Liberty Institute1. Quotes are by Jinsu unless otherwise indicated, for which Vitnarae provided the English translations. Jinsu’s interview did not originally include links, I added some citations for the convenience of readers, but otherwise did not alter the text except to arrange sections for editorial flow.

Let’s go down the list of why South Korea matters so much right now.

Economically feasible:
Incredibly high Land to GDP ratio

Two of the most common objections to UBI are “how will you ever pay for it?” and “won’t the UBI just lead to inflation when landlords jack up the rents?” Both objections are solved in one stroke with a simple retort: pay for the UBI with a Land Value Tax (LVT).

For this to work, however, there must be sufficiently high land values available that aren’t already being tapped. This is indeed the case in South Korea. South Korea’s land value to GDP ratio is in excess of 500%.

That is an astoundingly high figure, the highest in the OECD. To put that number in perspective, my own research puts the United States’ total land value to GDP ratio in the ballpark of a mere 200%. If you were at all excited by the figures I produced in my article series and book, then you should be more than twice as excited about South Korea’s.

Of course, the immediate reaction to hearing about Korea’s anomalously high ratio is that it sounds too crazy to be true. This must be some kind of temporary bubble, purely artificially elevated land value driven by insane mania or speculative froth that can never actually be captured. However, it turns out that long-run (last 50+ years) land value-to-GDP ratios are ~400%, and that the current ratios aren’t even at peak levels—the all time record tops out around 600%. Plain and simple, desirable land is just that valuable in South Korea—and that scarce.

The upshot? Taxing South Korean land values could generate an enormous amount of revenue, and a modest LVT could easily raise enough for a meaningful UBI with no risk of evaporating the tax base. This would directly drive affordability in two ways: provide direct financial support to struggling Korean citizens, while taxing the speculative extraction that makes housing unaffordable in the first place.

Technically feasible:
The land is already valued

The next objection to a UBI+LVT proposal is griping about how hard it is to value land. As we covered this in our last article, How to Value Land: Korean Style!, Korea has long since solved this problem.

All the land in the country is regularly valued by a central agency, down to the parcel, and this public data is sufficiently easy to obtain that Jinsu Lee has put together an interactive map that shows all the national values down to the individual parcel (https://landforall.kr):

Additionally, all the legal infrastructure for a land-based property tax is already in place, because there is already a nominal property tax. Of course, the current effective tax rate for holding property is quite low (the current political status quo favors high transaction taxes instead), but the existence of a non-zero nominal holding tax still provides the necessary scaffolding for instituting an LVT.

Politically possible:
President Lee Jae Myung

New president Lee Jae Myung has historically been a strong supporter of both UBI and LVT, although he has moderated his stance in public in order to get elected. Sources tell me that he remains a firm true believer and is simply waiting to marshal sufficient political capital, which may already be underway as he is achieving high approval ratings. Meanwhile, the former leader of the opposition, Yoon Suk Yeol, just got jailed for life for attempting insurrection.

This is not to say that there are not political headwinds and stiff opposition to overcome in Korea. However, having a national leader who has even heard of one’s favored policies, let alone personally advocated for both of them in the past, is a far cry from what UBI and LVT advocates are used to here in the West.

Socially and politically urgent:
Housing + Affordability + Fertility crisis

South Korea is widely recognized to be facing an existential crisis, exemplified by their rock-bottom fertility rate far below 1.0, the lowest in the OECD. Youtube explainer channel Kurzgesagt famously declared “South Korea is Over“ in a particularly doomy video with no side order of nuance or irony:

All the Koreans I speak to agree the situation is bad, and that if everyone just follows the status quo, the country is basically done in 50 years. The appetite for reform is high. My Korean friends disagree with the western received wisdom in one regard: they believe their country can still be saved. Here’s Jinsu:

Citizens have self-pride and hope in the fact that they drove out a bizarre government non-violently and established a new government. For this reason, the citizens of the Republic of Korea were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize early this year. Also, I have hope in the fact that President Lee Jae-myung is a very capable administrator while being public-oriented, although he is not a perfect person. While Korean citizens have been steeped in rent-seeking for a long time, on the other hand, they are diligent and have a strong heart for the community. I think we can become a country that is an example of democracy and other countries, not just in terms of productivity but in terms of guaranteeing fundamental rights and distribution, and I want to work toward that. I hope we become a righteous country rather than just a wealthy country.

One of the chief causes of local hardships is incredibly high cost of living burdens on young working families, which LVT + UBI directly addresses. LVT attacks land speculation and boosts housing supply to address the housing shortage, while UBI directly addresses financial hardship. Formulating the UBI as a per person bonus rather than per adult (so that there is an explicit bonus for families with children) tilts the scale even further in the desired direction.

In short, there’s a ton of potential, the institutional ground has already been paved, the current president seems close to ideal and at the apex of his power, and everyone seems to agree that if South Korea does nothing, disaster is certain.

So where do we go from here?

South Korea’s Challenges

First, let’s take an honest look at the challenges South Korea is really up against, not only to properly grasp the urgency, but also so that nobody goes in halfcocked thinking this will be a cakewalk.

Upside-down property tax system

The effective holding tax on real estate South Korea is quite low—around 0.15%—which is lower than just about any city in the United States:

On the other hand, the real estate transfer tax (called “stamp duty” in some countries) is quite high, ranging between 1 and 4%. This is almost completely backwards and the opposite of what economists recommend. Whereas holding taxes on real estate are generally beneficial—and land value tax is the best—transfer taxes are about the worst kind of real estate tax, because they create perverse lock-in effects.

Life for the Average Korean

I asked my Korean researcher friends about daily life, material conditions, and working hours in South Korea right now. Here’s what Jinsu had to say:

40 hours a week (8*5) is the standard, but depending on the occupation, there are cases where people work a lot of overtime. Before the 90s, the ratio of dual-income couples was about 20%, but it has gradually increased to over 50%, and for the younger generation, it is over 60%. On average, they save about 8% of household income.

The wage gap is very large. With median income, life is tight [for a single-earner family]. Because the wage gap is so large, young people compete fiercely to go to good universities and get jobs at large corporations somehow, rather than developing their own aptitudes. Considerable rent-seeking and resulting social waste occur in jobs as well.

Many workplaces are concentrated near the capital, Seoul. To get good jobs, the population flocks to Seoul, where land prices are high. This creates a negative interaction that raises real estate prices again, and the concentration of jobs in the metropolitan area tends to become more severe. This is a problem, and currently, the Lee Jae-myung government is implementing strong local decentralization policies in response (e.g., Rural Basic Income, differentiating subsidies the further a region is from Seoul, etc.). All citizens and the government recognize that concentration in the metropolitan area is a problem.

He’s really not kidding about land prices in Seoul. See that giant red tower on the upper left? That’s Seoul. Notice how part of it goes off the top of the image.

If we go to another map Jinsu produced, landforall.kr, we can look at per parcel values:

(I don’t read Korean, but Google does, so forgive me for any mistakes I’m about to make here)

Gangnam Value

The text on the legend to the left says “Officially assessed land value (10,000 won/pyeong)”. Won is the Korean currency, and a pyeong is a unit of measure that Wikipedia tells me is equivalent to 3.3058 square meters. The parcels that line the streets of the Gangnam District are in the 100-200 million Won/pyeong range; that works out to $1,894-$3,789 USD/sqft, and that’s not even the top of the range. And that’s just land value.

If any of you are old enough to remember this massively popular music video and were wondering what the “Gangnam” in “Gangnam style” meant, just replace “Gangnam” in your mind with “Beverly Hills”:

For context, let’s compare that to this $8.35 million dollar empty lot in San Francisco I found on Redfin, which is listed for a measly $782 USD/sqft:

If you go further out in Seoul to the orange/yellow areas, the land prices are more like $95-$189/sqft, which sounds more reasonable at first (a 2,000 sqft empty lot would go for $190K-379K at those ranges), until you consider two things:

1. South Korea’s average salary is only 61% that of the USA

2. Official land prices lag; currently they are ~69% of market value

To properly guide your intuition, those two figures taken together mean that any figures I put in dollar terms should be further multiplied in your head by about 2.37X to get a rough sense of how expensive things actually are to the average Korean. How does the average Korean experience these sky-high prices?

House prices in Seoul are too expensive (they have risen steeply with some fluctuations over the last 10 years; while prices rose 20-30% over the past 10 years, Seoul house prices more than doubled). For a median-income household in Seoul to buy a median-priced house, they must save for 14 years without spending anything (as of 2024). Therefore, the perception that investing in real estate is the most reliable has spread among all ages. Newlywed couples often buy houses by taking out the maximum possible loans even if it is a stretch, instead of looking for monthly or ‘Jeonse’ (deposit-only) rental houses.

What’s Jeonse? Time to learn some fun Korean vocabulary words!

Jeonse and Yeong-kkeul

Jeonse is a system where instead of paying traditional lease rent as in most countries, you pay a large up front lump sum which can be as much as 80% of the total purchase price of the entire house, as a sort of deposit. Then, when you move out, you receive that entire value back. For those who can actually afford such an up-front payment this creates the illusion that the rental is sort of “free” in the long run—whereas what’s actually happening is that you are losing the time value of that money and surrendering it to your landlord, who invests the deposit and makes money off of the interest for the entire duration of your stay. When you leave and receive your deposit back, not only have you lost money due to inflation, you have also gone without all the interest that large amount of money could have earned you, which went to your landlord instead. As for those who can’t afford jeonse, they would be entirely locked out of those properties, unless they go to extreme lengths to borrow the necessary capital. Vitnarae Kang tells me that due to widespread scams related to Jeonse, more people are favoring conventional monthly contract rent, or simply attempting to buy their own house outright, if they can afford it. Here’s Jinsu again:

Consumption is also significantly shrinking due to repaying the principal and interest of loans. Most people agree that high house prices in the Seoul metropolitan area are a major factor in Korea’s extremely low birth rate. In the case of men, there is a large difference in marriage rates according to income levels. (The marriage rate of low-income men is significantly low).

The next term is Yeong-kkeul, literally, “to scrape together even one’s soul”, is a phenomenon in which you mobilize every single last resource you possibly have: emptying your savings account, taking out every loan you can, borrowing from your family, levering yourself to the complete hilt—in order to make a big purchase (typically real estate).

Vitnarae:

In particular, homeowners and those who own multiple properties utilize online real estate communities, such as Naver Cafes, to influence market analysis and public sentiment. Their aim is to promote excessive leveraging and the practice of “yeong-kkeul” (stretching one’s financial resources to the absolute limit to purchase real estate).

Jinsu:

The new word ‘Yeong-kkeul’—meaning pulling together even one’s soul—was created to mean gathering all available loans from family and banks to buy a house.

To the Moon

Another thing I noticed immediately from the map was just how concentrated land values were in the capital city relative to literally everywhere else. Jinsu explains:

The difference in house prices between Seoul and the provinces is large. The price-to-income ratio is over 10 for Seoul and under 5 for areas outside Seoul. In Korea, housing prices were at a low around 2012. After that, they rose very slowly, then rose very sharply from 2017, and rose particularly much during the COVID period. There was a significant adjustment at the end of 2022 as COVID was ending, but prices continued to rise centered on the metropolitan area due to the real estate stimulus policies of the conservative government in 2023.

(That’s the same government whose last president just got jailed for life for insurrection)

The expression “crazy” would be appropriate for real estate prices in the metropolitan area. Compared to 2012, real estate prices in the metropolitan area have tripled, while income has only increased 1.5 times. While most people think current real estate prices are not normal, they also have a psychology of FOMO and a psychology that real estate is the investment asset with the highest value and safety. The behavior of the past few years was that even the younger generation bought houses in Seoul by taking out massive debt (even taking the risk of reducing spending to pay back principal and interest) out of a psychology that they could never buy if they didn’t buy now.

Banks lend a lot of money through real estate mortgage loans. Although they regulate LTV and DTI, they are not very strong and change a lot according to the tastes of the administration. Since the inauguration of the Lee Jae-myung government in June 2025, there has been some strengthening of real estate policy regulations, but prices have continued to rise moderately. Recently, as the President has been speaking out strongly about strengthening real estate regulations for the past month, real estate prices in the most expensive areas of Seoul have begun to turn downward for the first time in a while. However, prices have not dropped much yet. Personally, I think it is a normal price if Seoul’s house prices drop by more than 30% from the current level.

President Lee — Georgist or not?

So the current president has made a lot of noise in the past about both UBI and LVT. Where did this guy come from, what does he stand for, and what is he saying now?

Jinsu (clearly a fan) says this:

Basically, Lee Jae-myung has and pursues values that resist privilege and consider the weak. While serving as the Mayor of Seongnam, he came out with a really strong Land Basic Income policy when he ran for the presidential primary in 2017. At this time, our Institute and related people had a lot of influence on the drafting of this policy, and Georgist activists, including myself, were quite excited. In the process of the Democratic Party primary, competing with candidate Moon Jae-in who was more popular, he proposed a policy to establish a National Land Holding Tax and distribute it as Basic Income (initially about 300,000 KRW per person per year) and once stated that everyone has an equal right to land. Unfortunately, he lost to Moon Jae-in in the primary. After that, he served as the Governor of Gyeonggi Province, the metropolitan local government surrounding Seoul. After President Moon, Lee Jae-myung went out as the candidate for the Democratic Party but narrowly lost to the conservative party candidate, Yoon Suk-yeol. Since President Yoon Suk-yeol resigned after serving only 3 years of his 5-year term due to impeachment for declaring illegal emergency martial law, Lee has been the President since June 2025.

Here’s where we’re at now:

Regarding real estate, President Lee is speaking in a less radical voice than during his days as a candidate 10 years ago. Recently, regarding real estate policy, he did make a statement that holding tax is the last resort, but he is making it clear that high real estate prices are a problem and earning money through real estate is not desirable. Recently, he showed his strong will to stabilize house prices by selling the house he had owned and lived in for 30 years. Also, he recently gave an instruction to exclude public officials who own multiple houses from drafting real estate-related policies.

President Lee Jae-myung gradually weakened his stance after proposing the strongest LVT policy (combined with Basic Income) in the 2017 presidential primary. However, Lee Jae-myung appears to be a very practical and strategic person rather than an idealist, and in some ways a “populist” (in a neutral sense). He is certainly a politician who pursues idealistic values. He clearly maintains the position that income generated as unearned income from real estate is not desirable and it is necessary to minimize it. However, his idea that holding taxes should be strengthened universally seems weak. As a politician, he seems to have a strong motivation to minimize the groups that lose out due to policy. On the other hand, regardless of political interests, he has stated several times that he will stabilize real estate prices (in the metropolitan area).

So how popular is this guy?

President Lee Jae-myung began to gain popularity with the public by being the first politician to raise his voice saying the President should be impeached during the large-scale mass protests against President Park Geun-hye’s corruption case in 2016. However, he was not popular enough to become the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party at that time. It has now been about 9 months since he started his presidential term, and his approval rating is rising as his term progresses. It is currently over 60%, and the reason people like him is that he is practical and capable.

I double-checked that figure, and as of today his approval rating is actually at 69%, a record high. Let’s see if he can keep it up.

He enjoys substantial debate and broadcasts most cabinet meetings live (for the first time in the history of the Republic of Korea). Although he did not do it intentionally, his mobile phone number is public, so he reads all the text messages people send and tries to continue communicating with people through X (Twitter). On the other hand, Korean media has a strong conservative tendency, so he actively uses his own social media as his own media. He is very skilled in diplomacy and his appearance of taking good care of his country’s interests is gaining significant support from the existing moderate and conservative classes. I think the factor of his popularity is that he conducts practical policies without being biased toward ideology. He shows a very strong side in persuading and debating opposing forces when he tries to implement policies for improvement. (In the past, he had an image like a fighter, but recently he has become a bit more of a soft image.)

So where do we go now?

The impeachment of President Yoon has given the current ruling Democratic Party very strong support and momentum. I think this is a good opportunity for the current President. Meanwhile, it is an important task to restore the order and the people (public office) planted by President Yoon Suk-yeol, and it seems to be going well. Many people want President Lee Jae-myung to serve as President for more than 5 years even by amending the Constitution, while on the other hand, there seems to be internal conflict for leadership within the ruling Democratic Party because the approval rating is high. Since there is a local election in June this year, I thought he wouldn’t bring up the holding tax before that, but it was a bit surprising that President Lee Jae-myung recently said that holding taxes can also be used. May 9 was the deadline for the end of the suspension of heavy taxation on capital gains tax. The suspension had been extended several times until now, but the President has been sending a strong message since the beginning of the year that he will absolutely not suspend it this time and will start the heavy taxation on capital gains for multi-home owners as planned. Therefore, Seoul house prices have stopped their long-term upward trend and begun to turn into a downward trend.

Ultimately we can only put so much faith in politicians, but I’m willing to be cautiously optimistic here. I think this is one of the best opportunities we’re going to see for a while, so anyone who cares about UBI and LVT and can help this initiative along in any possible way should seriously consider reaching out to allies in Korea.

What’s the Plan?

When we wrote our previous article on President Lee, it included this:

In [2022], one analysis found that an effective LVT of 1.1% would generate revenues of 80 trillion won (USD$58.5 billion), enough to fund an annual UBI of 3.6 million won ($2,600) per household (5% of current incomes). They found it would lower house prices, raise the net income of 85% of all households, and reduce every measure of income inequality².

Jinsu proposes that same UBI, but per person, not per household:

I expect that a Basic Income of about 300,000 KRW per person per month can be paid in Korea. (This is an amount of about 30 hours at Korea's hourly minimum wage). Tax improvements that are tax-neutral, such as lowering taxes on buildings and raising taxes on land (or reducing acquisition tax and raising holding tax), will also be necessary.

How likely is this to go through? Obviously a lot depends on how bold the president’s feeling, but from the looks of it he’s more than happy to keep pursuing UBI publicly, and that makes me optimistic for LVT, because there’s realistically few other ways to actually fund it.

But maybe we can help give him a nudge. I asked Jinsu what he hoped to achieve in the next year:

I want to create visualizations to show exactly who is reaping the most unearned income from land, where they are located, and how much people in specific areas are actually paying in property holding taxes (effective tax rates). Through this, I want to visually convey the unfair reality that a small minority is monopolizing land value.

Just put it on a map! That’s the spirit.

In 2024, we created a 2D bitmap land value map of South Korea for specific years (utilizing vectors at high zoom levels). [LARS: I believe this is landforall.kr] This year, I want to develop a 3D vector land value map that incorporates the past 30 years of officially assessed individual parcel prices provided by the government, enabling time-lapse animations. [LARS: the 3D maps of Korea in this blog post were produced by Jinsu]

Seizing the opportunities presented by a progressive presidency, I aim to propose a land tax combined with a universal basic income. This would ensure that everyone can practically share at least a portion of the land’s value, while also securing the stability of real estate prices.

At the institute level, I want to expand our communication channels and actively scale up the collection and curation of domestic and international trends in related research and activities, leveraging automation technologies.

Furthermore, as an institute, I want to continue building a repository of research reports on the real estate tax systems of various countries. I also want to contribute to academic journals.

I asked Jinsu what resources and help he needs to achieve his goals:

The operating finances of the Institute are not abundant, so becoming a supporting member of the Institute, even with a small amount, would be a great help to our stable activities. (This is the overseas sponsorship channel: https://ko-fi.com/landlibertykorea).

I wish there was a global newsletter that delivers research on land value and shared wealth from each country and news of activities (it might already exist and I just don’t know).

I’m not sure if this exists already either, but hopefully Progress & Poverty substack is quickly becoming just such a resource.

Here are some other things you can do to support this initiative:

• Share this article with any of your friends obsessed with UBI

• If you attend UBI events, tell everyone involved about South Korea’s UBI push

• If you attend mass appraisal events, tell everyone involved about South Korea’s land valuation system

• Download the South Korean land value datasets and build your own models. I think these are the sites:

  • https://www.data.go.kr

  • https://rt.molit.go.kr

• Reach out to folks like Jinsu and Vitnarae and ask them how you can help. I can connect you directly if you like, just email me at lars@landeconomics.org

And last but not least:

I ask for your prayers that Korea may become an exemplary country of distributive justice.

You’ve got it, brother 🙏. Godspeed!

We also have a proposed Land Value Return policy in Andalusia, Spain, a win in Cook County, Illinois (that’s where Chicago is), the winners of our fellowship, and more, all in today’s Landscape.

Expanding LVT Enabling Legislation in Virginia

On April 6th, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed HB 282 into law. The bill passed both chambers with overwhelming majorities, authorizing the cities of Charlottesville, Falls Church, Fredericksburg, and Newport News to voluntarily adopt a split-rate land value tax.

As we covered last month, Virginia has been on a slow march toward LVT for decades, adding cities to the authorized list one bill at a time. HB 282 adds four more, and the unanimous vote signals this is no longer a fringe idea in Richmond.

Now the question is implementation. In Charlottesville, there are local advocates and council members interested in acting on this new authority. In Falls Church, Councilmember Justine Underhill was making the case publicly before the ink was dry, arguing that soaring Northern Virginia land values need to translate into affordable housing, not just windfalls for landowners. Fredericksburg and Newport News each face their own version of the same challenge.

Kentucky: From interest to law in half a year

Kentucky’s HB 607 passed the state legislature in late March. The bill, which covers a much broader set of provisions related to local government of Republican priorities, contains a provision enabling metro governments to implement split-rate taxes in their urban service districts. Beshear vetoed the bill on April 13th, but the GOP supermajority overrode that veto on the 14th, and the measure has now become law.

When the bill first passed the House on its way to the Senate, Rolberto Roldan, a reporter at Louisville Public Media, caught hold of the idea. In his article, he spoke to local and national advocates (including myself), and one quote from a local Democrat councilwoman stuck out:

“We’ve gotten to a little bit of a breaking point where the people that live in the suburban areas of the city are saying, ‘We don’t want any more development. We’d like to see more development go downtown,’” Owen said. “So, I think this is one way to do that.”

We’ve previously highlighted folks who have spent decades building coalitions to successfully get land value taxes implemented, such as Josh Vincent in Pennsylvania and Dr. Dirk Löhr in Germany. Now, the next generation of LVT advocates is coming into its own.

Today we offer the story of Jackson Arnold, a local resident of Louisville, who deserves much of the credit for this recent local legislative win.

Jackson discovered LVT around 3 years ago, but was disheartened to learn that local implementation was blocked in most places. He later became, in his own words, “abundance-pilled” and joined an Abundance-focused national network which connected him to other members, including Louisville councilman Ben Reno-Weber.

He also found us, joined our OpenAVMKit Discord and started poking around avenues to implement and model land value taxes in Louisville. He faced two chief challenges:

• Non public property assessment data
  He gained access to the data through conversations with the city council who helped facilitate access.

• Local LVT not permitted
  He found a legal mechanism to enable it for Louisville and found interest among state representatives.

Later, Jackson spoke to state Republicans (Kentucky is a red state) and found a larger bill related to reforming the powers of local metro governments that could serve as a vehicle for LVT enablement.

The LVT provision became part of the bill which had pre-existing momentum to make it all the way through both houses of the state legislature with a large enough majority to overturn the governor’s veto. Now, LVT is enabled for Louisville’s Urban Service District.

Andalusia, Spain

In Andalusia, Spain, the Andalucistas coalition (led by Andalucía Por Sí) is running on a platform that includes what is effectively a land value tax, though they’ve branded it “FRUSA” to work within the constraints of Spanish national tax law, which reserves property tax authority to the national parliament. A Sectoral Coordinator for Discourse and Strategy for the party, Pablo Soria-Rojas, has been developing a housing policy funded by the FRUSA alongside a proposed tourist tax, positioning the package as a practical response to Andalusia’s housing crisis.

The connection runs deep historically: Blas Infante, the father of Andalusian nationalism who was killed during the Spanish Civil War, was heavily influenced by Henry George, and Progress and Poverty held pride of place among his personal library. With Andalusian regional elections now officially called for May 17 (moved up due to a corruption scandal), the Andalucistas are in active campaign mode, and Pablo recently published an opinion piece in a local Almería newspaper advocating for land-value-based housing policy.

We are excited to see these developments in Andalusia and hope to see more from other European countries in the future!

A Win in Cook County

Drake Warren, who appeared on our LVT Landscape Live event late last year, successfully won his seat for Cook County Commissioner of the tenth district. Illinois has been flirting with land value tax for the Chicago region, and this win helps build momentum to turn the interest into reality. (As an aside, the Cook County assessor’s office has been a leader in open source initiatives, and their repository was the direct inspiration for our own OpenAVMKit).

This year, there are other candidates across the country running for elected office with a platform that includes support for land value taxes. We plan to highlight those folks as campaign season progresses. Know any, or are you running for office yourself? Shoot me an email: greg@landeconomics.org.

Updates from the Center for Land Economics

Join Us at StrongTowns National Gathering

Lars and I will be at StrongTowns National Gathering, and we will be hosting a get together on Monday, May 18th at 5PM—right after registration and before the 7PM StrongTowns reception.

There will also be a LVT panel at StrongTowns sponsored by the Center for the Study of Economics featuring Lars Doucet, Josh Vincent, and Joe Minicozzi.

We will be joined by our friends at the Progress and Poverty Institute. If you are around and curious about land value taxation and getting it implemented, or just looking for a good conversation to start the weekend, join us!

RSVP HERE —> https://luma.com/piu2mmj9

Announcing the Land Economics Fellows

When we opened applications for the inaugural CLE Land Economics Fellowship, we were testing the hypothesis that there is a lot of untapped potential for high-impact research on land value return policies. After reviewing the applications, we were surprised by both the number and quality of applicants. Selecting just a handful was no easy task–a validation that our hunch was right.

We are thrilled to introduce our four fellows for this year. Each will produce original research investigating the role of land in our economy from a differing perspective.

Elle Griffin is the writer and publisher behind The Elysian and the author of the pamphlet Let Cities Build Utopia. Her fellowship work will examine best practices and cautionary lessons from new cities, community land trusts, and city-owned land initiatives, exploring how communities can successfully consolidate land ownership for the public good.

Dr. Brendan Long is a researcher at the University of Notre Dame Australia. His fellowship will focus on the Australian Capital Territory’s landmark implementation of land value taxation, one of the most significant real-world experiments in LVT policy, which has yet to be properly studied.

Dr. Yilin Hou is a professor at Syracuse University whose research has included building a comprehensive land valuation database for China. His fellowship will draw on that work to analyze land value data across China, offering what promises to be a rare empirical window into land economics at a national scale.

Henry Walther is a master’s candidate at MIT in City Planning and Real Estate Development, and a Housing Fellow at the Center for Public Enterprise. He previously served as Director of Policy and Data in the New Orleans Mayor’s Office. His fellowship research will examine the implicit “improvement penalty” that property taxes create, discouraging owners from protecting and upgrading buildings against disaster, as well as investigating what a shift to land value taxation could mean for New Orleans.

We are excited to see what this group produces this year, and we plan to run the fellowship again in 2027. If you’re interested in applying in the future, stay tuned.

More LVT Coverage

• Josie Faass, Executive Director of the Progress and Poverty Institute, has a fantastic Shelterforce piece arguing that property taxes aren’t the cause of our housing crisis but a solution to it. The piece includes quotes from many folks involved with LVT advocacy across the country, including me.

• Reed Schwartz, a former Niskanen Center intern and current Institute for Progress researcher, as well as a previous contributor to the Substack, did a deep dive published by Niskanen Center into Kauai’s experience with a split-rate tax system, and covering the modern need for land value tax.

• Speaking of think tanks and established support for LVT, Joe Gyourko, a renowned housing economist, makes the case that we should be taxing land much more than buildings in his Brookings Institution 35-page primer on addressing the housing shortage.

• Over in the UK, The UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence published a large 139-page report titled “Who Should Own the Value of the Land?“ which seems quite holistic in its exploration of land value capture. My only regret is that I have not yet had the time to sit down and fully read it.

• Whitney McKnight, founder and publisher of The Edge in Berea, Kentucky, is interested in expanding LVT to other areas of Kentucky beyond just the metro councils. She published a piece which features an interview with me on the potential for land value tax shifts in Kentucky.

• TAPinto Princeton investigates land value tax in Princeton, NJ citing Progress and Poverty Institute’s study of a LVTShift in the city.

• Twin Cities covers land value tax as a method for St Paul, MN to encourage development. Minnesota currently has legislation being considered which would enable land value tax–which we have covered in past LVT Landscape articles on this Substack.

• A commentary piece in Cambodia made the case for using a land value tax to fund a guaranteed income in Cambodia.

• Rod Lockwood, a veteran Michigan real estate developer and Chairman of Lockwood Companies, makes the case for Belle Isle in Detroit to become a Special Opportunity Zone with a full land value tax implemented in order to spur economic growth in the region in a podcast conversation with the Mackinac Center. This proposal is as interesting as it is ambitious.

• Russell Richie, who recently became Director of Strategy and Impact at the Progress and Poverty Institute, wrote a commentary piece in Broad & Liberty pushing for land value tax in Philadelphia.

Greg Miller is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Land Economics.

A particularly striking existence proof against this claim is South Korea, a country which not only regularly values all its land (and land values specifically, not just total property values), but which does so annually, and not based on broad regional bands, but down to the individual parcel, accounting for all sorts of hyper-local effects such as road frontage and locational premiums. Furthermore, the Koreans run a tight ship and get the whole operation done in five months flat, at least if official reports are to be believed.

These public land valuations are made freely available for all to inspect and download via public API. Because the land values are free for anyone to use, it’s easy to put them on an interactive web map. One such example is LandForAll.kr, a site produced by Korean researcher Jinsu Lee, which lets you explore per-parcel land valuations for the entire country:

The South Korean land valuation regime is of particular note in recent times because Land Value Tax is gaining momentum both in the US and abroad, and one of the most reliable pieces of pushback is concerns about technical and logistical hurdles.

A particularly salient example is the country of Wales, which under Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Welsh Language Mark Drakeford, recently published the results of an extensive research project on Land Value Tax's feasibility in that country, complete with a deep dive into Land Valuation methodologies. The work itself was farmed out to not one but six separate research groups, whose final reports can be found on this page. Their conclusions are mixed and mostly echo existing conventional wisdom, which can be fairly summarized thus:

• Market-based statistical valuation is the gold standard for total property values (land + improvement), but this method struggles with land valuation because vacant lot sales evidence is thin.

• Machine-learning algorithms have high predictive ability, but struggle when it comes to explainability, and are often seen by the public as mysterious “black boxes.”

• Formulaic area-based methods are a reliable method for tracking overall market values and are much simpler to administrate, but lack precision on a per-parcel basis and are sensitive to administrative assumptions.

These studies were neither blinkered nor provincial—they cited case studies from numerous countries throughout the world and thoroughly engaged with the available academic literature. Nevertheless, none seemed aware of the most relevant example of all, the South Korean system. The closest we got was one single mention in a report by Alma Economics, which buries the lede as follows:

In Korea, for instance, about 1,300 appraisers (2011 data) value sampled plots, with prices extrapolated to adjacent plots

One can hardly blame the Welsh researchers for overlooking the Korean system when I myself only learned of it a few months ago, and only because Korean researchers reached out to me directly. The chief reason I suspect both the Welsh researchers and I missed it is because despite having such an advanced land valuation system, South Korea’s effective tax rate on land is extremely low, and therefore it doesn’t turn up in searches for “countries with land value tax.”

However, now that we’ve found this fascinating example, it’s time to learn from it. My chief sources for this article are:

• 2025 Guidelines for the Survey and Assessment of Official Standard Land Prices and Appendix (in Korean)

• Act on the Public Announcement of Real Estate Prices [Act No. 17459, Enforced Dec. 10, 2020] (in Korean)

• Various Korean researchers I’m in touch with, especially Vitnarae Kang and Jinsu Lee

Mark Drakeford, if you’re reading this, consider this an unsolicited “mini” seventh technical report submitted to your initiative, courtesy of the Center for Land Economics.

How the Koreans Value Land

One big caveat before we proceed—I do not speak Korean, and am heavily relying on machine translation and Korean speaking friends. Any errors or omissions in this article are therefore mine alone.

Three things stand out about the Korean system:

• One special technique I’ve not seen anywhere else

• Otherwise, a reliance on completely standard mass appraisal practice

• A high degree of organizational competence and attention to detail

Korea’s “one special technique” is a particular focus on standard land parcels. Every year, MOLIT, the Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, identifies on the order of 500,000 “standard parcels” which serve as valuation anchors for all other parcels in the nation. For context, that’s about 1.6% of Korea’s 31 million total parcels. Each standard parcel is carefully selected to be the most representative parcel for a given area and land type. Nearby parcels of the same category are linked to the local standard parcel they have the most in common with, and valued in direct reference to it. This is called the “Standard Land Price System.”

There are two fundamental outputs of this system: a standard land table, which values each individual “standard parcel” at a specific KRW/square meter rate, as well as a set of adjustment tables which provide factors for every way local parcels can deviate from their referenced “standard parcel.”

Once these two products have been produced, valuing any given parcel’s land is fairly straightforward: apply adjustments for every difference in characteristic the subject parcel has from the standard parcel, then multiply the final rate by your subject parcel’s land size. It’s essentially a Land AVM, simplified to a set of consistent and predictable mechanical rules, calibrated from market evidence, updated on an annual basis.

Centralized or Decentralized? Why not both?

Although the system looks top-down at first glance, and it certainly benefits from strong centralization, it’s actually being simultaneously worked from top, bottom and the middle. Throughout the entire valuation process, MOLIT is in constant bidirectional communication with regional, municipal, and local government officials. While valuing each “standard” parcel is MOLIT’s job, valuing all the other parcels is the responsibility of local governments. This is a clever way to organize responsibilities in a reasonable and scalable way, with the national organizations doing what they do best—ensuring standardization, training, and structure—while local governments do what they do best—sharing and applying irreducible local knowledge of their hometowns.

There’s more to it than just that, though—MOLIT doesn’t do all the standard parcel valuation work itself. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that MOLIT organizes the national effort. The “standard parcel” appraisals themselves are actually performed by private licensed appraisal corporations, and crucially, the rules state that in all but exceptional cases each standard parcel must be valued by at least two different appraisal firms.

Furthermore, a special organization known as the Korea Real Estate Board (KRB) sits in the middle of the process, providing the basic infrastructure for the whole operation. First, the KRB, alongside MOLIT, is the co-author of the guidelines linked above. Second, the KRB provides the mandatory annual training that licensed appraisers must complete to be eligible to participate in the standard price system. Third, the KRB is responsible for all the IT, software, and databases used throughout. Fourth, the KRB is the central hub where a large multi-round national price balancing process occurs. This is where individual appraisers submit their results which are in turn reviewed during a national consultation meeting where failing valuations are flagged for review prior to finalization. Parallel to this, MOLIT separately conducts its own oversight, audit, and review. Finally, the KRB produces and distributes the Land Price Comparison Table, which local governments use alongside the Standard Parcel valuations to complete their local valuations.

Evaluation

How do we know if the South Korean land values are any good? Several mechanisms are in place to test the values against market data, and can best be understood in a western context as a mixture of “mass appraisal” and “fee appraisal” practices and standards. Valuations are checked against prices of recently sold properties, with the building component typically stripped out through conventional cost approach/depreciation estimates. A similar approach is done for properties valued on capitalized income, which are compared to comparable rental income and expense data. Additional statistical checks are made to check the overall uniformity of valuations for similarly located, similarly classified land, with the goal of ensuring that however any individual parcel is valued, it is valued in the same manner as those directly comparable to it. Beyond the basic statistical checks, there are provisions and checklists to ensure that each appraiser submits sufficient evidence and arrives at their valuations through proper approved procedures, with documentation every step of the way, and several rounds of audits.

This is just a high-level gloss, to get into more specifics would require more time (and more translation), but I’m eager to dig into the details (and run my own statistical tests) in a future article.

The Secret Sauce: Diligence & Data

Other than the standard parcel system and Korea’s enviable state capacity, there really isn’t anything in the described methods that you can’t find in any conventional appraisal textbook. They use the three approaches to value just like anybody else—the cost approach, the income approach, and the sales comparison approach. (If you don’t know what those are, I covered them in the first article I ever wrote about appraisal). They also employ hedonic regression, land residual extraction, paired sales analysis, and all the other conventional techniques.

One key advantage the Koreans have is far better datasets than the average anglosphere jurisdiction is used to. The only possible explanation for how the Koreans have achieved this is their mystical oriental powers, most especially a particular magic spell known as “passing a law.” Here’s how it works: a Korean wizard known as a “lawmaker” writes an incantation upon a sacred scroll known as a “bill,” speaks its True Name, such as “The Act on Real Estate Transaction Reporting”, and inscribes upon it a plea that all real estate transactions and their details be swiftly reported to the government. Then, poof! Whenever there’s a real estate transaction, the details are swiftly reported to the government! They don’t stop there, either—similar provisions provide for broad mandatory collection of rental lease information, and there’s also an official government survey which collects income and expenses from a sample of commercial properties, with penalties for refusal or false response.

Joking aside, the contrast with my own country is striking. Here in the US, there are twelve “real estate non-disclosure” states (including my own) where assessors do not have guaranteed access to sales transactions, yet these very same states insist assessors value property “at fair market value,” which is defined in reference to—you guessed it!—sales. And even in the other thirty-eight states, assessors tell me they sometimes struggle with data sparsity issues when it comes to valuing rental and commercial properties. Ironically, tying assessor’s hands doesn’t actually protect anyone’s privacy—that personal data is bought and sold freely on commercial sites like MLS, Costar, and RealPage anyways, often for the benefit of landlords.

Because Korea has access to sufficiently good data, it’s much easier to conduct any kind of property valuation, including land.

Limitations

The Korean system is not perfect, and one can quickly find domestic complaints and critiques of the system. One persistent critique is that historically, official land prices lagged the market to a significant degree. This paper from 2010 found the assessment ratio of land to be about 56%, that is, land was consistently undervalued by about half of prevailing market rates. Over the years that followed, there was an attempt to increase the assessment ratio closer to market value, however in 2023 the Yoon Seok-yeol administration moved to freeze rates and keep them at a lower assessment ratio (Yoon Seok-yeol would later be sentenced to life in prison for insurrection). The new president, Lee Jae-myung, has signaled intentions to raise valuations closer to market rates, targeting 90%, but has not yet done so, keeping the 69% realization rate for now while a five-year plan is being worked out.

Another important detail is that these land valuations play an important role in the real estate market, they have not yet been fully stress-tested as a tax base, because South Korea has no Land Value Tax, and as for the conventional Property Tax it does have, the effective rate is very low. For this reason, whatever level of accuracy and precision has been achieved so far probably sets a floor rather than a ceiling, as the imposition of higher fiscal stakes will demand even further scrutiny.

There are various other debates, critiques, and concerns that turned up in searches, but frankly, I’m not sufficiently well versed in Korean language or politics to give them a full and proper treatment in a short blog post like this, and will save such deep dives for future treatments, which I’ll perform in direct cooperation with Korean experts.

Limitations aside, I’m genuinely impressed. No other country I’ve seen has a system this thorough.

“Sure, but it won’t work here”

Okay, so what does this mean for countries like the US, or Wales?

Let’s briefly assume for the sake of argument that the Korean land valuation system is close to the ideal, and that a Land Value Tax levied upon such a tax base would actually have all the predicted beneficial effects. Even if that were the case, critics could still point out that their country just can’t muster the same state capacity as Korea. In fact, just such an argument was made by the Welsh researchers.

Aside from complaints about the technical and administrative difficulty of land valuations, other objections included the lack of a national cadastre, significant skill gaps in local government, complications created by Wales’ discretionary planning system, insufficient data gathering capabilities, and fundamental legal restrictions.

These objections were not one-offs and were echoed across the research groups, so I don’t want to minimize them. Nevertheless, a path can be paved to a future implementation if we’re willing to think outside the box a little and also willing to start with small, incremental reforms. A good place to start would be a regional pilot project centered on an urban area like Cardiff, much like ongoing local Land Value Return efforts we’ve been nurturing in the United States.

Let’s go over each major objection in turn.

Objection 1: We don’t have a cadastre!

South Korea has a highly centralized national government with exceptional data collection and organization, underpinned by a central land registry which encodes who owns what property, what’s built where, and who sold what to whom at what time. Wales doesn’t have that.

Even worse, the three functions that a cadastre usually represents—land ownership, parcel boundaries, and valuation—are spread across three other separate UK agencies: the Land Registry (which tracks ownership), the Ordnance Survey (which does mapping), and the Valuation Office Agency.

However, we can look at the stories of a few other countries to contextualize how big a limitation this really is. For one, plenty of countries have just taken the plunge and built out state capacity that used to be lacking. Consider Estonia, for instance. Formerly dismissed as a “Second World” country, Estonia is now considered to have one of the most advanced and efficient tax systems in the world (a system which includes a small Land Value Tax). There’s also been some fresh developments in Serbia, which has recently made major strides to modernize and revamp their property tax system. The lesson from these two countries is that the best time to get your valuation infrastructure in order is twenty years ago, but the second best time is today.

We could also consider another country which has many regions and cities with sophisticated property tax systems despite the country itself having no national cadastre whatsoever. Who could possibly think of doing something so bold and reckless?

“We don’t need no stinkin’ cadastres!”

Believe it or not, there is no official land register or cadastre in the USA, nor is there any single document that is sufficient by itself to legally prove ownership over any piece of land.

It’s true that various local agencies like county recorders and property tax assessors will maintain local databases that encode who claims to own this or that parcel, and local governments levy property taxes against those claims, and the system hums merrily along. From a strict legal perspective, however, nobody actually knows for sure who truly owns a particular piece of land until an exhaustive chain-of-title search is conducted which traces every property transfer from buyer to seller all the way back to a “terminal deed,” which declares the original parcel to be the unambiguous legal property of e.g. the King of Spain by right of conquest.

I’m absolutely not kidding about this:

In the US, you don’t really “own” land so much as “strongly claim” to own land in a probabilistic sense, with the ground truth only to be revealed with finality if and when someone digs up all the paperwork. This is why title insurance exists, in case you were wondering (or as Patrick McKenzie calls it, “The $4,000 insurance policy designed to never pay out”).

On top of this, the property databases that do exist in the United States are massively devolved—typically to the county level, sometimes below even that, and there are no universal rules or formats for how deeds and parcel records are maintained and digitized. Nevertheless, many1 American localities are still able to administer property tax systems admirably well.

From a purely technical perspective, you don’t need to wait for the stars to align just to stand up a local database, value property, and mail notices to particular addresses, even if external sources are the final source of truth, not you. There may very well be durable legal barriers that prevent this approach from taking root in Wales, but they should be properly understood as such: legal barriers, not technical ones; for whom the problem is “we need change the law,” not “we don’t know how.”

Look, if a bunch of wild yankee cowboys can pull this off, so can you.

Objection 2: Discretionary Planning System

Wales, like the rest of the UK, has a particularly illegible land use system, in which it’s almost impossible to know ahead of time what will be legally permitted to be built on a particular piece of property. Korea, by contrast, has an extremely legible system where any parcel’s legal uses are highly predictable. Wales’ system of land use permissions is a significant complication for implementing a reliable land valuation system.

To get the full picture, let’s compare various regimes against one another.

On one extreme we have the famous Japanese system of zoning, the statutory use district, which is fundamentally rule-based, highly centralized and standardized, and operates in terms of what is explicitly forbidden, rather than what is permitted. If it’s not forbidden, it’s permitted. (The Korean zoning system is close enough in broad strokes that the two can be considered variants of the same fundamental approach). This article from which the charts below are taken is a good explanation of the Japanese system:

North American zoning, often known as “Euclidean zoning,” is also a rule-based system, but is much more regionally fragmented with no single national standard. The other key difference is that it concerns what is explicitly permitted, rather than what is forbidden. If it’s not permitted, it’s forbidden:

The one saving grace of the North American zoning system is that although local zoning codes can be convoluted and ambiguous, at the very least you can rest assured that what you are and aren’t allowed to build is in fact codified somewhere, in some actually existing local ordinance that you could, in theory, make sense of.

On the opposite extreme is the UK system, or discretionary permission. Under this system, there is no development as-of-right, nor any clear and consistent zone-based rules that make it predictable what may or may not be built where. Instead, permission must be explicitly sought and explicitly approved on a per parcel, per project basis. This makes valuation on a “highest and best use” standard difficult when “highest and best use” can unpredictably change at the whims of a planning board.

The inherent uncertainty of whether planning permission will be granted surely distorts the property market, but property still actually trades hands and gets leased out, and therefore actual selling prices and rental values can still be observed. Some kind of valuation can still be performed in this environment, even if overall precision might be less than what can be accomplished in South Korea.

This is also another case where reforming the law might be a good idea, for reasons entirely apart from facilitating better valuations. Clearer rules of the road for what can and can’t be built will not just make the market more efficient, they would also remove incentives to corruption where local planning officials trade planning permission—and the subsequent uplift in land value—for backroom kickbacks.

Objection 3: Data Gathering Capabilities

Finally, we come to the issue of data gathering limitations.

Suffice it to say, I’ve spent a lot of time researching mass appraisal, I give presentations at assessor’s conferences alongside assessors, and I maintain an open source Automated Valuation Model library that’s being actively adopted in assessor’s offices. I am deeply familiar with the kinds of data that need to be collected in order to pull off a reasonably accurate and defensible land valuation system.

Here’s how any scrappy upstart jurisdiction, anywhere in the world, can collect the data they need.

Financial transactions

The heart of every mass appraisal system is sales and rents. Most valuation jurisdictions have sales, but ideally they should be gathering rental data from leases as well, and also income and expense reports from commercial properties.

What to get:

• Sale price (actual price the real estate transacted for)

• Sale date

• Parcel ID

• Sales validity metadata

• Whether there was a building on the site at time of sale

• “Frozen” parcel characteristics at time of sale

• For leases: price, date, terms, duration, etc.

How to get it:
If you have sovereign authority, pass laws that mandate the regular collection of these. If you don’t, get this information however you can; the private market has likely collected and organized it already, so there’s often the option of just buying it. If it’s not available (or the private market refuses to sell it to you), running a voluntary survey is better than nothing.

How to enrich it:
Sales must be validated before they can be used as either test evidence or predictive fodder for a regression model. Some sales don’t actually reflect the operation of the market, but instead represent data errors or e.g. non-arms length transactions between a father and son for massively reduced prices. Not only does OpenAVMKit include a module for dealing with this, we’ve also written a thorough article that goes through all the most common sales anomalies, how you can detect them, and what the proper validation procedures should be.

Parcel characteristics

These are the physical features of your parcels — what’s actually there on the ground.

What to get:

• Parcel shapefile (the geometry itself)

• Situs address (physical address of the parcel itself)

• Owner’s address (where to send the tax bill)

• Classification information:

  • Building type

  • Zoning/land use/permission, if known

• “The big five” characteristics2:

  • Land size

  • Building size

  • Building year built

  • Building quality (of materials and construction)

  • Building condition (e.g. amount of physical depreciation)

• Other characteristics:

  • # of bedrooms

  • # of bathrooms

  • # of units (for a multifamily or commercial property)

  • # of floors

How to get it:
Hopefully somebody already has digital parcel geometry for you somewhere. Even if you’re not the source of truth on that, you can always download and copy it for your own use.3 As for the other characteristics, you should be able to tap into your country’s postal system to figure out how to reach the person currently claiming to occupy that parcel, as well as its current situs address. The rest can be measured through mandatory disclosure at time of sale, with regular inspections every few years. However, here’s where modern tech can yield serious savings.

How to enrich it:
In the USA, many appraisal jurisdictions are contracted with vendors like EagleView and NearMap, who provide overhead and oblique aerial imagery, or CycloMedia and NCTech, who provide street-view images. If you have access to imagery like this, you can run open source commodity computer vision models on them to extract valuable characteristics. This lets you encode whether a parcel has a building or not, whether there is visible damage, how many corners the roof has, the presence of certain materials, and many other useful facts. These facts can then be fed through an objective rubric that generates standardized building quality and condition codes.

Additionally, there are many free data sources, such as Overture, which pre-process bulk aerial imagery into building footprints for you, which we used to great effect in our research in Baltimore to overcome local data limitations. Hooks for this functionality are already available for free in OpenAVMKit.

Locational Characteristics

These are factors that have everything to do with where a parcel is, what sorts of amenities it has access to, and generally everything related to location, location, location. They are often significant drivers of value in statistical models.

What to get:

• Street frontage

• Water frontage

• Views

• Topography / slope

• Proximity to various things:

  • Central business district

  • Parks

  • Schools

  • Golf courses

  • Etc.

How to get it:
You can do this the easy way or the hard way, and I strongly recommend the easy way. The hard way is to “pound the pavement” and send people out to observe all this stuff by hand. We really don’t need to do that anymore.

How to enrich it:
This is the easy way, and the best way. Use GIS tools to automatically calculate this stuff. In OpenAVMKit, we have a dedicated street frontage calculator that leverages Open Street Map data to meticulously calculate street frontage against every parcel at an extremely fine level of detail. We also have the ability to calculate proximity to any arbitrary shape file you provide, not to mention stamp parcels with zoning codes or district names. As for topography, if you have a Digital Elevation Model (which should be available for most countries), you can automatically calculate each individual parcel’s overall bumpiness and average slope. There’s even been a lot of research on calculating viewsheds directly from GIS data. We hope to have all these features available out of the box in OpenAVMKit soon.

Start Small + Do the Least You Can Do

We don’t need to overcomplicate this. Just start small, do the least you can do, and get the ball rolling from there. While a “national” LVT on the scale of an entire country sounds big at first, it’s not so bad when you realize that Wales is smaller than Maricopa County, Arizona, not only in terms of square miles, but also total population and GDP. (Incidentally, Maricopa County has an excellent property assessor’s office and I would be happy to introduce you to their staff).

For Wales, the best place to start is the capital city of Cardiff. Set up your own databases, collect, copy, beg, borrow, and buy what you need to fill up your tables, and enrich the rest using modern GIS techniques. Then, build up some basic valuation models—and please feel free to reach out to me if necessary, I’d be happy to connect you with all the relevant experts. You can (and should) do this well in advance of actually passing an LVT, because it will tell you what the likely effects would be.

Further, please understand that you don’t need to pull off something as sophisticated as South Korea’s models. A first principles analysis of the incentives shows that a much simpler regional approach, which we have dubbed “Least You Can Do” (LYCD) land valuation, will largely have the same beneficial effects as a “platonic land valuation.”

Then, put it on a map and start telling your story.

In conclusion, please enjoy this music video I found of the song “Soda Pop” from the hit movie KPop Demon Hunters, in Welsh:

It deserves more attention.

Why this matters

Baden-Württemberg isn’t a small pilot program or a single city trying something unusual. It’s one of Germany’s largest and most economically important states — home to Stuttgart, major manufacturing hubs, and a mix of dense urban areas, suburbs, and rural regions. In other words, it’s a real economy with real land markets. That makes it an important and interesting contemporary example of a land-based property tax in practice.

The federal decision

Germany’s property tax, the Grundsteuer (literally: ground + tax), was based on ancient property valuations; in West Germany, assessments dated back to 1964 and in parts of East Germany, they went back even further, to 1935. (This is also the experience of some counties in the United States, particularly those for which regular reassessments are not mandated).

Over time, this created obvious distortions. Two similar properties in the same city could face very different tax bills simply because one had been assessed more recently or because local markets had evolved differently since the last valuation.

Eventually, the issue made its way to Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court. In 2018, the court ruled the entire system unconstitutional. Not because property taxes themselves were a problem, but because the way they were calculated violated a core constitutional principle: equal treatment under the law.

The court forced lawmakers to fix the system. If two properties are similar in reality, they should be taxed similarly. A system built on decades-old values couldn’t meet that standard anymore. The mismatch between assessed values and actual market conditions had simply become too large.

What followed was a compromise. The federal government designed a new framework for the property tax which crucially allowed individual states to opt out and create their own models. This became known in Germany as Grundsteuerreform (literally: ground + tax + reform – compounding words should be more common in the US).

That decision opened the door for local experimentation.

The man who saw it coming

Long before Baden-Württemberg adopted a land value tax, Dr. Dirk Löhr was helping lay the groundwork for one.

Löhr is a Professor of Taxation at the Trier University of Applied Sciences and, by his own description, a Land Value Tax proponent. He doesn’t present himself as a political operator or activist. In conversation, he comes across as methodical and understated, even a bit reluctant to take credit. But over the past decade, he has been one of the central figures behind Germany’s land value tax push.

Dirk Löhr participated in a Henry George School of Social Science panel.

He is not the kind of academic who is content to sit back and write papers. In 2012, years before the Federal Constitutional Court forced Germany’s hand, Löhr co-founded—alongside Ulrich Kriese of NABU, a German nature conservation organization—Grundsteuer: Zeitgemäß! (”Property Tax: Contemporary!”), an initiative built specifically around the coming property tax fight. The name was deliberate: the campaign positioned land value taxation not as a radical idea, but as a sensible modernization whose time had arrived.

“We knew,” Löhr told me, “it is a question of time that the constitutional court will say [property tax valuations were] unconstitutional.”

When the court finally ruled the property taxes were unconstitutional in 2018, Löhr and his colleagues were ready.

From there, the campaign assembled an unusually broad coalition: environmental groups, tenant advocates, researchers, urban planners, and local officials. The point was not to build a narrow ideological camp. It was to show that taxing land more intelligently could appeal to very different constituencies for very different reasons.

“Land value tax is not something left or right,” Löhr said. “There are some people on the left who like it and some people who are more right who also like it. And these people you can bring together at one table.”

After the federal court decision, they worked everywhere trying to get land value taxes into all states. The message landed best in the German state of Baden-Württemberg.

Baden-Württemberg

Most states chose to stick fairly close to the federal model, updating property values but keeping the same basic structure intact. Property taxes as normal.

Baden-Württemberg took a different path.

The state is governed by a coalition of the Green Party and the conservative CDU, and the Greens were the decisive factor. The land value tax fit naturally with their priorities—not because Löhr is a Green Party partisan, but because the policy logic aligned: “The Green Party found it very appealing because the land value tax is a tax which gives an incentive to be careful with the scarce resource of land.”

The tax aligned with green goals around compact development and land efficiency in ways that a standard property tax reform simply didn’t.

Löhr is candid that political alignment was the hinge. “It was the Green Party in power there. [LVT] had the most sympathizers in the Green Party,” he says. When he looked at other states where the campaign also had support, the Greens were not strong enough to push it through. In Baden-Württemberg, they were.

The result: Baden-Württemberg opted out of the federal framework entirely. On January 1, 2025, the Grundsteuer there began taxing land value alone.

Löhr draws a broader lesson from the experience: in Germany at least, reform doesn’t magically come from within the political establishment. “From the political machine, from the political business, there comes nothing,” he told me. “You have to give pressure from outside.” The coalition he built was precisely that kind of outside pressure.

How the tax actually works — and what it charges

Germany calculates property taxes in a few steps, but the logic is straightforward once you break it down.

Start with the assessed value of the property, or for BW, the land.

That value is then multiplied by a small state-level rate called the Steuermesszahl (tax + measure + number). Think of this as a base tax rate set by the state.

Finally, municipalities apply their own multiplier, called the Hebesatz (lift + rate), which scales the tax up or down depending on the city.

So in simple terms:

Land value × state rate × local multiplier = final tax bill

Baden-Württemberg chose to tax land alone but built in one notable political accommodation: a split-rate structure. Housing land is taxed at a lower effective rate than commercial land. Löhr views this as an imperfect but necessary compromise.

“It should be the same rate,” he told me plainly. “But we have two rates. This was the condition, otherwise it would have been impossible to push it politically.”

In Baden-Württemberg, the state-level rate is very small by U.S. standards: about 0.13% of land value, reduced to about 0.091% for residential land. That number is then multiplied by the local Hebesatz.

In Stuttgart, the Hebesatz is 160%, meaning the base rate is multiplied by 1.6. That brings the effective tax rate to roughly:

• ~0.15% on residential land

• ~0.21% on non-residential land

These are very small effective tax rates compared to the United States. In many U.S. cities, total property tax rates are often 1% to 2% of total property value (land + buildings).

Assessments for tax purposes will be updated every seven years (though the public real estate assessment boards do their own independent valuations every two years). Löhr finds this maddening. He has personally asked the assessment boards why they bother with biennial valuations if they won’t flow through to tax bills for seven years, and has not received a satisfying answer.

For all its compromises, Baden-Württemberg represents a rare move toward land-based taxation. Most states, however, went in a different direction.

What if you taxed buildings more?

Bavaria decided to go in almost the opposite direction.

Rather than basing the tax on values at all, Bavaria adopted a pure area-based model: the tax is calculated according to the physical size of the land parcel and the building footprint, with no reference to market value whatsoever. A prime commercial site in central Munich and a field on the rural fringe pay on the same per-square-meter basis.

Löhr doesn’t hide his skepticism. “They only measure the size of the building and the land,” he explained about Bavaria’s system. “According to the size — no matter how old it is, no matter how valuable it is — they put the [same] tax on it.” From a Georgist perspective, this abandons the core logic of taxing land rent entirely.

The simultaneous parallel and differing paths chosen by German states is why Löhr, in a 2020 paper, calls the German experience a “living lab”.

What comes next: legal threats and political limits

The reform is not without its threats. Opponents, primarily real estate interests and a taxpayers’ association, have filed suits challenging the land value tax at both the state tax court and the federal tax court simultaneously. The plaintiffs’ argue against any method that involves valuation—even the federal model which they are also seeking to undo in other states.

Löhr, who has been tracking the case closely, has been called on to defend the reform’s methodology against hired experts brought in by the plaintiffs. A hearing is expected in autumn 2026.

The opponents preferred alternative is Bavaria’s area-based system: a flat tax on physical size with no reference to value whatsoever. It taxes property mainly by lot area plus building area/use, so a larger low-value parcel in rural areas can face a higher tax base than a smaller but much more valuable downtown property if the latter has less taxable area.

In reality, these are organizations with vested interests. They try to muddy the waters on any government regulations and taxes in order to protect the business interests they represent.

Even if the law survives the courts, the path to higher rates is constrained. German States control few taxes, mostly property and business. Most taxes are levied at the federal level, and states have limited access to federal tax levers like the value-added tax. Therefore, Baden-Württemberg does not have flexibility to lower other tax levies in exchange for raising the land value tax.

For now, the Green Party’s re-election in Baden-Württemberg’s most recent state elections means the reform is almost certainly safe for another four years. But expansion remains a harder fight than preservation.

The bigger picture

One of the world’s great skepticisms about land value taxation has always been political feasibility. Baden-Württemberg is a direct challenge to that skepticism. It required years of unglamorous coalition-building, a favorable constitutional moment, and the right political alignment in a single state. But it happened.

We will be watching what comes next in the courts, in the data, and in any other state or city that takes note. But none of that changes what has already been demonstrated. “If it is possible here… in sleepy Germany” Löhr says, “it should be possible anywhere.”

We are always looking to connect with folks who want to see LVT in their local area. Do you have leads on land value tax potential or want help with local efforts? Reach out greg@landeconomics.org.

Greg Miller is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Land Economics.

For a brief moment a couple of weeks ago, lawmakers who rarely agree on anything found common ground when the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by an 89-10 margin (easy explainer of its provisions). The bill itself is mostly good, but one provision targeting build-to-rent housing is still causing a significant fight. Under Title IX, any investor owning 350 or more single-family homes would be required to sell newly built rental homes within seven years.

The logic is politically intuitive: Wall Street has become a villain in the housing story, and the provision polls well across both parties.

The provision targets the corporate form of the developer, not the underlying dynamic that produces the problem. The concern of build-to-rent development exists because America has a land crisis as public institutions have systematically failed to capture the value their own investments create, leaving private actors to step into the gap and extract it instead. Restricting who can hold that land doesn’t change the dynamic. It just changes who benefits from it.

The families who would have rented those homes still need to live somewhere. The land value created by growing metros keeps flowing to whoever holds the title, whether that’s a pension-backed Real Estate Investment Trust or a local speculator sitting on an empty lot.

Meanwhile, The debate the provision ignited was real.

Over 100 housing groups — including Pew, the Mortgage Bankers Association, and the National Apartment Association — have signed letters in support of the bill but against the Build-to-Rent (BTR) provision. The establishment viewpoint is that BTR is necessary additional supply at a time when we are dealing with a severe housing shortage.

Here’s my take: strip the BTR provision, pass the rest, and ask the harder question: why do large private firms keep doing a better job of coordinating land development than the public institutions that are supposed to be doing it?

What build-to-rent actually is

Build-to-rent communities are purpose-built single-family rental neighborhoods designed from the outset to be rented rather than sold. They typically involve multiple actors: a master developer who assembles significant parcels of land on the suburban fringe, entitles it, and builds out community infrastructure; a BTR operator who acquires a designated parcel within that master plan; and a contracted homebuilder who constructs the actual homes. Some developments are more integrated than others. The BTR operator then retains ownership of the entire parcel, collecting rents from families who want the single-family experience without the commitment of a mortgage.

As Matt Stoller documented in his piece on the homebuilder industry, large homebuilders like D.R. Horton have increasingly become land financiers more than builders — acquiring cheap land on the urban fringe, holding it while it appreciates, then hiring subcontractors to build on it. BTR operators take this one step further: rather than selling finished homes, they retain ownership indefinitely, capturing not just the development margin but all subsequent appreciation.

Why hold rather than sell? Two structural advantages make the model uniquely attractive to institutional investors. The first is diversification: a BTR firm owning homes across the Sun Belt carries risk spread across dozens of markets in a way no individual homeowner can match. The second is capital access. Since 2008, institutional investors have retained uninterrupted access to cheap debt markets that have effectively closed to middle-income buyers.

BTR currently accounts for somewhere between 3 and 10 percent of new single-family housing starts and has been one of the fastest-growing segments of new residential construction. The Pew Charitable Trusts estimated it adds between 70,000 and 130,000 homes annually to the housing supply. Industry groups argued, credibly, that the Senate’s seven-year disposal requirement would make the financial model unworkable.

None of that means BTR is above criticism. These firms are accumulating substantial wealth through land ownership, extracting rent from families who might prefer to own, and in some cases engaging in the kinds of fee-gouging and lease manipulation the FTC found at Invitation Homes. The moral discomfort is real. However, before we reflexively reach for the bonesaw, let’s understand what this symptom is telling us about the real disease it stems from – America’s land crisis.

The housing crisis is a land crisis

The deeper story here starts with something we’ve written about before: The Housing Crisis as a Land Crisis.

In most American cities, land near jobs, transit, and amenities is scarce and increasingly expensive. Zoning constrains what can be built on it. Infrastructure expansion is slow and politically contentious. When land values rise faster than wages, people’s incomes are extracted by high rents. And when land near the urban core is expensive and underbuilt, development pressure moves outward in search of cheaper land at the suburban fringe. This outward pressure is what generates most new housing supply in America today.

One of the reasons cities fail to develop their interior land — the vacant lots, the surface parking, the underutilized parcels next to transit stations — is that there’s no pressure on the owners of that land to do anything with it. Land sitting idle near a growing urban center appreciates in value simply because the city around it is growing. The landowner doesn’t need to build, doesn’t need to improve, doesn’t need to take any risk. They just wait, and the surrounding community’s investment in itself — in schools, transit, parks, public safety — flows into private land values as an unearned windfall. Development pressure then sprawls outward, not inward.

Conor Dougherty made this point compellingly–and controversially–in the New York Times: infill is slow, expensive, and politically blocked in most cities, while greenfield development on the edge offers scale and speed.

BTR in practice: the Cadence at Gateway example

This is a plot of land on the eastern fringe of Mesa, Arizona in 2018. It’s empty. Desert scrub, virtually worthless. But notice what’s right next to it: the Loop 202 San Tan Freeway and State Route 24, a major highway interchange built with public dollars that connected this previously remote corner of the East Valley to Phoenix’s employment corridors. That freeway didn’t just move traffic. It created land value. Suddenly this empty desert was thirty minutes from major employers, the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, Apple, Boeing, Intel. The land is now worth something, not because of anything the landowner did, but because the public built a road.

Harvard Investments and GTIS Partners foresaw that. In 2015 they announced plans for Cadence at Gateway, a 444-acre master-planned community on what had been the GM Desert Proving Grounds. Harvard and GTIS bought the land, did the planning and entitlement work, and built a community from scratch: 13 parks, 12 miles of trails, an 8-acre amenity hub with resort-style pools, fitness center, tennis courts, a café, and an event lawn, plus a new elementary school and retail at the main entrance. By 2020, Cadence had sold all 2,200 of its for-sale residential lots to national homebuilders — Lennar, Pulte, Toll Brothers, David Weekley, Maracay — at prices that reflected the community infrastructure already in place.

And then there is the small area highlighted in blue: Tricon Gateway, a 197-home build-to-rent community that GTIS developed inside the same master plan it co-owned, financed through a joint venture with the Arizona State Retirement System. The homes were built by a contracted homebuilder. Tricon Residential manages and owns every one of them. Tricon’s residents pay rent, use Cadence’s parks and trails, and walk to the same retail strip that Lennar and Toll Brothers buyers use. The BTR community is roughly 9% of the community’s residential units — a designated parcel within a larger master plan, not a standalone project.

This structure matters for the current policy debate. When Senator Warren’s provision requires investors to sell BTR homes within seven years, it doesn’t necessarily eliminate the housing on those parcels. In a community like Cadence, the master developer may simply sell that parcel to a homebuilder instead, who builds and sells individual units to buyers. Some of the backlash from housing advocates worried about supply may be overstated in that sense. Though, based on some anecdotal poking around Google, more recent build-to-rent projects appear to be more fully integrated (where the land owner and developer is the same as the house developer and landlord).

But Cadence also illustrates the deeper dynamic that produces BTR in the first place: the BTR operator benefits freely from surrounding public infrastructure they didn’t pay for, then captures the land value created within its perimeter indefinitely.

Thesis 1: BTR is a symptom of untaxed land rents — and so is SFH sprawl

The reason people hate BTR is not complicated: when a corporation owns a home and you rent it, the land value appreciation flows to the corporation. When you own the home yourself, it flows to you. The populist case against BTR is essentially an argument for widening access to asset ownership and keeping the housing wealth ladder accessible to more Americans. Everyone loves the housing ladder… as long as they get to climb it first. We have previously covered the contradictions for everyone excluded from it here:

Progress and Poverty

The Housing Ladder's Broken Promise

Last week, President Trump gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he said housing affordability stands in direct opposition to preserving the property values of existing homeowners (emphasis mine…

Read more

4 months ago · 63 likes · 25 comments · Lars Doucet

It’s worth asking a harder question. We have built an economy in which the primary mechanism for middle-class wealth accumulation is owning land. That is a fragile and inequitable foundation. It produces winners and losers based largely on when and where people were born. The question should not only be how we get more people onto the housing wealth ladder. It should also be why so much wealth is stored in land in the first place.

When land rents are untaxed, two things happen.

First, landowners near urban centers have no incentive to develop. They can hold indefinitely while the surrounding city creates value for them. Surface parking lots sit blocks from transit stations. Vacant lots remain vacant for decades. This is the predictable result of a system in which holding vacant land in a growing city is a lucrative and low-risk investment. Sprawl is not just a planning failure. It is a tax policy failure.

Second, developers who build at the fringe create new land value where none existed, and BTR operators are uniquely positioned to capture it. The Loop 202 freeway made Cadence possible. Mesa’s schools make it desirable. BTR developers capture the value of the public investment as well as the private land value improvements indefinitely.

Thesis 2: Private sprawl developers capture created land value, and cities should learn from them

What BTR operators are doing within their property lines is a narrow but genuine version of land-value coordination: they hold ownership long enough to capture the value their investment creates. That is exactly what cities chronically fail to do.

Cities invest in transit, roads, schools, and parks. Each investment creates land value for nearby private landowners, value the landowners didn’t earn and that cities recapture only partially, through property taxes that lag market values, overtax buildings, and undertax land. The result is that cities chronically under-invest in themselves while the gains flow to whoever holds land nearby.

The actor closest to doing what cities should do is the master developer: assembling land, building infrastructure, capturing the resulting value. But they capture it once and exit. From digging through examples of recent build-to-rent communities, it seems integrated projects are becoming more common: the same folks creating the roads and plots are the ones developing and renting the homes. They understand they can capture the land value indefinitely.

What cities should be doing is the same thing. A city that captured a meaningful share of the value its investments create could reinvest it in more infrastructure, which would create more value, which would fund more investment. The mechanism is well understood: land value taxation or long-term ground leases. The political will to use them aggressively is what is almost always missing.

Where that leaves us

The housing groups that signed the letter opposing the BTR provision aren’t doing it because they think America should be a nation of renters. They’re doing it because they understand that in our current land system, BTR is one of the few mechanisms actually building new supply at scale in places where housing demand is real and growing. Killing it without a replacement mechanism doesn’t solve the land problem. It just removes one of the few private actors stepping into the gap that public institutions have left.

That doesn’t make BTR above criticism. The wealth accumulation happening through privatized land ownership is real. Tricon’s 2021 SEC filing recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in fair value gains on rental properties, not from building or improving homes, but simply from owning land in markets where the housing shortage kept getting worse.

What would actually change the dynamics is changing how we treat land value in the first place: not as an untaxed private windfall, but as something that reflects the collective investment of the community around it and should be substantially recaptured to fund more of that investment. Cities that invest in themselves create land value. If they captured much more of that value, they could invest more, which would create more value, which would fund more investment. We would be focused more on developing in our urban cores where the value of land is treated as a public good.

The ROAD to Housing Act is a good bill. Strip the BTR provision and pass the rest.

Greg Miller is Co-Founder of the Center for Land Economics.

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The answer is over 100 times1. Land value in Manhattan literally towers above everything else:

Note that this comparison takes the assessed values at face value—New York real estate is widely known to be under-assessed in general. Nevertheless, the assessed land value of Manhattan is greater than all of the rest of New York City combined.

Okay, but maybe this is just New York City. Surely this is a unique pattern and we’d see something different elsewhere in the state?

Syracuse

Rochester

The absolute values are much lower, but the same basic pattern persists—the closer you get to the city center, the heart of economic activity, the more land values go exponential.

And in case we’re tired of New York state, let’s fly to the other side of the continent to Spokane, Washington. Here we see a less extreme ratio, but there’s still an unmistakable “towering fortress of land value” in the center of the city, not to mention a long thin wall of value marching north along the commercial corridor.

Spokane

Next, let’s hop over to middle America. Here in Cincinnati we see two clusters, both concentrated towards the Ohio river, with value gradients that quickly decay as you leave the city center(s).

Cincinnati

In these cities, you can reproduce the same 10x, 20x, even 100x difference in observed land value rates between the central and outlying areas.

I have two points I’m trying to make here:

1. People have wildly incorrect intuitions about where land value is concentrated

2. Putting values on a map is the best way to fix those misconceptions

This has been an essential part of our advocacy efforts at the Center for Land Economics, and it’s why we built CivicMapper, the tool which produced the above images:

Speaking of CivicMapper, we’ve recently added some great upgrades to it, which are already live on the CivicMapper.org site. We’ve also greatly expanded its open source companion tool, PutItOnAmap.com (PIOAM). We use these tools all the time, and thought we’d do a deep dive on them so others can take our tools and use them in their own work.

Altogether we have FIVE free tools to talk to you about today:

1. New & Improved Civic Mapper

2. PIOAM visualizer

3. PIOAM GIS Data Fetcher

4. PIOAM GIS Format Converter

5. PIOAM GIS File Constructer

Before we get into all that, a quick request:

Please help us keep building this stuff

Ever since we started, people have been asking us to add their city to Civic Mapper, to expand OpenAVMKit, and to build more GIS tools. We’re doing our absolute best to keep up, but the requests keep coming in and it’s expensive and time consuming to keep producing technology like this and also to pay the hosting fees. If you want us to keep pumping out a steady stream of great free software, please consider donating to the Center for Land Economics:

Now let’s get to the goodies, starting with new CivicMapper features.

CivicMapper

We recently relaunched the website so that it has an actual proper landing page, complete with silly interactive 3D gimmick (the blocks wiggle when you mouse over them):

Next, we’re now up to nine cities, and adding more as fast as we can manage. Our latest additions include Cincinnati, St. Paul, and New York City:

The sheer scale of New York City forced us to stop procrastinating and build an actual vector tiles pipeline, but now that we’re cleanly over that hump, we feel more confident in adding other large cities. Each city page is fed by a data pipeline that transforms public open data sources into our internal format, and the next big project is automating that process so we can rapidly add new cities in hours, not days.

Vacant & Underdeveloped Analysis

We’ve significantly improved the vacant land analysis feature, which should be available for every city on the site. Upon first load, you will see the main view of the city’s land values. Here’s St. Paul, Minnesota:

Scroll down and you get a filtered view. The parcels shown in this view are either vacant lots with no structures, lots specifically identified by the assessor as parking lots, and lots with very small structures relative to their overall land area. This is a great way to show elected officials how much development potential in the most valuable areas might be going to waste:

Click on the green “Explore Surface Parking Analysis” button and you will get a special analysis view, which specifically identifies surface parking lots.

Our pipeline fetches data from publicly available satellite imagery (NAIP), then processes it with an open source computer vision model that specializes in parking lot detection. We found it on HuggingFace, based on the excellent paper “A Pipeline and NIR-Enhanced Dataset for Parking Lot Segmentation”, by Qiam, Devunuri, and Lehe, 2024. This solves two problems:

1. Assessor data doesn’t always cleanly or consistently identify parking lots

2. Many large parking surfaces are technically portions of a larger commercial parcel with a small improvement on them, so naively looking at parcel-level land vs. improvement square footage can miss large parking surfaces.

We join the polygons the computer vision model identified as surface lots to our underlying assessor parcels, which lets us price how much land value is tied up in parking. You can zoom in and inspect each lot individually:

Just below that is a table of the top 20 parking lots ranked by total land value:

If you’re thinking, “Hey, that looks a lot like those maps from the Parking Reform Network!” you’d be absolutely right:

We were directly inspired by PRN, whose co-founder Tony Jordan is on our board of advisors here at the Center for Land Economics. Our hope is that these tools can benefit not just those of us interested in Land Value Return, but everybody in the greater urbanist movement—such as PRN!

That brings us to our second suite of tools, Put It On a Map (PIOAM).

Put It On A Map

It’s not just a slogan, it’s a website! PIOAM started as the same 3D visualization engine that Civic Mapper was built from, but has quickly evolved beyond that into our own in-house “GIS Swiss Army Knife” that we keep adding small standalone tools to. The entire suite is available free and open source under the permissive MIT License.

These tools solve common day to day GIS problems and work around some of the clunkier aspects of QGIS2 by just doing the exact thing we want.

The philosophy behind PIOAM is to do as much work as possible entirely locally in your own browser, with absolutely nothing sent to any servers that we control3. Not only do we not grab or store your data, we don’t want your data, because of the liability it would incur. PIOAM is just a standard productivity app that happens to run in a web browser, where all the actual logic runs on your own machine. For maximum control, nothing stops you from downloading the source code and running it entirely on your own computer or office intranet. Ask your IT person to take a look if you don’t believe us.

So far, PIOAM consists of four tools:

3D Parcel Explorer
This is the same 3D visualizer engine you’ve seen in Civic Mapper. It’s local-only and requires you to bring your own data, but it has more analysis tools.

Data Fetcher
What’s the point of fancy GIS tools if you don’t have any GIS data? If you know where your local government stores its open data, this lets you quickly and easily fetch that data straight from the source, then save it out to the same format our tools use.

GIS Format Converter
Got GIS data, but it’s in the wrong format? Never fear, just plop it into this tool, select your output format, and save the result.

GIS File Constructor
If you have two files, and you want to join them together, this will let you do that without requiring you to learn SQL or python. Just drag, drop, click, and export.

Tool #1: 3D Parcel Explorer

This is our big power tool. The interface opens by asking you upload a parquet file:

Once you’ve selected a file, a pop up asks you to identify key fields, and the computer will try to make educated guesses for you to classify them. You don’t have to do this, and you can change your choices later, but doing so will unlock extra features. You can also pick which fields to load to cut down on file size.

WARNING: large files can kill your memory, so try to stay lean, or create a file that only contains a subset of your large jurisdiction. In practice, unless you have a tiny jurisdiction we’ve found that the current version of this app works best for analyzing a subset (such as a few neighborhoods or one big market area at a time, or just your sales rather than every parcel in town). We’re working on ways to make it scale better.

Visualizing Something

Let’s reproduce the Civic Mapper visuals. In the “Layers” menu, under “Field to visualize”, I pick “assr_land_value,” which represents assessed land value in my file (your file will almost certainly have something different in it).

Once I do that, the map gets some color, and both menus change. Let’s look at what’s going on:

There are three sections to the “Layers” menu — the layers themselves up top, then “Field to visualize” and “Paint” below (clicking on the ▼ symbol will collapse/hide any sub menu). Lets go through each section one by one, starting from the top:

I have only one layer, and it’s currently visualizing “assr_land_value.” Then there is a special layer beneath it for the base map. The base map layer has two buttons — one to show the open street map view, and the other to show a satellite view. Clicking the eye for any layer will hide that layer entirely. Then there’s some additional buttons on the main layer widget itself, but we’ll save those for later.

Now let’s look at “Field to visualize.” Notice there’s a dropdown that says “as-is”, we have two other choices in there, “…per land size square feet” and “…per building size square feet.”

These latter two options are only available because of the field classifications we made at the beginning of the app (and yes, it supports metric units). These classifications can be changed at any time in the settings menu. For now let’s pick “…per land size square feet.”

Now our map looks like this, the colors represent assessed land value per land square foot:

That’s cool, but it’s not impressive. Let’s open the paint options:

Here we can change the color scheme, and how it decides how to distribute the gradient across the value range. We can also control the opacity of the map layer, which is useful when you’re working with multiple layers. I’m going to keep the default options, and click that fancy “3D enabled” box:

Whoa! What’s going on? What’s with those towering columns of land value? Is this jurisdiction giving Manhattan a run for its money?

No, this is the humble city of Petersburg, Virginia, which is not breaking world records for land value; there’s something fishy going on with the data. On the left side of the screen are all of our tools. Let’s select the third one down, with the question mark, that’s the “inspect tool.”

With that selected, let’s click on one of these anomalous parcels:

Whelp, there’s our problem. The assessor’s official land size for this parcel is a mere 251 square feet, which given the $2 million dollar land value would put it at a whopping $8,170/sqft, putting prime Manhattan real estate to shame. Clearly, this is misinterpreted data (maybe 251 is supposed to mean “acres?”). I need to use a different field.

I click “settings”, which spawns a new menu:

I go over here to “Data Sources” and click “classify…”

Then I change the land area field to “land_area_gis_sqft” instead:

I do that, close the menu, then go back to the “Layers” menu, and re-select “as-is” then “…per land size” to reset the visualization. Boom, now things look less insane:

This is a much more intelligible map of land values, with the typical pattern I’ve seen in all the other cities. With a little bit of cleanup, I could produce a nice presentation-worthy screenshot of Petersburg City, Virginia (or any other city for that matter).

NOTE: You can’t yet save, host, or send shareable online links to the maps you make with PIOAM’s visualizer yet— but you can at least make screenshots. We’ll build out more features soon.

Going back to our visualization, I notice a few super-tall “pencil” anomalies with extremely skinny bases that I don’t think reflect true reality. This is actually another thing the app is useful for—on a flat map, these outlier parcels are much harder to notice. They can also easily hide in a spreadsheet or database, but on a 3D map, they become super obvious. So much data cleaning work comes down to just narrowing down which parcels are likely to have issues, so this is another tool for quickly locating those.

If you get tired of the 3D view and want to go back to a regular top-down map, do this:

• In “Layers” / “Paint”, uncheck the “Enable 3D” checkbox

• In “Settings” / “View Presets”, click the “Top” preset to flatten the camera perspective:

Now that we’ve got our basic visualization task done, let’s revisit those little buttons in the layers menu:

Statistics

Let’s click on the three bars first. This launches the “Statistics” menu for that layer:

From here I can analyze any of my numeric fields, and, just as in the visualizer, view that as-is, or denominated per land area or per building area. I get a readout of all the usual summary statistics, as well as percentiles and a visual histogram, complete with configurable overflow and underflow buckets.

Note also these buttons on top, which controls what parcels are in the selection driving the statistics:

• All: every parcel in this layer

• Visible: every parcel that’s not currently hidden

• Selected: every parcel selected on the map

• Group: pick a field and value(s)

To give you an idea of how powerful these tools are, let’s go through a couple workflows. First, let’s select by visibility. I’m going to the layers menu and selecting “property use” as the layer visualization. This is a categorical field, so it just assigns a unique random color per category.

After a little panel rearrangement, I have this:

See these little eye buttons in the Legend? They let me show/hide the corresponding category on the map.

If I hide everything except “101 Urban Residential Improved”, and then pick “Visible” as my selector within “Statistics”, the numbers and graph update in real time to correspond to what is visible on the map:

If I show a few more categories, both the map and the statistics change again, instantly:

You can also look at statistics by group, and this is one of my favorite methods. Pick a field, and then pick a value. Here I’ve picked “property_use,” then “101 Urban Residential Improved.”

I can click “Select on map” to highlight all those parcels, but what I really love to do is to just select the second dropdown and hit the “down” arrow on my keyboard and move through each category, instantly seeing the statistics update:

But what if I’m only interested in one particular area? That’s where “Selected” comes in handy.

Let me select a few parcels in one particular neighborhood. For that I go to my selection tool. If I click and hold on the select tool, I get several options:

Let’s pick the “Polygon” tool and grab some parcels:

Clicking on the same point I started at completes the selection, with a handy circle showing up to give me visual feedback:

Now some parcels on the map are selected, highlighted here in green. The selection controls pop up to tell me what I’ve got selected and provide me a handy button to unselect them.

If I change my Statistics selector to “Selected,” then these specific 306 parcels highlighted in green will drive the statistics for me. As you can see in the statistics panel, the land values are clustered in a tight range, absent a few outliers.

ASIDE: Selection Tools are Super Important

Humor me for a minute while I go off on a rant about selection tools.

Whenever you’re doing GIS operations, being able to precisely and quickly select the parcels you want, and deselect the parcels you don’t want, can make the difference between a workflow that takes seconds and a workflow that takes minutes or even hours. I’ve spent a lot of time dialing in the selection tools for PIOAM with the aim of making it my own personal “Photoshop for GIS.” Here’s a list of particular things I’ve added to make my life easier.

First, four selection modes:

• Point (click one thing at a time)

• Rectangle (click and drag a box)

• Lasso (click and drag to draw a loop)

• Polygon (click sequential points one by one, then close)

Additionally, all of these tools support both additive and subtractive selection, so you can quickly use them together to craft complex selections. If you press and hold ALT as you select, the selector will turn red and signify that you are removing parcels from your current selection:

Meanwhile, pressing and holding SHIFT as you select will add parcels to your selection.

Another thing that has always bugged me about QGIS is that selected parcels are always yellow, which can be troublesome if you use yellow in your underlying map layer colors, and I never figured out how to change that. In PIOAM, the “Selection Controls” menu opens whenever you select something, and it lets you change the selection color as needed:

Scatter Plots

Going back to the layers menu, let’s click on the button right next to “Statistics,” which is “Scatterplot.”

Unsurprisingly, this generates a scatterplot. It has the same basic “selector” interface as the “Statistics” menu, but instead of statistics it draws an X vs. Y graph. You define which fields represent X and Y, and also what subset of your data you want to plot.

It’s usually best to narrow your focus to one kind of thing at a time, so let’s look at “101 Urban Residential Improved” again:

So far, so typical. You can stick some things on a map, you can paint them with pretty colors, you can select some things, and you can look at the same bog standard summary stats that anyone with a Power BI dashboard could also cook up in five minutes. What else can this tool do?

Two particularly useful mass appraisal tasks, namely:

1. Generating time adjustments

2. Finding and displaying “comps”

Time Adjustments

Generating time adjustments is an essential task for any assessor or mass appraisal specialist (for a refresher on this basic topic, see this section of our previous article).

In a nutshell, the market moves over time, and the same property might sell for significantly more or less in January than it would have the previous July. Therefore, when we estimate “market value,” we estimate that value as of a specific date, typically January 1st. That means if we’re going to take several years of sale prices and feed them into a regression model or any other prediction algorithm, we will want to “time-adjust” the prices first, so that we not only account for observed market trends over time, but also yield predictions calibrated for the valuation date.

There’s several methods for doing this, which we implement for you in PIOAM’s time adjustment tool. Here’s how.

First, we need to upload some sales. So far, we’ve only been playing with “parcel universe” data — the actual parcel characteristics, but lacking any transaction data. Fortunately we can add new data, such as sales, anytime. We click “Layers” to bring back that menu:

Then we click “Add layer”, and “Browse for file…”

I grab my sales transaction file, which includes sale prices, sale dates, and property characteristics as of the date of sale. The menu tries to auto-detect the essential fields, and finds them. However, this time it also finds sale data, which the “parcel universe” file didn’t have:

I load in the new sales file, and it’s automatically added as an additional layer to my map, defaulting to gray, overlaying my parcel universe (the random colors):

I’m going to hide the underlying universe layer for now and set the sales layer visualization to “sale price per built square foot,” then I’ll enable 3D, just for fun:

Now, let’s do some time adjustment. I click on the time adjustment tool…

…and, it’s already calculated as soon as I open the menu. That was fast!

Let’s zoom in on that graph and explain what’s going on here, then I’ll explain all the fiddly bits in the menu. First, let’s hide everything but the graph:

Each gray dot is a sale. The vertical position is the price divided by the (built) square footage—therefore, this is only a graph of improved property sales, and in case there was any doubt, the little dropdown labeled “mode: Improved” makes that clear. If you have enough samples you can also analyze vacant land sales the same way, in which case it will use land area as the denominator.

The horizontal position is the time of the sale. The gray dots are partially transparent, so when more sales happen at a particular time and price range, the darker that group of dots will appear as they stack up. The blue line is the time trendline that forms the basis for our “time adjustment.” In January 2020, the median price/sqft was $88.12, and in September 2025, it was $141.60, a more than 60% increase.

At the bottom of the menu we have two buttons — one to download as CSV, and one as Excel:

Those will generate spreadsheets that look like this:

Multiplying a sale price by the “correction_factor” for its time period will bring it up to the same price level of the final time period, while “start_indexed” and “end_indexed” provide you with numbers that make for nice looking charts, comparing price levels at different times in percentage terms relative to either the first or last time period in your series.

With no grouping, we are lumping all our property together, which isn’t super useful. We should zoom in to a specific category, like “101 Urban Residential Improved” for a more specific time adjustment:

Next, note the “sampling” dropdown. If we have a ton of data, we can create fine-grained monthly time adjustments which capture inter-year seasonality effects, but as our sales get sparser we should be more conservative, and reduce overall noise by chunking by quarter or even by year:

We also have a special “peak” method, which samples the beginning and end of each year, with a floating midpoint in between, which is often called as a “spline” in this context. This particular method is based directly on an approach described by the Florida Department of Revenue’s time adjustment training materials for local assessors4.

Additionally, median sampling isn’t the only choice. You can also pick “mean” (average), as well as “regression.” The latter will do an ordinary least squares regression using dummy variables for each time period as your independent variables, against log sale price per unit area as your dependent variable (this method is also based directly on the method described in the Florida DOR time adjustment training materials).

If you want to go further, or if you want to dial in the settings to comport with local standards, you can specify inclusion and exclusion filter criteria, specify a custom start and end date, set outlier exclusion rules, and impose a minimum sales threshold for time period sampling:

We hope this tool will be flexible enough to accommodate whatever the local jurisdiction’s standards are. If yours needs something different, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll add it in!

Let’s move on to the comp-finder.

Comp-Finder

This is the second big feature that’s core to a lot of mass appraisal workflows. You invoke it by clicking on the “Comp Finder” tool on the left toolbar. This invokes the “Comp Finder” menu, which is blank until you click on a parcel.

With the comp finder tool selected, I select a parcel on the map. Now it looks like this:

The “subject” parcel is the one I want to find comparable matches against, and it’s marked with a yellow pin. The marked radius represents my search distance, but if I want I can tell it to only find comps within a manual selection of parcels, too. Note that I can also change which layer I’m looking for comps on. Right now I’m looking for comparable sales, so I’m targeting the sales layer, but there’s no reason I couldn’t just look for physically similar properties by targeting the universe layer.

The most important part is the criteria section:

These fields define what counts as a comp. A few defaults are picked for me based on building size, land size, building age, and property use, which I can either disable or remove if I don’t like. I can also add new criteria. For numeric criteria, I can define distance in terms of absolute value (+/- 500 square feet) or in terms of relative value (+/- 10%). Once I’m satisfied, I click “find comps,” and all my matches show up on the map, and in the panel below.

The comps are listed below in a “Comp Grid,” which shows the parcel key and address, along with the matching criteria relative to the subject. I can also add a new field to the grid if I want more information. New fields added this way won’t drive comp matches, but they will show me how the comps differ from the subject.

In this case I can see that the first three comps are all 68 square feet larger than the subject, with small differences in land size, and all but one are the exact same age. The buttons at the bottom let me export this comp grid to a spreadsheet.

In the future we plan to add the ability to add priced “adjustments” to comp grids, so that they can be used as visual aids in in property tax protest hearings—not just by the appellant, but also the assessor!

When both sides have the best possible tools, we can feel much more confident about the quality of our property tax valuations.

Future Work

…and that’s about it for the Put It On A Map visualizer. There’s a few other features in there that we haven’t covered, like the ability to edit fields, and a very clunky export function that’s honestly nowhere near ready yet, but we’re steadily working on improving this over time in partnership with real assessors in the field.

The main thing we want to add next (beyond feature upgrades and some overdue bugfixes) is a desktop and/or hosted database-backed version that anyone can deploy themselves easily. That’s a pretty big lift, so if you find this tool interesting and want to see it more widely developed and deployed, please donate to the Center for Land Economics.

Tool #2: Data Fetcher

What, did you think we were done? We still have three more goodies to show you today! Next on the list is the GIS Data Fetcher.

Having a fancy schmancy GIS visualizer app is of no use if you don’t have any data. Where can you get some data? From local government open data portals, that’s where!

All you have to do is find an ArcGIS server endpoint with the data you want, paste it into the bar on this page, and hit load!

Um… what’s an “ArcGIS server endpoint?”

What’s that, you have no idea what I’m talking about?

Fear not, I’ll explain. By the time I’m done with you, you’re going to be the coolest person in the office and everyone will think you are a magical wizard. Here’s how to find free, public data provided from a local government near you.

Step 1: go to your favorite search engine and type: “<name of location> open data portal”

If your jurisdiction is cool, one of the first few hits will be something like this:

Step 2: Ignore all the official search tools and make a beeline for the first thing that looks like an interactive web map.

It doesn’t really matter which interactive map you click on, because they all tend to be hooked in to the same underlying data sources. Ideally you’ll find a parcel map, but even if you can only find a map of school district boundaries or something, that should work too. Just find any interactive web map:

Step 3: Find the ArcGIS server endpoint

Now for the magic. With the interactive map open, hit F12 on your keyboard. You should see something like this pop up at the bottom, find the tab that says “Network” and click it:

What you’re looking at is a list of network requests. Let me explain what this means, because although it looks complicated, what’s going on is actually pretty simple.

When your browser loads a page, what usually happens is it first tries to load a basic page as quickly as possible so that the user doesn’t think the page is frozen, and then asks the server for additional content to fill in, putting in little spinners and loading bars until the whole page is ready. Each request for more information from the backend database shows up in the bottom panel here. That means if you know where to look, you can find the exact address of the server that’s feeding the map as you click around, and you can download data from directly from that server using our tool. All you need is the server’s name.

Next step: with the network requests panel open, and your eyes on the map, refresh the page. This way you’ll see all the requests, including the ones that happened before you opened the panel.

For good measure, zoom all the way in on a detailed part of the map or click on some things to try to get it to load more information, until the panel fills up. Next step is to filter the list down, because it can get literally hundreds of items. Find this section at the top and click “Fetch/XHR”, this will remove a bunch of irrelevant stuff like loaded images and other stuff we don’t care about:

There’s still a lot of stuff left, but don’t worry, I’ll guide you. What we’re looking for specifically are ArcGIS server endpoints.

ArcGIS server is a specific piece of software produced by ESRI, which powers the backend for approximately all of the online web maps like this one.

We’re specifically looking for URL’s that have “query” in the title, and especially “arcgis” or “gis.” The pattern can vary, so also look for “rest/services” and “MapServer.” The server won’t always be obvious from the data in the “Name” field alone, you’ll have to look at “Request Url” on the other side, but if you click on enough entries you will eventually find a likely candidate, like this:

This is what we want. Go over to the right panel where it says “Request URL”, and copy that whole field:

Here’s the endpoint for this jurisdiction:

https://maps2.dcgis.dc.gov/dcgis/rest/services/DCGIS_DATA/DC_Basemap/MapServer/tile/9/92/165

We’re going to strip off everything after “MapServer”:

https://maps2.dcgis.dc.gov/dcgis/rest/services/DCGIS_DATA/DC_Basemap/MapServer

Now we simply stick that server endpoint into our Data Fetcher.

NOTE: in case you were wondering, you are not doing any elite hacking here (sorry to disappoint you). You are requesting publicly provided information that is being freely broadcasted by a local government, that was already being downloaded to your computer every time you interacted with one of their maps. If they were trying to restrict you, they would require a password with the request.

Click load, and bam! We can now download any or all of these layers, and export them directly as GIS-ready files:

Of course, this particular layer isn’t all that useful. It’s just literally one polygon, the boundaries of Washington DC. However, we have another trick up our sleeves. Let’s look at that URL again:

https://maps2.dcgis.dc.gov/dcgis/rest/services/DCGIS_DATA/DC_Basemap/MapServer

There’s probably more data here, we’re just in one of many subdirectories. If we back up to the end of “services” I’m sure we’ll find the root menu:

https://maps2.dcgis.dc.gov/dcgis/rest/services

Let’s try it:

Sure enough! Here’s all the data:

Each of these has its own expandable category. Folders/DCGIS_Apps/PropertyQuest (MapServer)/Layers/Lots/ seems pretty interesting:

We can check as many as we like, and then, before we commit to downloading them all (which could be quite large), we click “preview layers” to see what we’re getting:

This is 137,378 rows long, and has all the fields we would expect. This is what we want. Let’s go ahead and select “Load selected layers”

That takes us to this screen:

Hit “Load selected layers” and the downloading begins!

Once your download is finished, the “Save file” button highlights, and you can download your file as a parquet. If you have multiple files downloaded, you can save them all as a zip file.

And that’s it! Now you have your files!

NOTE: Files you download this way will not always be ready to put directly into our visualizer, because a) really big files will make your computer choke on memory limits, and b) the coordinate reference system might not be compatible out of the box. We’re working on tools to address that.

Tool #3: GIS Format Converter

What if you already have data on your computer, but it’s in the wrong format? The most common GIS format in assessment offices is the ESRI Shapefile, which goes back to the early 1990’s and has a lot of limitations. Our visualizer app only supports parquet, which is way more efficient—it’s a smaller file size, supports longer field names, handles data better, and loads much, much faster. If you’re using QGIS, you’d also benefit from using parquet format (or at least geopackage) over ESRI shapefiles.

Never fear, the GIS format converter is here! Simply select your GIS file, then convert it to a fancier format with a click! Start by putting your file here:

The system processes it:

And bam! You can convert and save it to either geoparquet or geopackage format:

That’s it! That’s all this tool does. Very handy.

Tool #4: GIS Construct

Let’s say you have two data files — one contains parcel geometry, and the other contains parcel data. How do you join them? Normally you would need SQL, python, or a GIS app like QGIS or ArcGIS. Or you could just use PIOAM’s Construct utility:

The way this works is that we have a “left” side and a “right” side. You upload the file with your geometry to the “left” and the rest of your data on the “right”. Then we’ll go through and join them.

We drop some files in and it loads their data:

If one of the files is a CSV, it will ask for your guidance on how to parse it correctly, and show you a preview of the results you’ll get, so that it doesn’t make a mistake:

When we’re ready, we click “continue to review.” Now we’re looking at each data source and making sure everything’s what we want. We can pick which fields we want, we can override the inferred field type for each column, and we can see how much data is actually in each field:

In this example, let’s say I want to throw away everything on the left except for the parcel id. I click the master “Use” checkbox to untoggle everything, then toggle “PAR_ID” alone. Then I click “Continue to RIGHT columns:”

Since the “right” data source was a CSV, I might want to check if all my fields are being properly interpreted, as CSV’s can mess up the types. I decide I’m going to keep the defaults, and “Continue to configure:”

Now we need to figure out the join logic. Fortunately this next step will help us with this. It loads up and gives us some options:

We’re trying to find a field on the LEFT that will join up with the RIGHT. It’s automatically made some guesses for us, but it guessed wrong on the right, “OBJECTID” isn’t the field I want. If I click “Preview matches” it will show that I have 0 matched rows by using that key:

I go back and I select “Parcel” instead:

This is good enough for my use case, but let me explain the rest of the interface for completeness sake. First, normalization:

Sometimes one file will have keys formatted like “000123 456 abc 11” and another will have the same keys, but formatted like “123456ABC11000”. These are actually the same, but will not naively match with one another, because:

• LEFT has leading zeroes: 000123 456 abc 11

• RIGHT has trailing zeroes: 123456ABC11000

• LEFT has lowercase letters: 000123 456 abc 11

• RIGHT has uppercase letters: 123456ABC11000

• LEFT has spaces as separators, RIGHT doesn’t

We need to clean all this stuff up so that the keys will match. We’ll get a live preview of how our keys will change when we click these various options, then we can test them out by clicking “preview matches.”

Next, we have to properly handle duplicate entries for the same key:

The app will drop duplicates by sorting each file by a chosen field, then dropping all but the first instance of the chosen key. So if “123” shows up eight times in the left side, only one of those will be picked. If I sort by, e.g. “sale_date”, ascending, then it will pick the one attached to the latest sale. If there’s no duplicated IDs in your dataset, there’s nothing to worry about here.

Next, we pick which key we want in our output file:

This screen will also tell us whether there are any collisions between columns in both data files — that is, whether they both share a column with the same name. If we’re good to go, we can preview matches.

Everything looks good. The RIGHT data file is somewhat smaller, so there are 32 rows from the LEFT that are not matched. That’s fine. Also, we had some duplicate rows on the left, and we’re losing 573 rows. That’s also fine. The thing I care about in this case is that every row on the right, the one with my characteristics, is unique, and every one matched parcel geometry from the left. Let’s bake the file out.

In the file step, I pick my format and file name. I click “build” and wait for the file to finish.

It updates with a preview of what’s in my file, and I can click export to save it. Here’s my file!

Further work

We hope these tools will be of use to not just us in the Land Value Return community, but also to the greater Urbanist movement, as well as civil servants and GIS professionals more generally.

We’re constantly working on refining and updating these tools, as well as producing tutorials, examples, documentation, and other training materials, but in order to do all that, we need your support and feedback. In addition to our labor, building the next generation of these tools, particularly those that require server hosting, incurs recurring costs. Your donations help us pay for all that and deliver more and better tools:

If you can’t give us money, however, the next best thing is to give us is your complaints. We want these tools to actually be used by people besides us, and I just know they’ve got lingering bugs, deficiencies, missing features, and edge cases I never thought of. The only person who can discover these is you. That’s why we want you to use them, break them, and then loudly complain to us about them (but politely!) Also, if you use any of our tools in your workflows or presentations, please let us know about it!

File your issues here, or join the OpenAVMKit discord (which has become a catch-all gathering place for all our projects) and complain there too.

Thanks for everything, we couldn’t do it without you. Let’s build all the things!

“Northern Virginia is rapidly transforming from a car-centric suburb into a people-first destination,” says Falls Church City Councilmember Justine Underhill. With that transformation comes soaring land values — and a decision that can no longer be deferred.

Underhill, who also runs a well-known urbanist YouTube channel, puts it plainly: “Should these gains translate into affordable housing and better public transit, or should they merely pad the pockets of land speculators? HB282 gives us a vital tool to ensure that this socially created value benefits the broader public.”

She is joined by Charlottesville Planning Commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates, who sees the bill as long-awaited relief for residents squeezed by rising assessments. Speaking in a personal capacity, Solla-Yates says: “We have been studying tax reform measures to meet our housing, equity, and climate goals for many years now. Reducing the tax burden on Charlottesville families will provide some relief from spiking assessments while making the numbers work better for those working to protect, repair, and build the homes we need.”

“It is heartening to know that Richmond hears us,” Solla-Yates added, “and wants to work with us to solve the problem.”

This progress continues Virginia’s slow march towards land value tax (LVT). The modern journey began with a 1998 opinion from the state Attorney General which concluded that nothing in the Virginia Constitution prohibited a split-rate LVT, but that local governments must first receive explicit permission from the General Assembly before adopting one. Since then, lawmakers have gradually granted that authority one jurisdiction at a time: Fairfax in 2002, Roanoke in 2003, Poquoson in 2011, and Richmond as recently as 2020.

With HB 282, that list of cities has doubled. Taken together, these eight cities contain roughly 7% of Virginia’s population, including two of the state’s largest cities, Richmond (population 235,000) and Newport News (185,000).

Over the last few years, interest in land value taxes has been building in Virginia as the state struggles to accommodate an influx of population resulting in increasingly unaffordable housing, flooding of coastal areas, shortfalls for funding schools, and aging infrastructure.

Indeed, the Progress and Poverty Institute (PPI) has published two detailed analyses of LVT for Richmond. Analysis on behalf of the City found that a revenue-neutral LVT shift would be broadly progressive, tending to reduce the tax burden in lower-income neighborhoods. This would shift the tax burden off of multifamily housing and commercial properties, and onto low-intensity land uses such as vacant land and surface parking lots. In parallel, a series of case studies for the Realtors Association recommended implementing an LVT prior to the Richmond 300 rezoning, as a way to capture some of the windfall land value conferred upon upzoned properties. This revenue stream could be tapped to fund infrastructure necessary to accommodate growth, or to provide tax relief for the rest of the city.

PPI have also published similar analyses for Fairfax City and Charlottesville (although the latter study now relies on outdated assessment data), both of which found that a revenue-neutral LVT shift tends to reward the construction of much-needed multifamily housing, while raising taxes on vacant and underutilized land.

With the passage of HB 282, Virginia now appears perfectly-poised to actually implement LVT. Perhaps Charlottesville will be the first city to try it out.

Kentucky joins the fold

Kentucky may soon become the next state to enter the national conversation around land value taxation.

Unlike most states, Kentucky has two consolidated city–county governments known as Metro Governments: Louisville–Jefferson County and Lexington–Fayette County. These unified governments combine city and county functions under a single administration and legislative council elected from districts across the county.

In Louisville, however, the consolidation preserved a key institutional boundary from the pre-merger city. The area corresponding to the historic City of Louisville is now designated as the Urban Services District (USD). Within the USD, Louisville Metro directly provides traditional city services such as fire protection, trash collection, and snow removal. Because these services are delivered at a higher level than in the surrounding county area, the USD has its own additional property tax layered on top of the countywide tax.

This district provides a natural opportunity for experimentation with tax policy.

Kentucky lawmakers are currently considering HB HB607, a broader bill dealing with Metro Government governance and oversight. One provision would allow Louisville Metro to adopt a split-rate property tax within the Urban Services District, creating separate subclasses for land and improvements and allowing land to be taxed at a higher rate than buildings.

In effect, the legislation would allow Louisville to pilot a split-rate land value tax within the area where traditional city services are already concentrated, making it a logical testing ground for the policy.

What’s more interesting is the way this came to be. Jackson Arnold, a local resident interested in land value taxes, Progress and Poverty reader, and frequent contributor to OpenAVMKit, decided to run the numbers himself. He did the analysis of the impact of a split-rate tax and at the same time engaged in conversations with city council members about the practical and good implications of land value tax shifts. He has attracted interest from several elected officials, including the chair of the Republican caucus of Metro Council, Anthony Piagentini. Through these conversations, Arnold met with the relevant parties across the city and state and found an opportunity for this enablement.

This approach follows the playbook we have discussed before: speak pragmatically, find a local champion, and do the boring work for your elected officials. This boring work included legal and data analysis, as well as writing explainers and engaging with the weeds of the policy.

Syracuse mayor expresses interest

Last year, land value tax momentum started finding a foothold in New York, led in part by Syracuse Councilmember Corey Williams and State Senator Rachel May. The Center for Land Economics published a report on the potential impact of a land value tax shift in Syracuse. The results are excellent: a pragmatic, sound policy that shifts the tax burden from productive to unproductive uses of land.

Now, recently-elected Syracuse Mayor Sharon Owens has stated her interest in exploring land value taxes as a solution to problems facing the city. Speaking to the Central Current, a Syracuse-based news source, she says:

“Like that’s a sea of parking over there, a sea of parking. Minimally, build a parking garage that you can build more parking in,” Owens said. “But really, in high-demand city spaces, surface parking lots are not the best, and we don’t own them. And so I am learning more about it.”

She then expressed a similar desire to explore land value taxes in her State of the City while discussing tools to ensure fiscal sustainability while nurturing growth in the local economy. “We will also explore new opportunities such as a land value tax to incentivize the highest and best use of property for economic growth”, Mayor Owens stated.

She is joined by her City Councilmember Corey Williams who has been a key champion of the policy since he first learned about it from Zach Zeliff, Senator May’s Chief of Staff. They have been useful in pushing the state legislation which was recently re-introduced from last year with one improvement: removing the pilot cities clause.

Last year, the legislation would have enabled a pilot program for cities. A pilot program that requires state approval introduces complexity making implementation for a city more difficult, having to vote for a policy without guarantee the state approves the city for the pilot program. To avoid any complications, the amendment would now allow any city to implement split-rate taxes, a cleaner solution.

Armed with a state bill to enable cities and the data to support the policy, Syracuse has the opportunity to be among the first in a new wave of cities nationwide to implement land value tax shifts.

Syracuse does not need to wait for the state; instead, they can pass a City Council resolution petitioning Albany, engage their local state legislators who already support land value tax, and build enough political pressure to see it through to the governor’s desk. In 1993, the city of Amsterdam charted a path worth following: the Amsterdam City Council twice passed resolutions petitioning the state for authority to implement a split-rate tax, their local legislators sponsored a bespoke single-district bill, and after lobbying from the mayors of other cities helped secure the governor’s signature, Mario Cuomo signed it into law on August 4, 1993.

A couple hundred miles away, recently-elected Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan, who mentioned land value tax shifts multiple times in his campaign, has remained quiet about them so far. Buffalo is properly situated to benefit heavily from such a policy, so let’s hope the Mayor will translate his stated desires into active support for state policy to allow Buffalo to implement the split-rate tax.

The growing moment in Ohio

In Ohio, one man has been the source of a large push for a land value tax. We have reported before on Republican State Senator Louis Blessing’s SJR 7, a proposed constitutional amendment which would enable cities to implement land value taxes. Since then, the media has relentlessly covered his push—making it perhaps the most public push since Detroit’s efforts years ago.

The public push has translated into real media traction. Blessing has made the rounds across Ohio and national outlets, with coverage appearing in Fox 8, 10TV, WKBN, the Ohio Capital Journal, Marietta Times, and even Realtor.com. The framing is consistent: with a grassroots campaign threatening to abolish property taxes entirely, a move Ohio’s Office of Budget Management warns would open a $24 billion hole in local budgets, Blessing is offering LVT as the grown-up alternative.

His pitch is crisp: “Why are land value taxes superior to property taxes? Quite simply, they don’t tax development. And as many of you know, if we’re going to tax improvements, we get less of them.”

On the abolition push, he’s equally blunt, warning that a property-tax-free Ohio would be a windfall for land speculators: “If I were an out-of-state investor, I would get my ass into Cincinnati as quickly as possible, buy up as much land as I can, sit on it forever, tax free.” It’s a pitch aimed squarely at the business community, housing advocates, and local governments alike — and it’s finding an audience.

At the time I am writing this, I asked the Senator for a quick time to chat, and in typical fashion, he responded that he would… after he got off another call with the media talking about his push for land value tax enablement. He notes, too, that he is a fan of vintage Puck magazine cartoons.

His public push is not for naught. Ohio is a red state, and like other states, there is a contingent of red state politicians pushing for property tax abolition. Blessing, rightly, understands that this is a nonstarter for a prosperous economy. Instead, Blessing is hoping to reframe the debate toward abolishing the tax on development but retaining Milton Friedman’s favorite tax: the land value tax.

Updates from the Center for Land Economics

To quickly catch new readers up, we launched one and a half years ago and made a splash in our first year. Right now, we are two folks—Lars and Greg—but supported by a powerhouse board. We also recently launched a fellowship program, and the application window closed last weekend, so we look forward to hosting fellows soon.

And now, a few announcements.

First, we have recently revamped the CLE’s website! It is now more functional and features many interface improvements for a better overall user experience. One page we’ve improved in particular is the LVT Legislation Tracking webpage.

We’re also joining the conversation in local newspapers. Last weekend, we published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle: California needs to fix Prop 13, but Tom Steyer’s plan has a fatal flaw. In it, we argue that the pragmatic way for California to escape the mess of Prop 13 is to eliminate it with provisions that ensures that unwinding Prop 13 does not immediately create a windfall increase in tax collection for cities.

Further, our recent report evaluating vacant land valuations across Maryland was reported on by the Baltimore Banner. From our initial analysis of the updated values, the State Department of Assessment and Taxation (SDAT) is making improvements on the glaring issues we found in our original report. We will be speaking on a webinar with HGSSS about these two reports in a week.

CLE also supported Elle Griffin’s deep dive: Let Cities Build Utopia. The first installment from Elle is well worth a read, as is the full pamphlet.

Finally, we will also be in Chicago late April. If you are in the area, our friends at the Progress and Poverty Institute have been working with local organizations to put together an event on Land Value Tax in Chicago on April 30th. This will be an exciting event, and in addition to ourselves will feature Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s Chief Economist, as well as John Norquist, former Mayor of Milwaukee.

Rounding out today’s updates are the following news beats:

• Phil Levin and Ben Southwood, writing in Works in Progress, argue that urban retail fails because the value it creates — the foot traffic, neighborhood vitality, and rising home prices nearby — is captured by landowners rather than the retailers themselves. They survey several mechanisms to fix this leaky value capture, from unified ownership models (malls, transit-oriented development) to hyperlocal taxing authorities like Business Improvement Districts, making the case that land value capture tools are essential to sustaining the shops, cafes, and restaurants that make cities worth living in.

• David Rickheim, a resident in St Louis Park, MN, writes in to the Sun Sailor expressing that a land value tax is the alternative to retrograde tax property tax policy proposals such as levy limits and value caps.

• Jared Fleischer, CEO of Bedrock, a real estate firm operating in Detroit and Cleveland and Detroit’s largest downtown developer, has endorsed land value tax as a way forward for Detroit’s economy to spur development.

• Maryland has introduced a senate companion bill to their house legislation as they consider enabling Baltimore and counties to adopt split rate tax. Hearings have occurred in both the House and Senate for this bill with a mix of supporters and opponents. In a future post, we plan to dive into the hearings and the context of Maryland, including a fiscal note which may hinder progress on the bill this year—the state department incorrectly claiming implementation will cost $36 million.

• In a BBC interview, a Green Party spokesperson responded to vacancy land taxes with a smarter proposal: “The way land and property is taxed in Wales needs a total overhaul, including replacing council tax and business rates with a fairer land value tax.”

Greg Miller is Executive Director of the Center for Land Economics. Stephen Hoskins is the Director of Community Research and Engagement at the Progress and Poverty Institute.

Applications for the Land Economics Fellowship are due March 1st at Midnight.
Progress and Poverty Institute research proposals are due April 6th.

Foreword:

When I started the Center for Land Economics, I spoke with Georgists across the country who have spent years working to turn good ideas into real policy. No one inspired me more than Josh Vincent.

Josh has worked with cities across America to show, in practical terms, how land shapes local economies and how better public finance can help communities thrive. Over a year and a half after our first conversation, Lars and I are proud to welcome Josh to the Center for Land Economics Board of Governors. In many ways, our work stands on foundations he helped lay.

In our many conversations, it became clear that Josh’s legacy should not remain in meetings and policy memos. It should be shared widely, especially with those who are ready to do the hard work of change.

So I recorded this interview with Josh. I hope you enjoy it.

Greg Miller (00:00)

Hi everyone, I’m Greg Miller, the executive director of the Center for Land Economics. I appreciate you all tuning in today. I’m excited to be talking with Josh Vincent, who will introduce himself in a second, but I first have to disclose that he is also on our board of governors at the Center for Land Economics. And we added him to our board because he’s been one of our main inspirations in the work we do as somebody who’s been doing this work for decades to great effect. And so with that being said, I’m excited to be talking today to Josh.

Josh, why don’t you start us off with giving us a quick introduction about who you are, what you do, and what you have been doing for

Joshua Vincent (00:32)

Thanks Greg. Thank you for the invitation. I’m honored to be here. I’m Josh Vincent and I’m the director of the Center for the Study of Economics. We’re a 501c3 Economic Research Foundation. And I’d say the center is a hands-on kind of group. We don’t do any high and mighty abstract stuff. Most of my time in the center’s time is spent exploring the feasibility of administering and implementing the land value based system of taxation, be it through the process of property tax or reduction of even more corrosive forms of tax, like the sales tax, income tax or business tax. And so that’s kind of nonprofit we are. We were very public facing. Yeah.

Greg Miller (01:16)

Yeah, that’s great. And I’ve always been drawn both to your work, but also to your story. How does one go from being a normal person to being a Georgist and then from being a Georgist to being a full-time practitioner for decades on Georgist policy? Not just thinking about the idea, but really doing the hands-on work. I’m curious to hear your story.

Joshua Vincent (01:29)

Come on.

That’s a really good question of how I came to this ship or this island. In the prehistoric days, the 1980s, I had incidentally studied Georgism as a student of American history at Oberlin. My professor in the history of economic thought was Dr. Robert Neal, who late lamented Dr. Robert Neal, but was a great student of American political history and economic history. And he told the class one day as he was assigning papers that he was really bored with rehashing of Marxism

from anxious young sophomores. I thought that was kind of cool because I was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist.

and he sort of brought me up standing, stopping, and said, okay, so instead he suggested to several students to approach socialism from a non-surplus theory of where the increased value of a product occurs. Where does that increased value go? Does it go to wages? No. Does it go to the capitalist? No. And that’s really how I

got introduced to Henry George as a highfalutin idea. approach socialism from a non-surplus theory of where the increased value goes. So from Henry George, I agreed that the increased value goes to landowners in the form of economic rent. Coincidentally, at the time I was working for First Albany Corporation, which is an early form of a private equity corporation.

And I was doing my summers off with about 10 other kids.

We were conducting basic pragmatic research on the value added of Battery Park City. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but at the time it was a modern miracle. They put in a bunch of fill near the World Trade Center into the Hudson River and they created new land. And so First Albany Corporation commissioned us to see if it was worth anything. And it turns out that just creating this land skyrocketed the land value.

because they created the value. So I did that and put the paper together for Professor Neal and I got a B plus I think. So that’s how I got into it originally.

Greg Miller (04:02)

From a B plus in college to being probably the main practitioner for decades of the cause. How did that then transition you from this one paper to discovering that you can actually do this work in the real world?

Joshua Vincent (04:18)

Yeah.

⁓ good question. ⁓ I had been, once I left college, I did what I think most people did in the 1980s because at that time, if you could read, write and communicate well, you could get any kind of a job. And I was trying to be a punk rock star in New York City in the 1980s, so that required a day job. And my day job was

for the National Insurance Research Council. And so I just paid the bills by doing really immoral work, exploring toxic exposure lawsuits, creating abstracts to defend insurance companies against payouts. And I said, my God, this is immoral. So how can I do this? And ⁓ at the time I’d heard about from...

Greg Miller (05:00)

Yeah.

Joshua Vincent (05:09)

about the Henry George Foundation of America. Because I was still interested, I thought it was a good idea. And the Henry George Foundation at that time had also taken on a C3 wing, was CSE, the Center for the Study of Economics. And they were working, really going from city to city in Pennsylvania, because that was the only state where you could implement the land value tax shift.

And so Dr. Steve Cord, who had just retired from Indiana University of Pennsylvania as an economic historian.

He was kind of the Johnny Appleseed of ⁓ Georgism at the time. He was tired of showing up to dry academic meetings and journals talking about whether Henry George was a good idea. He wanted to put it into practice. And so the best way to do that was to get the numbers and go from town to town. And at the time, as you may know, all these cities in Pennsylvania, they had just had their

budgets blown up. They had the guts of their existence blown out by the collapse of the steel industry. So there was no work and there were no taxable buildings left in these towns. And so he said, look, you’ve got to fill up these vacant lots to pay the bills. And that was really the essential idea. A lot of these cities were facing issues where they had to lay off police. They couldn’t pay their power bills to, know, Allegheny, light and power. So

That’s what he did. He had retired. He was approaching 70. So he wanted a young buck that had a working Toyota Camry to continue that work. And I just went from town to town doing the research at the time. And this is, I’m dating myself. This is pre-Excel. This is a long time ago. And we had to do it on paper and do random properties, you know, like each property at the top and bottom of the page.

right out in the long hand what the effect of a land value tax shift would be. At that time Dr. Kord was he was hunting bigger game. He went to the former Soviet Union and he was part of the team that helped Estonia adopt the land value tax on a national level. So I was left to sort of you know hold the shop together by getting towns in Pennsylvania to expand or adopt land value tax. I like to credit myself because I think I really helped helping the council people, progressive institutions, and conservative businessmen in Allentown to adopt LVT as part of their Home Rule Charter. And that was really the start, just learning politics, learning how to do mass communication. We did mailings to the voters in LVT.

was voted in in 1996 by the electorate of Allentown because it had been vetoed six times by city council who were working not in the best interest of the city but in the best interest of their golfing partners, if you will. And that’s local politics. So we did an end run around the establishment and using politicians and people from the left and the right, we got Allentown to adopt and then expand. Same with Harrisburg, Steelton, Altoona, and a few other towns. There have been some rescissions, but essentially, what we’re trying to do is help cities approach the new realities.

Greg Miller (08:49)

Yeah. I mean, and this is why I wanted to have this conversation. Cause if there’s one person that people should emulate, if they really care about getting land value tax implemented in their current area and their region, it’s the work you’ve done. so, you know, applause to you for that. And I’m curious to know when you were working in these cities in Pennsylvania, you know, there’s been some writings out there, but I’ve also heard you just talk about the impact to these cities when they have implemented land value tax, whether it be in Allentown, of course, Pittsburgh’s talked about all the time.

But there’s also smaller cities that have implemented. so what have these results shown and what have you seen when you tell these stories to other city council members in Pennsylvania of, look down the road and look at what they achieved. What have you found?

Joshua Vincent (09:32)

That’s a good question. You have to remember that the original mission of CSE was to show that it could work.

And the best way to do that in our institutional view was to help manageable jurisdictions, small cities, towns, adopt the program and provide an experimental background where people could check the results of LVT. Did it do anything? Did it do nothing? Did it hurt the town? And none of these questions were answered before CSE. So I guess we can take credit.

take credit for what’s happened since I came on board and took over. But what happened to these towns now, primarily because politics and economics are the same thing, political economy, who benefits from a land value tax? And the answer is, is was quite clear. It still is. Most voters, and that means homeowners, most property owners have to save on their tax bill.

You know, if people are going to go to the trouble of changing the tax system or adjusting the tax system, there has to be a benefit. Qui bono? Who benefits? And the answer has to be...

the voters because elected officials are responsible to the voters, whether we like it or not, but at the municipal level more so. And so because we could go to a city council person and say, look, these are the numbers and the council person would read the, by that time, Excel sheets and say, wow.

Greg Miller (11:07)

Yeah

Joshua Vincent (11:09)

90 % of my homeowners will save. 60 % of my businesses, home owned small businesses will save. He said, I see votes in this. I see a path out and a path to attract investment into our town. I don’t know what you know about Pennsylvania, but it’s not exactly at the cutting edge.

of much anymore. And some people say the best days of Pennsylvania towns are behind them, but I don’t believe that’s the case. And the city leaders didn’t. There was a chance, but they had to make their towns competitive, especially in the sense of urban sprawl, because even in small Pennsylvania cities, people left to go outside the city boundaries when times were tough. And so the city had to become competitive in the tax picture with the surrounding jurisdictions. and the rationale and the explanation of Mayor Reed and Harrisburg was if I can persuade and demonstrate that if you put a six-story building up in our downtown, it’s going to be cheaper than putting it up in the suburbs, then you’ve got the key to golden prosperity is the urban institute called LVT. And that’s what happened. And if you can in your action as a city leader or something, if you can say to a business or a homeowner, your taxes are going to be lower here in a city with established infrastructure and services than in the surrounding suburbs that are basically cornfields turning into tract homes, then that’s a great advantage. And that’s been the great advantage in Pennsylvania. And now we’ve been, of course, trying to expand it into other states. and all of that. But if you think about and you know stop me if I’m going too fast or too far.

Greg Miller (13:06)

No, keep going.

Joshua Vincent (13:08)

Land value tax, I think, is taking root these days because we’ve provided these real-life examples of where it’s used, studied, and expanded. The arena of possibility has expanded these days from the nation-state to the subnational, regional, and municipal.

We’re in the age of de-evolution. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Devo, but I am. And I took the, they’re a new wave band from the 1970s. And I took inspiration from their message of everything falls apart, which is true. That’s a scientific concept, a philosophical concept of de-evolution. For example, the central government in London and the UK devolved powers to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Greg Miller (13:38)

Okay.

Joshua Vincent (13:59)

And that’s what’s happening now. The gearbox of national government is kind of frozen and it will be for the foreseeable future. So who’s going to be left to...

I don’t mean to put it crudely, who’s going to be left to make sure that the toilets work and that the streetlights stay on? It’s going to be cities, counties, and states. So they’ve got to have tools at their disposal to change the systems of revenue so that it doesn’t repel investment, people, and capital, and instead attracts them. And that’s really what we’re doing.

Greg Miller (14:35)

Yeah, and there’s a through line I’m seeing in a lot of what you’re saying right now, which is you took an incremental pragmatic approach. You found problems that cities faced and said, we have a solution for that. And then you took that one step at a time, starting with cities as some quite small cities. And now we see where we’re at at national level, which we could talk about in a moment. But there’s also this big idea of Georgism.

And I think a lot of people I talk to who are Georgists, in the same way Marxists are Marxists, think that system is so designed that it’s so bad that we need to tear it down. there’s, you know, an incremental approach when it work and Georgia wants to see us get towards that, that single tax. And so I’m sort of curious to know what the healthiest way for Georgia is to hold on to their sort of moral vision of what they see in the world, but also be credible. And they talk to city officials and how you think about that incremental approach that you’ve taken as compared to other Georgia’s who frankly, you know, just want to see the single tax and

Joshua Vincent (15:12)

Right.

Greg Miller (15:34)

tear down the federal system until we get there.

Joshua Vincent (15:36)

Yeah, if you’re a Georgeist, you know, in the full sense of the word, I’m a land value tax technical advisor. I try to change tax policies. So people that are Georgeists sit and wait for the call from the Oval Office.

they’re going to sit and they’re going to sit. There are ideologies ⁓ that people have experimented with. Georgism is an ideology. It’s a it’s a view of how the world can work in our time. Well, in my time, you live in a posthistoric time, Greg. So in my time, there were two basic ideologies, Marxism and globalism, neoclassical economics.

Greg Miller (16:09)

Yeah.

Joshua Vincent (16:16)

And I think that socialism has been dealt with under the broad umbrella of the God that failed. There was a great series of essays about how communism and socialism just doesn’t work, no matter what college kids of all ages say.

And so that’s been covered, but I think that we haven’t really had a history yet of the collapse of the globalist vision and ideology of free trade, which is not free trade, actually. It’s a globalist, neoclassical economist view. And it doesn’t work and it hasn’t been covered yet. I think that Thomas Piketty’s book,

the capital of the 21st century, I took a stab at it.

But a famous economist like Joseph Stiglitz criticized Piketty’s book, as could I, because he left land, rent, and natural resources out of his analysis. And Stiglitz was very clear, you’re not going to get the whole picture without putting that factor of economics into the discussion and into the debate. And he left economic rent out of his work. Economic rent works

in a village and it works across the world and economic rent is there. It’s like a physical element like cadmium and so that economic rent belongs to everybody, you know, unless you’re a

I suppose a full-on libertarian or Ayn Rand style person, libertarian. It belongs to the whole world. We didn’t create this rent. It’s there and it’s just for us to pay for essential public services. So yeah, Georgism is an idea. You know, the single tax and it’s or at minimum the large tax base coming from land. But

I don’t want to work on theories because I can’t. You if I drop into a city council work session, lots of people come up to city council work sessions with all kinds of ideas about how the earth is hurtling into the sun. If we’re not careful, you can hear a lot of stuff at city council meetings, but.

None of it’s real. Well, I shouldn’t say none of it, but a lot of it’s simply not real. You know, they’re worried about things that towns can’t affect. So governments know what’s wrong metaphorically. Like I said, if the toilets don’t flush, if the streetlights haven’t got power coming into them.

That’s important. That’s real life. So fixing these things and delivering for the common good at this point in time requires local solutions. Now with states and localities, we’re still mimicking tax policies that were invented in the 1920s. It’s hard for me as an old guy, but that was 100 years ago.

At least I knew some people that were born in the 1920s. But the 1920s were 100 years ago, and that’s where our tax systems at the state, local level, county level were invented. Sales tax, business privilege tax, local wage tax, and the current property tax. So our work at CSE is not fixing the property tax per se. It’s about sourcing revenue from that

looping feedback effect of land value capture and return. We’re capturing that land value and I know land value capture is phrase planners use, but we’re returning it. We’re returning it back to the city and to the people, to the citizens. So I think that that’s what works for us and as some people have said, pragmatism with a vision.

Greg Miller (20:05)

Yeah, precisely. then I suppose on the flip side, you know, there are people who are already Georgia’s, and then there are people who just follow New York Times. And there’s a lot of concerns, and there’s city council members who follow New York Times, and they’re weighing whether they should care about education, criminal justice, any number of different issues, climate change, AI safety, that’s sort of all around, right? There’s always an infinite amount of things to be worried about. And so if you’re

You know, for a listener out there who is, you know, listens to this and also cares about other policy issues. Why do you tell them that land value tax is something they should actually spend time on? Like, why is this so important that folks should actually devote time on it and city council members should prioritize it when they’re looking at their docket?

Joshua Vincent (20:37)

Right.

That’s a great point. ⁓ Once again, I spent a lot of my time at city council meetings and all of these issues funneled down into one thing. Where are we going to get the money?

And it’s funny, when I was a kid, Mario Cuomo was one of my heroes as governor of New York. He was a very pragmatic, in my mind’s eye, Democrat. And he said, yes, all these proposals that you’re bringing up, prison reform, labor reform.

affordable housing, housing the unhoused. These are all important things. You tell me how to pay for it. And at those council meetings, nobody has an idea of how to pay for it. They just demand it. So as

a Georgist in the field, I’d say this is how you pay for it. You provide them a way to pay for it that works. Income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes are either regressive or unworkable in an age of mobile labor and mobile capital. So a land value tax capture and return is something that you can do in each and every town and you can affect small things. mean, the village of Ebbensburg

in Cambria County has a land value tax. It’s a small one though. It pays for plowing the streets, fixing the sidewalks, you know, and paying for the dog catcher. It can affect a little stuff, but it can expand to anything.

a person or a government would like. That’s why the state governments of Australia are funded not wholly, but majorly by a land tax.

inflated up to any level. And as I was referring to earlier, Estonia, they pay for the cost of municipal government across the nation. It’s a national fund that pays for local services and it comes out of land values, full stop. That sounds beautifully elegant. And it is. And land values never flee, they never go extinct.

Well, they can flee, I suppose, if there’s a tax policy in a place that’s so terrible, you get tax exiles and land values can drop as a result. But to forestall that.

I think that what you’ve got to do is use what you have in a community and that’s land values and you can prove it in numbers. That’s the I think the crucial thing. The property tax is actually a pretty good vehicle to work through. Once we work through it, we should get rid of the traditional property tax. The tax on buildings is awful.

⁓ And it’s a factual thing because a building is a combination of labor and capital. If you don’t take care of the building and you don’t invest in it, it’s going to fall down. It’s going to flee. So a building is actually mobile in that sense, constrained only by the powers of gravity. So what we have left is the land value. And that is something that we have to persuade people is something

doable. And I think we’ve done that. Because of urbanism, highest heightened interest in urbanism, the heightened interest in smart cities, and the heightened interest in smart growth, people have got to make the most out of what they have created. You know, a great plan creates land values. That’s everybody knows that. A great idea produces value. So what are you going to do with that value?

As I said, claw it back, which sounds kind of violent and negative. It’s not. You’re just getting what you provided. It’s sort of a user’s fee for land. And you take back some of that value that you donated to the community as a government, and you hand it out to the citizens in the form of more city services or better city services.

Greg Miller (24:47)

Yeah, as we like to say, returning the value of land to the community that makes it valuable or the city that makes it valuable. There’s also something in that answer that relates to California’s current efforts for a wealth tax. You you talk about different taxes, but I think in general, we can think about the Pennsylvania experience. You know, if people talk about all the time with LVT, I’m curious your take on the California experience with property tax in general. And, you know, they’re now

their push for a wealth tax now to make up for their budget and their massive amounts of wealth, but meanwhile, extreme amounts of inequality. So, curious to hear your thoughts on California in that sense.

Joshua Vincent (25:14)

Right.

Yeah, I’ve thought about California. I think any of us working in the ⁓ tax sector have. California cut its throat to satisfy a very select group of vocal

taxpayers, homeowners, specifically middle-aged and elderly homeowners. Should they be protected? Sure. If they’re going to be losing their homes or something, we should put in protections. But their alternative was property 13, which was implemented in 1976. And at that time, California had the best roads in the United States. It had the best public schools in the United States. And it had

a university system that was the envy of the world.

that has changed utterly. As far as league tables, California is near the bottom in quality of infrastructure, quality of public schools, and the ability of local governments to do what they’re supposed to do, which is fix things. So because Prop 13 limited property tax increases, assessment increases, and so on,

They had to resort to higher and higher wage taxes, business taxes, and that drove people out of the state, people that were paying their, that paid taxes. So what’s happening in California now is, my gosh, we’ve lost all these people that can pay wage and business taxes. What’s left? Now, of course, land values are left, but nobody, nobody thinks that.

lot of people do, but most don’t. So what’s left are fixed assets like wealth. You know, if you’re a Google guy or a tech bro and you’re living in San Jose, you’ve got a lot of wealth. You you’ve turned the world around in 25 years from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based economy. And as a result, you’ve made a heck of a lot of money. So what are you going to do with that wealth? Well, you’re going to buy a bunch of stuff.

That’s what people do. Now a wealth tax is something that you can flee from and that’s what I think is going to happen. I think Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, has just bought a giant mansion in Miami merely because of the threat of a wealth tax. And so I think that’s what California is going to see.

Now their wealth tax won’t collect land values necessarily or at all. It’s going to collect

what could be the products of capital and labor, which can be usefully recycled back into the California economy. But instead, people are going to Texas and Florida. And I think that’s going to leave California bereft and leave it worse than it is today. California is a terrible place to be working class or poor.

I mean, they’ll keep you alive. You could say that about California. The welfare system keeps you alive. They give you, you know, canvas for your shelters on the street.

That’s all they do. They make sure that you don’t erupt in violence. And they also have encouraged people that we want to stay in the community, know, parents that want to have good schools, employers that want to have well-trained workers.

what reason is there for them to stay? the wealth tax, think, just going to be a, I don’t know if it’s fatal, but it’s going to be a very dangerous page to turn. And so that’s why I think going back to the property tax makes a lot of sense. California doesn’t have much of a property tax.

It’s up there with poor southern states like Louisiana or Mississippi, with poverty-stricken states like New Mexico, some of the poorest places, toughest places to live in.

And interestingly, the property taxes in California are on the same level as Hawaii. And Hawaii has huge levels of wealth and income inequality and housing unaffordability of any state in the nation.

Hawaii is not a paradise. It’s sort of an extreme version of California. They have almost no property tax and so they tax wages and the ultra wealthy of course can hide their wages in wealth and California’s idea is okay we’re gonna go after the wealth. Good luck on finding it.

and good luck on keeping these people in California. They’re going to go elsewhere. You Texas has high property taxes. I think the sixth highest property tax rate, effective tax rate in the country. But why are people fleeing to Texas? There are no income taxes. They have reasonable business taxes. And the same with Florida. There’s no income tax.

I think they’re going to be cutting their throats if they get rid of the property tax in Florida, but that’s a story for another day.

Greg Miller (30:34)

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I like this idea. think it’s interesting this idea that perhaps the reason why California needs a wealth tax to begin stems back to Prop 13 decades ago, and that rather than making the system better now, they’re just spiraling and all of these is just going to create a chain reaction that just loops in on itself. It’s interesting. ⁓

Joshua Vincent (30:53)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think you’re

right. You know, they’re getting desperate.

Greg Miller (31:00)

Right. And then we do have Florida. I mean, let’s talk about it, right? So there is a movement, not just in Florida, perhaps popularized by Ron DeSantis, who’s a national conservative figure, but there are a lot of folks talking about property tax burden and burden particularly increasing on homeowners who feel the burden increasing at least. Perhaps it’s because of revaluations, perhaps it’s because COVID boosted their land values substantially, but

then there’s this real push. And as you said, like the building taxes bad. And so, you know, is Ron DeSantis right? Are these conservatives right? property taxes bad? But why is there a push all of a sudden? And what do you make of this movement?

Joshua Vincent (31:41)

You referenced ⁓ COVID earlier and COVID accidentally drove up property values and that is that’s still with us. so property values increase. What happens when values increase, taxes increase. Very few jurisdictions at the state level or below tie ⁓ value increases with tax reduction.

So governments have been flush with money. They’ve been taking in almost too much money. If you’re going to have a reassessment or if in fact values are just rising, then you have to have an anti-windfall on the government, prevent the government from collecting a lot more money. I have five dollars worth of carrots and all of a sudden those carrots are worth ten dollars, the government should not take

more of the carrots and that’s what’s happening. If values change, government has to be responsible, I think, and sort of cool their jets on what they take in property assessments.

⁓ Florida has exploding property values until now. Now they’re entering a bit of a slide and a bit of a crash in some areas of the state because so many people are moving there. And if people move to a place, they increase scarcity of the land. Land values go up. And folks don’t know instinctively, I think, that land and buildings are two different animals. And so that’s that is the problem of the property tax.

keep

your house fixed up. If your house is a nice house, you shouldn’t be taxed on it. So DeSantis is half right. A lot of national conservatives are sort of correct, but it’s a disaster to get rid of the property tax. And I think that’s been proven. Texas has been trying

I think constantly over the past 15 years to limit the property tax. And what are you going to tax instead? You’ve got to do two things. You’ve got to slash government spending, which means cutting spending on the goodies that all citizens like. Or you’ve got to slash taxes, and you can’t do one without the other.

Greg Miller (33:34)

Yes.

Yeah, and it’s interesting to think about the property tax that way, which is the property tax is the one tax that people feel the most in terms of what they actually get out of it. I pay income taxes every year and I don’t know what the federal government provides for me outside of, you know, what I read in the property tax. you were to cut city budgets, the sewage wouldn’t be running as often. There’d be more roads failing and lights not on, you know.

Joshua Vincent (34:09)

Yeah.

Greg Miller (34:20)

And so I like to think of the property taxes as a beautiful tax in that lowercase C conservative way, I suppose.

Joshua Vincent (34:26)

Yeah, and I like it too because, as you say, service is rendered by the government.

paid through the property tax, hopefully the land value tax, is visible in better roads and better services. And if government learns not to waste money, which they haven’t learned to do yet at any level, then the property tax can be a reasonable

main source of revenue. know, user fees, sewage fees, garbage fees, we can debate about that. But I think the property tax should be the anchor of any sensible tax policy. I mean, if you look at Europe,

They have very, very low property taxes. And as a result, they’re very world economy dependent, these nations. And the localities have almost no power to raise taxes. It’s all a matter of the nation’s capital dispersing money. I think our nation does a pretty lousy job of dispersing money, but Europe does it even worse. That’s why the property tax is not

exist

in places like Greece and Italy. And that’s a shame because the local town knows what they need, the town government, but they’re not going to get that resource, their own resource, and be able to use it to spend on improving the city.

Greg Miller (35:50)

Yeah, Lars and I have folks reach out from those countries, know, who are Georgists, and Lars and I look at each other and say, wow, do we have it lucky here in the United States? Because we at least have that gratis and infrastructure to think about land value tax. But there you’re creating a whole new system of taxation that includes its assessments.

And perhaps that’s a good transition point to think about. You’ve learned a lot in dealing with opposition and dealing with land value taxes over the years. You’ve seen a lot of barriers, whether they be technical or political or administrative, or whether it just be purely rhetorical. And so I’m wondering, what have you learned? What are those main barriers you’ve found? And then how have you gotten around, gotten about getting around those barriers?

Joshua Vincent (36:15)

Yeah.

The main barrier is that everybody hates taxes and everybody hates the property tax. Usually it’s paid in quarterly installments or monthly installments on a mortgage. And an expensive mortgage makes people irked because the mortgage companies, they’re very clever. send out, this is what your mortgage payment goes to. And property taxes are a large part of that pie.

when you’re retired, and this is crucial, and your mortgage is paid off, the government sends you a bill once or twice a year, and you open the envelope and your eyes pop open. What? I don’t even have any kids in school, that kind of thing. So that’s where the problem is. Any kind of tax is unpopular.

I think it’s the sticker shock of getting one tax bill or two tax bills a year that really drives people nuts. And it should really. But they don’t know that a sales tax, which you don’t even you don’t know how much you spend a day in sales tax. So you don’t even recognize if it’s two or three times what you pay in property tax. You don’t realize if your income tax is two or three times what you pay because it’s

taken out of your your check before you get paid. So the property tax doesn’t have that kind of deception built into it like other taxes do. And I think that’s that’s a big issue. Now explaining to or discussing not explaining but conversing with people. Do you want services? Yes. How should we pay for it?

And they say, well, property tax, I hate it. How about a land tax? In other words, let’s exempt your building. Let’s universally exempt every building in town from taxation. And people really actually start to think about it. And then they think about the fabric of their community and what makes it good or bad. We were talking about

city problems.

If you have city disinvestment and abandonment, which we have suffered over the past 30 years, what does that mean? Well, homeowners know they keep their house up. They love their house. But if across the street there’s an absentee and lets the property go to rack and ruin, they know exactly what happens with that house across the street. They don’t pay anything in taxes. That’s unfair. It sounds unfair. It sounds un-American.

So when we flip

that script and talking to people in towns or to city council people, you know, let’s not defend the results of bad tax policy and bad actors. Let’s rely on a stream of revenue that is there. It comes out of your current property tax. Let’s just eliminate the building entirely or as much as we can. And then that’s kind of hard for people to get across. Can you separate land and building values?

I think as you and Lars know with your valuation tools, it’s pretty routine now or automated to separate land values into building values. There are

whole departments in Australian universities that study this, how to split land and building values. It’s doable. I think it’s a false argument that, you can’t determine the split values. We can do it. And when you look at the numbers and communicate, people, say, OK, I live at 23 Elm Street. What’s going to happen to my house?

You’re going to save $500 a year. You’re going to save $2,000 a year, sometimes even more. And people go, great.

But then I always say, you want to see what happens to the slum property that’s owned by somebody 500 miles away? Yeah, what happens to that? Their taxes go up three or $400 or $500 a year to make up for what you saved. So the same amount of revenue comes into the city. Once city officials are insured that the same amount of money, it’s revenue neutral, is assured, then they’re a lot more open to it.

math at that point.

Greg Miller (40:55)

Yeah, that’s interesting. Of course we face these same problems, but in our view, we can overcome all of them. So along those lines, if you were speaking to an urbanist, Georgist, or whoever that reaches out and says, hey, I really like this idea of shifting our property tax burden. What’s your playbook? What should folks be doing? What’s the first steps they should be taking? And how should they think about really making change in a city government? How do you make change in the city government?

Joshua Vincent (41:13)

Yeah.

You start with the champion. I think that’s been inevitable. Now, in the earlier part of the 20th century, you had people that understood what Georgism was, people across the spectrum. And so they said, ⁓ we can do this and provide the numbers and they go, ⁓ cool. And so they implement.

But working it right now is finding a champion, getting a meeting, and having that champion, that local champion, be it a council person or a state representative or county council person, sort of carry the torch. And you’ll find elected officials, and a lot of elected officials are absolutely dedicated to the citizens, and they’re absolutely dedicated to their jobs.

and they don’t get enough credit. I know that there’s a lot of brick bats thrown at them, but they don’t get enough credit for trying to improve the city. But they need to understand the tools that are available. And once they do, they’re very loyal. Pat Toomey was a businessman in Allentown. He owned four or five bars.

And that was his life path. And he got angry at the business taxes that he had to pay every time he fixed up his business. So he ran. He passed a Home Rule Charter Amendment in Allentown. Then he ran for Congress and then he ran for Senate and he became a senator and he carried with him all that time the idea that taxes should not be an obstruction or a

hindrance

to people’s aspirations. And he became eventually a very, you know, a right wing Georgist, if you will, president of the Club for Growth. But he did that with the understanding that government has to operate, it has to be there, it has to provide services, but it should, to the greatest extent possible, not interfere with the market, not interfere with people’s life choices. And I

that’s what we can provide from the village level on up really. And that champion will then say this is a good idea. And in fact in Pennsylvania a lot of the effort was helped by having you know the mayor of Harrisburg or Pat Toomey when he was in Congress write letters to mayors saying hey this has helped our town we didn’t have to spend any extra money.

It’s not a new tax. It’s just the property tax reconfigured and tooled for the 21st century.

And it worked in my town. That’s all I can tell you. And I’ve been mayor for 40 years, whoever, and and I’ve been voted into the US Senate. Hasn’t hurt me. But I think that’s what you need. And writing letters to colleagues has helped dramatically in places like, they haven’t adopted yet, but in places like ⁓ Pittsburgh, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and other cities, Hartford, Connecticut, letters from

mayors that use LBT really encourage them to get enabling legislation passed at the state level. That’s what you need first and foremost because I assume this is going out to a national audience. In a lot of states you have to make sure you can do it legally first and I think a lot of the work on the ground now.

Greg Miller (44:47)

Yeah, and-

And for a lot of listeners

that that challenge of, okay, so I just need magically this champion to appear sounds daunting. Right. But I think that what you would propose is throughout this conversation, you’ve talked about, are problems that city council members face and you could go talk to your city council member and discuss this idea with them in terms of what’s the problem they’re facing and find out if they might be a champion of this cause. then, and then once they are, sounds like.

These champions just need support. need the data analysis. They need any other level of support that helps push this forward because they’re dealing with hundreds of pieces of legislation or consideration. So is that correct? Is that how you go about it?

Joshua Vincent (45:25)

Yeah.

Pretty much, ⁓ first and foremost, I would preface all of that by saying that there has to be a problem to be solved and an apparent problem to be solved. And these days it’s usually fiscal. And so a council person will be upset that a lot of neighborhoods are burning down and being abandoned. How do we fix that? What’s the problem?

And is the solution more revenue? Often, yeah, it is. And is it through the very structure of your tax system? Yeah.

a lot of the problems are baked in to how we fund government. So we do have to modify that. And that’s why going to a land tax helps address existing problems that everybody knows exists, but they don’t have a clue of how to replace it. So just a little data would work. I was doing some research on

I won’t name it because I think it’s secret now on a city in Virginia, a small city in Virginia, and they’re interested because ⁓ as you may know, there’s a statewide, there’s a lot of efforts in Virginia to expand the land value tax and permit it for other cities. Five cities already have permission to do it. So I’ve done the, run the numbers, know, looked at the properties, looked at what a land value,

tax would be and it’s just algebra as I said earlier it’s just math and then make you know planning style maps of the community and charts and tables showing that it will benefit monetarily people that live in the community and at the same time will prod recalcitrant or bad property owners to act or to sell to someone who will.

I mean, that really addresses a lot of the basic problems a city has. If you’ve got, we were discussing earlier today, Baltimore City in the neighborhood of Mount Clair, there’s a fellow that owns 100 properties. He bought them for $1,000 when Baltimore was really desperate. And now he wants $100,000 for those vacant lots, just strip clean, vacant lots. Well, why should

should

that $100,000 go to this person who is an LLC in suburban Maryland? He should get a fair price for that land, but no more than the fair price. You he should get a profit, yeah, but not an incredible windfall profit such as he would enjoy. So that’s what we want to reverse. And community organizations that hear about us will tell their councilmen about it.

and the councilmen if we need legislation will say okay let’s go to the state capitol let’s get to work let’s change the law and that’s how you get support to identify a problem in the community offer a solution that’s a somewhat georgia solution and then see it through and you know hold hands if you have to yell and scream if you have to and let other people do the heavy lifting because that’s what elected officials

officials are for.

Greg Miller (48:46)

Right. And I’ll give the listeners a cheat code, which is there is also a moment for urbanism and yimbyism and housing affordability. So go find your city council member who cares about that. And that might be the first council member to reach out to.

Joshua Vincent (48:58)

absolutely.

Urban planners, they come up with these great ideas. But again, I’ll go back to Mario Cuomo. Great. How am going to pay for it? And they’re stuck for an answer or they don’t answer. And so if they’re stuck for an answer, you just simply offer up this resource that nobody has tapped yet. And that’s the land values under our feet.

Greg Miller (49:09)

Yep.

And on those lines, you’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past year, there’s been six to eight states considering legislation for LVT enablement. That to me, as somebody new to the movement, feels like a lot. I’m wondering if that feels unusual to you. It’s obviously built on a lot of the evidence from Pennsylvania. And if it is unusual, what’s causing it? Why are we seeing so much within the past year versus three years ago?

Joshua Vincent (49:30)

Right.

Yeah.

I think the interest has come out of all of what we’ve talked about. In other words, people are not looking at Washington for solutions anymore. The levers of government at a lot of levels are just not doing anything anymore. So I think that why you’re hearing about it more is that the Yimbe community wants to build more housing.

denser housing and want to get value for money for the improvements like sewers and schools and so on that have been created. How can we get people to utilize this infrastructure and making it cheaper to build is a surefire way to do it, to take advantage of that. So that’s why I think the new urbanists, a lot of smart growth advocates, strong towns, which is a very popular

concept which is similar to ours. It’s a big idea, writ small. And Strong Towns argues rightfully, we’re creating all this value.

land value and it’s going to waste. How can we collect that land value? So I think that that’s been the change and that’s why I think you’re seeing it in frankly in states that I wouldn’t have imagined seeing it happening. I’d say interest now is probably as great as it ever has been since Pennsylvania cities in the 80s and 90s.

Greg Miller (51:09)

Yeah, and we’re excited about that as I’m sure you are. Well, I’ll give you a moment as we wrap up. If there’s anything else that listeners should understand both about your work, about what it means for them, and also what feels important for people to understand about this moment in the path forward for land value taxes. Any closing thoughts?

Joshua Vincent (51:28)

My closing thoughts are clear. This is doable. A lot of stuff that is being proposed is pie in the sky or close to it. The New York City mayor, for example, wants a wealth tax to be passed by the state to authorize the city to collect a wealth tax. Well, it’s not going to happen.

You know, they’re very sensitive to the needs of taxpayers, including wealthy and powerful taxpayers. So this is doable. It’s doable right now in New York City. And that’s just an example where you have to you don’t have to do all this huffing and puffing to get money to pay for a program that you want.

It’s there and that’s what I would leave you with. The data is there. It’s in your town and a little bit of legwork can get it done. And if you reach out to the various tax oriented policy shops out there, yours, mine and others, you can get the answers quickly if it makes sense. If people don’t pay more, it makes all the sense in the world to do this and at any level of government.

local county state. I stay away from Hatchell.

Greg Miller (52:40)

Yeah, well, we appreciate your time, Josh. I mean, this you’ve been very helpful for the Center for Land Economics and Formation and thought about how we go about these issues, of course, laying the foundations over decades that everybody’s sort of building upon. So very much appreciative of that. And I think listeners will have learned a lot from this conversation. We’ll push it out to the progress and poverty substack. And so for listeners of this.

Joshua Vincent (52:45)

Thank you.

Greg Miller (53:05)

If you want to keep an update on what’s going on in the land value tax world and thinkings about this, can subscribe to the Progressive Poverty Update. And if you want to see more about what Josh Vincent’s been up to, you can check out his website ⁓ at the Center for Study of Economics. And he’s got some data and reports up there, but he’s also got writings sort of scattered around the internet and other places. So I recommend those as well.

Joshua Vincent (53:25)

Yeah, that’s the way to go now. I use my LinkedIn site actually. It’s gotten 4,000 views for each article in the past couple of months. I’m happy.

Greg Miller (53:35)

Great, yeah, go find Josh Vincent on LinkedIn and thank you

Greg Miller is the Executive Director of the Center for Land Economics.

Last August, the Center for Land Economics released a report detailing chronic undervaluation of vacant land in Baltimore by Maryland’s state property valuation agency, SDAT. Fortunately, SDAT responded quickly and began working on fixing the issue.

One of the questions we kept getting in the wake of that report was, “if Baltimore has this problem, what’s going on in the rest of the state? Is there a fundamental and universal problem with all of SDAT’s land valuations?”

Thanks to a follow-up report sponsored by the Henry George School of Social Science, we now have a clear answer:

No. Chronic under-valuation of vacant land is specific to Baltimore.

The full report, which includes a detailed explanation of our data sources and methodology, can be found on the official Center for Land Economics website:

For this report, we took a zoomed-out view of the entire state, measuring data from every county. Using a statewide parcel dataset sourced from both Maryland open data as well as through our data partnership with REGRID, we compared sales of vacant lots with their officially assessed values, to see if the chronic under-assessments we saw in Baltimore were a pervasive problem elsewhere.

The data was pretty clear—no other county sticks out like Baltimore:

There are two bits of good news here—first, it means that the problems we encountered in Baltimore are not fundamentally baked into SDAT’s methodology, but are localized to Baltimore itself. The problems we identified are correctable, and simply require paying some additional attention to this issue.

Second, that additional attention is already being paid as we speak. SDAT has acknowledged the problems in Baltimore, and publicly pledged to fix them. This work is now underway and many of the individual issues we highlighted in our report have already been fixed. For the avoidance of confusion, today’s report doesn’t take those recent fixes into account—it’s a side-by-side analysis of valuations in other Maryland counties before SDAT’s recent initiatives.

In order to be as fair as possible to SDAT, we employed a strict sales validation procedure, excluding any and all suspiciously low-priced sales that bore the signs of non-arms-length transactions; our exact procedure is outlined in the report.

Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news, so we’re happy to find that the assessment problems detected in Maryland’s largest city are confined to that region.

This report has an intentionally narrow and limited scope, concerning itself solely with the overall assessment level of vacant lots throughout Maryland. There may or may not be other assessment quality issues, but this study does not go into them.

How to Improve

We’ve found that many of the largest issues with regards to land valuation often come down to simple consistency—are two parcels in the same location, with identical land characteristics (including zoning and all other land use regulations), being valued the same way? Our latest report does not concern itself with causes of undervaluation, but we can offer some general tips here in an informal matter:

First, we cannot emphasize enough the importance of data quality and proper sales validation. Valuation is a “garbage in, garbage out” process, and the fanciest algorithms will be utterly defeated by poorly cleaned data, as we outlined in this previous article:

On that note, state legislatures and other elected officials can improve the situation for taxpayers and assessors alike by ensuring that assessors always have access to the highest and best quality data sources. They can also ensure that other government offices in the data pipeline, particularly county recorders, are well trained and resourced.

Second, a particularly persistent cause of side-by-side discrepancies in otherwise identical vacant vs. improved lots, is a misapplication of the “allocation” method. This is a method where an assessor first deduces land value by taking the full market value of improved property, and then multiplies it against a percentage, such as 20%. Assuming the percentage itself is well supported, this can be one way to value land with mass appraisal. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, as we outlined in this article:

The wrong way is to take every improved property in a given neighborhood, and simply apply the allocation percentage individually to each parcel. This yields uneven land valuations, as the land valuation comes to depend on differences in the buildings, not in the land itself:

The right way to apply the allocation method is to apply the allocation percentage against the prevailing (average or median) local price of improved property, and use that to come up with a single, standard, local land rate, and then use that single rate for all the land. In this way each lot within a homogenous area gets the same land valuation:

Of course, any land that has special characteristics that deviate from what’s typical for the local area—such as unique zoning, different size, shape, etc.—will need additional adjustments, which well trained assessors should know how to apply. The above example is simply a way to ensure that the “broad brush” land valuations achieve local consistency.

Finally, we’ve found that simply charting land values on a map, and especially visualizing them on a per square foot or per acre basis, makes side-by-side inconsistency issues very easy to detect. We maintain and publish our own such interactive 3D maps at www.civicmapper.org (please reach out if you’d like us to map your city!)

1) CLE’s Land Economics Fellowship

GREG:
At the Center for Land Economics, we’re excited to launch the Land Economics Fellowship, a new program designed to support focused, high-impact research on land value, land speculation, and land value taxation.

The fellowship is built for individuals who want to produce substantive, public-facing work without committing to a multi-year academic process. We’re interested in empirical, descriptive, and investigative projects that help clarify how land markets actually work—and how land-based policy reforms play out in practice.

What Fellows receive:

• A $3,000 stipend to support 4–6 months of time-blocked research

• Access to CLE resources, including data, tools, and institutional support where feasible

• Direct access to CLE leadership (Greg and Lars) for feedback, research guidance, and strategic input

• A public platform for your findings, with editorial and dissemination support to help your work reach an engaged audience

The fellowship is open to individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, including students, independent scholars, journalists, and practitioners. This work may be a continuation of a thesis, or other project engaged in by the applicant. No formal credentials or institutional affiliation are required.

Why we are launching this fellowship

We believe many of the most important questions in land economics—especially around land value and LVT—don’t require years of academic work to generate insight. Well-scoped, time-limited projects can meaningfully advance the data, narratives, and case studies that shape how land policy is understood and debated.

There is no shortage of smart, curious people interested in land. What’s often missing is time, modest funding, and a platform that takes this work seriously. This fellowship exists to fill that gap and to help surface research that pushes the conversation on land value forward.

Applications for the 2026 Land Economics Fellowship are now open and due March 1st at midnight.

More information and the application can be found here: https://landeconomics.org/fellows

2) PPI’s Progress of Ideas Grants

STEVE:
Over at the Progress and Poverty Institute, we operate an annual cycle for grant funding of research topics relevant to our mission. We are excited to announce that this year’s shortlist of topics is even more concentrated on topics relevant to Georgist advocacy: land valuation, impacts of LVT shifts, and political and legal barriers to LVT implementation.

The first seeks proposals for research or applied projects that can help expand the successful adoption of Land Value Tax. We welcome proposals from academic researchers, public policy institutes, nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups and cross-sector collaborations. Projects may be theoretical, empirical, legal, computational, or strategic in nature. Grants of up to $10,000 will be considered.

This time around, we are especially interested in the following topics relevant to LVT:

• Methods of land valuation

• Modeling the fiscal and distributional impacts of LVT in reform scenarios

• Polling, messaging, and political economy of LVT

• Legal and institutional constraints on LVT

• Public policy design that maximizes LVT’s probability of adoption and retention, e.g., tax deferrals, assessment frequency

• Comparison of LVT to related policies like vacancy taxes and community land trusts, in e.g., viability and impact

The second seeks proposals utilizing our new Mason Gaffney Digital Collection. We welcome proposals in support of work to be disseminated in either traditional academic venues (e.g., journal papers) or popular ones (e.g., podcasts).

The application deadline is April 6, 2026. You can find full more information about on eligibility criteria and the grant application here.

Unfortunately, these grants are only available to researchers working for a US-based non-profit (501c3). If that excludes you, make sure to keep reading, as you may qualify for the programs below!

3) Research Grants from the Henry George Foundation of Great Britain

GREG & STEVE:

While the above programs are aimed at US-based researchers, we are excited to partner with our friends over at the Henry George Foundation of Great Britain, who have generously indicated that they have funds available to support research relevant to their mission to “explore and promote principles of economic freedom and justice”.

They are eager to hear from anyone with research questions related to “the 21st century political and ethical implications of the work of Henry George”, and especially those which might have an international, European, or UK-focus.

If that sounds like you, check out the HGF website and send them an email with a short introduction to yourself and your research interest: office@henrygeorgefoundation.org

Land Research Network

Regardless of whether you apply for any of the above programs, we are super eager to build and connect a network of researchers with an interest in topics relevant to Georgism. If you are a researcher interested in any of the topics mentioned above, please fill out this form so we can connect you with likeminded folks and keep in touch with any future opportunities.

Yes, there is a Housing Crisis

Some still doubt that we really have a housing crisis, so let’s start by establishing two things: a) what we specifically mean by “housing crisis” and b) that we definitely have one.

When we say “housing crisis,” we specifically mean housing affordability crisis–people are spending much more of their incomes on housing than they were in the past.

Here’s the evidence: a rising share of renters today are severely rent-burdened, paying over 50% of their income on housing. This share is trending near record highs not seen since the Great Recession, and has nearly doubled since 1970.

A central feature of the housing affordability crisis is the growing gap between what households earn and what housing costs. One way to see this is by comparing wages to home prices over time. The figure below shows an index of weekly wages alongside the Case-Shiller Housing Price Index, which tracks changes in the prices of existing single-family homes. Since the early 2000s, home prices have risen faster than wages. This divergence means that buying a home requires an ever-larger share of household income, placing upward pressure on housing costs throughout the market.

The trend did not begin with COVID, nor did it arrive as a sudden shock, but has been growing for a long time. To understand how the housing affordability crisis came to be, we must first understand the persistent shifts which contributed to it over time.

What the Housing Crisis Is Not

A natural explanation for rising housing costs is that housing has simply become more expensive to produce, or that we stopped building enough of it overall. If this were true, we would expect either rising construction input costs, or a sustained decline in aggregate housing supply relative to population.

At the national level, the data do not support this story. Real residential construction input costs were largely flat throughout the 2010s, prior to the post-COVID supply-chain shock. While costs rose sharply after 2020, housing is a slow-moving asset, and these increases arrive too late to explain a crisis that has already been underway for decades. This series tracks inflation-adjusted producer prices for goods inputs to residential construction (materials and related goods) as well as construction labor costs.

We can get a clearer picture by looking at the number of housing units per capita:

The United States did experience a decline in housing units per person following the Great Recession, when construction collapsed in the face of increasing population. However, that decline stabilized more than a decade ago. For roughly the past twenty years, per capita housing supply has remained relatively steady, fluctuating within a narrow range rather than trending downward.

This distinction matters. The level of housing units per capita today may be lower than its mid-2000s peak, but the change over time does not align with the worsening of housing affordability. If rising rent burdens were driven primarily by an ongoing national shortage of housing units, we would expect to see a continued decline in this measure. We do not.

Taken together, these figures suggest that the housing crisis cannot be explained by a recent collapse in total physical housing supply, nor a sustained increase in costs of construction labor and materials.

If the housing crisis is not driven by aggregate supply, then it must be driven by demand. The question is, what is driving that demand? Or better yet, where is that demand concentrated?

The Great De-Densification

The answer: America’s urban centers. Why then are we not meeting demand in these, the most valuable locations in the US?

The answer lies in America’s deliberate policy of de-densifying these places over the last century. American cities were once far denser than they are today; Manhattan, for instance, is almost half as dense as it was in 1920, despite renewed demand for urban living.

One major force was technological – with the mass manufacturing of the automobile, living farther from city centers became feasible for the first time. However, the decline in urban density over the 20th century was driven just as much by top-down policy as it was by invention and market forces. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 funded the massive expenditures of the modern interstate system. Oil companies celebrated this transformation, viewing highways as engines of mobility and growth. And indeed they were as they expanded the frontier, America’s traditional solution to housing affordability.

The heavy hand of government wasn’t just limited to highway building, either; deliberate urban renewal policies—which brought along zoning, building codes, and the elimination of single-room occupancies—reinforced the de-densification of American cities, limiting how many people cities could house, even as natural market demand resurged.

The result was a long period of de-densification. And, the broader trend is also visible when looking not at a single city, but at the average population density experienced by a U.S. resident over time. This is a graph of population-weighted density answers a simple question: how dense is the place where the average person lives?

The result shows a dramatic decline in population-weighted density from the early 1900s through around 1980, followed by a long period of relative flatness, when the era of rapid outward expansion largely ended.1

Flat averages, however, hide important shifts. “The great de-densification” can also be thought of as “the great averaging,” as both dense cities and sparse rural areas began to empty out, in favor of semi-dense suburbs and exurbs:

Today, demand has re-concentrated in job-rich regions, even as the systems that once accommodated growth have stalled and shrunk.

Why Demand Re-Concentrated

The re-concentration of housing demand did not happen for a single reason, but the simple version is that proximity got more valuable while outward expansion got more expensive.

One factor is transportation. During much of the twentieth century, suburbanization was supported by rapid expansion of road infrastructure, which has slowed in modern times. While vehicle miles traveled continued to rise, the total mileage of public roads grew much more slowly after around 1980. The result is congestion: longer commutes, higher time costs, and diminishing returns to living farther from employment centers.

As congestion increases, time becomes more scarce. Time spent commuting is time not spent in work, caregiving, or leisure. For higher-income households in particular, the time value of money rises with wages, making long commutes increasingly costly even if housing located further away is cheaper in nominal terms. This increases demand for living closer to job centers.

Credit markets have also shifted. In the wake of the Great Recession, mortgage lending tightened substantially. A growing share of outstanding mortgages—and especially new originations—have gone to borrowers with very high credit scores, reflecting stricter underwriting standards, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.

Kevin Erdmann has written extensively about this shift and its implications for housing markets, arguing that tighter credit has constrained access to homeownership and reshaped housing demand. One consequence is that more households remain renters for longer periods of time. Renters, in turn, are more likely to live near job centers, where access to employment, transit, and amenities is more immediate.

Labor market dynamics reinforce this pattern. Over time, college-educated workers have increasingly selected other college-educated workers for romantic partners. The proportion of couples in which both spouses have a college degree has increased from around 5% in the 1960s to around 25% now:

Coordinating two careers makes proximity to dense employment centers essential, compounding the cost of long commutes.

Household structure has also shifted. Marriage rates have declined, coupling patterns have changed, and a growing share of adults live without a spouse or partner. This increases the number of households relative to population and changes residential preferences. Single adults are more likely to locate in urban areas, where jobs, services, and social networks are closer together.

This is not a comprehensive list of all forces at play. Transportation constraints, credit conditions, labor markets, and household structure influence one another, and housing prices themselves may also feed back into these dynamics. No single factor controls the housing market by itself, but all plausibly push demand towards dense, job-rich locations.

The Rising Share of Land Value

If housing costs were rising simply because buildings were becoming more expensive to construct or maintain, we would expect prices to be reflected primarily in structures. Instead, much of the increase shows up in land.

The financial burden on households is increasingly a tax on location rather than a payment for better or more expensive buildings. As reflected in the indices below, the CoreLogic National House Price Index has dramatically detached from the Fixed-Weighted Price Index for Houses under Construction, which tracks the actual cost of materials and labor. While the inflation-adjusted cost to physically produce a house has remained relatively stable for decades, the total market price of homes has surged to nearly six times its 1980 value.

This growing “wedge” is the manifestation of the land crisis. Because physical construction inputs are not driving the price spike, the gap represents the “location premium”---the rising value of land that occurs when demand for a specific area is high but the supply of housing on that land is strictly capped.

Researchers from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) have constructed a database of land values at the local level using sales and construction data across the country. This gives us access to understand the time trends of land values, though at an admittedly zoomed-out level. Their data shows that over the past decade, the share of residential property value attributable to land has risen, particularly in urban areas. In rural areas, the land share has declined over the same period.

This pattern is revealing. When rents rise without material improvements to buildings, what is increasing is not the value of the structure but the value of the location. When a homeowner’s property tax assessment rises despite no changes to the home itself, that increase reflects land value.

Land value rises when access to a place becomes more valuable and supply cannot expand to meet demand. Zoning, permitting, and building codes constrain how intensively that land can be used, while speculation on future land appreciation may further amplify price pressures.

The housing crisis, viewed through this lens, is not simply a failure to build enough housing. It is a failure to allow high-demand land to absorb more people. Rising housing costs are the price signal of that constraint.

Loosening the Land Constraint

From the stagnation of transportation networks and the tightening of credit markets to the shifting dynamics of labor and household structures, modern economic life has ruthlessly re-concentrated demand into specific, job-rich regions. These pressures act as a funnel, boosting the value of land where housing density has failed to keep pace with the influx of people.

High prices persist because the constraints on that land persist. We cannot overcome the housing crisis without first dealing with the land crisis that underpins it.

So what can we do about it?

We can start by allowing more housing to be built where demand is highest. Zoning has existed largely since urban renewal, and matters more today than ever as demand for urban areas increases. However, upzoning is not enough as it does not address the roots of land speculation. In many urban cities, vacant land or parking lots already empty despite having developable capacity.

The increase in land prices has benefitted landowners and speculators alike at the expense of the renters. To address the land crisis, we should address land speculation head on.

We need to consider land leasing. By shifting toward a system where the community retains a stake in the land, we can ensure that the “location premium” benefits the public rather than just private windfalls.

We need to shift taxes to land value. It is a policy failure to allow the most valuable land in our economy to be used for surface parking lots while people are priced out of the city. We must create structural incentives that encourage land to be put to a good use. This includes shifting the incentives for the large surface parking lots sitting on valuable land in our downtown areas.

The housing crisis isn’t an inevitable fact of nature; it’s a policy choice. By loosening the land constraint, we can finally build the dense and affordable communities the 21st century demands.

Last week, President Trump gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he said housing affordability stands in direct opposition to preserving the property values of existing homeowners (emphasis mine):

I am very protective of people that already own a house, of which we have millions and millions and millions. And because we have had such a good run, the house values have gone up tremendously. And these people have become wealthy. They weren’t wealthy, they’ve become wealthy because of their house. And every time you make it more and more and more affordable for somebody to buy a house cheaply, you're actually hurting the value of those houses, obviously, because the one thing works in tandem with the other. And I don't want to do anything that's going to hurt the value of people that own a house, who, for the first time in their lives, are walking around the streets of whatever city they're in, very proud that their house is worth $500-600-700,000.

Trump openly admits a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the standard model of American middle class prosperity for the last century: everyone should be able to afford to own a home, but also that home should be a great investment that keeps increasing in price forever. This is the so-called “housing ladder,” which young working families are increasingly unable to climb, precisely because housing has become an investment, and therefore unaffordable.

The “housing ladder,” as I define it here, means this:

• The path to prosperity is to buy a home

• That home should retain its value and appreciate over time

• That home should be your single biggest investment

• This should be the plan for everybody

Stated this way, the plan is simply impossible. Some people must always be excluded from it, and it can only be sustained under certain conditions. The only reason it worked for most of the the twentieth century was due to rapid economic growth and the invention of the automobile, as we covered in a previous article:

To quickly summarize: at the end of the 19th century, America had a massive housing affordability problem. However, we sprawled our way out of it over the last hundred years by simply building massive amounts of suburban homes, which were newly accessible by car for the first time. This let people earn high incomes from good jobs in the cities, but still live far away where land was cheap. Then, increasing populations and economic growth steadily increased the value of their homes. Unfortunately, this is a trick that only works once—we’ve reached the limits of that frontier (that is, the value of suburban housing is now fully priced in) and there’s no next frontier in sight.

This leaves us in a pickle—housing prices must come down if young working families are to afford them, but older generations who played by the rules in good faith would get wrecked financially if their home values decline. We’ve accidentally trapped ourselves in a nasty zero-sum game that pits not just classes, but generations, against one another.

Some say that though the current system is in many ways unfair, it would be even more unfair to do anything to unwind it now, and we should simply do nothing and let the status quo play itself out. Unfortunately, in that situation the housing ladder’s fundamental contradictions will reach their natural conclusion in an uncontrolled manner, risking disaster for everybody, young and old alike. It’d be much better to come up with a sensible and pragmatic off-ramp while we still can, that ultimately leads us to shared prosperity for everyone, not just those who got lucky.

Let’s begin with a proper understanding of the forces behind rising property values.

What Makes Housing Go Up

The market value of a house is the highest amount someone is willing to pay. For my house to be “worth,” say, $350,000, I must be able to list it for that price and quickly find a willing buyer. If I list it for a half million dollars instead and get no offers, that doesn’t mean nobody’s willing to “pay what it’s worth,” or that “buyers aren’t motivated”—it simply means I’m deluded.

A home’s value is not abstract, it’s not some number on a piece of paper, it’s an economic force generated directly by actual buyers and sellers. For my home’s value to go up every year, an actual person must offer to pay that price in the future. That “someone” must:

1. Exist

2. Have the money

3. Want the house

4. Have to compete for it

Crucially, all four conditions must hold:

1. People who don’t exist can’t bid on housing.
   I must therefore hope the local population keeps growing or at least doesn’t decline.
   

2. People who don’t have the money are physically unable to pay the asking price, even if they wanted to.
   I must therefore hope the economy keeps making people richer, or at least keeps granting them access to sufficient credit.
   

3. People who don’t want the house might have enough money to pay me, but don’t want what I’m selling.
   I must therefore hope that my house stays attractive, which means my house’s three most important features—location, location, location—must have all the things people want: good jobs, good schools, good amenities, public services, low crime, clean streets, etc.
   

4. Finally, people who have both money and motivation still won’t actually pay their maximum offer unless they have to outbid other buyers.
   I must therefore hope that the economy makes not just a few people richer or able to borrow, but lots of people, and that my location stays desirable enough that lots of them want my specific house.

If any or all of these conditions stop being true, the “housing ladder” begins to break down. Note that because all housing markets are fundamentally local, this can play out in different ways in different areas at different times, even within the same country. House prices famously collapsed in Detroit decades ago, but they’re still sky-high in New York City.

Nevertheless, the grim truth is that wherever you live, the housing ladder will inevitably falter in one way or another, simply because it can’t fulfill all of its promises forever. As Stein’s Law says, “things that can’t go on forever, won’t.”

This would be bad news for people hoping their home values will keep increasing, but it could also be bad news for young working families hoping for a price reset, because most of the ways the housing ladder tends to come down aren’t pretty.

Let’s explore a few ways this could go.

1. Crash

In this category, the housing ladder topples over and home values with it. All scenarios in this category would wipe out homeowners’ asset values, but the speed, severity, and manner of the decline varies wildly.

The Big Bad Crash

Imagine America in 2008, but worse. Or Japan in 1992. Unsustainable housing prices come down all at once, as overinflated assets sharply reset to what renters and buyers are actually able to pay. Homeowners get wiped out, but because inflated asset prices are heavily based on speculative loans, banks and mortgage lenders get wiped out too. Widespread contagion wrecks the entire financial sector. Even those without home equity get hammered by secondary shocks to the stock market and economy at large. That means layoffs and prolonged unemployment, which reduces people’s incomes. That reduces their ability to pay, which lowers rents, which lowers property valuations, which wipes out even more property owners and their creditors, and so on.

Homeowners
😢 Bad news: your home equity is wiped out.

Young working families
😊 Good news: home prices have finally come down.
😢 Bad news: you’ve lost your job and your life savings.

The economy slows to a crawl and the country risks experiencing at least one “lost decade.” This scenario is bad for everyone, but as Mike Bird skillfully outlined in his book The Land Trap, it happens again and again throughout the world wherever property mania is allowed to grow unchecked:

The Sneaky Silent Crash

A weirder kind of “crash” is when nominal home prices stop growing and just remain “sticky”, refusing to decline, but at the same time real home prices get slowly eroded by rising inflation. At the same time, inflation pushes up nominal wages, which means that over time homes eventually become more affordable in real terms—that is, as a percent of a median worker’s income.

Homeowners
😢 Bad news: your home equity is wiped out.
😢 Bad news: inflation has wiped out your savings.

Young working families
😊 Good news: you can finally afford a house.
😢 Bad news: inflation has wiped out your savings.

The Demographic Death Spiral

Housing prices are caused by too much demand and not enough supply. One simple way to bring those prices down is to decrease the demand. Once you realize that the demand in this equation is people, the grim reality of “reducing demand” sets in: a lot of people must either die, leave the area, or never be born in the first place.

As housing becomes increasingly out of reach, young people start to leave, and those that do stay, fail to form families. Fewer babies are born, and each generation gets smaller than the last, and the number of retirees balloons. Once this passes a certain inflection point, the cycle becomes self-reinforcing as the older generation becomes the democratic majority and the single most likely group to vote.

One proposed solution to combat high housing costs is to abolish property taxes, but this is akin to extinguishing a fire with gasoline. Lowering real estate holding costs makes housing an even more attractive target for out-of-state rich people who bid up the price even further1. In order to maintain local services, the lost revenue is inevitably made up by increasing the tax burden on businesses and young working families, accelerating the cycle. We discussed this in our previous article where we proposed a better alternative, Universal Building Exemption, which delivers pragmatic and meaningful tax relief for young and old alike:

The bitter irony is that a policy to “preserve housing wealth at all costs” ultimately undermines itself: as young working families get chased out, one day there is no one on the other side to actually pay for the houses, and retirees’ paper riches vanish anyways.

Homeowners
😢 Bad news: your home equity is wiped out.

Young working families
😊 Good news: you can finally afford a house.
😢 Bad news: there’s no jobs and no reason to live here anymore.

2. Neo-Feudalism

Universal doom is hardly guaranteed. Many places have been able to successfully preserve high housing prices long term without undermining their long-term desirability, and continue to attract lots of people willing to pay high prices to live there. Unfortunately, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it,” as the late George Carlin put it.

Playground for the Global Rich

In this scenario, even if prices eventually stop growing, they stay high. This prices out many of the city’s own service workers, who out of sheer necessity must charge more for their services due to their own high housing and transportation costs. These increased labor costs don’t mean service workers actually enjoy higher take-home pay, however—the increase just gets eaten up by landlords and commuting.

Meanwhile, the cost of every service job in the city that depends on human labor and can’t be easily automated—healthcare and childcare especially—goes through the roof. With daycare costing as much as an entire spouse’s salary, there’s not much point in young working families trying to make it in the city.

The difference between this and the demographic death spiral scenario is that if the city is rich and cool enough, it is able to remain attractive on a national or even international scale, steadily shedding the poor unwashed locals for an increasingly elite globalist class. This is arguably the scenario that has been playing out in New York City, London, and other such cities.

Homeowners:
😊 Good news: Your property values stay high.

Young working families:
😢 Bad news: You’re not welcome. Get out.

Pottersville: Lords and Peasants

Only a limited number of superstar cities will be able to continue to enjoy perpetually growing housing prices, with a steady supply of rich residents both willing and able to pay. Second and third tier cities that avoid killing their own economies through over-extraction, but which just aren’t productive and cool enough to cater to the global elite, could settle somewhere in the middle.

In this scenario, property speculation cools, but housing prices never “crash” to affordable levels because bubbles pop, but shortages don’t. As long as the demand for housing stabilizes at a level persistently higher than the supply, landlords can still charge exorbitant rents, and selling prices will reflect those rent levels. House prices remain high, but because rents aren’t expected to increase, there’s no future price growth. High housing prices are now a big, dead, weight around your neck, a high cost of entry that you can’t really leverage into future gains.

In this scenario, society sorts into two classes—those that own property and those that don’t, with the latter paying a large portion of their incomes to the former in the form of rent. In other words, a return to the stable equilibrium that has reigned for the vast majority of human civilization, and the same one depicted in the cautionary vision that Clarence the angel shows to protagonist George Bailey in the classic Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life.

In a no- or slow- growth situation, landlords still can (and will) charge high rents, and tenants will still be compelled to pay them, but the loss of steady price appreciation causes several problems for those used to the old model.

For one, if you’re an owner occupier, your investment is also your residence. That means if you sell your house, you immediately need to buy a new one, and anything equally good will be just as expensive, so you can’t make a profit by selling. Your only way to realize your equity is to take out a reverse mortgage.

For two, if housing was your investment vehicle, well, now it’s less like an investment and more just like gold, something safe to park your money in knowing that it probably won’t increase much in real terms, but won’t go to zero either.

If you’re not on the housing ladder yet, the bad news is that it’s now been pulled up. High rents will make it perpetually difficult for you to save up enough just by working hard, because the average local prevailing income drives the rent level (see Ricardo’s Law of Rent). And since there’s no over-inflated bubble, you can’t wait for it to pop, either.

If you do somehow manage to get on the housing ladder, you’ll find that it’s no longer a “ladder” exactly, just a very high and flat bridge. That’s because housing is no longer a ticket to ever-increasing returns, just a really expensive thing you have to buy in order to live in this city.

Homeowners:
😊 Good news: your home equity isn’t wiped out.
😢 Bad news: homes don’t make you rich anymore.

Young working families:
😢Bad news: you probably can’t afford a home.
😢Bad news: they won’t get cheaper anytime soon.
😢Bad news: even if you buy a home, it won’t make you rich.

There is simply no scenario in which homes retain their value, and increase in price forever, and make housing affordable for everyone. At least one of these things has to give. As we’ve seen, the scenario can stabilize in a lot of different ways, but all of them are pretty bad.

And as we noted, all markets are local. We will likely see some or all of these scenarios play out in different places—one nation crashes, another muddles through at the cost of massive inflation; a leading city becomes a playground for the rich, while others go into demographic decline, or stagnate into unaffordable but stable Pottersvilles.

Instead of waiting for the housing ladder to break in one of these exciting ways, we could also just climb down before we hurt ourselves.

3. The YIMBY/Georgist Off-Ramp

We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.

The Easy Way

The “easy” way to is to make a bunch of sensible, pragmatic reforms before the whole thing either crashes under its own weight, or else splits us into permanent over- and under-classes. We need to make housing easier to build, which means YIMBYism, and we need to fix broken tax incentives and share the value of land equally, which means Georgism. Guest author Stephen Hoskins previously discussed the need for both movements here:

Meanwhile, we must absolutely stop subsidizing demand while restricting supply. When we “stimulate” the housing market by giving home buyers tax incentives, cheap credit, or straight up cash-money-dollars, all we are doing is increasing the amount of money people are able to pay for housing. However, housing only gets cheaper if there’s actually more housing. If the supply stays fixed, all that extra money just goes into the pockets of the people who already own the homes. If our goal is to “preserve property values,” then, mission accomplished, but we’re definitely not making housing affordable.

The YIMBYs are already on the march making sensible reforms to zoning, parking mandates, and other restrictions on building throughout the country. But to truly unlock housing affordability, we also need to fix the broken tax incentives that actively reward holding the most productive land out of use and which encourages people to treat housing as a speculative investment.

Ultimately, we need to share the land. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “The problem with Capitalism is not that it produces too many Capitalists, but too few.” Likewise, the problem with Landlordism is not that it produces too many landlords, but too few. All of us should benefit from the value of land, not just the people lucky enough to get there first.

As for actually achieving that vision, we’ve written about it at length in this article:

A sensible first step is to reorient local property taxes by shifting the tax base off of buildings and onto the land underneath them. Many suppose this will wipe out homeowners, but that’s only because they have wildly incorrect intuitions about where most land value is concentrated. The vast bulk of it is concentrated in city centers:

These are the highest value areas of the city:

And it is precisely these areas, in America at least, that are the least developed relative to their potential:

Revenue-neutral shifts that collect the exact same amount of tax money as before, but which collect it from land instead of from buildings, will shift the tax burden primarily towards underdeveloped uses, such as surface parking lots and vacant land. This will unlock lots of housing supply and at the same time make land a less valuable instrument to speculate on. See this report for Syracuse, New York, for additional details.

With that done, the next step is to remove taxes on productivity—such as income and capital taxes, to further ease the burden on businesses and young working families, who currently bear the burden of double taxation: the public tax of government, and the private tax of high land rent.

Or we could do things the hard way.

The Hard Way

The hard way is to wait for something bad to happen—like a big housing crash, such as the one many think might be coming soon:

If a big crash does indeed happen, the most important thing to do is to not make the same mistakes we made last time: massively pull back on home-building, restrict supply, and do everything in our power to re-inflate the housing bubble as quickly as possible. Then, Georgists and YIMBYs must unite, step in at this crucial moment just as the previous regimes lose all credibility, and confidently present a new plan for prosperity.

Or we could throw up our hands and do nothing, because, after all “there’s no silver bullet solutions to the housing crisis.” I think I remember someone saying the same thing about werewolves, once.

For those just joining, the Landscape series is a recurring roundup where I track momentum, legislation, and news related to land value taxes. You can find the previous installment here.

If you enjoy this article and don’t want to miss future updates, consider subscribing:

Announcing the Center for Land Economics Board

Before jumping into the latest LVT legislation, I’m excited to announce the formation of the Board of Governors and Advisory Board for the Center for Land Economics. This board brings together nationally recognized leaders in housing economics, parking reform, pro-housing policy, civic entrepreneurship, and local fiscal resilience to accelerate our mission and scale our year-one impact.

Our Board of Governors consists of Daryl Fairweather (Redfin Chief Economist and author of Hate the Game), Will Jarvis (CEO of ValueBase), and Josh Vincent (President of the Center for the Study of Economics), along with founding partners Lars Doucet and myself, who both work full-time on CLE.

Our Advisory Board includes Andrew Burleson (Strong Towns co-founder), Laura Fingal-Surma (Urbanist Ventures founder and YIMBY Action founding board member), Kevin Fishner (Successful tech executive and Radius Grocery Founder), Tony Jordan (Parking Reform Network founder), Kevin Purvis (insurance executive and United Way Broward County Board), and Rory Sutherland (Vice-Chair of Ogilvy and regular contributor to The Spectator).

This is an exceptionally strong group, reflecting how quickly land value tax is becoming a mainstream policy idea—first within urbanist circles, and increasingly beyond them. Lars and I are deeply grateful for the opportunity to build CLE with the support of this team.

This is the perfect moment for this launch, with land value tax legislation being actively considered across the country.

Starting with Legislation

As the New Year begins, so do new legislative sessions across the country. Already, two states have introduced new legislation in the past few weeks, while others are carrying over bills from the previous session, and still more states are considering what legislation they will introduce.

Maryland: Split-Rate Tax Authority

In Maryland, Delegate Vaughn Stewart has reintroduced legislation that would allow Baltimore and other counties to adopt split-rate property taxes, separating the tax rate on land from the tax rate on buildings. The bill was introduced last week as HB0078.

Cities in Maryland—other than Baltimore—already have this authority. Delegate Stewart’s legislation is intended to provide parity by extending the same taxing powers to Baltimore and additional counties.

Over the past few months, I’ve had multiple opportunities to speak with Maryland-based groups about the importance of land value taxation.

In December, I presented at an event hosted by Baltimore Thrive, a local organization focused on land value capture. Last week, I was joined by Josie Faass, Executive Director of the Progress and Poverty Institute presenting at Hood College for residents of Frederick, Maryland.

Momentum around land value tax is also building in the region more broadly. Greater Greater Washington recently published its staff pick for favorite post of 2025, awarding the honor to a land value tax piece by Matt Girardi of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU).

In 2025, ATU collaborated with Nick Allen, an MIT PhD student and a key architect of Detroit’s land value tax efforts, to publish a report exploring the use of land value taxation to fund WMATA operations.

New Hampshire: A Republican-Led “Tax Shift” Bill (HB 1417)

New Hampshire has a newly introduced land value tax bill: HB1417. It’s sponsored by Rep. Joe Sweeney, a Republican representing the 25th District and is scheduled for a public hearing on January 23rd.

At a high level, HB 1417 would authorize municipalities to adopt a land value tax system to shift their taxes to land. This is a Republican-sponsored bill sponsored by a candidate whose campaign promised lower taxes and smaller government. The bill’s own statement of purpose emphasizes “efficient land use, expanding housing supply, reducing blight/vacancy, and shifting the tax burden away from building investment.”

One of the underappreciated features of a land value tax is that residents feel its benefits directly. Because the revenue is raised and spent locally, it is more closely tied to tangible services—streets, schools, public safety, and infrastructure—than most other taxes, whose benefits are often diffuse or difficult to trace. That same locality also makes the tax unusually accountable. When a land value tax rate rises, residents can clearly see where the money is going and who decided to raise it. If they disagree, they know exactly which local officials are responsible and can vote against future increases through town meetings, council elections, or referenda. By contrast, increases in income, sales, or statewide taxes are typically spread across layers of government, bundled into larger fiscal packages, and far harder for voters to identify, challenge, or reverse. In that sense, land value taxation is not just economically efficient—it is one of the most democratically legible forms of taxation available.

This is why fiscal conservatives are adopting the land value tax as a forward thinking conservative principle.

New York: Carryover LVT Legislation

Some states operate on biennial legislative sessions, meaning lawmakers are returning this year with bills introduced in the previous session still active. Several of those carryover bills involve land value taxation.

In New York, legislators are returning with active land value tax legislation. The Senate bill is S1131.

The companion Assembly bill is sponsored by Alex Bores, who previously sponsored and led a major artificial intelligence regulation bill. Bores is currently running in a crowded primary in New York’s 12th congressional district, where AI-focused Super PACs are spending heavily against him in response to his work on AI regulation, a dynamic covered in detail by Wired. The correlation between Bores AI regulations and support of land value tax should not be a surprise: forward-thinking politicos will endorse forward-thinking policy ideas.

Minnesota: State Legislation and Local Institutional Support

Minnesota lawmakers are also returning with land value tax legislation already introduced. The Senate bill, SF 1422, comes with public support from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, signaling serious executive interest.

Momentum is also building at the local level. Minneapolis’ Board of Estimates and Taxation (BET), an often overlooked body that sets the city’s maximum tax levies, now includes an elected member openly supportive of exploring land value taxation.

As MinnPost reported in its article on how Minneapolis’ tax board is exploring new approaches to property taxation, BET member Eric Harris Bernstein has expressed interest in a land value tax as a way to encourage more productive land use while reducing pressure on residential property taxes. This support builds the cross-government institutional support that is needed for a policy like this to be passed within a city government.

This positions Minnesota as one of the most promising states for near-term progress.

Washington: Spokane’s Sprint in a Short Session

In Washington State, Spokane continues to pursue a universal building exemption as a mechanism to shift property taxes toward land. I was interviewed by the Spokesman-Review, which covered the legislative push and highlighted how the proposal could realign incentives, particularly for valuable downtown parcels.

The Washington State legislative session has already begun, but it is short—just two months—which may imperil a new bill of this kind. Even so, there are reasons to remain optimistic. There is a real push behind the proposal, and even if it does not advance this session, momentum is likely to carry into the next.

This effort aligns with broader political trends in the state. Seattle’s new mayor, Democrat Katie Wilson, has officially taken office after winning her election on a platform that endorsed land value taxation. In addition, Nilu Jenks, a progressive candidate for Seattle City Council District 5, has also publicly endorsed land value tax in her campaign announcement with The Urbanist.

Michigan: Duggan Vows to Renew LVT Effort

In Michigan, former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has officially left office and is now running for governor as an independent.

In a recent interview with Rocket Mortgage co-founder Dan Gilbert, Duggan vowed to renew his push for land value tax if elected governor, explaining that his experience trying, and failing, to secure state authorization in Detroit directly shaped his decision to seek statewide office.

While serving as mayor, Duggan had secured legislative buy-in but lacked the authority needed from the state legislature. The bill ultimately stalled due to interpersonal and interpolitical conflict and was never brought to a vote. That experience also helped motivate his decision to run as an independent rather than as a Democrat, with the goal of advancing land value tax at the state level.

Ohio: LVTs Blessing from Blessing

Ohio Republican State Senator Bill Blessing continues in his press to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot which would allow cities to enact land value taxes. He has issued a statement which responds to frequently asked questions and rebuttals and continues to spread the word via local media. For Blessing, the land value tax offers an alternative to the ongoing discourse in Ohio about lowering and eliminating property taxes.

A Step Back in Scranton

Scranton, PA has long held a split-rate taxation system and Mayor Paige Cognetti has undone the system.

Lackawanna County has completed its first revaluation since 1968. Numerous times over the past couple of years, counties have completed revaluations for the first time in decades, leading to property tax backlash (just ask Delaware or Syracuse which voted to undo its reassessment efforts). Reassessments should be a continual process, but unfortunately some counties do not treat them as such.

The results of the revaluation come out this year. It is telling then that before the results were even out the city decided to undo the split-rate system. Why undo the system without first releasing the reassessments? The citizens deserve to understand what the change back to property tax entails and why it is being done in line with the reassessments. It also is sadly another case where assessment controversy has impeded land value tax—the most notable being Pittsburgh.

In peak irony, the budget states:

“The incentive behind a split real estate tax millage rate is that a higher millage rate for land would encourage development of vacant properties and spur economic growth. Over the past 100 years, the City has developed most of the vacant, developable property in the City.”

If anything, that’s the clearest endorsement possible. The policy aimed to encourage development and productive use of land, and Scranton’s own budget claims the city is largely built out. Yet the proposed change risks reversing those incentives by taxing buildings more heavily, discouraging improvement and new construction at the exact moment the city needs housing and reinvestment.

Mayor Cognetti is a well-educated Oregon transplant with bigger ambitions, now running for Congress. She may go far. But as housing costs become an increasingly potent political issue, and as over 58% of Scranton renters face rent burden, rolling back a system that rewards building and penalizes vacancy should result in questions being asked of her priorities later.

A Roundup

Beyond formal legislation, land value taxation continues to surface across media, research, and political discourse—often in places where you wouldn’t have seen it even a year ago.

• Land value tax made its way into Congress, with Representative Bill Foster (D-IL) raising its merits during a congressional hearing. Foster focused in particular on ways the federal government could encourage state and local adoption. You can watch the exchange here.

• As California debates a controversial wealth tax, land value tax briefly trended on X (formerly Twitter) after Armand Domalweski tweeted: “the best wealth tax is a land value tax because land literally cannot leave lol.” The viral moment reflects a growing intuition that immobile assets are easier and fairer to tax.

• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board issued a full endorsement of land value tax in their piece, “Pittsburgh should return to its roots in land value taxation.” Pittsburgh remains a touchstone for LVT advocates, having implemented a land value tax with notable success before abandoning it in 2000 amid political and assessment turmoil. The editorial sparked several supportive letters to the editor, including this one.

• The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy released an updated edition of its “Who Owns America?” analysis in November, mapping corporate ownership of residential land. Their findings are stark: across nearly 500 urban counties with sufficient data, 8.9% of residential parcels are now owned by corporations. The full report is available here.

• A parallel report—“Who Owns Kenya?”—was published and quickly spurred debate about land inequality and taxation. According to the findings, 0.1% of large-scale landholders control 39% of agricultural land in Kenya, renewing interest in land value taxation as a corrective tool.

• Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s Chief Economist, wrote in Forbes about land speculation in the aftermath of climate disasters, one year after the Palisades fires. She argues that land value tax could discourage speculative “buy and hold” behavior in disaster-stricken cities. Her piece can be read here.

• The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published a report at the beginning of the year examining new revenue options to expand housing subsidy programs, explicitly including land value taxes among the tools states should consider. The report is available here. Even a revenue-neutral shift toward land value taxation—by lowering taxes on buildings—would meaningfully expand housing supply for low- and middle-income renters.

• In Florida, Matt Caldwell, the Lee County Appraiser and former state representative, argues that land value tax offers an innovative solution to property tax reform. His argument is laid out here.

• Similarly, in the Sun Sentinel, Reed Schwartz makes the case that land value tax is “the most conservative tax,” positioning it as a serious alternative amid calls from Governor DeSantis to eliminate property taxes altogether. That column can be read here.
  

That wraps up the first Landscape of the year. If you are seeing movement on LVT in your area, reach out: greg@landeconomics.org.

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The contents of this essay, including all data, analyses, and predictions regarding the 18-year real estate cycle, are provided for informational and educational purposes only. This document does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. The views expressed are the author’s personal reflections on economic theory and should not be interpreted as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any specific security or to adopt any particular investment strategy. The author is not a licensed financial advisor, registered investment advisor, or certified financial planner. Any investment decisions made based on the information in this post are at your own risk. You have been warned.

Henry George argued that land speculation plays a significant role in economic cycles, and that land value taxation could dampen cycles by deterring such speculation. Some Georgists have argued that not only does real estate speculation contribute to bubbles, but it does so on a fairly regular – and predictable – pattern. Specifically, they say that land cycles generate significant crashes approximately every 18 years. While this theory flies in the face of conventional modern portfolio theory, its advocates are credited with having called both the early 1990s recession as well as the Great Recession of 2008, many years in advance.

The next crash is predicted to occur this year, in 2026, giving new reasons to take a closer look at this theory.

The essay is divided into three main parts. First, I summarize the theory and its origins. Second, I look at the evidence for it. Finally, I conclude with the theory’s implications for individuals and the Georgist movement alike.

The 18 Year Cycle Theory

The land cycle theory, first developed by Henry George, is based on the insight that the supply of land is completely inelastic – we cannot produce any more of it in response to rising demand. Consequently, the market in land behaves differently from markets in other commodities. When demand for a non-land good increases, it motivates producers to provide more of the good, expanding supply while pushing long-term prices towards the good’s production cost. However, since land is not created, it has no production cost. Therefore, when demand for land increases, there is no corresponding expansion of its supply. Instead, its price inflates. This means that land values tend to absorb the value of increasing productivity. This is most clear with local public goods. The opening of a new metro station in an area will greatly increase local real estate prices. But rising land values can also come from general growth and increasing purchasing power, which increases demand for land.

This all makes land markets unusually susceptible to speculation. How much I am willing to pay for a site will largely depend on how much I expect to be able to sell it for later. I will pay more for an asset if I expect its resale value to rise than if I expect this value to fall. Thereby, increasing land prices creates expectations for future increases, which further increase the price, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This has adverse effects on the broader economy, since land is itself an input into production and a good that we must all consume in the form of our homes. Hence, increasing land prices have the side effect of raising the costs of production and cost of living. This “private tax” on the economy ensures that the bubble cannot continue indefinitely. At some point, land speculators will be unable to find buyers at current prices, at which point the bubble bursts and the market crashes. Since land is often used as collateral for loans, and since land values tend to absorb the wider economic productivity, these effects ripple out across the economy as a whole. Then, as land prices fall to reflect their non-speculative rental value, producers and regular people can again afford land, at which point production resumes, and the cycle starts anew.

The 18-year pattern in real estate values was first discovered by urban economist Homer Hoyt. After losing significant investments in real estate during the Great Depression, he focused his dissertation, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, which explores the history of land values in Chicago, noting a remarkably consistent 18-year pattern. The thesis remains widely read and cited today. Fred Harrison built on this with his 1983 book The Power in the Land, by integrating the Georgist land cycle theory with Hoyt’s empirical pattern. Harrison applied the model prospectively, predicting that the next peak in land values would occur around 1990, followed by a recession.

Harrison and other defenders of the model argue that the cycle follows a larger and highly specific pattern, illustrated in the image below. In this supposed pattern, a crash is followed by a ~4-year recession phase, a ~7-year buildup phase ending with a “mid-cycle dip”, followed by another ~7-year boom, finally concluding with a bust. After this, the cycle repeats.

So why would this specific pattern emerge? While the Georgist theory explains why cycles arise in the land market, it does not necessarily imply that these cycles should always be the same length, nor that their length should be around 18 years in particular.

Harrison argues that this pattern emerges due to specific features of land and real estate markets. Drawing upon historical data, he argues that there is an approximately 14-year building cycle for real estate. One historical reason for this was the 5% interest rate, set by English usury laws, giving a predictable length for real estate developers to pay off their mortgages. These 14-year periods correspond to the “expansion” phase in the cycle. This expansion phase is not smooth, but is divided into two roughly similarly sized parts: a “recovery” phase and an “explosive” phase. These two phases are separated by a “mid-cycle recession”. The reason for the approximate seven-year phases is, again, a pattern in the housing market, as this corresponds to the average life of a mortgage.

The second seven-year phase generates increasing returns and increasingly aggressive investing, escalating to the final boom, or “winner’s curse” phase. In this phase, market prices are set only by those providing the highest bids for an asset, entailing that market prices will be determined by those most prone to overestimating the value of the asset. Eventually, these optimistic speculators find that no one is willing to purchase their investments, at which point the bubble bursts, causing a recession, which lasts for approximately 4 years. This length of the period was also estimated by Keynes, and is determined by a mix of human psychology and the durability of capital rendered redundant during the post-boom phase. After this 3-5 year period, confidence increases, leading to the initiation of new construction and the start of a new cycle.

Using this theory, Harrison extrapolated into the future from the 1973 crisis, accurately predicting both the early 1990s recession and the Great Recession of 2008. The mid-cycle dips, which the theory places approximately 7 years prior to the big bust, correspond to the dotcom bust of 2001 and the Coronavirus downturn of 2020. The next big crash is predicted for 2026.

What does the evidence say?

I have tried to assess this theory with several different types of evidence. First, we must ask what the ‘base rate’ of the claim is. In other words, what type of claim is this, and how often do these types of claims tend to be true? Secondly, we look at the historical data supposedly justifying the 18-year pattern. Can we be sure the pattern is a genuine signal, instead of just random noise? Finally, if we were indeed on the verge of a crisis, shouldn’t there already be signs of this? What signs would we expect, and can we detect them already?

Base rate and prior probability

A great place to start is to ask how often theories and forecasters trying to beat the market are correct. In my view, this provides the strongest argument against the theory. According to modern portfolio theory, people cannot reliably time the market with their investments, and doing so generally leads to lower returns due to missing investment opportunities. Similarly, pundits and ‘experts’ giving investment advice generally have a very poor track record. Indeed, some evidence suggests that these supposed experts do worse than chance. Thus, on the standard view, economic downturns are unpredictable and based on idiosyncratic factors that vary from one occasion to the next.

Furthermore, there is good reason to consider this consensus view as well-supported. Given the huge sums invested in this field, the economic returns to anyone capable of precisely predicting downturns would be massive. Therefore, if the pattern was as simple as the crisis occurring approximately every 18 years, it should have been obvious to more observers. Hence, we should take any voice significantly deviating from this consensus with a fistful of salt, and have very low starting priors for such advice being correct.

There is an old joke about two economists walking down the street, as one of them spots a $100 bill. However, his friends say that there is no need to pick it up. If it were a real $100 bill, it would have been picked up by someone else a long time ago! While the joke is intended to make fun of an over-reliance on the efficient market hypothesis, I think that the analogy does provide some weight in this example. If the 18-year cycle is true and reliable enough to use for market prediction, we are talking about a trillion-dollar bill on the street. Moreover, this is an extremely busy street, trafficked by millions of people vigorously looking for lost bills. If the theory is correct, this bill has been lying openly on the street for decades. This justifies a high degree of initial skepticism.

Historical pattern and theoretical coherence

The evidence used to support the 18-year cycles is primarily based on macroeconomic data tracking land value cycles and economic crashes. Consider this table, showing the peaks and intervals of land values and business cycles over the last 200 years:

A few things stand out. The interval pattern in land values before 1925 is surprisingly persistent, being only off by one year in six cycles. However, there are disruptions. How problematic these deviations are will largely depend upon how much we need to adapt the model to account for them, or in other words, how many ‘degrees of freedom’ we accept. Can these deviations be accounted for in a way that is theoretically justifiable, or is it ad hoc? I will try to give an interpretation in line with what defenders of the theory could say. Treat the following arguments as trying to “steelman” the pattern, rather than decisively disregarding contrary evidence. These deviations undermine the elegance of the pattern, and even if the theory can account for interruptions, excessive degrees of freedom risk making the theory unfalsifiable.

One such issue is that the pattern since 1973 is a bit erratic, with 6, 10, and 17-year intervals. One possible interpretation is to understand the 1979 peak as just a strong mid-cycle dip, rendering the period 1973-1989 into a single 16-year cycle, closer in line with the pattern. This is the approach Harrison took in 1983, using the 1973 peak as the baseline from which he anticipated a new 18-year cycle. Defenders of this interpretation could argue that it is theoretically motivated, due to their recognition of mid-cycle dips, but skeptics would still worry about this as a way to retrofit the data to fit the theory.

The bigger issue is the half-century gap from 1925 to 1973. Defenders of the view attribute this anomaly to the two world wars and the post-war rebuilding phase. Another speculative explanation, more in line with Georgist theory, is the significant shifts in land use during this period. Widespread adoption of the car enabled suburban sprawl into cheap land, while the invention of the elevator massively increased how intensely land could be used. Together, these opened up a “new frontier”, mitigating and postponing many of the difficulties Georgists saw in the land market.

When we shift focus from the land value cycles to the business cycle, the pattern is much more erratic. While there is still an average of around 18-years, the variation is much higher. These deviations from the pattern tell us that busts do not always arrive with clockwork precision. However, let us look at the matches between land value peaks and crashes – almost all land value peaks were followed by a crash within a 3-year window. The most notable deviation from the pattern was the 1907 land value peak, which would make us expect a crash near the end of that decade. Instead, it is listed as corresponding to a 1918 crash, rendering the interval before it unusually long and the interval after it unusually short.

One possible explanation for this would again be World War I. But this can’t be the full story, since the war did not begin until 1914. Mason Gaffney offers another interesting theory: “From 1798 to 1929 the 18-year cycle of land booms and crashes was broken only once, in 1911, 18 years after the crash of 1893. What went right then? That was the only time before or after when the nation’s treasuries depended mainly on the property tax, and there was no big runup of land values” (Gaffney 2013, p. 156). This explanation has a lot of theoretical elegance, and if we accept it, it would lend credence not only to the crash pattern but also to the Georgist policy proposal to contain them. But again, we should always be a bit skeptical about retrofitting.

How persuasive we find the pattern largely depends on whether we find these adjustments theoretically justified. To give a broad sense, by removing the outlying 1925-1973 gap and merging the 1973-1989 period into one interval, the standard deviation of the land value intervals falls from 11.4 to 0.5 years, while the coefficient of variation falls from 60% to 3%. While the former set shows no meaningful signal at all, the latter shows a really strong pattern. Yet, unless we feel strongly justified about these modeling choices, this clearly looks like massaging the data.

The fact that we only have about 10 observations prevents us from doing formal statistical inferences or stronger hypothesis testing. And since these observations are collected over such long periods, a lot of the economic institutions and background conditions are bound to change. However, this limitation is inherent to the kind of long cycles proposed by the theory itself. To get 100 observations, we would need to collect data for another 1600 years, which is not really helpful if we want to know what the theory can tell us in 2026. Therefore, it seems that we are currently bound to plausibility assessments, rather than stringent hypothesis testing.

Moreover, I think that one word of warning should be considered in relation to the table. My impression is that it is intended to illustrate the supposed cycle by listing all crashes that can be connected to nearby peaks in land values. However, it is not a comprehensive list of all crashes during this period. I don’t think that Foldvary should be accused of cherry-picking data, because he could have easily listed the crash of 1948 if he had wanted to, which came 19-years after the Great Depression. However, if we accept that crashes occur regularly, there is a non-trivial chance that any land value peak will coincide with such a crash by chance. Some of these other crashes might be explained by the cycle model as mid-cycle dips, but overall, it should make us more cautious in interpreting the results.

I would appreciate someone better trained in economic history and statistical modeling than I am to take a crack at this, with more sophisticated analysis and a larger dataset. Ideally, I’d like to see the theory applied to data sets that it was not itself trained on, but as suggested above, that might be methodologically tricky. Due to increasing global economic integration, it seems feasible that global economic rhythms would be increasingly synchronized.

This connects with the worry of this pattern arising from mere data mining from a large dataset. Some patterns are bound to emerge randomly, so what should make us trust this one? I think that there is some value arising from the fact that the two latest observations postdate Harrison’s 1983 claim that these cycles are not only historical, but also ongoing. He is often credited with anticipating both the 1990 and 2008 peaks, extrapolating from this pattern. If we assume that there is a 15% chance of calling a peak in advance, that gives you only a ~2% chance of being correct twice in a row. Notice that any such numbers should not be taken too literally, and are supposed to be illustrative rather than definitive. Since these predictions are fuzzy, whether a prediction qualifies as successful is not always clear-cut, and if we expand our criteria for what qualifies as a successful prediction, we also risk including more random noise.

Another approach to assessing the risk of data mining is to ask to what extent the mechanism can be plausibly explained. I have a high credence in the Georgist economic theory generally, including the Georgist business cycle theory more specifically. This theory provides some reason to believe that cycles would be fairly predictable and suggests that they arise due to structural features of the economy, rather than random external shocks. However, as mentioned above, this theory in itself does not imply that cycles must be of any particular length.

I find the suggested explanation for the 18-year land cycle theory, and the data concerning the particulars of the housing market, rather opaque and difficult to assess. Harrison does go through different forms of historical evidence, such as the time-scales used by homeowners’ building societies, historical interest rates, and historical data mapping cycles of building. However, the outcome feels a bit contingent. The claim that building cycles tend to be about 7, or 14 years, or that recessions usually follow a 4-year pattern sounds more like rules of thumb than laws of nature. It sounds similar to the conventional wisdom in construction that houses have an approximate life-cycle of 50 years, before every piece will need some repair or replacement. These figures could turn out to be right, but I do not feel compelled by the evidence in the same way that I find the more general Georgist cycle theory compelling.

Crisis tendencies?

Another type of evidence that could either support or undermine the theory is to ask what signs would be observable today if we were indeed in the boom-phase of a cycle. If these signs are observable, this would lend more credence to the theory that we are approaching a crash. Hence, I tried to spot-check some key metrics. To avoid cherry-picking metrics that fit my priors, I asked AI to suggest a number of key housing-market indicators that would likely show signs under a land bubble, and then I independently checked this data.

• Price-to-Rent Ratio: The purchasing price of land is basically a capitalization of the expected revenue, including both its actual rental value plus speculative expectations. In the boom phase of a cycle, we would expect such speculation to increase, inflating housing prices beyond the rental value that they actually generate, thereby also increasing the price-to-rent ratio. Over the last few decades, this metric has hovered around 100, before shooting up to an all-time high of ca. 135 since 2022, exceeding the previous 2006 peak at 127.

• Land Value to GDP: The main driver of the cycle is that speculation of land prices inflates this sector relative to the rest of the economy, to an unsustainable level. Hence, if we are indeed in the boom phase, we would expect these metrics to be elevated compared to normal levels. At about 14%, the share of real estate and leasing of GDP is elevated and close to an all-time high (at least for the period I could find data for).

• Household debt: The theory suggests that credit would become dangerously loose as we approach the final, speculative stage of the bubble. While household debt is at a nominal all-time high of ca $18.6 trillion, a proper assessment would also need to consider inflation and income growth. Household debt as a share of personal income does not seem unusually elevated. Moreover, while the 2008 crisis was triggered by subprime mortgage loans, this does not seem like an imminent threat today, as about 90% of mortgages are locked into low fixed-term rates. A skeptic could interpret this as evidence against a looming real estate crash. A proponent would rather say that it is likely to change the trigger mechanism of the crash, for example, saying that it would be more likely expressed through a frozen market, or that it is more likely to occur in the commercial real estate sector. Nevertheless, this introduces some measure of protection for many current homeowners, who are much less vulnerable to default than during the previous cycle.

• Housing supply: During the boom phase, access to cheap credit and high expectations encourages construction of new housing. However, since such construction takes time, there is often a significant lag between the decision to build and the actual increase in supply. Moreover, the increasing prices that incentivize such building also price people out of the market, meaning that actual demand does not meet this new supply, causing an excess inventory. The Monthly Supply of New Houses (MSACRS) measures such inventory of new houses. Since 2022, it has hovered around 7-10, significantly above the historical average, ranging around 5 to 6.

• Housing Affordability: Since the theory suggests that a driving cause of the bust is that land prices exceed people’s ability to pay, the theory would predict a trend towards falling housing affordability in the years leading up to a crash. The evidence I found suggests that this is indeed the case. Data from FRED’s Housing Affordability Index relates the median household’s income to the median housing costs. A score of 100 means that the median household can just barely afford mortgages, while a higher score means that they can afford it by some margin, and a score that is lower means that they cannot afford it. From 2018 to today, the index has fallen from about 150 to 100. A similar story can be seen in the FED’s data on homeownership costs as a percent share of median income, displayed below. As you can see, it shows a clear peak before the 2006 crash, followed by 15 years of relative affordability, before a sharp increase since 2021. See, for example, this graph:

Four out of five of the metrics align directionally with the predictions made from the theory about what kind of signs we would expect to see prior to a crash, while one is more ambiguous. Of course, these results could be a fluke, independent of any pattern. The relevant question to ask is how likely these results would have occurred if the 18-year theory is correct, compared with the probability that they occur as a fluke, and update our credence in the theories accordingly. By these lights, I think that this provides some interesting evidence in support of the theory.

Adding to this, here is an excerpt from a recent report from the forecasting institute Sentinel.

The US economy is displaying a number of indicators of distress.

In housing, the number of homes on the market greatly exceeds the number of buyers, and there are signs that homeowners are under financial pressure: for instance, the number of Google searches for “help with mortgage” has passed its 2008 peak (as we reported previously), and US Google searches for “bankruptcy lawyer” recently reached an all-time high. The commercial real estate market is also struggling with vacancies.

Nonetheless, the housing market is also in a very different place than in 2008; the market isn’t plagued by adjustable-rate mortgages (more than 90% of US mortgages are fixed-rate loans), and homeowners own a large and growing share of the equity in their homes. […]

The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index is near historic lows. The labor market has been weakening. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 chases all-time highs, powered by AI investments, even as bond markets are signaling risks.

Forecasters estimate a 19% (14% to 30%) probability that the SP 500 will drop more than 10% in any one week by the end of 2026. They point out that the baserate is six times since 1980 (this list, plus COVID and the 2025 crash). They also point to the Case-Shiller index, a measure of housing valuations, being at all-time highs, suggesting that it has peaked, although a fall might not be precipitous.

Notice that a lot of these contemporary trends could also be explained by alternative hypotheses, such as the worry about an AI bubble. Whether the AI sector is a bubble is an entire genre of Substack posts in itself, and I will not weigh in on it here. However, notice that this theory is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the 18-year theory and could even be interpreted as complementary. Since there is bleedover between different asset types, the bubbles and crashes predicted by the 18-year theory are not necessarily restricted to the housing sector. Soaring housing costs will enable homeowners and landlords to invest more aggressively in the stock market, while ballooning stock prices will also increase people’s purchasing power for buying real estate. For example, this is how advocates of the theory would connect the dotcom bubble with the land cycle. This also means that a crash in one of these sectors would affect the other, such that a housing crash could pop a potential AI bubble, or vice versa.

Conclusion

Taken together, these various types of evidence paint an interesting but inconclusive picture. When assessing the evidence, I think that it is important to distinguish between at least three levels of claims:

1. That land plays an important structural role in creating business cycles,

2. That these cycles are a fairly regular pattern, averaging around 18 years, and

3. That this pattern is sufficiently predictable for us to use when making investment decisions.

We should clearly have more credence in (1) than (2), and (2) than (3). To support the Georgist claim that LVT is desirable, due to its ability to dampen speculative cycles (among other reasons), we only need to accept (1). However, if we want to use this for private investment decisions, the relevant factor is your credence in (3).

I do find the empirical pattern in the land value cycle noteworthy, but would like to have a better understanding of why this pattern emerges. I also find it plausible, both theoretically and based on the data, that these land value peaks would cause, or coincide with, business cycle downturns. However, the exact relationship between them seems very fuzzy, with significant deviations. I am not sure if this is a damning problem for the model on a theoretical level. It seems plausible that land-value peaks create heightened economic vulnerability, which only erupts into a crash when combined with some further trigger. And such triggers may well occur semi-randomly.

But even if we find such a model plausible, it significantly undermines the confidence I would need to use this for exact forecasting. While the spot-checking of the housing market directionally aligns with the predictions of the theory, suggesting that there is a heightened period of vulnerability, I also take the warnings against trying to time the market very seriously. One of the strongest arguments against the theory is the low base　rate that we can successfully predict the market. And this issue seems to directly challenge statement (3), but not really undermine (1) or (2). To quote Startup L. Jackson: “Predicting what’s going to happen is often pretty easy. How is harder. But when, when is the one that ******* kills ya”.

When assessing theories like this, we should think in probabilistic rather than binary terms. The relevant question is not whether it is definitely true or false, but how likely it is. Moreover, the level of credence that matters depends on the context in which we are using it. An investor does not need to assign a probability above 50% for a hypothesis to affect their decisions. Only a probability high enough to change which option has the highest expected value. Because the outcomes of a potential crash would be highly asymmetric, even a relatively low probability may still warrant taking the theory seriously. When betting on the future, we should not only consider the probabilities but also the odds. I am not offering investment advice, but I think that this approach is intellectually valuable, giving us actual skin in the game when assessing these theories, and prompts us to think in degrees of belief rather than simple binaries.

Using this probabilistic approach also makes it easier to change our minds in response to new arguments. I remain uncertain and could make significant updates in light of new evidence. On the positive side, whatever happens in the coming year, it will provide another useful data point. I also hope that the essay will prompt discussion that can help me get a better grasp. I am sure that some parts of the reasoning above are mistaken, but in the spirit of Cunningham’s law, the best way to find out which parts is to share this essay.

I find the 18-year theory interesting, but it is not the main foundation for my confidence in Georgism. Hence, even if the 18-year theory turns out to be incorrect, I will not take this as a fundamental issue for Georgism more broadly. Nevertheless, I believe that a 2026 crash could have important implications for the Georgist movement. Periods of crisis often increase the possibility of social reform. To quote Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. The Great Depression was a significant catalyst for Keynesianism, whereas the stagflation of the 1970s lifted neoliberal and monetarist policies from the academic seminar room to state policy. Georgism provides both a diagnosis and a treatment for cycles, since taxation of land values would reduce the incentive to speculate on land values, thereby removing a structural cause for such cycles. If Georgists successfully predict another downturn, this could bring additional attention to the view. Hence, if the theory is correct, this can become a crucial opportunity for the Georgist movement to advance our solutions to social problems. We should be prepared to seize it.

Further Reading

Here is some literature discussing or defending the view. Note that I do not necessarily endorse the reasoning or conclusions of these texts, and I have not read everything on this list. For people new to the subject, my primary recommendation would be to check out the two texts by Fred Foldvary.

• Anderson, Phillip J. 2009. The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

• Bird, Mike. (2025). The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset. New York: Portfolio.
  A recent treatment of the financialization of land with clear parallels to the Georgist land cycle theory. See also this excellent book review, published on the Progree & Poverty Substack!

• Foldvary, Fred E. 1997. “The Business Cycle.: A Georgist-Austrian Synthesis.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 56(4): 521–24. doi:10.1111/j.1536-7150.1997.tb02657.x.
  Journal article in which Foldvary seeks to reconcile Georgist and Austrian cycle theory, notably predicting the 2008 crisis.

• Foldvary, Fred E. 2007. “The Depression of 2008.” doi:10.2139/ssrn.1103584.

• George, Henry. 1898 [1879]. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry Into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want With Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. New York: Doubleday and McClure Company.
  The core statement of Georgist theory. For a discussion of the Georgist business cycle theory, see book V, chapter I.
  If 19th-century English is not for you, I recommend this 2006 version, edited and abridged for modern readers by Bob Drake.

• Harrison, Fred. 1983. The Power in the Land. London: Shepheard-Walwyn Publ.

• Harrison, Fred. 2005. Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010. London: Shepheard-Walwyn.

• Harrison, Fred. 2021. #WeAreRent, Book 1: Capitalism, Cannibalism and Why We Must Outlaw Free Riding. Teddington, London: Land Research Trust.
  Harrison’s most recent two-volume book, in which he predicts a 2026 house-price peak followed by a recession.

• Hoyt, Homer. 1933. One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise in Its Land Values, 1830-1933. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• “The Eighteen-Year Real Estate Cycle.” 2012. Georgist Journal.
  Interesting excerpts from an email exchange of well-known Georgists discussing these ideas.

Land leasing has proven to be the most politically durable approach to Georgism over the course of the last century. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of these examples, explore how they work in practice, and consider what they mean for implementing a broader raft of Georgist reforms going forward.

New York’s City within a City

Our story begins in New York during an economic low point in the mid 1960s. At the time, policymakers at both the state and municipal level were interested in revitalizing the city’s fortunes and were pursuing a development strategy of luring white-collar employers back into New York’s urban core.2

One such project was the original World Trade Center (WTC). Construction created a problem that was eventually turned into an opportunity. Preparing the site for the 110 story buildings that would eventually go up required digging deep into the earth (tall buildings require deep foundations) and figuring out what to do with all the excavated rock and dirt.

Enter New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller.3

Rockefeller was also keen to see NYC bounce back, if not as a matter of pure policy, then as a feather to put in his cap ahead of a presidential run. His big idea was to take all the excavated material from the WTC dig site and use it for a land reclamation project that would serve as the basis for a state-led real estate development meant to help revitalize downtown Manhattan. This is the origin story of Battery Park City.

Battery Park City is a 92-acre neighborhood on the southwest side of the island of Manhattan. The land created via reclamation was placed under the stewardship of the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) which was given responsibility for raising capital and managing the neighborhood’s development.

As a New York State public-benefit corporation, the BPCA was able to issue debt more aggressively than a municipal government or state agency. Because the BPCA lacked direct access to tax revenue — public-benefit corporations don’t get taxing authority — it structured its bonds around the revenue it could generate post-development; revenue generated, in no small part, by long-term land lease agreements with developers.

The typical BPCA land lease runs for 99 years, although several have already been extended out to 120 years. These leases also include pre-set reassessment points. For example, a developer might lease land worth $3M in year zero and agree to pay 5% on that value as their land fee. At some designated point, say year fifteen, the land gets revalued at $5M and the developer’s land fees now become 5% of the new, higher value.

This allows the BPCA to recoup increasing land values and do so in a way that’s slow and predictable for developers.

Now, time for caveats. The BPCA revenue model falls short of the Georgist ideal. On top of leasing fees, it also charges something functionally, but not legally, equivalent to taxes on improvements called PILOT fees.4 So, in reality, it’s running what would be better characterized as an aggressive split-rate system. That said, this system seems to work pretty well — at least from a financial perspective.

In FY2023, the BPCA generated about $400M in revenue. It spent roughly half of that on debt service, infrastructure, and services like maintenance of its public parks. The other half it remitted back to the City of New York.

As cool as the story of Battery Park City is, it admittedly required the involvement of (2) Rockefellers, 92 acres of rubble with no place to go, and a particular moment in New York City’s political and economic history. Thankfully, it’s not the only example we have to talk about.

Virginia Leasehold

Falls Church is a 2 square mile community tucked away in the northeast corner of Virginia, just a few miles outside the U.S. capital in D.C. The city traces its origin all the way back to 1734, though its incorporation as an independent municipal entity happened in 1948.5

In 2017, the town decided to rebuild the local high school. The existing facilities were built in the 1950s and the cost of maintenance was becoming so high that it became economical to rebuild the facilities from scratch. The city had two options:

• Option A: increase everyone’s property taxes by $1,050

• Option B: use 10.3 acres of publicly owned land for redevelopment, monetize through land leasing, and only raise everyone’s property taxes by about $280.

After a voter education campaign and a series of public hearings, the council moved forward with option B.

When the city rebuilt the local high school, they sectioned off a portion of the land (labeled “West Falls” in the image below) and transferred ownership to the newly created West Falls Community Development Authority (CDA). The CDA was empowered to issue bonds and enter into a lease agreement with a development partner, eventually choosing FCGP Development LLC.

The CDA structured their agreement around two lump sum payouts plus a yearly lease fee, and eventual repossession of the land and all improvements at the end of the lease term.

• Phase 1 payment: $25.5 million (roughly 57% of the land’s assessed value) paid out over the first six years of the lease. Grants developer rights to build on most of the property (3 acres held in reserve).

• Phase 2 payment: $10 million or the assessed value of the reserved 3 acres (whichever is greater), payable after the Phase 1 completion. This structure ensures the CDA captures any unanticipated land appreciation.

• Annual lease payments: Annual lease payments starting at $200,000 and increasing 2% annually, with a one-time $25,000 step-up in 2030. Payments starting in 2026.6

• Repossession of land and improvements: The final cherry on top comes at the end of the lease period. Barring renegotiation, everything FCGP Development has built defaults to CDA ownership.7

Here again, this is not textbook Georgism. The city will still levy property taxes on improvements, collect sales taxes from businesses (including hotel taxes), and, obviously, the lump sum structure of the lease payments is not textbook Georgism. And yet, it is Georgist policy. The city is not selling the land, it’s being compensated for its use. Though the land is priced against current expectations, there are mechanisms for capturing unexpected upside. And, most importantly, in a hundred years, the city will still have a revenue generating asset producing wealth for the great grandchildren of the people living in Falls Church today.

Lessons Learned

Battery Park City and Falls Church aren’t the only examples we could look at. Roosevelt Island is another NYC example of leasehold Georgism. The Boston Planning and Development Agency largely self funds by monetizing its 13 million square foot real estate portfolio. And, if we’re willing to entertain a non-U.S. example, the Squamish are in the process of funding their entire nation’s medical system through a ~10 acre mixed-use development in Vancouver. Elsewhere in the heartland of privatized land rents (aka California), officials on the San Francisco United School Board have expressed interested in developing underutilized district land to me in one-on-one conversations. Similarly, one of the candidates for the California Lieutenant Governorship wants to do the same with land owned by California’s two public university systems.

That’s all to say, we have various examples of public land leasing, both existing and prospective. At this point, though, we might ask what to make of it all.

To start, I want to reiterate that Georgist policy exists, it’s just that it more commonly looks like the pre-appropriation via land leasing than it does reappropriation through land value taxation — and this is for an obvious reason. In the U.S., we’ve created an electorate of owner-occupier landowners. Homevoters ended Pittsburgh’s split rate system. And a statewide tax revolt created the abomination that is California’s hobbled property tax system. That’s not to say there’s no hope for land value taxation, especially where it can be implemented as a neutral change for homeowners. But if we acknowledge how hostile the political-economy of land use in the U.S. has historically been towards LVT, we can start to see how land leasing bypasses those structural impediments.

These land leasing examples also remind us how messy actually implemented policy is always going to be. There’s no one weird trick that land rentiers hate that delivers a world where all rents are appropriated for the common good and private effort remains untaxed. And as has pointed out in the past, even if you could press a button and make that change overnight, you’d cause an international financial collapse which would, in fact, be bad. Instead, policy will always be incremental. When we accept that fact, it makes us better at taking the bite at the apple we can take, whenever and wherever we can take it.

In a similar vein, Georgist policy will never be implemented because it’s Georgist; Georgist measures will get implemented because they solve specific policy problems in ways that are politically tractable. Though it’s a story from a much more technocratic age, Battery Park City’s leasehold financing was set up to pay for a development strategy which the Governor of New York thought would revitalize NYC and help him with a presidential bid. In a different institutional context, Falls Church pursued leasehold development to defray the cost of investment in public education (investment the voters wanted, but were very happy to pay for in some way other than out of their own pockets).

People don’t experience outcomes in either the long run or the aggregate. We need to connect policy solutions to tangible outcomes. Our examples of successful land leasing are good reminders of that fact.

Leasing vs Taxation

Before we conclude, it’s important to acknowledge that land leasing and land value taxation are not perfect substitutes.

Undertaking leasehold monetization requires a competent development authority that’s able act as the lessor and select development partners. Development authorities also need the ability to issue debt to finance the public infrastructure necessary for private development on leasehold land (roads, power, sewage, etc). In sum, this requires the establishment of a professionalized bureaucracy to lead development and oversee the leasehold property in perpetuity.

Similarly, leasehold development implies greater government involvement in urban development as compared to a taxation based approach. The typical American municipality, whether they realize it or not, manages the development of the built environment as a sort of arm’s length series of operations. Euclidean zoning, non-zoning ordinances, and the shape of transportation infrastructure determine what developers are allowed to build and also what they can do so profitably. In this standard pattern, the built environment is a second order outcome of the conditions and incentives created by municipal authorities.

In our two main examples, however, neither BPCA nor the Falls Church CDA were just selling access to land and letting developers take it from there. Both had opinions on exactly what kind of development they wanted to see and put out RFPs as part of the developer selection process. Some might argue this is a very top down development approach and perhaps that is fair; but whether it’s truly top down or not, decision making was guided by the need to maximize lease values (or at least maximize them to the point they could pay for what they were intended to pay for). Whether this active role is desirable depends on one’s view of state capacity and urban planning—but it’s a distinct feature of the leasehold approach that advocates should understand.

Conclusion

Georgism exists. It’s just that many of our existing examples look like leasing public land instead of taxing private value. While there’s a bright future for LVT style reforms, if we recognize public land leasing as a complementary policy we can open up the aperture of our imagination and start to see a wider array of political opportunities for reform.

As advocates, this means recognizing more opportunities to deploy Georgist solutions to policy problems of political import — and, in so doing, further the work of coalition building that will be required for ongoing reform.

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Never fear, bold adventurer. Let’s guide you on your journey.

A Humble Quest

The best way to pitch Land Value Return is as a pragmatic common-sense solution to an existing problem in your community. Find a local elected who will champion the cause, then build on that base of support by doing your elected official’s homework for them. Importantly, you don’t have to wait until you’ve built a massive grassroots movement; sufficiently motivated individuals paired with the right local person in power can get a lot done.

The Chosen One(s)

Every local victory starts with local champions—someone who cares about the issue, and someone with the power to further it politically. In some cases these are the same person, in other cases the person who cares about the issue needs to find someone with the power to do something about it, such as a city councilor, mayor, state senator, etc. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that one or both sides of that duo is you.

You live somewhere, right? Being from somewhere gives you a superpower national advocates like us can’t match—you’re a local. When you call your politicians, you’re their constituent. When you look at a map, you recognize the streets. When you pay your property taxes or rent, you have skin in the game. This place is your home.

Don’t think you have to go it alone, however, or that you have to do it all by yourself. There may be like-minded friends and allies in your area you can invite to join your party of adventurers (more on that later).

“But,” you say, “my town or state is too small to matter in the grand scheme of things. I’m from Podunk, Nowhere. Even if we achieve reform here, what difference will it make on the national stage?” You and your neighbors will benefit, and that alone makes your cause worthwhile. But for what it’s worth, you’ll also be directly contributing to the larger movement, because our goal is to succeed anywhere.

Succeed anywhere

Our theory of change it that a steady stream of small, pragmatic, local wins throughout the country will provide the broader movement with momentum, social proof, and fresh empirical case studies. Politicians are by nature skittish, but love to follow hot new trends once they’re already proven successful. As the saying goes, “nobody wants to be the first or the last person to get off the bus.”

Given this local focus, we recommend that your first Land Value Return pitch should be framed as a voluntary opt-in for local jurisdictions, and calibrated to be revenue-neutral. This immediately takes two common attacks off the table—that the new reform will be “forced” on an entire populace who didn’t ask for it, or that it is a money-grab.

What begins as a small trickle of modest, pragmatic reforms, can grow to a rising tide and then a flood, just as we’ve seen with the YIMBY movement. Early on they relied on theoretical arguments, but as they got successive wins on the board, they were able to increasingly point to real world success stories. Each victory provides the political capital necessary for more ambitious future reforms.

So how do we achieve the change we want? By doing politicians’ homework for them.

Doing the homework

Even if your local elected officials are open and even friendly to Land Value Return, politicians are busy and easily distracted and won’t support a policy while it’s still full of risks and unanswered questions.

The bad news is that politicians simply don’t have the time and energy to do all the grunt work it takes to effectively pitch a policy. The good news is that if you’re willing to do it, it can go a long way to influencing your leaders.

Here’s a brief overview of everything that needs to be done:

• 🤝 Coalition building

• 📢 Finding stories to tell

• ⚖ Legal analysis

• 🗺 Overall strategy

• 🔍 Data modeling

Remember, you don’t have to do every single piece of this by yourself! If any of it feels intimidating, just find a piece of it you can do, and try to connect with others in your area or in the national movement to fill in the gaps. And please reach out to us at the CLE as well.

Coalition Building

Any good adventurer must form a strong party of fellow wizards and warriors if they want to make it through the dungeons alive.

YIMBYs often make for natural allies, as do Urbanists of all stripes, including your local Strong Towns conversation group. Affiliated groups like Welcoming Neighbors Network and Habitat for Humanity are good candidates as well. There are many other groups to consider as well, but the above are the easiest to start with. They may even have scheduled events at your local tavern!

For more on this, see the “Coalition Building” section of our LVT Landscape Live article.

Find the stories to tell

Politicians are going to have a lot of questions, and they’ll expect you to have the answers. If you propose shifting taxes, they’ll ask who wins, who loses, and by how much. Ideally, you’ll be able to answer that question down to the individual parcel.

Another thing you’ll discover is that elected officials don’t always know as much about the local property tax system as you might expect—it’s therefore your job to become the expert they can rely on.

At the same time, don’t drown people in data or long winded arguments. Condense your findings into a simple, high-level analysis, paired with straightforward, concrete examples that explain your reasoning in a common sense, easily relatable way.

To illustrate, let’s start at the end of the journey by showing you the kind of pitch you want to ultimately make, pulling a few key slides from a report we recently did for Spokane, Washington1.

First, we open by framing the conversation around how much valuable undeveloped and underdeveloped land is just sitting there:

Then, we show where land value is concentrated overall:

…followed by a pair of slides that show how the most valuable area of town is being utilized far below its potential. We point out that taxing buildings discourages developing downtown to its full potential, while under-taxing downtown’s tremendous land value implicitly shifts property taxes onto everybody else in the city.

We then move to concrete, common-sense examples of how the current property tax system punishes building and investment, and rewards speculation:

We spend some time going over the mechanics of the policy, and towards the end we go over who wins and who loses:

The report also spends some time going over the proposed policy and explaining it’s mechanics, but you get the basic idea. Take the raw data, and use it to tell common-sense stories about real things happening in the real world, tied directly back to problems your local elected official already cares about.

So how do you get to this point? First, you’ll have to complete a lot of smaller quests, starting with gaining a solid understanding of your local laws.

Legal Analysis

There’s no use in spending hours on a detailed policy plan only to find out that a massive legal barrier you haven’t considered stands in your way. This is especially so if a clearer understanding of the law from the outset would have led you to an alternate policy that wasn’t blocked, while achieving the same goals.

There are five big things you need to know about the law. Create a document for yourself, and put these bullet points on it as headings. Your quest is to fill out all five sections with whatever you can learn about your jurisdiction.

1. ⚖ Uniformity

2. 📁 Classification

3. 📊 Assessment rates

4. 🚫 Exemptions

5. 📈 Millage rates

⚖ Uniformity
This is whatever state constitutional clause or state law governs whether all real property must be taxed in the same way. Uniformity clauses require that all classes of real property be taxed in a similar manner—that is, you can’t have separate tax rates for different classes of property. These clauses forbid localities from adopting local split-rate taxes. The details matter, however, and in many states the legislature just needs to pass an “enabling act” to circumvent the state constitutional clause rather than requiring a full constitutional amendment; see Uniformity Does not Preclude Land Value Taxes.

Your questions are:

“Does my state have a uniformity clause? If so, where/what is it?”
“Can different types of property be taxed at different rates?”
“Does changing this require an enabling law, or a constitutional amendment?”

📁 Classification
Every state groups different kinds of property into different classes, such as “residential” or “commercial.” Sometimes classifications are defined by local authorities, sometimes they’re defined by state law, and sometimes they’re enshrined in the constitution itself. Even if there is only one uniform tax rate, that tax rate only applies to a property’s taxable value, and some property classes (agricultural land in particular) can have special rules that reduce their taxable value below their fair market value.

Your questions are:

“What are the classifications?”
“Who decides on them?”
“How are they defined?”
“Can land and buildings be treated as different classes?”

📊 Assessment Rates
The assessed value of a property is the amount that is actually used to calculate the final tax bill (sometimes this is the first step in calculating a separate taxable value, and sometimes assessed value is synonymous with taxable value). Typically, this is calculated by multiplying the full market value of a property by an assessment rate, which may or may not differ for each class of property.

Example: the fair market value of a property is $250,000, but the assessment rate is 50%, so the assessed value is $125,000.

Your questions are:

“Who sets the assessment rates?”
“Can land and buildings have different assessment rates?”
“Are there any caps or other limits on assessment rates?”

🚫Exemptions
Real property can be either partially or fully exempt from taxation, and you will most often see this with regards to religious, charitable, or government properties. However, nearly every tax code I’ve looked at has a whole bunch of other exemptions in there as well, and this may provide you with the legal infrastructure you need to pursue the Universal Building Exemption approach. Property tax exemptions can come in three basic forms:

• per owner (e.g. for homeowners, seniors, or veterans)

• per property (e.g. agricultural exemptions)

• per area (e.g. special tax districts)

Your question is:

“Can buildings be partly or fully exempted from taxation?”

📈 Millage Rates
Millage rates represent the actual tax rate—the number that is multiplied against the taxable value, resulting in the parcel’s actual tax bill. As for the term “millage” itself, it’s basically the same as a percentage rate, it’s just expressed in parts per thousand rather then parts per hundred—100 mills is equivalent to 10 percent. Another way to think of it is “for every $1,000 of taxable value, how many dollars of property tax are owed?” Typically, each local government unit whose jurisdiction you are in, will apply their own millage rate against your parcel’s taxable value.

Example: a property with a taxable value of $100,000 is assessed at 15 mills, resulting in $1,500 of taxes owed. In this example, those 15 mills are a combined rate, consisting of 7 mills for the school district, 5 mills for the city, and 3 mills for the county. $700 goes to the school district, $500 to the city, and $300 to the county.

Note: millage rates are usually derived by working backwards from the budget. So if a city has a property tax base whose total taxable value is $1 billion, and the budget they want is $10 million, then the millage rate is 10, or 1%.

Your questions are:

“Who sets the millage rates?”
“What limits are there on millage rates?”

Once you’ve collected the answers to all these legal questions, you should be ready to pick your overall strategy.

Overall strategy

We know what winning looks like abstractly—“reduce taxes on labor and capital and increase taxes on land.” However, there’s more than one way to do that, and which strategy you take depends highly on local conditions. Four basic strategies are:

1. Split-Rate Property Tax
   Tax land and buildings at different rates. Lower the tax rate on buildings, and raise the tax rate on land.

2. Universal Building Exemption
   Exempt all buildings from taxation. Raise the tax rate (on land).

3. Land Leases

   Instead of selling publicly owned land out of land banks for pennies on the dollar, the public retains ownership of that land and leases it out at market rates, regularly updating the ground rent. This achieves the same goals as LVT for publicly owned parcels.

4. Targeted Land Value Capture

   Apply any of the above strategies, but limited to specially targeted areas, such as special tax districts created around transit stations.

If a uniformity clause blocks the split-rate approach, it might still be constitutional to try for a universal building exemption instead. That’s because even if differential tax rates aren’t allowed, every state provides for property tax exemptions, and you might be able to use the existing legal infrastructure that governs exemptions to your advantage.

All of this requires carefully parsing legal language, and our “official advice” is that at some point you should try to talk to an actual lawyer. That said, lawyers are expensive and you probably don’t have access to one right now. Just personally, I think more people should get comfortable reading the law for themselves and not getting intimidated by legalese. I’ve also found that LLM chatbots are surprisingly adept at parsing these documents into plain English. Just be sure to find someone with actual legal credentials once the stakes get higher.

On that note, if you have professional legal expertise, you could immediately help the movement in one of two main ways. First, by volunteering to make yourself available to local activists, and two, by helping us build up a national database of all the specific legal barriers to Land Value Return throughout the US. If this is you, reach out to us at the Center for Land Economics.

Once you’ve done your legal homework and decided on your basic path, your next step is to crunch some numbers.

Data Modeling

Here’s some more homework for you:

1. 🔍 Check local assessed values

2. 🗺 Put them on a map

3. 💻 Model an LVT shift

The main questions you are trying to answer here are:

“Where is land value concentrated in my jurisdiction?”
“Are the existing land values good enough, or do we need to adopt new ones?”
“Who wins and who loses in my proposed shift?”
“What does my local assessor think of all this?”

Three quick notes here:

First, it’s always easier to proceed with existing land values, than to require a revaluation or the adoption of new land values, particularly ones calculated by an external consultant. Fortunately, in many parts of the country (particularly those with short revaluation cycles), assessors are quite experienced and the land values may already be good enough. If not, you’ll have to convince your jurisdiction to not only adopt a new tax policy, but also to adopt new valuation methods, which is a bigger ask.

Second, the assessor possesses a pocket veto on any property tax shift policy, because not only will lawmakers defer to their expertise, assessors are the ones who must implement much of the policy. Do not make an enemy of them. Include them early in any political discussions with elected officials, anticipate their objections and have ready answers for them. Assessors are used to being treated like the bad guys, so win their trust by treating them with respect.

Finally, you don’t need to have elite data science skills to make good use of public data, and you certainly don’t have to build a bespoke from-scratch valuation model for your entire city. Often the most important thing is to just look at the existing data and tell the stories of existing property taxes.

On to our data modeling homework:

🔍 Check local assessed values
You have two main ways of getting assessed values: download them from an open data portal, or write to your assessor and ask for them. Most cities and counties in the USA have open data portals, which should be your first stop: go to your search engine of choice and search for “<jurisdiction name> open data.” Often the first result will look like this:

The design and contents of your local open data portal will vary wildly, but a lot of them will look something like this, with either a search bar up top or a big friendly landing page. Your mission is to find the property tax parcel data.

A full tutorial on how to navigate open data portals is beyond the scope of this particular essay, but we might cover it in a future article. If at any point you find yourself intimidated by the technical aspect, consider joining the OpenAVMKit discord; plenty of like-minded and highly technically proficient people are gathered there (including myself) and we’ll be happy to guide you.

In any case, you are looking for the following things:

• Parcel shapefile
  This is a file that gives you the polygonal geometry of every parcel, along with its primary parcel key identifier, and optionally other useful facts like the size of the land, the situs address, and the owner’s name and mailing address. You need this data in order to put anything on a map.

• Assessed values
  These are valuations that the assessor has assigned to each real estate parcel. You should expect to find full market values/appraised values, which represents what the property would actually likely sell for, the taxable/assessed values, which is what tax bills are actually based on, along with splits within those categories for land value, improvement value, and total value. You need this data in order to judge whether there are any quality issues with the assessed values, and in order to run any tax shift analysis.

• Property characteristics
  These may be included in the parcel shapefile, or they may come separately as their own file. They are usually encoded as a data table or spreadsheet of individual facts about land and buildings. Each row should include a primary parcel key identifier that ties these records back to the parcel shapefile. Besides property type, classification, and zoning, the most important of these characteristics are the “big five,” which are the ones most strongly associated with value: land size, building size, building age, building quality of construction/materials, and building physical condition. Additional characteristics include bedrooms, bathrooms, and whatever other data the assessor has chosen to provide. You need this data if you intend to categorize properties by their characteristics, or do any mass appraisal modeling.

• Sales transactions
  This is a record of recent sales transactions, that is, sale prices, dates, and conditions of the sale. You need this data if you intend to perform independent ratio studies, or if you wish to do your own mass appraisal modeling using tools like our own open source library, OpenAVMKit.

The best assessors might already have done a lot of analysis for you and already posted it on their website. For instance, North Carolina jurisdictions are required to post an annual Schedule of Values, such as this one by Wake County. These kinds of documents describe the local valuation process in detail and is essential reading for any property tax reformer.

As for evaluating the quality of your local jurisdiction’s assessments, you should first see if there’s a state oversight body that has already published results, such as the Texas Comptroller’s annual and comprehensive Property Value Study. The name of the oversight body will vary wildly from state to state, but the most common name is the “Department of Revenue.” Also, oversight results may not be published on your local jurisdiction’s open data portal, they’re more likely to be found on the official website of whatever state agency does the oversight.

In the case that no open data portal is available, your local assessor should at least have a website with contact information. There will likely be instructions for how to make data requests, and if not, you can always just email (or call) them politely and ask. Keywords to use are “parcel export,” or “CAMA export.” They’ll almost certainly ask what you intend to do with the data, so have a clear and concise answer ready.

Alright, you’ve found and downloaded all this data. The first thing you should do is put it on a map and look at it.

🗺 Put it on a map

If the data is already natively in map form (such as an interactive web map), that’s great! If not, you have three main options: Felt.com, CivicMapper / PutItOnAMap.com, and QGIS.

Felt, or as I like to call it, “Google Docs for Maps” is probably the simplest and easiest way to throw together a map.

Felt has a free version and a paid version, and comes highly recommended. Felt’s chief advantage is that it’s easy to use, powerful, and it’s dead simple to generate sharable links to maps you create. It’s limited to 2D maps, however.

CivicMapper, and its open source version, PutItOnAMap, are tools we created and published here at the Center for Land Economics in order to visualize property and land values in 3D:

CivicMapper contains a number of curated city datasets that we host ourselves. However, if you want to load your own custom data, you can create a very similar visualization yourself by using PutItOnAMap; you will just have to provide your own data in GeoParquet format.

CivicMapper’s chief advantage is that if your city is already curated by us, you don’t have to do anything, and you can easily share it with others. If you’re using PutItOnAMap, everything runs locally on your own computer and there’s no way to share what you’ve created; in order to show the work to someone else you’ll have to either create screenshots, or show them your laptop screen. We’re actively working on both sites and welcome feedback and feature requests.

As a final alternative, you can always use professional-grade GIS software, like the free and open source QGIS. These kinds of tools are very powerful, but also have a steep learning curve.

Okay, so you’ve got your stuff on a map. What are you looking for?

Look for inconsistent land values
Take a look at land values for neighboring side-by-side parcels, particularly in terms of $/sqft or $/acre, and look for discrepancies. In theory, parcels in the same location, with the same characteristics (size, shape, land use/zoning, utility access, etc.) should have similar land valuations. If they don’t, and there’s no good explanation for why they should differ, it could be a sign of anomalies in the land valuation methodology. For an idea of what to look for, see our report on Baltimore’s vacant land valuation.

Frame the big picture
Try to get an intuitive sense of where land value is concentrated and ask yourself if it makes sense. This is also where you can grab a “money shot” for your presentation that captures where land value is concentrated in a city. For instance, this map of Spokane shows how much land value is concentrated downtown, as well as along commercial corridors:

Identify valuable parcels with low value uses
Our curated datasets in Civic mapper include sections for each city where we identify vacant lots, parking lots, and underdeveloped lots, and then show only their land value, to point out how much potential is currently being wasted. If your city isn’t in Civic mapper yet, see if you can recreate these kind of visuals in your own chosen tools. Sum up the total value of these high-value, underutilized parcels.

There’s a lot more you can do with maps, these are just a few things you can do that we’ve found to be particularly effective in crafting our pitch.

💻 Model an LVT shift

This is the part where you actually crunch the numbers and model your actual policy proposal. You’ll want to have a good idea of which approach is the most likely to be legally feasible, and then sit down and do the math. It’s possible to do this entirely in Excel, but we also have our own open source python library called LVTShift if you want to use code—you can read about that here.

At a high level, the modeling process looks like this:

1. Get a data table of every parcel in your jurisdiction

2. Ensure each row has land value, improvement value, and current taxable value

3. Using existing millage rate(s), calculate current taxes owed per parcel under existing law

4. Sum up total current taxes owed

5. Solve for the new tax rate(s) under a revenue-neutral shift:

   1. Building exemption strategy:

      1. Calculate “taxable improvement value” by reducing building value by your reduction formula (complete exemption, partial % exemption, flat exemption, mix of these, etc.)

      2. Add land value and taxable improvement value from above to get “new taxable value”

      3. Solve for X, where X is the new millage rate that when multiplied by the new taxable value, equals total current taxes owed.

   2. Split-rate strategy:

      1. Determine how much higher the land tax rate will be than the improvement tax rate. Call that ratio R. (Example: land taxed at 4x the rate of buildings means R = 4).

      2. Solve for X, where land millage rate is X and building millage rate is X/R, such that X * (taxable land value) and X/R * (taxable building value), equals total current taxes owed.

This can get pretty complicated in jurisdictions when accounting for multiple stacked millage rates, exemptions, etc., so don’t feel shy about asking for help. For a simple model, keep existing exemptions in place, and handle them by first applying as much exemption amount as possible to the improvement value first, and only then applying any leftover amount to the land.

Wow, that sounds like a lot

Nobody said the quest would be easy, but this is a loose sketch of everything that goes into a typical local campaign. There’s a ton of details I’m leaving out and I’m sure people will have lots of questions, but the point is to just get the basics down so that we can have a standard piece to link to whenever our local advocates ask us, “what can I do?”

Again, you do not have to do everything, and you don’t have to do it by yourself. In fact, if you want to know the least you can do, here’s a nice simple answer.

Hand out a policy brief

Politicians have questions, and those questions need answers. Clear, direct, to-the-point answers. Answers that they can share with their colleagues when you’re not in the room. An essential tool in your kit is the policy brief, a short paper that explains why your policy is a great idea and why anyone should support it.

The simplest possible version of this is the “one-pager,” which you will almost certainly be asked for at some point. We’ve taken the liberty of putting one together for you, which you can find on our LVT resources page:

We’ll try to build out more materials in the coming year, but sometimes you’ll find you need to produce something yourself. Not everything can fit on a single page, but a good brief doesn’t have to be super long and fancy, either. It just has to do three things:

• Explain what the policy is

• Show why it’s a good idea and why it will work

• Be short and to the point

Start local, Start small

You don’t have to do it all at once, you don’t have to do it all yourself, and you don’t have to do it everywhere. Figure out what you can do now, what you can’t do but could do if you had more skills/knowledge, and what you need someone else’s help for. Over time you will be able to close those gaps. Post about what you’re doing somewhere others can see it, and make yourself known to others in the movement.

Thanks for joining us. We couldn’t do this without you.

And don’t forget to reach out!