Want to End the Scourge of Surface Parking? Tax Land, Not Buildings

The conventional property tax, which taxes land and buildings at the same rate, is essentially backwards when it comes to the behaviors it incentivizes. It penalizes property owners for building or making improvements to their structures, while rewarding speculators and absentee landlords who would rather allow their properties to decay than make expensive (and annually taxable) improvements. Taxing land and buildings at the same rate means that as long as you don’t put any buildings on your land, your tax bill is going to remain relatively cheap. If you’re a speculator, this means that you only need a modest amount of revenue (say, a few bucks a day from people driving into the city for work or to go shopping) in order to sit on that land indefinitely, or until someone comes along offering your “pie-in-the-sky” price (to quote one downtown city planner I spoke to)—effectively keeping the land out of the hands of those with genuine interest in putting it to productive use.

By taxing land at or near its development potential, however, owners of land being used at less than maximum productivity would be paying a disproportionate amount in taxes in order to keep it that way.

If the city is trying to encourage development—and to attract the 70,000 more downtown residents it seeks by 2025—it hardly makes sense to place a tax on that behavior. Similarly, if the city wants potential developers to treat land as the scarce resource that it is—encouraging them to build up rather than out in order to maximize economic output and reduce sprawl—it makes sense to tax land at a higher rate than buildings.