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LVT and things like market value based taxes are all far more complicated than is what already works, and what Singapore does (and a couple other countries like China): all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.

So the revenue comes through in resales once leases end.

Super simple: no valuation (only market sales); no annual expenses to consider (all upfront); development issues are simply a matter for leases to expire; speculation is capped given the capped lease length (although it can still get to stupid valuations).

Implementation is also extremely simple if you’re already onboard with taxation as expropriation: the state just legislates that all property is now a 99 year lease and they own it at that point (alternatively they compensate you 2-5% of market value, and retain existing annual taxes, or cut existing annual taxes to compensate, or they just do it without compensation!)

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Unless the state is renewing the lease every time you do non-trivial development work or actually undertaking the development work itself as in Singapore, short leases are a rather significant deterrent from making optimal use of the land. If you think developers hold back from developing land because it might be worth more developed differently in ten years' time, wait to see what incentive "the state will repossess it and everything you've built on it in ten years' time" has...

Well yes, in reality you want a system where you don’t wait until the lease expires because that would leave many short lease properties without investment. It is trivial to value (competitive real estate market, rational negotiation, market interest rates) a lease extension from 30 to 99 years (enabling development) and the state shouldn’t really care about it unless it wanted to take ownership early as part of a wider land development plan.

The state is technically repossessing it when you own a lease, but it’s not something you had rights to anyway, or had paid for. The terms of what you own are up to the lease end date, under the terms of the lease.


> all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.

All land¹ is already owned by the state and leased to the “owners”; the only differences are in how much the state charges those “owners” for rent.

In light of this, the difference between a 100% LVT rate v. the state issuing land leases is just semantics.

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¹ within any state's territory, of course.


I agree this seems like the most realistic way to implement an lvt. A pure lvt would need to have tons of loopholes to convince people to build industry in low value places. If a builder thinks their taxes will skyrocket in the future they will go overseas. The yearly evaluation is ripe for corruption(my city has tons of corruption in property taxes evaluations).

Singapore has freeholds.

A minority of land is freehold.



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