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Zoning Changes

In the UK, there is talk about something called "Planning Gain Supplements," which sound as if they might be similar to Georgist ideas. However, the incentives of PGS are very different from those of land value taxation, and the differences are very important.


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. ...

The whole practice of planning should be replaced by a system of charges for harmful consequences of land use and payments for beneficial ones. Planning is motivated by a concern for the harmful consequences that can result from land development. But the resulting restriction in land development makes planning permission all the more valuable to the few who receive it, with the result that vast fortunes are made by contriving to appear to have, in one's person or in one's projects, whatever attributes are regarded as attractive by those who grant planning permission. With so much money at stake, it is virtually impossible to avoid bias. A recognition of the impropriety of the large gains from receiving planning permission leads planning bodies to be ever more strict about granting it, and the result is ever higher prices of homes, to the detriment of first-time buyers.

When there are harmful consequences of land development, these are generally manifest in lower rental values of land near the land that is developed. The effort that is now devoted to determining whether to grant planning permission should be spent instead on identifying the magnitudes of the harmful consequences of development. Then everyone who wishes to develop land, and everyone who has title to land that is already developed, should be charged those costs. Those who have land that is adversely affected by development would be compensated automatically through the reduction in the rates on their land.  ... Read the whole article


Nic Tideman: Basic Tenets of the Incentive Taxation Philosophy

Ending Privilege

When the principle that the value of government-assigned opportunities should be received by the public treasury is violated, the result is "privilege," which from its Latin roots means "private law," that is, law that permits one person to do what others are not permitted to do. Thus what we stand for is an end to privilege.

Numerous examples of privilege are incorporated in our institutions.

    • Farm legislation restricts the growing of tobacco to those who have been assigned acreage allotments.
    • For numerous commodities, trade legislation limits shipments from individual countries to specified quotas.
    • In many cities, only persons who have been given permits are allowed to operate taxis, and new permits are not issued.
    • To operate a radio or television station requires a license, and there are no opportunities for new licenses to be issued.
    • In most cities, construction of commercial or multi-family residential structures requires zoning permission that is granted to some and not to others.
    • But the single most important category of privilege is land titles.

This list of examples of privilege, which is by no means exhaustive, contains some privileges, such as acreage allotments and import quotas, that would be best reformed by eliminating restrictions and permitting all to do what now only some may do. For other privileges, such as broadcast licenses and land titles, great productivity results from the social understanding that a specified individual will have the use of a given resource. For these privileges, the best reform is the introduction of the requirement that any person who is assigned such an opportunity must pay to the public treasury an annual fee equal to what the opportunity would be worth to someone else.  ...

Making Housing Affordable

The implementation of our ideas would have a dramatic effect in making housing more affordable. The principal reason why housing costs have risen so much is that the price of land has risen enormously. Some increase in the price of access to land is a natural accompaniment of an increasing population.

But the very great increases of recent years, which have made it nearly impossible for young families to afford houses of their own, have additional causes. The implementation of our ideas would bring down the price of access to land in three ways.

  • First, much land is held off the market by speculators who may wait generations do decide to develop it. The introduction of a fee for holding land, whether used or not, equal to the rental value of the land, will induce speculators to either develop this land themselves or turn it over to someone who will.
  • Second, an important cause of higher prices for access to land by those who wish to build low-cost housing is zoning restrictions. These restrictions are introduced by political factions that already have their houses and do not mind if housing becomes scarcer. It just raises the market value of their homes. But if a rise in land values were accompanied by rises in the fees that existing residents had to pay for the use of the land on which their houses sit, they would have an incentive to do what they could to make land plentiful rather than scarce, and zoning restrictions could be expected to diminish.
  • Third, a person who wishes to own a house must borrow money to cover the price of buying the title to the land on which the house sits as well as the cost of the house itself. If the use of land required the payment of a fee equal to the rental value of land, so that the selling price of land titles became virtually zero, then the amount of money that a family would have to borrow to purchase a house would fall.  Read the whole article

Karl Williams: Landlording It Over Us
Geoism holds that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being rich – indeed, an economic system exists whereby we could ALL be rich (in wealth, education or leisure time). The justification for riches all depends on whether a wealthy person has become so through creating wealth (in the form of goods and services that people willingly buy in a free and fair market) or through living off the wealth really created by others. Earned wealth might arise through talented or arduous inventing, writing, sports ability, entertaining, entrepreneurialship or whatever. ...

Geoism seeks to expose the many forms of unearned wealth, or privilege, that exist in our monstrous economic system. Monopoly rights are the more obvious examples of economic privilege, but less noticeable is the massive wealth to be gained by using the Global Commons (especially land) without reimbursing the rest of us. ...

But the rewards of land go far beyond status, evidenced by how, over the centuries, the land-owning elite has pulled the levers of power in society, politics and the world of commerce. The Earl of Derby’s 1881 candid analysis of the benefits of owning land perhaps says it best,
  • “One, political influence;
  • two, social importance;
  • three, power exercised over tenantry;
  • four, residential enjoyment including what is called sport;
  • five, the money return – the rent.”
Since then, the reform of the House of Lords has dented the political influence that was previously wielded by the landowning class (titles and land were once synonymous). But who needs status? – let’s get crass and just go for the cash. The great windfall profits which are dropped into landowners’ laps (which rightly belongs to the community) occurs with rezoning and the growth in residential/industrial values. In the UK between 1991 and 2001, the total return by this measure (including capital growth and rental income) averaged a healthy 12.6% per year.

The gross injustice of handing over community-created values to landowners is revealed by cold, hard figures. According to Yolande Barnes, head of research at FPD Savills, the average UK building plot – at £709,650 for a greenfield acre – is worth around 403 times the equivalent agricultural land. Nationwide, through this form of rezoning, around £5bn. windfall profit is handed over to UK landowners each year.

Barnes explains further, “In many parts of the South and Southeast, it is certainly true that prices are paid for agricultural land that wouldn’t be justified by its agricultural value.” She said further that it is impossible to know how much of this differential is accounted for by a "hope" factor – a speculative play on future change of use – and how much represents the premium for land’s amenity value when it is in such short supply. But she adds: “There has certainly been a deal of strategic holding and buying on city and town fringes by agricultural owners and farmers. New development land is usually designated in “fill-ins” and close to existing developments.”  She added further that farmers buy around towns because they can’t lose. They’ll farm the land anyway, and if permission is given to build, they’ve won the lottery.

A great way to run a casino, but what sort of way to run an economy and a society? ...  Read the whole article


Jeff Smith and Kris Nelson: Giving Life to the Property Tax Shift (PTS)
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. ...

Owners paying higher land dues feel pressured to develop their land in order to pay their dues, and development is already blighting many suburbs and farmland. Won't the PTS force premature or excessive development, losing open space and ecologically sensitive areas? Environmentalists should understand that development is actually needed to spare land. Using some land more intensely means using other land not at all. The PTS stimulates construction in the most intensely-used locations; compact urban form leaves more surrounding countryside pristine. Since about one-fifth of urban areas are vacant or underused land, and half is devoted to cars, there's plenty of room in cities for growth. While suburban commercial centers compete with downtown for redevelopment, each new building, whether for business or residents, must find tenants.

Higher density is the expected result of the PTS, yet many people oppose higher density. However, the noxious component is not a higher density of population but of automobiles, creating congestion, noise, noxious smells, and danger. The PTS, by clearing out the infestation of vehicles, makes human habitats more livable and the added people unnoticeable.

Without coercion or remote planning, the PTS improves our settlement patterns. Regulations and zoning, some assume, might be vitiated or obviated, become obsolete. Instead, the PTS makes it easier for regulations and zoning to do their job. Since the land tax lowers land price, buying land for parks and reserves is more easily afforded. The loss in revenue from removing the newly public lands from the tax rolls would be offset somewhat by the corresponding rise in value of sites near the protected open space. Creating green spaces raises the density of already developed land, and thus its value. Furthermore, land dues reduce the profit from land development, making it a less attractive investment, and land use decisions of less economic consequence. After a while, people with deep pockets would turn to investments that, post-shift, would be untaxed. Reserving land for recreational or natural uses becomes less contentious; people could more easily determine an optimum proportion of green space to developed space.

Redirecting land rent from owner to government might merely pass the motive to exploit from owner to state, possibly the next implacable force against conservation. However, while an individual must use their own land most intensely to maximize profit, a government must optimize land use to maximize its land tax base. That is, land value thruout the jurisdiction is lower when there is border-to-border development; overall values are higher when some space is kept open. From the government's point of view, there's more rent to be collected when highest and best use includes nonuse. ...

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


Michael Hudson: The Lies of the Land: How and why land gets undervalued
Turning land-value gains into capital gains
Hiding the free lunch
Two appraisal methods
How land gets a negative value!
Where did all the land value go?
A curious asymmetry
Site values as the economy's "credit sink"
Immortally aging buildings
Real estate industry's priorities
THE FREE LUNCH
    * Its cost to citizens
    * Its cost to the economy
SUMMARY 

YOU MAY THINK the largest category of assets in this countrly is industrial plant and machinery. In fact the US Federal Reserve Board's annual balance sheet shows real estate to be the economy's largest asset, two-thirds of America's wealth and more than 60 percent of that in land, depending on the assessment method.

Most capital gains are land-value gains. The big players do not want their profits in rent, which is taxed as ordinary income, but in capital gains, taxed at a lower rate. To benefit as much as possible from today's real estate bubble of fast rising land values they pledge a property's rent income to pay interest on the debt for as much property as they can buy with as little of their own money as possible. After paying off the mortgage lender they sell the property and get to keep the "capital gain".

This price appreciation is actually a "land gain," that is, it's not from providing start-up capital for new enterprises, but from sitting on a rising asset already in place, the land. Its value rises because neighbourhoods are upgraded, mortgage money is ample, and rezoning is favorable from farmland on the outskirts of cities to gentrification of the core to create high-income residential developments. The potential capital gain can be huge. That's why developers are willing to pay their mortgage lenders so much of their rent income, often all of it. ...

Two appraisal methods

PROPERTY IS APPRAISED in two ways. Both start by estimating its market value.

  • 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. ...

SUMMARY

For hundreds of years property's value has been calculated by discounting its flow of rental income at the going rate of interest. The lower the interest rate, the higher the price a given rental stream will justify -- or as property owners express it, the more years' rent a property will bring. What is so striking about land values today is that they are rising for reasons independent of their earnings stream. The major new consideration is their prospect for future "capital" (that is, land-price) gains. In sum, the ultimate aim of real estate investors no longer is so much to seek income -- most of which is pledged to their bankers as interest payments on the property they acquire -- as much as to seek property gains. Politically opportunites abound. Merely changing zoning in New York City in the 1980s to allow using commercial loft spaces for residential purposes had the effect of multiplying asset values five or tenfold.

Whether the gains come from selling the property or from borrowing more money against it, the essential phenomenon is the rapid growth in asset values and real estate's uniquely favored tax treatment. That's why investors choose real estate instead of bonds or stocks, and much of the strategy underlying corporate takeovers has followed the strategies they developed over the past half century.

Nationwide the capital-gains dimension needs to be incorporated into the rental revenue statistics to measure real estate's total returns. This sector's nearly complete success in escaping the tax collector has placed an enormous tax burden on everyone else. read the entire article

Charles T. Root — Not a Single Tax! (1925)

... If the reader has followed thus far, he is perhaps ready to inquire why, if the abolition of taxation is so desirable and so feasible, it should not be put into effect without more delay. In partial answer, it may be said that the body social has slid so far down from the right path in this matter that climbing back to it is no short or easy process. The way up bristles with problems, one of which is of course the opposition of a class of land speculators. Another relates itself to the regulation of the height and area of buildings in cities.

Even under our present system of taxed buildings, the desire to create the maximum of rentable space upon costly land has resulted in such lofty and closely packed structures as to endanger safety and health; and restrictive legislation has already been found necessary. When the landowner can no longer appropriate the larger part of economic rent and must rely for his profit mainly upon the rent of his untaxed buildings, such restrictions may have to be elaborated and watchfully enforced for the protection of the people.

Naturally such restrictions will lower the economic rent, but the reduction need never be sufficient to impair the necessary public income while ample compensation will be seen in the enhanced well-being of the community due to increased light, air and space.

But, whatever difficulties are to be met, it may be set down as an encouraging fact that the problem involved in doing things right is always less than those resulting from doing the same things wrong; and, Heaven knows, our way back to fiscal sanity cannot be through any worse jungle than that in which current taxation keeps us and will keep us so long as it is permitted to continue. ... read the whole article

 



Michael Hudson and Kris Feder: Real Estate and the Capital Gains Debate
Most capital gains reaped by business partnerships accrue to real estate firms, which shelter personal income by avoiding incorporation. IRS statistics ranking capital gains in terms of how long the assets were held show that many of these gains represent quick “flips." Often these are land that has been rezoned from a low-value to a high-value use. Retaining the capital gains tax would have little effect on deterring such speculation. Read the whole article


Herbert J. G. Bab:  Property Tax -- Cause of Unemployment  (circa 1964)
The tax assessed on the improvements has discouraged the construction of more and better housing. At the same time, the tax assessed on land has been too low to induce owners to sell, improve, or replace their rental properties.

Property taxes shape the pattern of our cities.
  • If taxes on improvements are low or non-existing and taxes on land are high, the cities are bound to grow vertically and at a fast rate.
  • If taxes on improvements are high and taxes on land are low, our cities will spread over larger and larger areas. They will become metropolitan areas and they will grow at a much slower rate.
Relatively low taxes on land and high taxes on improvements will discourage the owners of vacant lots or underdeveloped land, such as that used for parking lots, gas stations, hamburger stands, etc., from improving their land. It will encourage them to keep the land out of use and to sell later at a profit. This will create an artificial shortage of land, which in turn will lead to urban blight and irregular, leapfrog city growth.

This urban sprawl makes our cities look ugly, but it has many disadvantages besides:
  • It gobbles up a tremendous amount of farm land;
  • the farmers have to give up their land before it is really needed;
  • the building developer has to go far out to find available land;
  • the prospective home-owner has to travel farther;
  • traffic on congested roads will increase and
  • new roads and schools will have to be built.
It is generally believed that zoning laws are a very effective tool to control the growth of our cities. Zoning laws determine the best possible use of urban land. Yet nobody can be forced to improve his land and to build unless there is an incentive. This can be achieved by taxing land at a rate that will make it unprofitable to hold it without improving it.

The city planner needs land taxation just as he needs zoning laws. With both these tools the orderly growth of our cities will be assured, but -- as experience has shown -- without land taxation rational and efficient land usage becomes impossible.Read the whole article

Frank Stilwell and Kirrily Jordan: The Political Economy of Land: Putting Henry George in His Place

Indeed, one could say that the term ‘tax’ is a misnomer because what is really involved is value created by the community being retained by the community rather than being appropriated by private landholders. For example, under current arrangements landowners receive ‘windfall’ gains when the market value of their land rises as a result of publicly provided infrastructure being built nearby, or when local government zoning decisions reclassify their land as appropriate for further development. In this way, individual landowners stand to reap huge benefits at the expense of community-generated processes. Such arrangements create an odd incentive: allowing landholders to appropriate the unearned wealth generated by rising land values, thereby rewarding this unproductive activity, while taxing productive endeavour. The Georgist land tax ‘remedy’, by contrast, would eliminate such perverse incentives and thereby more effectively align private and public interests in the use of society’s resources. ... read the whole article

 

Mason Gaffney: 18 Fallacies
3. "You cannot take real property without compensation"

Wrong! Whoever said that has not been following zoning law. As a rule of thumb, zoning can take away about 85% of the use value of land before it is declared an unconstitutional 'taking' of property.

The owner must be left with some 'economically viable' use, meaning almost any use whose revenues exceed expenses, however small the net gain.

As to other property, well! No one has yet been compensated for losing the fruits of his sweated brow to the IRS, at rates which once soared as high as 90% in the top bracket. ... Read the whole article

Bill Batt: Stemming Sprawl: The Fiscal Approach

Stemming Sprawl: Command-and-Control Measures

Policymakers have two modes of leverage by which to implement public will: 1) so-called command-and-control approaches that are typically enforced by what state and federal constitutions group under "police powers" and 2) fiscal approaches that typically involve a variety of taxes, fees, fines, and other charges that derive constitutionally from either police powers or "tax powers." When governments administer either of these powers, they are legitimate and authoritative. Fiscal measures available to governments can come from either ground. The charges that the private sector usually impose differ in that they usually are responsive to market forces. Prices that are established by government, however, are not necessarily responsive to market forces, nor are they intended to be. Rather, they are set in order to accomplish specific public policy goals.[19] They can be no less efficient, however, when responsibly instituted.

Governments face the challenge of knowing which of the tools at their disposal — command-and-control approaches or "pricing" approaches — will best serve effective and efficient achievement of public policies. Only in recent years, however, has there been a renewed interest in fiscal levers to achieve goals that policymakers seek to achieve. There is particular interest among students of welfare economics in incorporating costs earlier regarded as externalities, especially in designing environmental policies. Moreover, the use of pricing approaches to recover costs of government services that have a high level of private good about them can bring about more attractive and achievable goals than reliance on conventional police power approaches. User fees, environmental fees, and other such fiscal tools have become more fascinating — at least to students of public policy — than conventional taxes.

The renewed interest in fiscal approaches comes in recognition of the fact that traditional command-and-control approaches have not been successful. Government authority is far more effective at prohibiting and controlling than it is inducing and channeling.[20] Three illustrations of failed command-and-control approaches will demonstrate this: zoning, urban growth boundaries, and altering (usually expanding) political jurisdictions. ... read the whole article

Frank Stilwell and Kirrily Jordan: The Political Economy of Land: Putting Henry George in His Place

Concerns about urban policies also raise questions about the current relevance of Georgist ideas. For example, it is pertinent to ask whether a more uniform land tax would encourage the more efficient utilisation of urban space. George argued that, in order to cover the costs of a higher rate of land tax, landowners would be forced to put their land to its most productive use, and could not afford to hold it idle. Here is a clear link with the modern concerns to discourage ‘urban sprawl’ and to promote ‘urban consolidation.’ To the extent that a higher land tax would encourage the development of more housing in existing urban areas, the pressures for housing development in outlying areas would be significantly reduced. This, in turn, could reduce the burgeoning demand for transport that is currently characteristic of large cities.

Land tax also impacts on the politics of peripheral urban expansion. Currently, the prospect of huge capital gains resulting from decisions by local governments to rezone land from rural to urban acts as an incentive for landowners on the fringes of built-up areas to lobby for changes that will allow increased development. Hence, landowners push for rights to subdivision, irrespective of whether or not there is actual demand (Day, 1995: 3). By creaming off the gains from windfall increases in land values, land tax obviates this bias towards relentless urban expansion.

However, the question remains: would a uniform land tax be sufficient to produce more efficient patterns of urban development? Or would there still be a need for direct land use controls? Land tax can certainly be a tool for discouraging the wasteful use of land. It tends to discourage people from purchasing excessive amounts of land or leaving it idle. However, it may also encourage the overdevelopment of land in order to produce the income stream necessary to pay the higher rate of tax.

Critics of urban consolidation such as Patrick Troy (1996) have examined the potential problems of such overdevelopment, including a range of environmental impacts such as altered hydrological processes. It seems to be an overly bold claim that a Georgist land tax alone would be sufficient to achieve optimal urban development patterns. Land use controls a necessary adjunct to land tax - in setting minimum requirements for green space, for example.

Local government planning controls are also important to prevent incompatibility of land uses, such the development of hazardous or unhealthy industrial activities adjacent to residential areas. Targeted decentralisation policies are a means of encouraging the further development of regional centres. Such policies can work in conjunction with land taxes to ease growth pressures in the larger cities, while addressing long-standing spatial, social and economic inequalities (Stilwell, 2000: 254-260). The desirability of promoting more decentralised regional development is consistent with a Georgist perspective, but not altogether compatible with the claim that land tax would facilitate urban consolidation. It seems clear that it ‘overburdens’ land tax to expect it alone to produce the best spatial outcomes, taking account of all the economic, social and environmental issues involved in urban and regional policy. The various other policy instruments – including regulations relating to green space, zoning, and the provision of public infrastructure to pave the way for decentralisation – are important complements to land taxation. In other words, land tax is best regarded as a necessary but not sufficient condition for more effective spatial policy.... read the whole article

 

 

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