On Thu, 06 Feb 2003, Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>If Britain collected Rent with a land-value tax - this would happen
>anyway. It would become uneconomic to keep land unused.
>Would such a collection be fair? Of course - the value of a site is not
>produced by the occupier of a site, but by the people of the community
>around it. If the community then re-captured this value, they would be
>getting back the value they created. And, incidentally, the sites would
>be fully used - for vacant land and sub-par housing would become
>unprofitable.
OK, I'm puzzled by this. Doesn't everybody do this already? I pay a
property tax based on a property assessment. Granted, land improvements
are included in the assessment, and if I read rightly, you are suggesting
those be exempt, but land value so exceeds building value for residences
here that it hardly matters. Isn't this the standard method for
civic tax collection? This is why whenever a part of town gets
particularly run down, businesses that don't depend on pedestrian
retail traffic flock in to take advantage of the low taxes, and
renovate the area to the point that the land value rises again.
That works here everywhere except in the region where the seediest
residential hotels are densely clustered, and even in the fringes
of that region.
-Pete V
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