Only partially true. You pay a *property* tax, which does sometimes have a land component to it, but mostly is a tax on the purchase price of your home.
A Georgist-style land tax proposes a tax on solely the land, so a 2000sq-ft lot is the same regardless of a $10mil home or not.
This would require an appraiser that regularly re-evaluates the value of the land-- but we already do that! But with homes.
Furthermore, a property tax still leaves open lots of tax-shenanigans. "Look, my home is actually worth half the appraised price, thus I should be taxed half." It's harder to do so with land, since you can't easily "hide"/play tricks with its value from a regulator.
Texas (what the original article in the original post revolves around) has the 5th highest property tax in the country and the urban areas have some of the outright highest property taxes in the country on a per city or county basis. This is both a land value tax and property tax.
It's a Property Tax which is significantly worse than a Land Value Tax.
Firstly it encourages urban sprawl, which is bad for the environment and bad for cost of living and housing access.
Secondly it penalizes productive value add. Build something beautiful and you're punished for doing so.
Thirdly it doesn't have the same logical justification as the Land Value Tax, which is to tax ownership of scarce, zero sum, excludable, naturally occurring resources that aren't the product of labor.
You don't know that. There are places on the East Coast, namely Pennsylvania and Delaware that I can think of, that have implemented LVT. Normally they are hybrid approaches though.
The usual advocacy point is to reduce most of the other taxes and send the LVT way up. "We should have a land value tax" is usually meant to mean "most tax should be on land".
It will incentivize construction of dense housing, which distributes the same amount of land tax over a larger number of residents. People get displaced by gentrification because current policy encourages landlords to hoard old structures instead of building as much as possible.
Many counties in Texas have solved this by setting a 10% maximum year over year increase in property/land tax for people LIVING in their homes. There are also locks and exemptions carved out for those over 65 and disabled veterans.
Yeah there should be exemptions (i.e. standard deductions) to help low-income people (retirees with low savings, such as those dependent on social security or disabled, etc) and for people's primary residence.
What we don't want is a 50 year old who fully owns a $2 mil house and has $15 mil in the stock market and $1 mil in cash to be exempted from most property tax, but a 30 year old with $200k total assets to be on the hook for the full property tax rate. That doesn't make sense.
Land value taxes ignore the value of buildings constructed on the land. It’s very different from current property taxes because it incentivizes density.
> Common property taxes include land value, which usually has a separate assessment. Thus, land value taxation already exists in many jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions have attempted to rely more heavily on it. In Pennsylvania certain cities raised the tax on land value while reducing the tax on improvement/building/structure values.
I'm not aware of any locality in the US that has a pure Land Value Tax. There are a few localities in Pennsylvania that have a split value tax, with separate rates for land and structures.
There are definitely counties here in Florida that value land and improvements separately. But there's often no separation as far as how they're taxed. It's just all added together. Here's the listing for Tropicana Field, which is owned by the county and therefore qualified as "municipal" use:
