this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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I worked for 5 years to promote LVT.
In real life it's far more complex to administer than a straight property tax, that's why it will never be popular. It also creates bizarre outcomes where where it rewards some land uses and punishes others and creates weird incentives about land topology and parcelization.
Who is going to assess the value of the land as distinct from improvements? Geologists? Environmentalists? Different parents will presume different values and push those values. Property taxes are assumed basically based on other similar properties on the market, in terms of size, age, and space. But 2 parcels of 2 acre right next to each other could be radically different values depending in there topology and environments. I lived on a 2 acre parcel once, and our neighbors had 1/4 acre plots, but our 2 acres was mostly swampy low lying land that was not adjacent to the part the land our house was on that was regular. It was also weirdly shaped and the 'access' to it was a narrow 10ft corridor. It was essentially... useless land attached to our parcel, we couldn't even develop it because in order to clear it you'd have to get permission form your neighbor to drive construction equipment across their driveway/lawn and destroy it. The extra 'land' in our case added 0 value to our property and in fact removed value, as houses around us were often selling for more due to the extra liability our extra land came with.
It introduces just as many problems as it those it claims to solve. It makes sense in some limited contexts, like say, urban land use across small and regular parcels, but not all land is urban land.
You forget that George was writing when society 70% agricultural and rural and working off a model of undeveloped land. in 2026 only 17% of the USA population lives outside of cities.
Finally a fellow georgist. How does one work to promote LVT? You mean you got paid to do it and despite that, you are now against georgism?
IMHO, your reasoning is weird and blown out of proportion. Measuring value of land and housing is easy and is done today for the market, for insurance and for taxing purposes. This could be a reason for georgism to become unpopular, but it isn't a reason against georgism.
The common reasoning with negative value land. This is only brought up because it is an issue in todays world. It wouldn't even be an issue with an LVT. If a strip of land is only costing money, just give it back to the Gov so they need to take care for it, you're not a charity. Otherwise it has a measurable value which you are denying to win an argument.
No it doesn't. I see one "Problem" LVT doesn't solve, but you haven't mentioned this one yet.
This is not valid. George focused on New York. It did include everything from agriculture to fully developed Manhattan. It's called Land Value Tax, not Land Tax.
No, i actually worked with economists, lawyers, and assessors on research projects. And everyone of them loved LVT in theory, but in practice sucked balls. Again and again, the research showed poor and awful outcomes when the direct implementation of the tax was studied and various municipalities that have tried it have totally and utterly failed and gone back to a property tax due, largely due to the overwhelming overhead costs involved with assessing and administering a LVT.
There is a huge gulf between theory and practice. Georgists sit around all day and theorize and idealize but never actually go into the trenches of tax law, tax policy, and tax enforcement.
Very interesting. Do you have any sources to share so I can read into that?
Also, I believe there are 2x publicly known sources for LVT being applied on a wide scale: Alaska and Singapore. Both are very successful and comfortably perform far above average compared to other US states / other countries. This somewhat directly contradicts your statements. So maybe your experience is not representative for LVT's performance, but rather your specific execution of it.
Just to be clear, LVT is just one form of resource tax. Actually all resource use including pollution and oil extraction etc. fall under my understanding of georgism.
No. It was 20 years ago but people I worked with included Karl Case. The guy who founded the housing index. You can go find your own search for the 100s of papers on the topic. In my 5 years working there I probably saw 30+ papers published relating to it. All the work was in the continental USA.
And I have no doubt it works in Singapore, because it's a city-state. Just like I said in another comment it works great in the context of small regularized parcels of land. Singapore also has super restrictive laws about land ownership. But you can't generalize that to the whole of the USA, let alone most USA cities/states due to the massive geological differences.
And yes, in theory if you just abolished all existing laws and land rights and property values and just divided up the entire USA into 1 acre square parcels, it would make sense to use a LVT. But again that's an ideal theory that in no way will ever become reflecting of reality. Land ownership and use and regulations are highly irregular in America and often subject to 4-5+ levels of government regulation.