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The Holy Grail of Urbanism: Land Value Tax with Greg Miller · Building Better Cities

• Kate Gasparro: On this podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about the way cities are unlocking development, zoning reform, infrastructure investments, transit-oriented development, public-private partnerships, and it's working to varying degrees. But there always seems to be that one parcel: the vacant lot on the corner, the surface parking lot in the middle of an otherwise activated block, the owner who watches investment pile up around him, watches his land value climb. And has every reason to keep waiting, because our current tax system is basically paying him to. That's the gap. Cities do all the hard work of creating value, and a single speculator can pocket it indefinitely. What if there was a way to flip that? To capture the value that public investment creates and turn it into a spur for the very development cities have been working so hard to unlock. That's what today's conversation is all about. My guest is Greg Miller, founder of the Center for Land Economics, who has spent his career modeling what a land value tax actually does when cities implement it, parcel by parcel, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. We get into why land is America's most valuable natural resource at 50 trillion and counting, why our current property tax system is a quiet gift to speculators, and why land value tax might be the one gap. You have to close to make every other urban investment work. I'm Kate Gasparrow and this is Building Better Cities. I read a book a few years ago about the value of cities lies mostly in the value of their land instead of the reverse way. And I'm curious what actually creates that land value. And we talked a little bit before listeners are joining us now about the fastest ways to increase value and decrease value. And maybe we can use that framing to help people understand how land is valued and how that value is different from property value. The most valuing in the United States, our most valuable natural resource is land. We have fifty trillion dollars of it. We have five trillion dollars of oil, right? This is a this is a large thing. This is a natural resource that we've privatized in many respects. And so we should probably think more about it. ⁓ and so land is valuable because at a hyperlocal level, because schools are there, because people want are also living there and you know, you you have a access to community. And then The city creates roads and infrastructure and sewage and that all makes this land valuable. And then the city might do a huge investment and put a huge subway station in. And that's gonna raise your land values a lot. And so there's a lot of things that go into land value. But what we're really talking about is not land value insofar as how many strawberries can I grow. ⁓ in which case land value is flat. It's just how much acres do you own. ⁓ we're talking about the value of a location and the the the premium that comes with owning access to that location. And the premium that comes with excluding others from access to that natural resource because now you own it. It's interesting that you compare you know strawberries is sort of a flat relationship versus you know putting in a subway station, which seems like an exponential relationship. And it's an exponential relationship to creation of more value, I'm assuming, ⁓ and the access to value. Is that fair to say? If you look at where land values are on a map, it they are exponentially higher. in San Francisco and even within San Francisco itself, you're you know, you're exponentially higher the more downtown you go. And this is true of New York City as well. And so it this is very much so like a a power law, I suppose. ⁓ and it's it's not smooth. that land wealth is extremely concentrated and land value. Okay. So I I wanna stick with this idea of the access to opportunity to create more value is what values land. So if you have a resource on that land that is very valuable, if you have access to a metro or subway station that can connect you to jobs that are very valuable, all of these things are going to increase the value of a parcel of land. And in this podcast, we've talked for several episodes now about how zoning, infrastructure investments, and even public policy shape what you can do with land and how we value it. So I'm curious, like Who has opportunity to create valuable land? And why is that something that we should be thinking about more? Yeah, if I own one parcel, it's very hard for me to create valuable land. But the city can create valuable land, right? If if I own one parcel in the middle of nowhere and I build a skyscraper, I'm trying to make that land more valuable than I I bought it for ten dollars because it's a rural farm and I build a skyscraper, I'm trying to make it worth the same as being in the middle of Manhattan. But I to convince people to move out there. So people building new cities have possibilities to create new land value. ⁓ single-family housing developers are doing I grew up in Chandler, Arizona, huge sprawl. But these developers, what they do is they have this land in the middle of nowhere on the sprawled edge of Phoenix. And they create roads and, you know, parks, and that creates a whole bunch of land value. But by and large, in our urban areas, people aren't actually creating land values themselves unless you own multiple parcels all connected to each other. And you build a residential right next to a coffee shop, right next to a Trader Joe's, right? but typically actually what you're doing is the small small residential businesses or or small businesses in general, small coffee shops, they create a spillover of land value. So they go in and they create a whole bunch of land values. People love small coffee shops, but they are actually creating the land value for everybody around them. And then because more or less they're usually not they don't own the land underneath them, these small businesses. Because they've raised all the land values, their rents go up because they did such a good job. so typically what what we're talking about is you're not creating land value yourself. You're creating land values for others if you're productive, or others are creating land value for you. If we're talking about the vacant landowner right next to the small coffee shop who comes in, and now the vacant landowner says, I should develop residential here. ⁓ there's this famous study on Trader Joe's, right? It raises land values 10% when a Trader Joe's comes in. Wow. And so I I think it's ten percent or something like that. And ⁓ th there's a whole, you know, sort of thing about this where the people nearby you are the ones creating your land value. ⁓ and so you're not the one creating it yourself, ⁓ because you only own one parcel. So it all depends on what's going on around you. Talking about density of opportunity, ⁓ which is like something that Yimbys love is like let's build density so we get keep people closer to jobs, transit. And in doing so increase the value of land. And then if you think about the flip side, people are fighting against that mentality to what they think protect their land value. They don't see that rising land values come from density and access to opportunity. They see land value as exclusionary. And so it's a hard square to circle. And so I'm just wanting to understand like that relationship because for the most part, land value isn't created by An individual homeowner, to your point. It's created by decades and centuries of investment in infrastructure, in investment in institutional infrastructure that has built our zoning code and sort of the history of place and land. So I'm curious, like as land value increases over time, and I know where this is going, how do we figure out what economic framework allows us to capture? that value and allow us to continue to invest in our neighborhoods so that people can move into cities where they want to be and get access to the opportunities to allow them to have upward mobility. Our land values are rising, our urban land values are rising, right? So when I was talking about this urban problem, ⁓ actually it's it's the urban land values are are increasing faster than cost of construction by far. And that's over the over the past decade, that's why we've seen rents increase so much. ⁓ and so That's why we need to figure out what to do about this. And so I actually don't think the single family homeowner in the suburb is the problem. They they somewhat are, admittedly, because over the past four decades, they've gained a lot of land wealth and they really like that wealth. And then they ⁓ they get to pass that on to their children, and that's created this sort of like generational gap, ⁓ and generational wealth inequality. And so land value tax also helps solve some of that in terms of single family homeowner, but The larger problem is the vacant lot owner and the surface parking lot owner in a lot of our cities, right? Those people are sitting on a lot more wealth, a lot more land value per square foot, and they're excluding a lot more housing units than the single family homeowner. And so the question then is those people can sit on that vacant lot or the surface parking lot's even better because they make annual revenue. And, you know, if you talk to people in this business, they're like, this is such a good business. We make so much money. ⁓ You go to Philadelphia to look at how many surface parking lots they have, or really a lot of our cities. They make annual revenue, that's good revenue, it's profitable revenue. And then twenty years later the the density continues to increase and their land value has doubled. And so if we had a land value tax, what we're saying is you're not gonna make money for holding on to this plot of land and not doing anything productive on it. And so I think that's where where the land value tax ties into this idea. Land values are gonna continue to increase. Cities make this money. Let's return that land value to the cities. So that way the cities can continue to invest in itself and continue to increase land values. Cause when land values increase, that's a really, really good sign that you're doing something right. And so when people complain about land values increasing in an area and it's displacing people, we do need to deal with displacement. But also we shouldn't say we sh we don't want land values to increase because Land values increasing is actually a sign that we're building things that people want that our city wants. We're building parks that our city wants. I'd I'd rather I'd rather land values rise a lot because we built a really good park than build a terrible park that nobody uses and land values fall, right? And so yeah, I think l cities just need to collect that revenue and private landowners shouldn't benefit from it. ⁓ and then they can inv cities can invest in themselves more. I'm a huge fan of land value tax and I think the people who are listen to this podcast regularly know that. It's all about aligning incentives around the value that land has and the value that can be extracted from land to continue this sort of circular or evolving investment in our cities. But for those people who this is the first time they're being introduced to this concept, they might think, well, we already have a property tax system. And so can you explain how property tax is different from land value tax and what the incentives are that are That are incentivizing homeowners, landowners to behave differently under these two different types of taxation systems. Yeah, I have to start by saying in the United States we should really appreciate the fact that we have a robust property tax system. Like this is a a chief advantage that we have over Europe, a lot of European nations. ⁓ and people don't like talking about taxes, but how we collect our taxes matters. ⁓ now, a property tax compared to a land value tax, a property tax hides two taxes in one. It is a building tax and a land tax and we e for each parcel we add together the va value of the location of that parcel of that property and we add together the value of the building on top of it. And we tax those together. We say your house is two hundred thousand dollars of land, three hundred thousand dollars of building, you're getting taxed at five hundred thousand dollars. We apply one tax rate to that. But it doesn't need to be this way. And so a land value tax is not actually I'm not proposing a new tax or a lot of people some people would. ⁓ I I'm not I What I what I propose is let's split that property tax system into two different taxes, a building tax and a land tax. Let's decrease the building tax because we need more development. We we we want more development, but development is good for our cities. And let's increase the land tax because we need less land speculation, less vacant lots and surface parking lots in our downtown corridors. And so typically what I work on is a revenue neutral shift in taxes from buildings decreasing the building taxes to land increasing the land tax. And that's where a property tax disagrees with a land value tax. So so the idea is that you would want to tax valuable land and then that would incentivize more development so that you could distribute per unit that land value tax to each of those units. Yeah, I think you you say tax valuable land. We we tax land at a rate. So we'll maybe tax land at one percent. By nature of taxing land at 1% to get $50 million for the city, you're taxing a valuable land more because you've the downtown corridors where your land value is. You know, we we established this. And then you're funding the city through that. ⁓ now there's two really good effects that come from this. One, development is a lot cheaper because you've just stopped taxing development. So you see more development. When you see more development, places become more desirable. So you see increased land values. And then when you increase land values and you have an increased land value tax, then people sitting on land and holding land are paying more to the city. And so everybody's paying more to the city. And then the city gets to decide what to do with that money. Right. Now, there's a lot of people who w like have the opinions on what cities should do with the money. They have opinions on how much cities should collect. I have my own opinions, but I also think that all of this is independent of that. Right. This is all a question of how we collect that money matters. And then we can also have our think tanks figure out what to do with the money and, you know, how much money to do. Should we give money back to units? Should we subsidize these units? Should we do this, that, or whatever? ⁓ important questions. ⁓ but also just how we collect the money matters. Maybe we can talk about a city in particular that is facing this question right now of if they should move to a two-tier property tax system that values both land and buildings. Who is going to be most affected by this? We've talked about the vacant ⁓ parking lot parcel owner in downtown whatever city you're gonna talk about. But how about single family homeowners? How about people who ⁓ have a large parcel but have a small house on that large parcel 'cause they like their big backyard. Can you just talk through like different types of land uses and how they might the next day feel that they're paying an unfair or maybe a more fair amount? We Do this analysis for a lot of cities. I've probably done 20 of these analyses on the land value tax shift. assessors already value land and buildings differently and they publish their data online, which enables us to do this analysis. The one most recently, to around two, three weeks ago, I put out a report in Spokane, Washington on a land value tax shift, achieved via a unique mechanism. ⁓ what we do is a universal building exemption. So if you exempt all buildings from taxation, then the only thing left to tax is land. We do this because the state constitution doesn't allow you to do a split rate tax where you tax land and buildings different. ⁓ but you could also imagine doing like fifty percent building exemptions. That way it's not a full land value tax. I think a lot of this needs to be incremental. And that's exactly what we modeled is an incremental policy for Spokane, Washington. And the single family homeowners on median decreased around four percent. But ⁓ most the large majority of single family homeowners stayed within 10% of their current tax bill. ⁓ what I mean by this is single family homes are actually a pretty good use of land in a lot of our cities. They're neither a great use of land nor a terrible use of land. They're an all right use of land. and that's a good thing. And so they don't get hugely punished by this policy at all. ⁓ now in San Francisco that story's gonna be different, right? A lot of single family houses are are quite terrible use of land in San Francisco, but it's all San Francisco allows. ⁓ which is a whole different story, but In most of the cities we model, this is what we find is single family homeowners largely remaining the same. So then who who wins? It's gonna be your multifamily that you know, in Spokane they decrease on median ten percent. ⁓ some of your townhouses and row homes are gonna decrease eight percent. And these results are typically true of a lot of cities we model of a similar scale. And then your vacant lots and your service parking lots are gonna double in tax burden. ⁓ again, these are this is all a sliding scale. This is not a all or nothing policy that cities have access to. It's it's a toggle. ⁓ typically they need the state to give them that toggle, ⁓ but then they they could figure out how much they they want to dial it up or dial it down. Hmm. So this idea of land value tax is from Henry George. I would like you to talk like a little bit about the history of land value tax because although it seems to be a centuries old concept, it's very infrequently deployed in the United States. So can you sort of walk us through like where this comes from and why this is not more heavily deployed if it's been around for such a long time? Henry George, around eighteen nineties, ⁓ moves to San Francisco. He's a journalist, political philosopher. And as I was talking about earlier, this is the industrial ages and the densest our cities have ever been. And he's seeing all this progress and he's asking himself, man, this is The industrial ages, we can now produce things quicker than ever. We we're building things we've never thought were imaginable at speeds we never thought were imaginable. But with all of this gain, now all of a sudden, instead of people living in farms all spread out, you know, that was our frontier at one point. Go own your forty acres and make your farmland. ⁓ all of a sudden people are moving into the city, and I see a lot of poverty with all this progress, all this prosperity. And what you realize was these workers, despite all this progress, Because there was so much progress, because it was so valuable for people to be around each other near factories, that the landowners were the ones gaining the most. And as those factories became more productive, the landowners, because wages would go up, because the factory was making more profit, the landowners could raise rents more. And in fact, it's kind of funny thinking about that that was San Francisco in the eighteen nineties and in peak you know density for San Francisco, but we think to the the news of the past couple of months with AI raising San Francisco. San Francisco's going through a a rent boom of forty percent year over year or something like that right now, right? And it's because all of a sudden San Francisco is extremely productive with AI. And so it's a similar story just a a century later. And ⁓ so Henry George says land has land is a big deal and we should tax it. ⁓ it's it doesn't move if you're an economics person, ⁓ a very good tax is a tax that doesn't move. You can You can move your income, you could decrease income, you could decrease your labor, you can move your consumption, you could decrease your consumption. You're not going to decrease land. Land can't flee the country, it can't flee the city. ⁓ He actually does have a decent amount of success. ⁓ and even in the United States, it's it's plausible that a lot of property tax, you know, has stuck around because of of Henry George's influence. ⁓ but he probably doesn't have as much success as a lot of us would have hoped. And now we're seeing a resurgence of his ideas in the form of land value tax. I think in large part because of this urbanist moment, thanks to the Yimbys, in large part that urbanist moment exists not randomly. It exists because there's a genuine problem that we've seen increase over the past decade. And now there's a solution that ⁓ folks are looking towards because we're seeing these problems ⁓ with with land ownership ⁓ and private land ownership and trying to solve problems for our cities, and this is a solution to it. So I think That's why we're seeing a huge resurgence in the ideas of land value tax. So even though we've seen like this resurgence, I want to go back to the question like how many cities have actually implemented land value tax? So can you speak to that? Most states don't allow cities to do this policy. Pennsylvania is the one state that has allowed it. ⁓ and they've had twenty cities implement ⁓ a split rate tax, taxing buildings less than the value of land or taxing land more than buildings. And Those 20 cities include Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh implements it in 1960s and starts dialing it up because it's going through ⁓ this post industrial bust that a lot of its peer cities, even in Ohio, ⁓ Baltimore and New York, up upstate New York, are experiencing. And then the economic evidence suggests that Pittsburgh recovered the best out of those cities because of it this the increase in land value tax. When you compare it to its peers, when it increased its land value tax, it saw an increase in housing unit infill development. saw an increase in permits. ⁓ it also saw a decrease in vacant land in general and vacancy in general. And so it it worked quite well in Pittsburgh. But it's kind of ironic that Pennsylvania is is the one state that's implemented this because they're also a state that does not require reassessments of property. So every year or or in some states, you know, in Washington state every year each property is assessed. But in Pennsylvania, even today you have cities where their last assessment was done in like nineteen sixty. ⁓ And so Pittsburgh goes through this massive reassessment in two in nineteen ninety nine, ⁓ for the first time in two decades, and people's property taxes obviously skyrocketed or or their prop their their assessment skyrocketed. So they weren't happy. They were wondering why they're doing this different thing, and they wanted to tax the skyscraper more. So they get rid of their split rate system ⁓ in two thousand, ⁓ which is what what helped make those skyscrapers in the first place. And now two decades later the Pittsburgh Gazette editors are coming out saying we need to revisit this. We should probably go back to a split rate system. ⁓ we still have fifteen cities in Pennsylvania who have a split rate tax. ⁓ but again, they have a split rate tax on bad assessment roles. You need good property tax assessments to to have a good property tax policy in general, even if it's just normal property taxes, let alone split rate. ⁓ so yes, there are Pennsylvania's the the one city that's really implemented this policy to to good effect, ⁓ at least according to economic evidence, this far. Mm-hmm. So I know the the Center for Land Economics works with several jurisdictions at the state and also at the municipality level to help them understand land value tax and get it implemented. I want to understand what are the levers that cities and states need to move to be able to allow cities to implement their own land value tax. So we talked about assessments need to be on some sort of frequency that you have to be allowed to tax property as both buildings and land. What are some of the other letters and c levers and can you speak to those as well? Yeah, I think I think you kind of just nailed it, which is ⁓ you need good assessments to begin with, ⁓ which a lot of states we again we have a pretty robust property tax system. A lot of states have good property tax assessments. And then you need the state to enable cities to do this. Now, some states are bound by their constitution. ⁓ and that's where in Washington State I said they're they're bound by the constitution, but at least you can exempt all buildings from taxation. There or are are var varieties of these policies. Then once you do that, then it's just a matter of the city implementing. making sure that residents know about it, going through the politics of of influencing a policy like this or you know you're touching property taxes, you're touching taxes. That's a scary thing for people. ⁓ but when you do the data analysis, which I think is really important, that's what we help them do, is the homework, right? When you do the homework and are able to take the homework to the single family homeowner and to the industry, you can get rid of a lot of the boogeymans. ⁓ I think a lot of people think, ⁓ you're touching taxes, this is going to be terrible for single family homeowners. That's where the homework helps. ⁓ this this doesn't really touch single family homeowners. And then industry really scared when you touch taxes, this is actually good for you. ⁓ go to the apartment association, make sure they understand this is a decrease. We're not trying to increase your taxes. And just because the state is enabling it doesn't mean we will. ⁓ there's a lot of that sort of work to be done as well. And that's one of the things that's probably the most important piece to getting this policy done is is just doing the homework. Okay. So I just want to like go full circle here because it seems like all the things that we've talked about at building better cities. So zoning, ⁓ infrastructure investments, ⁓ TOD development, all these things on a parcel by parcel basis does increase the value of the parcel when you're like scrolling on Zillow. But it seems like it's not increasing the the tax on the parcel if it's not being sold. And that's where the speculation and the property tax system as it currently is envisioned in many cities prevents development from happening. So maybe you have a more eloquent way of saying that, but I just want everyone to understand that. All of the policy levers that cities are using to build more are helping speculators stay where they're at if we don't implement a land value tax as well. Is that fair to say? No, that's that's ⁓ incredibly correct. Yes. the the city's creating a whole bunch of land value and nowadays cities are upzoning all over the place and that's creating a whole bunch of land value for private landowners. And without the tax incentive, one, when you're taxing buildings, you're decreasing development. And then two, when you're when you're not taxing land enough, right? We we have some land tax because it's in the property tax. You're just creating a huge windfall for private landowners. And I think returning that windfall that that the city creates is important. ⁓ and that's why we sometimes say this is all about returning the value of land or the returning the value of land to the community that makes it valuable. ⁓ it's not even about taxes, right? It's just about returning. I always feel like land value tax is like the last gap you need to make, that last leap. To really take all of this investment that's happening and actualize it for the community. I I've been told it's the holy grail of urbanism. So you're not you're not alone in that thought. Okay. Because, you know, I first came to land value tax probably in 2018. I was working in San Francisco and was obsessed with tax increment financing. And I felt that this was a more elegant way of interpreting land value than a TIF district. So I w just want us to spend a little bit of time talking about this relationship. And you know, to be fair, I did send you an article that the Lincoln Policy Institute does talk about this. I'll link it for everyone in the show notes. But ⁓ tax increment financing is a development public financing strategy that usually identifies a geographic area in which a lot of public investment will be made to improve infrastructure ⁓ and improve public resources in that area. And that will increase the land value of the surrounding parcels. And you can over time take that increased land value and use it to pay for the capital expense of making that upfront investment in the infrastructure. So it's sort of like the reverse of the land value tax in my head. Well, and part of the problem is TIFFs are so variable, right? And so you have Baltimore now doing the first non contiguous TIFF where they are putting TIFS on s single parcels that decide to do affordable housing development, where they're basically funding the affordable housing development and assuming that the development then because they have such high property taxes, that the tax on that development in the years thereafter pays it off. ⁓ feels very like sort of backwards to me because it's like you could just stop taxing development. Baltimore has a very high property tax rate. ⁓ I get what they're doing and they're dealing with the circumstances they have. And then there are TIFFs where it's like, okay, we think that this is going to raise land values a lot. The question is, is the TIFF being funded because it's raising land values a lot or is it being funded because we're going to tax the apartment building, you know, over the next thirty years ⁓ the the value of the building itself, in which case you still have a development tax. And so ⁓ this it just depends on the way the TIFF is is built. ⁓ but I think that these could be complementary, right? In a in a world where we have complete land value taxes and the city wants to build something massive, you know, a new subway. It's entirely possible that the city doesn't have that money up front, but that it knows that it can get that back. And so you can go fund that subway that way. ⁓ and and to sort of bring it full circle, you know, we've been working on this project, the IBX project, the Intraboro Express project in New York City. It's the first project that's connecting ⁓ The interboroughs rather than running through Manhattan. So it's gonna be a train out there. It's gonna be a five billion plus dollar investment. ⁓ one of the first new end-to-end train investments of the city in decades. And there's a huge proposal that that we're working on right now with other folks. Other folks are doing better work on this than us. We're just sort of tracking it ⁓ on a land value increment tax to fund it. So ⁓ you can imagine, okay, it's a five billion dollar project. Let's just try to bond out a billion of it, let's put a billion of it on bond and Draw a district around each stop because each stop is going to gain 10% in land value once this project's complete and tax that increment to pay off the bond. And then once the bond's paid off, you can keep that increment tax because they have the authority. Government, Governor Holkle just expanded the authority ⁓ for the city to do this ⁓ another year. And and you can keep that to pay for MTA operations. The cool part about this is Mamdani also was an assembly member a few years back. And nobody really knew about this authority because New York City has never used this authority to do a land value increment tax around new development. ⁓ but Mamdani was the one assembly member who was public about extending the authority. So this is a weird instance where we have the governor and the city ⁓ mayor potentially on board for something that could be transformative. And it it to me helps prove the point that these policies could actually interplay, right? This is a land value increment tax. You know, we're we're taxing the increments of land value ⁓ to fund an upfront bond for a massive investment. and so land value tax a long way of saying land value tax and TIFFs are separate, but there's like cool interplay between them. ⁓ and that there's ways to think about also how TIFFs are just taxes on development sometimes when you could get rid of the tax on development. ⁓ yeah, that's super interesting. Especially because the data that the Center for Land Economics has been putting together shows repeated success in land value tax being able to capture the value or show the incremental change in value when these big investments are made. So I mean before we started recording for the pod, I asked you the one question like what is the surest way to increase land value around a set of parcels? And we I said subway. Because I've been thinking a lot about transit investment. Right. And like what's the one way to crash every land ⁓ value? ⁓ in a set of in an area. ⁓ pollute the area. Right. So like you bring in these extractive businesses and that ends up tanking land values. So really land has this inherent value to it, but how we allocate land, how we zone land, how we decide who gets to build where and when really dictates that value of the land. So ⁓ I know we've been through a lot today. And I'm sure people will want to listen to this a couple of times and really like digest, but how can somebody who's interested in this idea learn more and understand the opportunity that land value tax has to offer? Yeah, you can check us out on landeconomics.org. Our sub stack is linked prominently there. ⁓ we blog about land, land value taxes, ⁓ modern land value tax implementations or or or the momentum of land value tax. And as well as a lot of our research on this issue. So for instance, I I referenced the report we did in Spokane, which is up on our website. ⁓ we have one pagers and an overview of the way we view the problem of land speculation today and the ways in which land value tax can solve this. ⁓ but really, if you are interested in this, what we love is people who are interested in this who are involved in their local area, whether they're a city council person or you know, part of their Yembi chapter ⁓ or strong towns chapter or whatever it happens to be. ⁓ reach out. We love to work with local folks on getting this done at the local level ⁓ and getting the state to allow the local city to do it. ⁓ we're working in plenty of states and would love to connect with more people. Awesome. And you know, just to leave people with something to think about, like what are the biggest criticisms that you hear against land value tax? Because I just you know if somebody's bringing this up to their neighbor or their parent or their spouse or a friend this weekend. Like what are some of the common misconceptions people have around land value tax and what can we arm our listeners with so that when they hear these things that they can address them in a you know authentic way? Yeah, there's boogeymans. again, when you when you say land value tax, it scares people 'cause you're talking about a new tax and immediately people think that you just like really want to tax people. So, you know, I start with the decrease the building taxes. So that helps solve the boogeyman of, ⁓ you're trying to tax me more 'cause I'm a single family homeowner. ⁓ Again, most of our city single family homes are good uses. And so y typically when people are getting ⁓ dinner with with their, you know, local resident friend, ⁓ that's the first thing the local resident friend's gonna care about is how does this impact the taxes I currently pay? ⁓ and so we you can beat back against that immediately. Then if you're talking to somebody really wonky, the usual pushback is how do we do assessments? how do we value land? And and it turns out we already do that, ⁓ in just about every county in the United States. We value land. ⁓ depending on, you know, how often you're doing reassessments, we could do a better job. ⁓ but there's a lot of vacant land sales, tear down sales, there's a lot of depreciated cost. What I like to tell people is if we had a world without property taxes today, we would think that property taxes are the dumbest idea possible because it's not it's not feasible to do at all. How do we value every parcel in a city? That sounds impossible. ⁓ and yet we do it, right? We're capable of doing these things. And while we're valuing every property at a full market value, ⁓ We're also valuing their land every year. So we already have the infrastructure in place, which is great. Greg called land value tax the holy grail of urbanism. And I don't think that's a hyperbole. Every investment a city makes in transit, in parks, and schools creates land value. And under our current system, most of that value flows straight to whoever holds the deed for that parcel, whether or not they did anything to earn it. The surface parking lot on your downtown corridor is proof of the concept. Study revenue, a fortune and land appreciation, and a fraction of the tax burden of the building next door. But land value tax changes this math. If this episode gave you something to think about, share it with someone who's trying to build cities, fighting for housing, or just trying to figure out why nothing seems to get built where people want to live. 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