> - There are deeper problems with valuing land. Land values in cities are directly related to approved zoning (i.e. what you are allowed to build), so the city government can rezone neighborhoods and unilaterally alter the land values the residents pay tax on. This may not agree with everyone's view of fairness.

That's actually a feature, especially if you make sure that the authority who can do the zoning also gets the revenue (or at least shares in it). That way aligns incentives.

> - LVT encourages building tall and is hostile to lowrise development and unbuilt/green spaces. Those policy preferences may not be shared by everyone.

LVT doesn't do anything like that. The whole point of LVT is that it has no influence on land use choices: you literally pay the same LVT no matter how you use the land. It doesn't encourage or discourage anything. That's why it is economically efficient.

(However, alternative taxation schemes like income tax or capital gains tax or taxes on improvements do discourage building tall. And if you lower those taxes, people will build taller.

Btw, I think that for all its faults a conventional property tax that doesn't distinguish between land and improvements is still miles better than income tax or capital gains tax or sales tax etc.)

> In a city bare land almost never trades.So you have to extract land values from building+land sales, which is much much harder and possibly impossible to do fairly.

Often land changes hands and the new owner tears down the structure and build a new one. You can reasonably assume that the old building was valued at zero, or even negative because tearing down costs money and time. So that gives a lower limit on the price of the bare land.

>> That's actually a feature, especially if you make sure that the authority who can do the zoning also gets the revenue (or at least shares in it). That way aligns incentives.

This is only a positive if your goal is to upzone everything. If you think cities should be a mix of zoning and zoning shouldn't be driven by tax considerations, then this is very negative, since the land management department has an incentive to increase zoning and taxes.

>> LVT doesn't do anything like that. The whole point of LVT is that it has no influence on land use choices: you literally pay the same LVT no matter how you use the land.

I don't agree that's how the incentives work.

If you don't tax structures you absolutely incentivize building structures, because they earn money but pay no tax.

In a land+building tax structure, there is less incentive to build a structure because they pay tax.

If I have a lot of green space and few structures, and we convert to LVT, I will be taxed proportionally higher than before, or than my neighbor with less land and more structures. By taxing me more you are dis-incentivising my approach.

Well, I think zoning is mostly silly, and people should mostly be able to decide what they want to do with their property.

(Before zoning was a thing there were already nuisance laws that forbade opening heavy industry next to a Kindergarten. No zoning required.)

In any case, people don't build high rises in the middle of nowhere right now. They won't start (or at least not much more than under the status quo) if someone drops taxes on structures a bit.

Also keep in mind that people don't get spontaneously generated. If people cluster together to form a high density area, some other parts of the country will see lower density. Ie if you let all the people who bunch up together, bunch up together, there's more space left over for the people who prefer lower density.

> If I have a lot of green space and few structures, and we convert to LVT, I will be taxed proportionally higher than before, or than my neighbor with less land and more structures. By taxing me more you are dis-incentivising my approach.

What you are describing is purely an effect of whether you tax structures or not. It's completely independent of whether you tax the land value.

> Land values in cities are directly related to approved zoning (i.e. what you are allowed to build), so the city government can rezone neighborhoods and unilaterally alter the land values the residents pay tax on.

Cities were already able to rezone neighbourhoods and unilaterally alter the values of residents' land (also just through everyday building - if they build a transit station in one neighbourhood and a sewage treatment plant in another, that alters everyone's property values), and this was already a very corruptible process. In theory LVT should improve it a little since now the city has an incentive to increase everyone's land value as much as possible.

> LVT encourages building tall and is hostile to lowrise development and unbuilt/green spaces.

Yes and no - it encourages making valuable use of expensive land, and moving less valuable uses onto cheap land, but it's agnostic about what that "valuable" is. If people prefer - that is, will pay more to use - lowrise buildings or green spaces, then that's what LVT will deliver.

That does seem difficult to do.