>Imagine long-time residents getting kicked out not because a developer wants to make buck, but because the tax system requires that to happen.
Some of us think that would be a good thing. My elderly neighbour has been living on her own in a five bedroom house for twenty five years meanwhile there are people nearby struggling to raise a family in one or two bedroom houses. She doesn't need that house, she is just there out of inertia. Letting the tax system nudge people in the right direction is a good thing.
Georgists would say that if some corporation built Disneyland next door, I no longer deserve to live there. How am I to compete with the vast productivity of a massive corporation?
Where do I deserve to live then? Only where my productivity matches the economic bar of those around me?
I'm getting old and tired. Am I only allowed in a retirement home?
On the contrary, Georgists would say that if some corporation built Disneyland next door, they have to compensate the local community for their use of that valuable land. Local homeowners have to do the exact same thing, but a single home would pay vastly less tax compared to the much more expansive Disneyland. So even the homeowners would marginally benefit in that scenario. Land is always valued according to the potential highest and best use, so the fact that a Disneyland may or may not have been built in any specific location matters less than one might expect.
To an economist, the highest and best use of the land around disneyland is not my home. It's not housing. It's hotels, motels, restaurants. So my land would now be taxed at that rate, until I'm forced out
For devil's advocate's sake, how is this not state sponsored gentrification?
The problem economists would point out is that this is a fully general argument against any development. Which is exactly what leads to the negative side of gentrification - people eventually being forced out of their communities, because there's way too little developed real estate and the rent is too damn high. Georgism lowers rents by pushing towards the highest and best use of land, which is the anti-gentrification move.
In your specific example, you shouldn't assume that the supposed change in the "highest and best use" will be enough to price you out if you're a typical homeowner (not a vulnerable renter in a sharply gentrifying area): the numbers don't really pencil out that way. High land values exist in some places, but they're quite rare and quite concentrated.
The solution to this is to use that LVT revenue to fund UBI, such that the income from all that Disneyland-related land value offsets your own LVT burden.
In a mathematically-perfect setup (100% LVT going entirely to UBI, with zero overhead and zero other government expenditures), the break-even point where your LVT exactly equals your UBI would mean that you own your exact equal share of that tax jurisdiction's total land value; if you own more, then you pay for it, and if you own less, then you get paid for it. Obviously in the real world some of that LVT revenue has to go toward paying people to collect taxes / distribute income checks (not to mention the many other functions of a typical government), but the point is that LVT+UBI produces a self-balancing system that maximizes fairness even for people using their land “non-productively”.
Some of us think that would be a good thing. My elderly neighbour has been living on her own in a five bedroom house for twenty five years meanwhile there are people nearby struggling to raise a family in one or two bedroom houses. She doesn't need that house, she is just there out of inertia. Letting the tax system nudge people in the right direction is a good thing.