[larsiusprime]

Because a revenue neutral implementation lowers taxes on net on improved active sites that do something with land, and raises it on net for vacant abandoned sites that do nothing, shifting the incentive to do something with the land or sell it to someone who will.

[fuzzfactor]

Texas already has exorbitantly high property taxes, more than most, that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning (which never stops increasing) will do.

Remember the purpose of property tax to begin with is for the owner to lose the property in case they are not as wealthy as someone else who might be interested someday. Or in case the property itself can not provide more than enough income to pay the tax in a timely way.

Another problem is that taxes were always high but they didn't actually start skyrocketing until a few decades ago, after one of the key stabilizing anti-Carpetbagger laws which prevented home equity loans, was repealed.

And the sky's the limit whenever untapped wealth is unleashed, to be audited and appraised.

So it's been kind of a race between property appreciation, available equity to borrow against as values increase, versus tax rates and appraisals trying to capture more of that in ways that can only result in owners becoming less whole that it ever has been.

Revenue-neutral or not, anything that makes it worse makes it worse.

[rafabulsing]

A land value tax is based on the value of the land only, with no input from whatever improvements are or are not built on it. So, with a proper LTV implementation (i.e., one where LTV is the only tax incurred on real state), there would be literally no tax incentive to tear down a usable (but unused) building. You would be paying the exact same amount of taxes on an empty lot as on a high end modern building on that same lot.

[wffurr]

>> that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning

This is exactly the problem that Land Value Tax proposes to fix. The tax doesn’t go down if the land owner destroys their structures and ruins the site.