In the immediate order of things yeah, tenants aren't going to receive any relief from taxing land. The benefit lies in the second, or maybe even third order of effects that LVT produces.

Do we want the landlords to just sit on all of that value they're accumulating or do we want to take in more tax revenue (not a higher tax rate) as their land value increases and then do something for the common good with that additional tax revenue? Maybe tax relief for businesses, or social programs that reduce the cost of living for the workers. Or even better, encourage the landowner to further develop their land to get a better return, potentially benefitting tenants and the nearby community? Because that's what LVT does, or at the very least enables.

LVTs focus is on maximizing land value, not profit. It just so happens that when a landowner maximizes the value a piece of their land provides, higher profits are almost guaranteed.

It's also a bit of a mistake to view LVT solely through an economic lense. Sure, we quantify it through a dollar amount or a difference in profits, but the value in LVT comes from how individuals value the land as a whole. So you are absolutely correct that a place without native vegetation, parks, playgrounds, etc. is going to be valued less than a place with those amenities by a lot of people. But only if people value greenspace and amenities more than pure economic output, which is mostly the case when it comes to residential spaces.

If people value greenspace, than the land around said greenspace will have a higher value. LVT would then incentivize those land owners to maximize their value, which would obviously include not destroying or removing the greenspace. Instead of would (likely) be to densify housing, or convert existing buildings to mixed-use spaces.

> If people value greenspace, than the land around said greenspace will have a higher value. LVT would then incentivize those land owners to maximize their value, which would obviously include not destroying or removing the greenspace.

This is where I believe LVT breaks down when faced with greedy reality.

In a perfect world, I totally agree with the above. That would be pretty awesome.

Could that ever happen in the real world of greedy corrupt politicians who never look further in time than the next election?

How do we assign monetary value to pleasant and beautiful things that provide quality of life? Like the parks and playgrounds and sports fields, etc etc. I'm sure there are studies, but the numbers are not as clear-cut and not as immediate as tax revenue this quarter, so they get ignored.

Each individual lot gets evaluated in isolation and the most profitable choice, individually, is to maximize revenue on that lot, so every lot ends up being a high rise concrete box, either offices or apartments. It would take a very brave politician to say let's look at the big picture long term, sacrifice some tax revenue today and build for a better quality of life because long term that will raise values more.

LVT is uncommon so a lot of it is argued in theory, but I suggest looking at a somewhat similar decision process happening in cities today, which relates to the homeless.

How are cities reacting to homeless? They fence off all the open green space and parks, rip out benches and bus stop roofs, eliminate all public bathrooms and so on. Making the area miserabe for everyone, destroying quality of life. Oh but it is difficult to measure quality of life, so they don't.

It would be much wiser for society as a whole to attend to the homeless and let us all have the open parks and benches and bathrooms, city life would be far more pleasant and long term also more profitable if cities can thrive instead of decay.

But that's not how politicians think or act, so I'm fairly sure it would be the same with LVT.

Well I can't speak to the notion of corrupt politicians, but it's worth noting that if it's in the interests of the landowners, then they'd likely fight to keep anything that they feel would keep their value high. And especially if they started developing/investing in their land to maximize the potential return of the land. Anecdotally, I've seen individual homeowners stir up enough support in my major Canadian city to stop city councils from starting somewhat major development projects, so I don't think that it'd be as inevitable as you're making it out to be.

It's also a mistake to say that a lot of land gets evaluated in isolation, because that's not even true with a the current property tax. You absolutely factor in the surrounding community and external factors when valuing a piece of land. Land in a downtown area is going to be inherently worth more than land on the periphery of a city due to the activity and potential of the land to generate economic activity.

To your point though, would you say that an apartment building next to a park (or even within several blocks of a park) is worth more than an apartment building with no park in proximity? I think most people would as well, therefore the apartment building with the park in proximity would have a higher value (which would extend to all land in proximity of the park), and thus the local government would be able to collect a higher tax dollar amount because of the park being there. Whereas maybe they could get a similar total amount by building another building, but why would a local government purposefully lower the amount of tax they'd collect on each plot of land? It's in the interest of the local government to maximize the value of the land within their jurisdiction to collect the highest amount of tax possible. Just like it's in the landowners interest to develop and invest in their land to get the highest return on their investment possible.

Re: homelessness, it would seem to me like a large group of people without housing would benefit from a system that incentivizes building more housing. Which LVT does. It would also encourage public spaces to be as ammenible as possible, so that the park is as appealing as possible in order to maximize the value for surrounding lots of land. At this point though we're talking second or even third order effects of LVT, which like you mentioned aren't super clear or even assured because LVT mostly remains in the theoretical. But if we have a sound theory, at this point why not try it and see what happens? Our current systems are very clearly failing us, so if we have ideas with sound reasoning, can things really get so much worse than they already are?

> It's also a mistake to say that a lot of land gets evaluated in isolation, because that's not even true with a the current property tax.

Sorry, my sentence may have been confusingly worded. I don't mean for tax computation (which certainly uses neighborhood comparables), but I mean that every lot owner will evaluate the maximum profit for their own pocket only, without any regard to greater good of the town. So every lot owner will sell to the developer who'll make a highrise building. Let "someone else" sell a lot to build a library or a tennis court! But there is no "someone else", everyone will seek to maximize personal profit which means no nice places will exist, only tightly packed concrete highrises.

> To your point though, would you say that an apartment building next to a park (or even within several blocks of a park) is worth more than an apartment building with no park in proximity?

Absolutely! But to actually sacrifice short-term tax revenue for longer-term benefit would require forward-thinking politicians. You mention being in Canada so those might exist there, but here in the US, there are none.

> homelessness, it would seem to me like a large group of people without housing would benefit from a system that incentivizes building more housing

I hesitated to mention homeless because my comment has nothing to do with the homeless issue per se. Only using it as a very real example where we can see that town governments are completely willing to ruin quality of life for everyone (fencing off parks, etc) just to save a few dollars short term. Even though it would be immensely better to spend a bit more upfront, to raise the quality of life for the whole town, which will bring in more prosperity and more property value and more tax later on.

X11 applications will still "work" on Plasma Wayland session by utilizing XWayland, a tool that (afaik) runs a compact X11 session for each application.

What is being removed is running an X11-native Plasma session, only Wayland Plasma sessions will be available starting with Plasma 6.8.

Because there is only a fixed amount of land a city can ever possibly sustain. Urban sprawl all you want, but eventually you run out of land to keep expanding into or the city goes broke because there aren't enough revenue generating properties in a given area to cover the cost of servicing those areas. At some point more has to turn into better and more efficient.

> Absolutely valid to say that "best and highest use" is vague and untrustworthy at best, but it's said this way to avoid getting trapped in the weeds of what exactly it means.

I mean.. if there was to be a law established to do it this way, it better go into very precise detail of exactly what it means and a verifiable mechanism and formula of how it is calculated.

Anything else would be a wide open door for corruption where assessors can do whatever they want to benefit various groups and harm others.

I definitely agree, I should have specified that it's said that way to avoid getting trapped in the weeds when talking with the average person, not when discussing actual policy implementation.

The next paragraph in my original comment starts to touch on how a LVT is somewhat inherently resistant to abuse by bad actors. Unlike financial accounts and spreadsheets and tax filings, you can't distort or hide your land, what's on it, and what's around it. If someone claims that their land is worthless, but there's hotels and amusement parks or maybe even a new large outlet mall being built nearby, it's easy to see that that claim isn't valid. I'd even say that it'd be relatively easy to penalize those assessors who intentionally misvalue land.

Of course, the caveat is in how the system is implemented like you mentioned. And while I'd love to say that there are workarounds and fixes and stopgaps to prevent for every edgecase a LVT presents, but I can't because we're only starting to see states and municipalities entertain the idea of LVT.

> Absolutely valid to say that "best and highest use" is vague and untrustworthy at best, but it's said this way to avoid getting trapped in the weeds of what exactly it means.

I want the government to be "trapped in the weeds" of specific definitions of terms, not free to define them as whomever is in charge at the moment sees fit.

> Broadly speaking, "best and highest use" is entirely contextual to the land in question. The "best" use for 40 acres of nutrient-rich soil an hour away from the nearest city is going to be agriculture. While a plot of land smack dab in the middle of mainstreet in a rural town would probably be a commercial building or a mixed use building offering an apartment(s) above a shop or restaurant of some kind. Downtown in a metropolis would be some multi-storied residential or business/commercial building, while the middle of nowhere filled with trees is forestry and maybe mining. Everything is contextual.

Absolutely, and I believe the landowner (influenced by the market of potential alternative landowners) is the person to make that decision, not the taxing agency.

> Who determines the "best" use case is usually delegated to a free market of land value appraisers. It seems counter-intuitive to leave so much leeway at this part, but consider that land value taxation is attempting to best capture the true value of the land. Meaning that land owners want the lowest possible valuation of their land to pay less taxes, but since land can't be hidden, it's (in theory) hard to fake the value of your land. I can't argue my house in an urban community is relatively worthless when A) every neighboring piece of land will have more or less the same value, and B) everyone can see where the land my house is located and what's around it.

It seems like zoning and other restrictions are also very important here, which provides yet another conflict of interest.

> This plays into your first comment, if your neighbor adds a bunch of improvements to his land, if you and your other neighbors gain benefit from those improvements (they opened a store, or a school, or installed a modern sewer system or clean drinking water system, or created a private land reserve, and you and your property have access to these), then yes your land would see an increase in value as a result. However, these types of improvements are rarely the case, and are mostly handled by some form of government. The same with a neighbor "overpaying", since in theory they wouldn't "overpay", they'd just be paying the value that the land is assessed at.

> Alternatively, if your neighborhood is run down compared to something brand new and shiny, and all of your neighbors decide to clean things up and do renovations and increase the overall perceived value of the neighborhood, then yes you'd see your property value increase as a result of others actions. But this is no different than when communities go through "urban renewal" and other programs that artificially increase the communities' value as a result of private and public funding.

No argument from me here. In both these cases, I would think that the land value would increase independent from any improvements made, which can be addressed through the current assessment methods based on fair market value instead of highest and best use.

Considering that there is a fixed amount of land, I do want to raise taxes for those who choose to sit on undeveloped or underutilized land within urban areas rather than either selling it to someone who will develop or developing it themselves. Although it's a bit disingenuous to refer to only refer to it as "raising taxes" since it's taxing based on land value rather than improvement value. It's probable that there would be a significant amount of land plots that would see their taxes decreased as well, especially those along the peripheries of cities since they wouldn't have access or proximity to the same services as a downtown or business district would.

I'd also like to think that a lot of land being developed leads to new businesses appearing and more economic development when compared to just leaving the same lot empty and unused.

Baltimore is a terrible example if you want to talk about underutilized land. The city literally can't give away vacant homes because of how badly the city is run.

If supply exceeds demand so much that the equilibrium price is below $0, there is no underutilized land.