Wealth and Want theme: Assessment

Louis Post: Outlines of Louis F. Post's Lectures, with Illustrative Notes and Charts (1894)

Note 4: The difference between site value and improvement value is much more definite than it is often supposed to be. Even in what would seem at first to be most confusing cases, it is easily distinguished. If in any example we imagine the complete destruction of all the improvements, we may discover in the remaining value of the property — in the price it would after such destruction fetch in the real estate market — the value of the site as distinguished from the value of the improvements. This residuum of value would be the basis of computation for levying the single tax.

The distinction is frequently made in business life. Whenever in the course of ordinary business affairs it becomes necessary to estimate the value of a building lot, or to fix royalties for mining privileges, no difficulty is experienced, and substantial justice is done. And though the exigencies of business seldom require the site value of an improved farm to be distinguished from the value of its improvements, yet it could doubtless be done as easily and justly as with city or mining property. Unimproved land attached to any farm in question, or unimproved land in the neighborhood, if similar in fertility and location, would furnish a sufficiently accurate measure. If neither existed, the value of the contiguous highway would always be available.

It should not be forgotten that land for which the demand is so weak that its site value cannot be easily distinguished from the value of its improvements, is certain to be land of but little value, and almost certain to have no value at all.

The objection that the value of land cannot be distinguished from the value of its improvements is among the most frivolous of the objections that have been raised to the single tax by people with whom the wish that it may be impracticable is father to the thought that it really is so.

No other tax, direct or indirect, conforms so closely to the third maxim. "Land lies out of doors." It cannot be hidden; it cannot be "accidentally" overlooked. Nor can its value be seriously misstated. Neither under-appraisement nor over-appraisement to any important degree is possible without the connivance of the whole community. 27 The land values of a neighborhood are matters of common knowledge. Any intelligent resident can justly appraise them, and every other intelligent resident can fairly test the appraisement. Therefore, the tyranny, corruption, fraud, favoritism, and evasions that are so common in connection with the taxation of imports, manufactures, incomes, personal property, and buildings — the values of which, even when the object itself cannot be hidden, are so distinctly matters of minute special knowledge that only experts can fairly appraise them — would be out of the question if the single tax were substituted for existing fiscal methods. 28

27. The under-appraisements so common at present, and alluded to in note 25, are possible because the community, ignorant of the just principles of taxation, does connive at them. Under-appraisements are not secret crimes on the part of assessors; they are distinctly recognized, but thoughtlessly disregarded when not actually insisted upon, by the people themselves. And this is due to the dishonest ideas of taxation that are taught. Let the vicious doctrine that people ought to pay taxes according to their ability give way to the honest principle that they should pay in proportion to the benefits they receive, which benefits, as we have already seen, are measured by the land values they own, and underappraisement of land would cease. No assessor can befool the community in respect of the value of the land within his jurisdiction.

And, with the cessation of general under-appraisement, favoritism in individual appraisements also would cease. General under-appraisement fosters unfair individual appraisements. If land were generally appraised at its full value, a particular unfair appraisement would stand out in such relief that the crime of the assessor would be exposed. But now if a man's land is appraised at a higher valuation than his neighbor's equally valuable land, and he complains of the unfairness, he is promptly and effectually silenced with a warning that his land is worth much more than it is appraised at, anyhow, and if he makes a fuss his appraisement will be increased. To complain further of the deficient taxation of his neighbor is to invite the imposition of a higher tax upon himself.

28. If you wish to test the merits in point of certainty of the single tax as compared with other taxes, go to a real estate agent in your community, and, showing him a building lot upon the map, ask him its value. If he inquires about the improvements, instruct him to ignore them. He will be able at once to tell you what the lot is worth. And if you go to twenty other agents their estimates will not materially vary from his. Yet none of the agents will have left his office. Each will have inferred the value from the size and location of the lot.

But suppose when you show the map to the first agent you ask him the value of the land and its improvements. He will tell you that he cannot give an estimate until he examines the improvements. And if it is the highly improved property of a rich man he will engage building experts to assist him. Should you ask him to include the value of the contents of the buildings, he would need a corps of selected experts, including artists and liverymen, dealers in furniture and bric-a-brac, librarians and jewelers. Should you propose that he also include the value of the occupant's income, the agent would throw up his hands in despair.

If without the aid of an army of experts the agent should make an estimate of these miscellaneous values, and twenty others should do the same, their several estimates would be as wide apart as ignorant guesses usually are. And the richer the owner of the property the lower as a proportion would the guesses probably be.

Now turn the real estate agent into an assessor, and is it not plain that he would appraise the land values with much greater certainty and cheapness than he could appraise the values of all kinds of property? With a plot map before him he might fairly make every appraisement without leaving his desk at the town hall.

And there would be no material difference if the property in question were a farm instead of a building lot. A competent farmer or business man in a farming community can, without leaving his own door-yard, appraise the value of the land of any farm there; whereas it would be impossible for him to value the improvements, stock, produce, etc., without at least inspecting them. ... read the book

Louis Post: Outlines of Louis F. Post's Lectures, with Illustrative Notes and Charts (1894) — Appendix: FAQ

Q8. What would be the expense of collecting the single tax as compared with that of collecting present taxes?
A. Much less. It is easier to assess fairly, and easier to collect fully; the machinery of assessment and collection would be simpler and cheaper, and it would not enable first payers to collect the tax with profits upon it from ultimate payers.

Q9. How would you estimate land values?
A. As we do it now. As real estate dealers estimate them. As appraisers in partition would estimate them. Read note 28.

Q10. How would you value the land of a farm when all the land of the neighborhood was fully improved?
A. By ascertaining the value per square rod of the adjacent highway. The value of that, for the purpose of adding it to the farms along which it runs, would denote the land value of the farms. Read notes 4 and 28.

Q12. How would the single tax be assessed on a railroad which passed through a farm worth (without its improvements) $30 an acre?
A. According to the value, not of the adjacent farms, but of the total right of way, much as the value of a navigable river might be determined if it were private property. ... read the book

Charles B. Fillebrown: A Catechism of Natural Taxation, from Principles of Natural Taxation (1917)

Q7. What is meant by land value?
A. Its site value -- its selling or market value -- its net value to the purchaser -- the capitalization of its net rent -- the value supposed to be adopted by the assessors as the basis of taxation.

Q53. How would the single tax effect the farmer?
A. It would greatly reduce his taxes. His buildings, stock, and crops would be exempt. His land is at present assessed at nearly twice its proper unimproved value, while town and city land is often valued at less than one half its actual value, thus subjecting him to a more than fourfold disadvantage. ... read the whole article

Ted Gwartney: Estimating Land Values

Winston Churchill: The People's Land

Unearned increment reaped in exact proportion to the disservice done. But let us follow the process a little further. The population of the city grows and grows still larger year by year, the congestion in the poorer quarters becomes acute, rents and rates rise hand in hand, and thousands of families are crowded into one-roomed tenements. There are 120,000 persons living in one-roomed tenements in Glasgow alone at the present time. At last the land becomes ripe for sale -- that means that the price is too tempting to be resisted any longer -- and then, and not till then, it is sold by the yard or by the inch at ten times, or twenty times, or even fifty times, its agricultural value, on which alone hitherto it has been rated for the public service. The greater the population around the land, the greater the injury which they have sustained by its protracted denial, the more inconvenience which has been caused to everybody, the more serious the loss in economic strength and activity, the larger will be the profit of the landlord when the sale is finally accomplished. In fact, you may say that the unearned increment on the land is on all fours with the profit gathered by one of those American speculators who engineer a corner in corn, or meat, or cotton, or some other vital commodity, and that the unearned increment in land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service but to the disservice done. ...

Tax on capital value of undeveloped land But there is another proposal concerning land values which is not less important. I mean the tax on the capital value of undeveloped urban or suburban land. The income derived from land and its rateable value under the present law depend upon the use to which the land is put, consequently income and rateable value are not always true or complete measures of the value of the land. Take the case to which I have already referred of the man who keeps a large plot in or near a growing town idle for years while it is ripening -- that is to say, while it is rising in price through the exertions of the surrounding community and the need of that community for more room to live. Take that case. I daresay you have formed your own opinion upon it. Mr Balfour, Lord Lansdowne, and the Conservative Party generally, think that is an admirable arrangement. They speak of the profits of the land monopolist as if they were the fruits of thrift and industry and a pleasing example for the poorer classes to imitate. We do not take that view of the process. We think it is a dog-in-the-manger game. We see the evil, we see the imposture upon the public, and we see the consequences in crowded slums, in hampered commerce, in distorted or restricted development, and in congested centres of population, and we say here and now to the land monopolist who is holding up his land -- and the pity is it was not said before -- you shall judge for yourselves whether it is a fair offer or not. We say to the land monopolist: 'This property of yours might be put to immediate use with general advantage. It is at this minute saleable in the market at ten times the value at which it is rated. If you choose to keep it idle in the expectation of still further unearned increment, then at least you shall he taxed at the true selling value in the meanwhile.' And the Budget proposes a tax of a halfpenny in the pound on the capital value of all such land; that is to say, a tax which is a little less in equivalent than the income tax would be upon the property if the property were fully developed. That is the second main proposal of the Budget with regard to the land, and its effects will be,

first, to raise an expanding revenue for the needs of the State;
secondly, half the proceeds of this tax, as well as of the other land taxes, will go to the municipalities and local authorities generally to relieve rates;
thirdly, the effect will be, as we believe, to bring land into the market, and thus somewhat cheapen the price at which land is obtainable for every object, public and private, and by so doing we shall liberate new springs of enterprise and industry, we shall stimulate building, relieve overcrowding, and promote employment ... Read the whole piece

H.G. Brown: Significant Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress & Poverty: Chapter 9. Alleged Difficulty of Distinguishing Land From Improvements (in the unabridged P&P: Part VIII — Application of the Remedy: Chapter 4 — Indorsements and objections

The only objection to the tax on rent or land values which is to be met with in standard politico-economic works is one which concedes its advantages — for it is, that from the difficulty of separation, we might, in taxing the rent of land, tax something else. McCulloch, for instance, declares taxes on the rent of land to be impolitic and unjust because the return received for the natural and inherent powers of the soil cannot be clearly distinguished from the return received from improvements and meliorations, which might thus be discouraged. Macaulay somewhere says that if the admission of the attraction of gravitation were inimical to any considerable pecuniary interest, there would not be wanting arguments against gravitation — a truth of which this objection is an illustration. For admitting that it is impossible invariably to separate the value of land from the value of improvements, is this necessity of continuing to tax some improvements any reason why we should continue to tax all improvements? If it discourage production to tax values which labor and capital have intimately combined with that of land, how much greater discouragement is involved in taxing not only these, but all the clearly distinguishable values which labor and capital create?

But, as a matter of fact, the value of land can always be readily distinguished from the value of improvements.

In countries like the United States there is much valuable land that has never been improved; and in many of the States the value of the land and the value of improvements are habitually estimated separately by the assessors, though afterward reunited under the term real estate.

Nor where ground has been occupied from immemorial times, is there any difficulty in getting at the value of the bare land, for frequently the land is owned by one person and the buildings by another, and when a fire occurs and improvements are destroyed, a clear and definite value remains in the land.

In the oldest country in the world no difficulty whatever can attend the separation, if all that be attempted is to separate the value of the clearly distinguishable improvements, made within a moderate period, from the value of the land, should they be destroyed.

This, manifestly, is all that justice or policy requires. Absolute accuracy is impossible in any system, and to attempt to separate all that the human race has done from what nature originally provided would be as absurd as impracticable. A swamp drained or a hill terraced by the Romans constitutes now as much a part of the natural advantages of the British Isles as though the work had been done by earthquake or glacier. The fact that after a certain lapse of time the value of such permanent improvements would be considered as having lapsed into that of the land, and would be taxed accordingly, could have no deterrent effect on such improvements, for such works are frequently undertaken upon leases for years. The fact is, that each generation builds and improves for itself, and not for the remote future. And the further fact is, that each generation is heir, not only to the natural powers of the earth, but to all that remains of the work of past generations. ... read the whole chapter

Nic Tideman: Basic Principles of Geonomics

The rental value of land can be determined by having local assessors acquire, each year, samples of sites with little or no improvements. These would be auctioned as unimproved land, on the basis of bids that represented offers of payment for the first year, with payments in future years determined by future bids for similar sites. The rental value of each site in the initial year can then be determined by comparisons with sites that have been auctioned. ... Read the whole article

Nic Tideman: The Case for Taxing Land

I. Taxing Land as Ethics and Efficiency
II. What is Land?
III. The simple efficiency argument for taxing land
IV. Taxing Land is Better Than Neutral
V. Measuring the Economic Gains from Shifting Taxes to Land
VI. The Ethical Case for Taxing Land
VII. Answer to Arguments against Taxing Land

There is a case for taxing land based on ethical principles and a case for taxing land based on efficiency principles. As a matter of logic, these two cases are separate. Ethical conclusions follow from ethical premises and efficiency conclusions from efficiency principles. However, it is natural for human minds to conflate the two cases. It is easier to believe that something is good if one knows that it is efficient, and it is easier to see that something is efficient if one believes that it is good. Therefore it is important for a discussion of land taxation to address both question of efficiency and questions of ethics.

This monograph will first address the efficiency case for taxing land, because that is the less controversial case. The efficiency case for taxing land has two main parts. ...

To estimate the magnitudes of the impacts that additional taxes on land would have on an economy, one must have a model of the economy. I report on estimates of the magnitudes of impacts on the U.S. economy of shifting taxes to land, based on a mathematical model that is outlined in the Appendix.

The ethical case for taxing land is based on two ethical premises: ...

The ethical case for taxing land ends with a discussion of the reasons why recognition of the equal rights of all to land may be essential for world peace.

After developing the efficiency argument and the ethical argument for taxing land, I consider a variety of counter-arguments that have been offered against taxing land. For a given level of other taxes, a rise in the rate at which land is taxed causes a fall in the selling price of land. It is sometimes argued that only modest taxes on land are therefore feasible, because as the rate of taxation on land increases and the selling price of land falls, market transactions become increasingly less reliable as indicators of the value of land. The answer to this argument is that collecting a large percentage of the rental value of land through taxes will require new assessment methods based on observing the rental price of land rather than the selling price. I describe how such methods can be devised.

Another basis on which it is argued that greatly increased taxes on land are infeasible is that if land values were to fall precipitously, the financial system would collapse. ...

Apart from questions of feasibility, it is sometimes argued that erosion of land values from taxing land would harm economic efficiency, because it would reduce opportunities for entrepreneurs to use land as collateral for loans to finance their ideas. ...
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Another ethical argument that is made against taxing land is that the return to unusual ability is “rent” just as the return to land is rent. ...

But before developing any of these arguments, I must discuss what land is. ...

While it is theoretically possible to capture fractions of rent approaching 100% by taxes on the value of land, there are practical difficulties in doing so. The selling price of unimproved land will be the present value of the part of rent that buyers and sellers expect to be left after taxes. Therefore, if taxes collect fractions of rent that approach 100%, the selling price of land will be dominated by the errors that are expected in the assessment process. Therefore a tax system that seeks to collect almost all of the rental value of land must use some assessment system other than observing market prices of land. There are several techniques that may be useful.

First, if nearly all of the rental value of land is collected in taxes, the selling price of land will be nearly zero. Assessors can purchase parcels of land with obsolescent improvements, demolish the improvements, and offer the land for sale at auction, under a rule that the bid will be the tax per year for, say, the first three years, and after that the tax will be determined by the assessor’s estimate of the rental value of the land, as determined by similar auctions and other processes.

If assessors were conducting such auctions regularly, they could hold assessment contests in which the contestants competed by offering land value functions that would be evaluated by the accuracy with which they predicted auction results. The contestant who provided the function with the smallest average error would be given a prize, and the winning function would be used to assess the value of land that had not been auctioned.

Another thing that assessors can do is to develop options markets in land. That is, they can enter into contracts with potential users of land to supply land with specified characteristics for specified tax rates. For example, someone who was interested in opening a restaurant might offer £3,000 per month for a parcel of 2,000 square feet within a quarter of a mile of the center of town. Such offers would set lower limits on the rental value of land. With such devices, land can be assessed for tax purposes even if the selling price of land is close to zero. ... Read the whole article

Nic Tideman: Using Tax Policy to Promote Urban Growth

Urban growth is desired because it raises peoples' incomes. In a market economy, incomes can be divided into components derived from four factors of production:

the rent of land,
the wages of labor,
the interest received from owning capital, and
the profits of entrepreneurship (the activity of choosing investments and organizing production).

Thus a successful urban growth strategy in a market economy must either increase the amounts of land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship that are used in a city or increase the payments that are made per unit of each factor, or both.

The land that a city has is fixed (or if it changes, it does so at the expense of other administrative units). Therefore, with respect to land, socially productive urban growth means adopting policies that raise the productivity of land. Labor, on the other hand, is reasonably mobile, and capital is highly mobile. Entrepreneurship springs up and fades away with the rise and fall of opportunities. Therefore, in a market economy, the payments that must be made to attract these factors are substantially outside the control of a city. Thus the growth of a city with respect to labor, capital and entrepreneurship is achieved primarily by making the city a place that attracts more of these factors, taking the rates of wages, interest and profits that must be paid to attract them as given by market forces.

Tax policy is critical for urban growth because taxes on the earnings of labor, capital and entrepreneurship drive these factors away. A city that desires to grow should refrain from taxing wages, interest or profits and concentrate its taxes on land, which does not have the option of moving away.

Certain other sources of public revenue, in addition to the rent of land, have the characteristic of not discouraging growth. These sources of revenue involve either charging people for using scarce opportunities that no one created, as with land, or charging people for the costs that their actions impose on others.

A city that wishes to grow should confine its search for revenue to these sources. In this way it will attract more labor, capital and entrepreneurship, thereby raising the rent of land, which can be collected publicly without discouraging growth.

Additions to the stock of capital are extremely important for urban growth, because of the impact of abundant capital on wages and rents. When capital is abundant, labor and land are more productive, and the more productive they are, the higher wages and rents are. ...

... Every activity that is continued should pass a test of providing adequate value for money. Most of the worthwhile activities of local governments raise the rental value of the land in the vicinity of the activity by enough to pay a substantial fraction if not all of the costs of the activity.

Thus the rental value of land is a natural first source of financing for local public expenditures.

Making the rental value of land a principal source of local public revenue has both an equity rationale and an efficiency rationale. The equity argument for social collection of the rent of land is founded on a recognition that the rental value of land has three sources.

Part of the rental value of land is the gift of nature--the fertility of soil, the value of good rivers and harbors, the depletable value of minerals, and so on. This part of the rental value of land should be collected publicly because no individual has a just claim to more than a proportionate share of it. Public collection is just either if it is followed by an equal distribution to all citizens or by spending on activities that provide equal benefits to all.
A second part of the rental value of land comes from the provision of public services. The local agencies that provide these services can justly claim the increase in the rental value of land that results from their activities.
A third part of the rental value of any particular site arises from private activities that are conducted in the vicinity of that site. Social collection of this part of the rental value of land is particularly appropriate if this money is used to reward those private activities according to how much they increase the rental value of land.

The efficiency argument for social collection of the rent of land has two parts.

First, the rental value of land has the rare quality of being a source of public revenue that does not discourage productive activity. If people are taxed according to their labor earnings, they can be expected to work less, and to tend to move from the places that tax them. If people are taxed on their investments and savings, they can be expected to save and invest less, and to find it attractive to put their savings and investments in other places where they will not be taxed as much. But when the rental value of land is collected, no one will reduce the amount of land in existence, and no one will move his land elsewhere. Thus social collection of the rent of land does not reduce the productivity of an economy in the way that most other sources of public revenue do.
The second part of the efficiency argument is that social collection of the rent of land tends to make land more available to those who want to start new enterprises. When the rent of land is not collected publicly, those who have rights to land will tend to ignore the possibility of releasing it to someone who might make better use of it. On the other hand, if those who have rights to land are required to make annual payments equal to the market value of the rights they hold, then these continuing payments will induce people to ask themselves regularly whether they ought to release the land to someone who can make better use of it.

To achieve the potential efficiency of public revenue from land, it is important that people not be charged more for the use of land, just because they happen to be using it particularly productively. The rental value of land should be reassessed regularly, the values that are determined should vary smoothly with location, and they should be available for public inspection so that all users of land can see that they are being charged amounts commensurate with what their neighbors are being charged.

Social collection of the rent of land also facilitates the privatization of land. If every user of land is charged annually according to the rental value of the land that he or she holds, then it is possible to undertake a just privatization of land simply by passing out titles to the current users of land.

No one will be disadvantaged by not receiving land. Future generations will not be deprived by not having been awarded shares. And the community will have a continuing income from the rent of land.

The efficiency that is entailed in using the rent of land to finance public activities applies to certain other sources of public revenue as well:

1. Charges on any publicly granted privileges, such as the exclusive right to use a portion of the frequency spectrum for radio and TV broadcasts.
2. Payments for extractions of natural resources. Such payments should be set at levels that yield the greatest possible revenue of the resources, in present value terms.

3. Taxes on pollution. Every individual or enterprise that pollutes the air, water or ground should be required to pay the estimated cost of the pollution it generates. The effect of pollution on the rental value of surrounding land is one possible measure of its cost.

4. Taxes on any other activities that reduce the rental value of surrounding land.

5. Taxes on activities such as driving or parking in crowded streets, where one person's activities reduce opportunities for others. The administration of such charges may be so expensive that it is not worth implementing them, but if the administration can be handled sufficiently cheaply, these charges are efficient to the extent that they only charge people for costs imposed on others.

6. Taxes on activities, such as the consumption of alcohol, which impose costs on others (e.g., higher traffic fatalities).

7. Charges for local public services, such as water, electricity, sewer connections, etc. It is not generally desirable to make every service completely self-financing. Rather, what is desirable is that each user be required to pay the marginal cost of the service he receives. Extensions of service networks are efficient when they increase publicly collected land rents by enough to cover the costs not covered by user charges.

8. A self-assessed tax on permanent improvements to land, at a very low rate (perhaps 1/10 of 1% per year). With a self-assessed tax, each possessor of land names a price at which he would be willing to part with the land he possesses (and any immovable improvements). He pays a tax proportional to the value he names, and anyone who wishes to may take over possession at that price. The value of such a tax is that it makes it much easier to assemble land for redevelopment, and to identify appropriate compensation when land is taken for public purposes.

All of the above taxes are positively beneficial and should be collected even if the revenue is not needed for public purposes. Any excess can be returned to the population on an equal per capita basis. If these attractive sources of revenue do not suffice to finance necessary public expenditures, then the least damaging additional tax would probably be a "poll tax," a uniform charge on all residents. If some residents are regarded to be incapable of paying such a tax, then the next most efficient tax is a proportional tax on income up to some specified amount. Then there is no disincentive effect for all persons who reach the tax limit. The next most efficient tax is a proportional tax on all income.

It is important not to tax the profits of corporations. Capital moves from where it is taxed to where it is not, until the same rate of return is earned everywhere. If the city refrains from taxing corporations they will invest more in St. Petersburg. Wages will be higher, and the rent of land, collected by the government, will be higher. The least damaging tax on corporations is one that provides a complete write-off of investments, with a carry-over of tax credits to future years. Such a tax has the effect of making the government a partner in all new investments. With such a tax the government provides, through tax credits, the same share of costs that it later receives in revenues. However, the tax does diminish the incentive for entrepreneurial activity, and it raises no revenue when investment is expanding rapidly. Furthermore, the efficiency of such a tax requires that everyone believe that the tax rate will never change. Thus it is best not to tax the profits of corporations at all. If the people of St. Petersburg want to share in the profits of corporations, then they should invest directly in the corporations, either privately or publicly. The residents of St. Petersburg would be best served by refraining from taxing the profits of corporations. Creating a place where profits are not taxed can be expected to attract so much capital that the resulting rises in wages and in government-collected rents will more than offset what might have been collected by taxing profits.

The taxes that promote urban growth have at least one of two features.

The first feature that a growth-promoting tax can have is that it can serve to allocate a naturally occurring resource among competing potential users. Charges for the use of land, for the use of the frequency spectrum and for depleting natural resources share this feature.
The second feature that a growth-promoting tax can have is that of being a charge for the costs imposed on the city by the person who pays the tax. This feature is shared by taxes on pollution, taxes on other activities that reduce the value of surrounding land, taxes on imposing congestion and other costs on other residents of the city, charges for the marginal cost of publicly provided services, and a self-assessed tax on property, reflecting the hindrance to future growth represented by existing development.

A city that confines itself to these taxes can expect to attract capital rapidly, and therefore to experience rapid growth, raising the wages of its citizens and the publicly-collected rent of its land. Read the whole article

Michael Hudson and Kris Feder: Real Estate and the Capital Gains Debate

On the other hand, the Fed statistics37 understate land values for methodological reasons. Starting with estimates for overall real estate market prices, Fed statisticians subtract estimated replacement prices for existing buildings and capital improvements to derive land values as a residual. These replacement prices are based on the Commerce Department’s index of construction costs. Thus, building values are estimated to increase steadily over time, on the implicit assumption that all such property is worth reproducing at today’s rising costs.

However, the value of any building tends eventually to decline, until finally it is scrapped and replaced. It is the value of land which tends to rise as population and income grow (over the long run, with cyclical swings), precisely because no more land can be produced. Thus, capital gains in real estate result mainly from land appreciation.

Building values fall because of physical deterioration, but also because buildings undergo locational obsolescence as neighborhood land uses change over time, so market prices tend to fall below replacement costs. It would not be economical to rebuild many types of structures on the same site if they were suddenly destroyed.38 In particular, where land use is intensifying over the long run, rising land values effectively drain the capital value out of old buildings. This is because the salvage value of land (its worth upon renewal) tends to rise, while the scrap or salvage value of most immovable improvements is negligible. Where land has alternative uses, rent is not its current net income but its opportunity cost -- the minimum yield required by the market to warrant keeping the land in its present use instead of converting it to the best alternative use. As the land value rises, a rising share of the property income must be imputed to the land and a falling share remains to be imputed to the improvements.39

39 Indeed, where ill-maintained old buildings occupy prime locations, a parcel may be more valuable once the building is demolished and the lot cleared for reuse See Gaffney (1993 and also 1971). Some improvements, such as gas stations and refineries, are accompanied by ecological pollution, which can be analyzed as a negative improvement -- the property would be worth more without it. Pollution may greatly increase the saIvage cost of land making it uneconomical to salvage some lands despite the value they would have if clean. This “brownfields” problem has received considerable public notice in recent months.

Thus, the correct way to separate land values from building values is to appraise land values directly in terms of opportunity cost -- how much would a vacant lot at that site fetch in the market? If the observed market value of the improved property exceeds the land value, the residual is the implied value of the standing improvements. The Fed’s land-residual method theoretically understates the land share of real estate values.40 The pitfall of this methodology is demonstrated to an almost comical degree by the fact that according to Fed statistics, the land component of corporately owned real estate has been reduced to near zero over the past five years (while the nominal reproduction costs of factories and other corporately held buildings are inflating).

The measurement problem is exacerbated by assessment bias in many states and localities. Particularly where land values are trending upward, overestimates of building values relative to site values reflect the steady under-assessment of land. Note that as a larger share of real estate value is imputed to buildings, a larger share of cash flow can be claimed as depreciation. In effect, assessment bias allows investors to partly depreciate land, at no cost to local government budgets. Read the whole article

Michael Hudson: THE LIES OF THE LAND: How and why land gets undervalued.

The land-residual approach subtracts the value of buildings from this overall value, designating the remainder as the value of land. Building values may be estimated in terms of their replacement cost (which usually produces a very high estimate, leaving little land value) or their depreciated value (which gives an unrealistically low building estimate, inasmuch as maintenance and repairs save most buildings from deteriorating through wear and tear). Using the depreciated value method leaves a higher residual land value. The Federal Reserve Board recently has experimented with a hybrid intermediate method that values buildings on the basis of their "historical costs".
The building-residual approach starts by valuing the land, and treats the difference as representing the building's value. The first step in this approach is to construct a land-value map for the district or city. This displays fairly smooth contours for land values. Overlays would show zoning variations. Most of the variations in property prices around this normalized map will be for structures, along with a sizable component of "errors and omissions." This approach rarely is used, and most assessed land values vary drastically from one parcel to the next. The problem is especially apparent in the case of parking lots or one-story "taxpayers," that is, inexpensive buildings in neighbourhoods that are heavily built up. Their purpose is simply to be rented out at enough to carry the property's tax bill, not to maximise the site's current economic value.

Note that the Fed's land-residual appraisal methods do not acknowledge the possibility that the land itself may be rising in price. Site values appear as the passive derivative, not as the driving force. Yet low-rise or vacant land sites tend to appreciate as much as (or in many cases, even more than) the improved properties around them. Hence this price appreciation cannot be attributed to rising construction costs. If every property in the country were built last year, the problem would be simple enough. The land acquisition prices and construction costs would be recorded, adding up to the property's value. But many structures were erected as long ago as the 19th century. How do we decide how much their value has changed in comparison to the property's overall value?

The Federal Reserve multiplies the building's original cost by the rise in the construction price index since its completion. The implication is that when a property is sold at a higher price (which usually happens), it is because the building itself has risen in value, not the land site. However, if the property must be sold at a lower price, falling land prices are blamed.

If it is agreed that any explanation of land/building relations should be symmetrical through boom and bust periods alike, then the same appraisal methodology should be able to explain the decline of property values as well as their rise. The methodology should be as uniform and homogeneous as possible. By that, I mean that similar land should be valued at a homogeneous price, and buildings of equivalent worth should be valued accordingly.

If these two criteria are accepted, then I believe that economists would treat buildings as the residual, not the land. Yet just the opposite usually is done. ... Read the whole article

Nic Tideman: The Case for Site Value Rating

The Social Justice of Site Value Rating
The Efficiency of Site Value Rating
How Valuations would be Made

Both for reasons of social justice and for reasons of economic efficiency, site value rating deserves a continued place in the programme of the Liberal Party.

The case for site value rating in terms of social justice is founded on two understandings: first, that the value of land in the absence of economic development is the common heritage of humanity, and second, that increases in the rental value of land arising from economic development and government expenditures should be collected by governments to finance those activities. What is meant by "land" is the unimproved value of sites and the value of extractable natural resources such as North Sea oil.

While there may someday be institutions capable of implementing a recognition of land as the heritage of all humanity on a worldwide basis, in the absence of such institutions each nation should implement a recognition that land within its boundaries is the common heritage of its citizens. This is accomplished not by making the nation a gigantic Common or by instituting government management of all land, but rather by requiring all persons and corporations that are granted the use of land to pay a fee or tax equal to what the rental value of the land they control would be if it were in an unimproved condition.

The case for site value rating in terms of economic efficiency is founded on the fact that a tax on resources that are not produced by human effort is one of the few sources of government revenue that does not reduce incentives for people to be productive. Two other revenue sources that have this virtue are taxes on other government-granted privileges such as exclusive use of radio frequencies and taxes on activities with harmful consequences, such as polluting the air. An economy will be more efficient if revenue sources that do not diminish productivity are employed to the greatest possible extent before any use is made of taxes that impede productivity.

What makes a tax efficient is that the amount of tax that is due cannot be reduced by reducing productive activities. When incomes are taxed, people can reduce the amount of taxes owed by working less. They do so, and the productivity of the economy falls. When houses are taxed, people can reduce the amount of taxes owed by building fewer house and smaller houses. They do so, and the housing shortage worsens. But when the unimproved value of land is taxed, there is no resulting diminution in the quantity of land. Thus taxes can be levied on land without diminishing the productivity of an economy. And shifting taxes from other, destructive bases to land will improve the productivity of an economy.

Subsequent sections explain in more detail these social justice and efficiency arguments for site value rating, describe procedures for implementing such a tax system, and explain why a variety of potential objections are without merit. ...

How Valuations would be Made

Before describing the valuation process, which employs auctions, it is useful to discuss the concept of a "second-price auction." A second price auction is one in which each bidder submits a single sealed bid, and the object is sold to the highest bidder at a price equal to the second highest bid. Second-price auctions have the advantage of making bidding simpler and more straight-forward. In an ordinary sealed-bid auction, in which the highest bidder pays what he or she bids, bidders are induced to under-bid strategically, not revealing the full value to them of the auctioned item, so that they can obtain it at a more advantageous price. This incentive for strategic underbidding is eliminated by a second-price auction. With a second price auction, a bidder who bids less than the object is worth saves no money as long as he or she is the highest bidder, and if the bid is low enough not to be the highest bid, the object is lost to another bidder. Nor is over-bidding beneficial. Either it makes no difference, or it results in the object being bought at a price of more that it is worth to the bidder. Thus honest statements of the value of the thing being auctioned are in the self-interest of bidders in second-price auctions. By a similar line of reasoning, when a contract is to be let to the lowest bidder, honest statements of the lowest price at which a party is willing to do the work can be obtained by letting the contract to the lowest bidder at a price equal to the second-lowest bid. There are two efficiency advantages to second-price auctions. Bidders do not have to spend resources trying to compute their strategically most advantageous bids, and because bids represent accurate valuations, the winning bidder is the person who values the object most, or can truly do the work at the lowest cost. It might seem that the amount received by the seller would be smaller in a second-price auction. However, the higher bids that result from removing the incentive for strategic under-bidding approximately offset the reduced returns from charging only the second-highest bid.

In the proposed system of site value rating, valuations would be made by property market professionals, who would be rewarded according to the accuracy of their valuations, as revealed by occasional auctions. An administrative agency would divide territory into blocks of a convenient size and take bids for valuation of all sites in a block, with the valuation contract going to the lowest bidder, at a price equal to the second-lowest bid. The valuer would provide a formula that could be used to compute the value of any site in the block, taking into account such features as size, proximity to shops and transportation, width of the street on which the property was located, and any other objectively measurable attributes that were thought to be related to site values. The actual payment to the valuer would be reduced in proportion to the average inaccuracy of the valuations, as revealed by subsequent auctions of some of the sites.... Read the whole article

Nic Tideman: Improving Efficiency and Preventing Exploitation in Taxing and Spending Decisions

For truly national public goods, other ideas must be explored. One of the major national public goods is defense. In a perfectly just world, everyone would be so respectful of the rights of others, and everyone would feel so safe that no defense spending would be desired. In a less perfect world, many people, but not all, want public defense expenditures. How can they be provided justly?

Some financing of defense expenditures can be provided by a Pigouvian tax on the externality of accumulating capital, which makes a nation a more attractive target of aggression. If the U.S. requires a greater defense budget than Canada, which is larger in area, it is because the greater value of the assets in the U.S. makes the U.S. a more attractive target of aggression. Thus anyone who owns capital might reasonably be charged for the increase in the defense budget that is needed to make other citizens as safe as they would be if that one person's capital were not adding to the attractiveness of nation as a target. It would be interesting to know how much of the defense budget could be covered by such charges. I propose a self-assessed tax of, perhaps, 1% per year on the value of all assets and contractual rights, to pay the costs of defense. The owner assesses the value and pays a corresponding tax, and if anyone wants to buy the asset at the assessed value, it is sold. There could be a personal exemption of perhaps $50,000 per year, and an exemption for personal papers. There could be a local add-on to pay the costs of local police and courts. ... Read the whole article

Fred Foldvary: Geo-Rent: A Plea to Public Economists

I concede that geo-rent is a hypothetical. Geo-rent is based on two fictions.

The first is that the site is devoid of improvements.
The second is that it is being rented out.

One occasionally hears criticisms of geo-rent taxation like this from the textbook by McConnell and Brue (2005, 300): “[I]n practice it would be difficult to determine how much of any specific income payment actually amounted to [geo-rent].”

Yet, professional real estate appraisers routinely separate a site’s ground value and the improvement’s value. This separation is typically required for fire insurance. Banks for mortgages also commonly require it. These parties estimate site value as a residual after the replacement cost of buildings, adjusted for depreciation. This process is combined with computerized contour mapping of site value per square meter, based on actual land-sale and lease data. The computerized mapping works to smooth out the assessments, and can be done to emphasize long-term trends rather than year-by-year fluctuations in land values (as is done today with the assessment of property-tax). Adam Smith (1776) advocates geo-rent taxation (832 - 844) and explains that separating out the value of improvements is not that big a deal (833, 844).2

2 George carefully rationalized the single tax in terms of Adam Smith's "canons of taxation." On the affinity between Smith and George, see Petrella (1984).

Of course this is inexact. Of course there will be judgment calls by assessors, as well as some politicking in the details. But serious economics is comparative. All tax rules will involve inexactness, judgment calls, and politicking. Let’s ask honestly how serious these problems are compared to other forms of taxation.

Sales, incomes, profits, imports, and estates are easily hidden. Deductions, cost accounting, and expenses are devilishly particularistic, involving whatever human activities the taxed party says are involved in generating sales, income, or profits. Documentation is a tangle of complex record keeping, and is very difficult to make accountable. Documentation is easily fabricated. Enforcement is intrusive and encroaches on civil liberties. The dimensions of earning sales, income, etc. are myriad, and all call for particularistic tax rules, each highly subject to arbitrariness and politicking because of the particularism.

By contrast, it is impossible to hide land. It is impossible to shrink, move or disguise land. Moreover, the dimensions of valuing ground space are relatively few. The government can set general rules that apply universally. In contrast to income-tax records which are for good reasons kept from public view, the site-value assessments for geo-rent would be a public record, as in fact real-estate assessments are today. In principle, absolutely no record keeping is required, apart from title to the land. Compared to taxing income, sales, estates, etc., taxing geo-rent is objective, transparent, and non-intrusive. These virtues were emphasized by Adam Smith (1776: 848).

Those who allege a relative difficulty in separating the value of land from the value of improvements lose sight of the main policy issue. The relative efficiency of tapping geo-rent is that doing so imposes no marginal cost on additional income, sales, or personal property. Condominiums assign to each unit a fixed percentage interest in the association, which is also its percentage of the assessments. This percentage interest is often based on the site value of the unit relative to the other units, i.e. its location and size, irrespective of any personal property inside the unit, let alone the owners’ income or spending.
Thousands of condominium associations are thus accomplishing what some claim is impractical. They tap the site value of a unit without reducing extra income or burdening extra spending or possessions. Residential associations, hotels, and other private communities do likewise with their rental charges and assessments. Some private communities such as shopping centers do practice modern sharecropping, basing some of their charges on the gross revenue of the tenant shops as a way of sharing risks, but this is not an essential feature of private-community financing. Read the entire article

Nic Tideman: Farm Land Rent and the Renewal of Rural Society: The Self-Financing Model

there is a way of raising revenue for local public services that does not have these disadvantages. That way is to use a combination of fees for services and public collection of the rent of land.

The rent of land is the amount of money that would be bid for the use of land in an auction. It can be thought of as 100 rubles more than the second-highest bid, that is, the amount of money that the person for whom the use of land is most valuable must bid to outbid the person who places the second-highest value on it.

What land is worth to a person who wants to use it depends on the length of time for which he will be allowed to use it. For the purpose of defining rent, this length of time should be indefinitely long, but with provision for revising the rent as market conditions change. In other words, if similar land rents for 20% more three years from now, then the person who secures the use of a site this year would be required to pay that additional 20% at that time.

The rent of land also depends on the condition of the land. The rent of land is what people would bid for unimproved land. In a town, unimproved land is land without any structures on it. In an agricultural area, many things other than structures can count as improvements--drainage, stone removal, fertilization, leveling, etc. It might be hard to find agricultural land that had no such improvements. Thus in agricultural areas, one must subtract something from observed payments for the use of land, to account for the value that is being paid for such improvements.

The comments above describe how one might observe the rental value of land. Economics can also say something about how a bidder would decide how much to bid. A bidder would decide how he could use the land most profitably, compute the net revenue from the most profitable use after all costs including the cost of his own entrepreneurial effort and a premium for the risk to his finances, and what was left would be the total rent of the land for the period of the investment. The bidder would then estimate future rent, subtract that from the total rent, and what was left would be rent for the current period. Read the whole article

Mason Gaffney: Full Employment, Growth And Progress On A Small Planet: Relieving Poverty While Healing The Earth

It is equally important to use the "Building-Residual Method" of allocating value between land and buildings. This means you value the land first, as though it were vacant, based on highest and best use. You subtract this land value from the total value of land-&-building as currently improved: the residual, if any, is building value.

Valuing one lot or parcel this way, you have information needed for valuing neighboring and other comparable parcels. Using a map with value contours, you can value a whole city this way with surprising ease and speed.

Using this method, I valued Milwaukee land in 1963 and 1967. The building-residual method nearly tripled the land values reported by the City Assessor, who was using the assessor's usual inconsistent mix of various other methods. How's that again? Did I say tripled? Yes, I really said "tripled." By his methods, buildings on the eve of demolition were carrying values higher than their sites; by the building-residual method these old buildings had no value at all, which of course is why they were being torn down. Besides depreciation and technological obsolescence, many buildings suffered severe "locational obsolescence," owing to shifting demand patterns. The land was re-usable, and had as much or more value without the extant buildings.

Using the building-residual method requires no change in present laws. It is within the latitude of assessing officials, who, in turn, respond to public opinion. The conscientious citizens' move is to educate and bring pressure, just as the old single-tax campaigners like Jackson Ralston did. In the process of "losing" they won over half of what they sought, just by taking a stand and making the effort.

One of assessors' greatest problems today is the strong pressures from owners who want to allocate as much value as possible to buildings that they may depreciate for federal income tax purposes. Here is where we must study how the parts form the big picture. Here is where federal and local tax policies intersect. Some Georgists have neglected or misunderstood the income-tax treatment of land income. Let us see how this works.

Congress and the IRS let one depreciate buildings, but not land, for income tax. This important distinction harks back to when the income tax was new, and Georgist Congressmen like Warren Worth Bailey, from Johnstown, PA and Henry George Jr., from Brooklyn were instrumental in shaping it.

When a building is new, the depreciable value is limited to the cost of construction. The non-depreciable land is the bare land value before construction. So far, so good. Over time, however, building owners have converted this into a tax shelter scheme. Owner A, the builder, writes off the building in a few years, much less than its economic life, and sells it to B. "A" pays a tax on the excess of sales price over "basis." The basis is reduced by all depreciation taken, so any excess depreciation is "recaptured" upon sale. It is defined by Congress as a "capital gain," and given the corresponding package of tax preferences:

Thus far, any tax preference goes to A, the builder, and may be seen as a wellconsidered building incentive. Watch, however, what happens next. "A" sells to B and B depreciates the building all over again, from his purchase price. To do so, B must allocate the new "basis" - i.e., his purchase price - between depreciable building and non-depreciable land.

How shall B allocate the new basis? Enter the local tax assessor. Here is where local assessment intersects with Federal income tax policy. The IRS does not try to assess land and buildings. Instead, IRS instructions tell taxpayers they may use locally assessed values to allocate basis between depreciable buildings and non-depreciable land. The IRS accepts this allocation as conclusive. As a result, local owners of income property press their assessors to allocate as much value as possible to buildings, and as little as possible to land. This does not affect their local taxes, but lowers their federal taxes. It lets them depreciate land.

Local revenues are not immediately affected. Local assessors have little reason not to accommodate their constituents, local landowners, to help them depreciate land for federal and state income tax purposes. They have little reason to use the correct "building-residual'' method of allocating value, and a compelling reason to use the wrong method that understates land value. Thus they convert non-depreciable land value into depreciable building value. It is the modern version of "competitive underassessment." In the process, they also convert the local property tax from a land tax into a building tax.

After a while B sells to C, who in turn sells to D, so each building is depreciated many times. So is a large part of the land under it, time after time, although it should not be depreciated at all. This is carried so far that real estate pays no federal or state income taxes at all.

The solution to this lies with the U.S. Congress. The need is to limit depreciation to one cycle only. It is a most urgent problem for both federal and local treasuries. We all have Congressmen. Write to them and raise their consciousness. They are brokers who respond to public opinion. It is we who are derelict. ...

Timberland owners around the country have sold this bill of goods to legislators. In many states, less than half the private land is fully taxable, because of such laws. These are not all western or southern states, either, as one might surmise. In NH, for example, only 45 percent of the private land (and none of the Federal land) is fully taxable. The rest is sheltered by the State's "Current Use" tax law, their version of our TPZ law.

Advocates for these laws argue that land taxes, accumulating with interest over long growth periods, would eat up all the profit from growing timber. Let us see. Taxes of $1.56 per acre per year, accumulating over 60 years at a real interest rate of five percent, come to $552 per acre in constant 1995 dollars. At that time the timber stumpage will be worth about $20,000 at 1995 prices, or 36 times the accumulated future value of the land taxes. (In addition, the investment will have served to shield the owners from the eroding effects of inflation, a benefit assumed away by using constant dollars. On top of that, it is a good bet the real value of timber will have risen after 60 years of population growth.)

Thus, land taxes would have to be 36 times what they are now to consume the whole value of timber harvests. The fact is, present taxes are a negligible token. Timberland is effectively sheltered from the full weight (light as it is) of the one percent property tax imposed on ordinary land. It pays, as we have seen, only about $1.2 million a year in Mendocino County.

The acre value of timberland is low compared with downtown values in San Francisco, where one little square foot in the hottest spot may fetch $2,000. That is $87 million per acre! However, there are very few such golden acres, compared to a million acres of timberland in Mendocino County, some 35 million acres in California, and 737 million acres in the U.s. That is 32 percent of the area of the 50 states. (The fraction of private and public land in forests is, by coincidence, the same: 32 percent.)

Owing to the success of timber people in spreading their gospel, almost all of their land is underassessed. Almost all state yield taxes, imposed in lieu of property taxes on standing timber, are too low to be revenue-neutral. Add to that, Congress since 1943 has made timber a "capital asset" for federal (and therefore state) income tax. Many costs of managing and carrying this capital asset are expensible - certainly interest and property taxes are. The net result is that timberland contributes very little to public revenues at any level.

Residents of timber counties are typically scattered and poorly organized. Timber companies are huge, rich, few and tightly organized. In Mendocino County, Georgia Pacific and Louisiana Pacific, absentee owners, together own the best 500,000 acres - 58 percent of the County's timberland - and Georgia-Pacific owns Louisiana-Pacific. They control state forestry schools, paying professors as consultants. They support research in forest economics at think tanks like Resources for the Future in Washington, which has never criticized their tax preferences but trained its big guns on public agencies, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. "The industry" controls tax laws in 50 states, and sloughs tax burdens onto others. It will continue to do so until other taxpayers in the timber counties wake up and organize to control state timber tax laws. Read the whole article

The question I am assigned is whether the taxable capacity of land without buildings is up to the job of financing cities, counties, and schools. Will the revenue be enough? The answer is "yes."

The universal state and local revenue problem today is whether we must cap tax rates to avoid driving business away. It is exemplified by Governor Pete Wilson of the suffering State of California. He keeps repeating we must make a hard choice: cut taxes and public services, or drive out business and jobs. (When a public figure gives you two choices you know they're both bad, and he wants one of them.)

The unique, remarkable quality of a property tax based on land ex buildings is that you may raise the rate with no fear of driving away business, construction, people, jobs, or capital! You certainly will not drive away the land. However high the tax rate, not one square foot of it will put on a track shoe and hop out of town. The only bad thing to say about this tax's incentive effects is that it stimulates revitalization, and makes jobs. If some people think that is bad, maybe this attitude is the problem.

In other cases, industries occupy land of high value that is wrongly assessed low simply because industry occupies it, and it has not been subdivided. What has subdivision to do with it? The bias of assessors is to value industrial "acreage" low, relative to improved "lots," even though they lie cheek by jowl. It is a kind of wholesale discount for owners of "raw" (undivided) tracts.

For example, in West Allis, Wisconsin, the southwest corner of the Allis-Chalmers plant occupies the northeast corner of the 100% location, the most valuable commercial site in town. That land, with the same retail potential as the other three corners, is assessed as raw industrial acreage, as though it were in the boonies, with no recognition of its high location value for retail/office use. To make a land tax work, the assessor must be reinstructed to value that land at its highest and best use rather than as ordinary raw acreage. Exempting buildings would create the necessary pressure, thus solving the very problem that otherwise might be taken as a point against it. As noted earlier, the U.S. Census of Governments gives us no data on this point. You, however, can find it easily enough: tax assessments are public records, and you know your own town.

In still other cases "industry" surrounds and intersperses itself with vast swaths of vacant land. They hold it for open storage, parking, purported "future expansion," accessways, buffers, backlots, discouragement of competitors, etc. Many of Los Angeles' swankiest buildings of today arose over the former surplus lands of the cinema industry, which disgorged them before 1978 because they used to have to pay substantial taxes on surplus lands. Read the whole article

John Muir is right. "Tug on any one thing and find it connected to everything else in the universe." Tug on the property tax and find it connected to urban slums, farmland loss, political favoritism, and unearned equity with disrupted neighborhood tenure. Echoing Thoreau, the more familiar reforms have failed to address this many-headed hydra at its root. To think that the root could be chopped by a mere shift in the property tax base -- from buildings to land -- must seem like the epitome of unfounded faith. Yet the evidence shows that state and local tax activists do have a powerful, if subtle, tool at their disposal. The "stick" spurring efficient use of land is a higher tax rate upon land, up to even the site's full annual value. The "carrot" rewarding efficient use of land is a lower or zero tax rate upon improvements. ...

Partial Applications -- Assessment Precision

Another way to mimic a PTS is to follow the letter of the law in assessing site value for accuracy and currency. Over the decades, US assessors have consistently undervalued land relative to improvements. The more poorly the land is utilized, the lower our officials assess it, despite uniform appraisal laws. This bias has overemphasized the detrimental half of the tax and crippled the beneficial part.

Consider Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC. In the late forties this part of Arlington was so rundown it inspired an advisory group to require the state to conduct a countywide reassessment in 1950. They stipulated that close attention should be paid to the true market value of sites without regard to use. Rosslyn valuations jumped; the core 154-acres saw increases from $300 to $2,300 per acre. A five-acre commercial tract jumped from $3,000 to $196,000 an acre.

How did they soften the blow to property owners?

First, all new assessments were mailed at once; owners saw they were treated uniformly.
Second, the assessment gurus read the market better than most owners; the updated assessments in Arlington rivaled the highest in quality in the US.
Third, chief assessor, Francis Austin, saw himself as an educator, not an enforcer. He assisted owners to make better land use decisions. Instead of suing, several land owners sold their lots at healthy profits.

Soon new enterprises took off, turning Rosslyn into a district of top-notch hotels, offices, and apartments. The success was also supported by annual reevaluations. As Rosslyn land values increased with accurate assessments, the pressure for renewal remained and removed the profit and incentive of speculation. By 1975 Rosslyn returned $43 million annually to the county and received $13 million in public expenditures.

Another outstanding example of simply following appraisal laws is Southfield, Michigan. State law required all taxable property to be appraised at market value. Buildings there in 1960 were assessed at 70 to 80 percent of value and land at five to 10 percent. After Mayor S. James Clarkson took office on a promise to correct this violation, and after a fight with the assessor, special interest groups, and the courts, the city stopped overvaluing new construction and remodels and began appraising land by its highest and best use. Soon the contrast with the slums of nearby Detroit were patent. Mayor Clarkson stated that Detroit taxed land values "next to nil" under Depression era assumptions. Voters reelected him four times on his promise of fair assessments. Average homeowners paid 22 percent less in taxes immediately. Those who held large empty lots in desirable locations saw huge tax increases but reaped windfall profits from selling or developing. As Detroiters migrated outward, accurate assessments enabled Southfield to capture rising land values, bulking up its tax base by 20 percent a year. ...

Most jurisdictions already appraise the value of land and buildings separately (however poorly), a taxing body could without delay adopt the PTS. Yet to derive maximal benefit from the PTS, many jurisdictions will have to upgrade their assessments.

In real estate there are two basic tautologies.

One, land value is unrealized rent and rent is realized land value.
Two, the annual rental income from a parcel is its market price multiplied by the interest rate, and land price is capitalized land rent (usually over a 30 year term). Since collecting land rent shrinks, even eliminates, land price, it becomes necessary to determine annual rent and use that as a basis for the rate on land.

Where density is low and growth rapid, land price inflates and assessments usually fail to keep up. Yet when land price inflation decreased from 15% to 10% annually, a land tax rate of 95% would capture the gain in land value and impact land allocation. Fortunately, the PTS precludes land price inflation, even lowers land price (tho' high density areas being developed would likely keep prices high).

Where assessments are inaccurate, the PTS will be less effective. Under valued assessments, common on large residential lots in Clark County, Washington, "produces the undesired outcome of tax reductions rather than tax increases" (Gihring, 1996). Room for improvement persists in most regions nationwide. How much better could today's assessments be, had state legislatures allowed localities to abolish taxes on buildings all together? Both the cities of Rosslyn and Southfield did in fact request just that. In Australia, with its long history of local reliance on site-values, accurate assessment is more the rule than the exception.

Another failed practice is assessment. Now assessors must combine building and land values and slip into evaluating by current use which is often less than potential use. They also undervalue large lots, vacant lots, parking lots, and underused locations. Value that should have been assigned to the location they attribute to the building, a capital asset which for income tax avoidance can be rapidly depreciated, benefiting the wealthiest land owners. Thus the property tax is made regressive.

Assessing property is more laborious, infrequent, and less accurate than simply assessing land. Freed from tallying changes in improvements, assessors could calculate market values of locations from actual sales or leases. Plus, assessors can turn to modern technology. Computer aided mass appraisal (CAMA), now accepted, facilitates annual assessments of all properties. The simpler the assessment process, the fairer and more progressive the taxation. ...

A big problem needs a big solution which in turn needs a matching shift of our prevailing paradigm. Geonomics -- advocating that we share the social value of sites and natural resources and untax earnings -- does just that. Read the whole article

Land comprises all natural resources, not just ‘terra firma.’ It is the universe minus man’s products. Even the simplest of human activities, sleep, requires each of us to occupy exclusively a space, a location, preferably a bed in a home of our own. But that word ‘own’ conjures emotions and political postures. ...

The Nobel-winning economist William Vickrey said that the property tax is actually two different taxes (Vickrey 1991). That is because buildings are capital, not land, in the economic sense – even if, in most legal codes, there is no distinction between land and improvements made to it which are all lumped together as ‘landed property’ or real estate. Buildings and other improvements to land all depreciate over time unless further capital is expended. Eventually the market value of such improvements may become negative, owing to the costs that would need to be incurred by someone wishing to redevelop the site for an alternative use. But that does not necessarily take away the rental value of the site.

Much urban blight is caused by these so-called ‘brown field’ vacant and under-used sites. However they are often in valuable locations, with good transport connections. It may be that owners are speculating that land prices will rise and enable them to sell at greater profit in the future than now, or it may be that there is genuinely no market for sites in a particular location unless the cost of remediation is subsidised as a form of public investment. Such investment, according to Vickrey and other followers of Henry George, can be entirely funded from LVT. In a lecture given in 1991, first published last year, Vickrey claimed:

The proviso, according to Vickrey, is to replace the tax on buildings with a tax on land value alone – LVT:-

Taxing buildings and work done to improve them discourages such work. Un-taxing them and taxing land more highly, irrespective of its actual state of development but based upon its highest and best immediate potential use, will encourage owners to maintain their sites and buildings in such a way as to maximise their income. A remote site or one with conservation or other restrictions will have a low site value, hence attract low taxes, whereas a high value city centre derelict site will very soon be redeveloped. The extra property tax revenue from extending the tax base to sites that are currently under-taxed (because the tax is based primarily on building/rental value not site/owner value), ensures public infrastructure projects can be funded without resource to general taxes or excessive borrowing on the financial markets. Read the whole article

Wealth and Want
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity.
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Wealth and Want			www.wealthandwant.com
... because democracy alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can prosper