A negative tax on the lowest bracket would also probably work, that’s just a minor adjustment though. The big goal is to refund the land value taxes so that the net change for an average family taking up a reasonable amount of land would be $0. Use more land, pay more. Use less land, end up better off than you are right now.

Ah, well that's more reasonable. It's a low-density tax. Wouldn't you want to calculate by (residentially-allocated) area rather than property value, then?

You’re also missing how mortgages work. The return was 5% on the property value, but not 5% on my investment. In the first year of my mortgage of my first house, I invested only around $45,000 including the down payment for 10% and the first year of mortgage payments. Lets say the property went up 5% in that time, which would have been around $15,000 on that first starter house I owned. So on an investment of $45k, I made $15,000k, that’s a return of 33%. But it’s worse than that, because the 45k is only my cash output value, not my actual costs. The whole down payment of $30,000 went to my principal, and is essentially 100% equity. Given it’s my first year of my mortgage, almost all of the monthly payment is for interest, equity from my monthly payment was only like 20% or something, so that’s another $3000 paid off on the home as equity. Of course there’s insurance, maintenance, etc. costs, a few thousand dollars so that pretty much eliminates that amount. So my actual investment costs is actually closer to the mortgage payments of $15,000, which gave me a return of $15000 (5% on the property value) for a 100% return on investment.

It's a leveraged investment. It earns more in good times as a result, as would leveraged equities. To be fair, I haven't actually looked into what kind of leverage the average mortgage-holder could get for that, but double the rate of return for the underlying instrument is no joke.

The proper way to calculate this would include the entire period of amortisation, all the payments together, and whatever you finally sell the house for added to the rent you didn't pay as the return. Risk is also a consideration - where I live, out in the country, the return would have been be a lot lower than that. If you bought a house in somewhere like Detroit you're just in the hole, because your house is only in one place and not diversified.

As for my own situation, I'm still young and building back up from rock bottom so I can't really talk about the last 14 years.