Earlier this year, I wrote about the gigantically good sense of land-value taxation (LVT), and the madness of not doing LVT. (I also wrote a letter, published in City newsweekly, on the subject.) The only thing that frustrates me about the LVT is that I didn’t know about it sooner: the progressive property tax practice of taxing land more and buildings/ structures/improvements less.
In April, my fellow LVT-obsessed Rochesterian Paul Kramer and I arranged to have Josh Vincent, the nation’s leading LVT expert and advocate, visit Rochester to talk tax with the Mayor of Rochester and his senior staff, the Rochester City Council, and several other gatherings of community leaders and citizens. The result? Quite a few opened eyes and opened minds (and some nice media coverage). Auspiciously, the city agreed to commission an analysis of the feasibility of land-value tax for the City of Rochester. We are expecting the results of the study within weeks, and will be sure to share those results with you here (and in a zillion other places, assuming our confident prediction that the study will reveal that LVT would turn property tax from a terribly regressive force into a progressive one for our city).