Property taxes discourage building. Empty land is really cheap, property tax wise. Once you build on the land, property taxes go way up. This discourages you from building on the land.

Land value tax is the opposite. The tax you pay is based on how much the land is worth, based on its location and supply/demand. An empty lot in NYC would cost the same in LVT as if it had a big apartment full of renters. This makes it very expensive to hold on to unless you’re going to build on it.

The same applies for improvement. If you own a plot with a single family house on it in an area where demand is skyrocketing, your LVT is going to shoot up along with it. This encourages you to either tear it down to build apartments or sell it to someone who will.

The really interesting part about LVT is that it paradoxically makes housing more affordable. One of the biggest problems with the current property tax system is that people’s taxes don’t go up when the value of their property increases. This leads to little old ladies sitting on multi million dollar homes and paying almost no taxes at all in places like the Bay Area. Land Value Tax would force tons of those houses onto the market, causing prices to go down due to increased supply. Truly expensive areas would also have to have apartments built to cover the tax.

The other nice thing about LVT is that landlords can’t pass it on by raising rent. Since the cost of rent in the area directly determines the value of the land, rent increases just turn into tax increases. At some point landlords have to stop increasing rent otherwise everyone would move out and then they couldn’t afford the taxes, so this leads to an equilibrium.

The only thing left to solve in this system is to make sure taxes are used to benefit regular people and not wasted.

Empty housing is empty land. It just has a house on it. And there are times and places where landowners will spend decades sitting on infill waiting for land values to go up. Additionally, land that could be developed into high density housing but is being held at low density at the behest of the area’s politically connected residents, is kind of like “empty” land. It isn’t a binary.

This right here. The US averages some thirty unoccupied houses for every homeless person. A lot of those are just owned by investment firms who will sit on them because housing is treated as an investment first and a human need second. It’s not a supply problem, it’s a fucking greed problem.

Basically everyone who’s ever paid property taxes has been taxed on value.

Right, but you pay property taxes based on the assessed value of the property, you don’t also pay income taxes on property unless that property is actually generating an income.

For example, you don’t have to figure how much you could hypothetically rent your home for if you weren’t living in it and add that to your income, even if you are wealthy enough to have a second home or summer home or something. It really just sounds like NY should significantly raise the property tax rate for unoccupied residential properties other than a primary residence, especially unoccpied residential properties owned by a commercial entity.

You don’t need to adjust for income. How do you get high value land with a low income? How do you own high value land and not derive an income from it? You’re imagining an extreme edge case of some family that’s been passing high value land down, generation after generation, without ever leveraging this advantage into financial success.

The more valuable the property, the larger a component of that value that tends to be in the value of the location itself, as opposed to the capital improvements to that location. Low income housing, as cheaply built as it is, is built in an even cheaper location. Conversely, a house but for higher income people is built more expensively, but even greater is the access to good schools, jobs, shopping, low (blue collar) crime rates, and so on that a high value location provides.

And that’s just residential real estate, which is almost people even think about. With commercial and industrial sites, location becomes even more important.

People who talk this way don’t know what land value is. They imagine there is a relationship to quantity, when location is almost the entire driver. Maybe a thousand square feet of space in upper Manhattan or San Jose or something is comparable to a hundred acres in rural Wyoming, or wherever.

And what about the poor in cities? They already pay a land value tax… to the owners of the land. You will say that if the owners are taxed, they will raise rents… but if they can just raise rents like that, why haven’t they already? Normally, a tax can be “passed on” because a tax on a thing affects the supply of that thing: the tax raises costs, which lowers profits, which drives capital out of that industry and into another, which reduces the amount being produced, which allows the higher price.

But land is fixed in supply. If you’re imagining a way of increasing or reducing the supply, you’re not thinking about land, but capital improvement to it. The supply can be neither increased nor decreased. Its existence is not dependent on any industry or thrift or other service on the part of the landowner and, as such, any income derived simply from owning a location and leasing it out to others is unearned. It’s essentially extortion, one person renting to another the “privilege” of existing, and if there are any landowners not collecting the full value that can be collected, it is either because they haven’t found the highest price yet, or out of the kindness of their hearts.

The storefronts being talked about are already zoned mixed use, it’s really just the first floor street side storefronts that are barren, with residential apartments 2nd floor on up.