We can have one without the other
Detroit’s current tax system has long been a subject of criticism, with homeowners burdened by some of the highest property taxes in Michigan. Paradoxically, because land values are low, the owners of the City’s many abandoned buildings, scrap yards, and parking lots face low taxes,… Read More »Detroit’s Land Value Tax Plan: A Game Changer for Tax Bills
Building on the lessons of the roughly 20 Pennsylvania municipalities and school districts that have made use of Land Value Taxes (LVT), Detroit’s Mayor Duggan introduced a proposal to bring the policy to his City in May 2023, during the Mackinac Policy Conference. This plan,… Read More »Exploring Detroit’s Land Value Tax Plan: A Revenue-Neutral Approach
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s plan to implement a Land Value Tax continues moving forward, albeit with a new timeline. Since May 31, when Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan unveiled a plan to introduce a Land Value Tax, Michigan tongues have been wagging furiously. Declaring the current… Read More »Land Value Tax plan takes shape in Detroit, as negotiations continue
With so many cities grappling with rising rents, insufficient supply of new housing and widening inequality, many are starting to consider the ways in which these challenges could be mitigated by shifting the tax base onto land values. In a previous blog post, we explained… Read More »How does a land value tax shift work in practice?
In this third installment of our blog series on Green Georgism we delve into the world of ecological tax reform, exploring the fusion of ecotaxes and green incentives to promote sustainable development. Ecotaxes, or green taxes, impose levies on activities with harmful environmental impacts, while… Read More »The Principles and Policies of Green Georgism: LVT, Carbon Tax, Ecotax reform
Note: this article contains mathematical equations; please download a PDF copy at this link to view those equations in the proper format. Introduction Recently, there has been increasing interest in the potential for land value taxes (LVT) [1] to help combat housing crises and wealth… Read More »Decoupling Land and Improvement Values
Here at the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, our research initiative Resource Justice recently hosted an event called Driving the Shift, as a forum to hear from local efforts to advance land value tax policies in places throughout the U.S. We were lucky enough to hear from… Read More »Driving the Shift: Tax activism and the move to Land Value Tax
Over the past few months, we have published a series of articles which explore the presence of vacant and underutilized land in New York City and the role of Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) in the city’s housing market. Today, we publish our ground-breaking report, Privilege in the Wasted Land, which examines the factors associated with these phenomena and clearly establishes that LLC investors are over-represented among owners of both vacant and underutilized land in NYC.
Tyler Cowen writes: “The land tax, an idea that dates to Henry George and the classical economists of the late 19th century, is having another one of its moments.” In fact, the idea is older, dating back to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill,… Read More »Land Taxes Break the Power of NIMBY Interest Groups, a Rebuttal to Tyler Cowen
Tom Daniels, Crossways ProfessorDept. of City and Regional PlanningUniversity of Pennsylvania IntroductionThe research project on the California Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation (SALC) program combined the broader exploration of how the SALC might serve as a national model—both to preserve farmland from conversion to development and… Read More »Methodology and Findings for the ‘California Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program: Evaluating the Use of Cap-and-Trade Funds to Promote Climate Mitigation and Adaptation.’
