Center for Land Economics

Overview

The Center for Land Economics (CLE) is a US nonprofit research and education organisation launched in February 2025 by Greg Miller and Lars Doucet, which "conducts research and provides education to promote equitable assessments and foster sustainable development for the benefit of communities."[1][2] Its core thesis is "the value of land returned to the community that makes it valuable."[1] The Center represents the modern, empirically minded wing of the Georgist revival, focusing on the practical questions that determine whether land value taxation can work in the real world. Co-founder Greg Miller previously worked as a Program Analyst in the Office of Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); Doucet is the author of the Progress and Poverty Substack and a longtime writer on Georgist economics.[3]

Focus

The Center's central concern is land assessment — building better methods and data to value land separately from improvements, directly tackling the most common objection to LVT, that land value cannot be assessed accurately. Its flagship tool, LVTShift, is an open-source modelling platform that lets a city estimate the effect of a land-value-tax shift on property tax bills by property type and neighbourhood, drawing on parcel-level data about vacant and underutilised land and land-to-improvement ratios.[4] In June 2026, LVTShift was extended with AI-agent-driven commands (/lvt-city, /legality-analyzer, /explain-model, /refine-model) that let a user with a Census API key and an AI coding agent run a full city-level LVT-shift simulation — from assembling assessment data through generating parcel-level distributional visualizations — without writing the modelling code themselves.[7] The Center has also built land-value-transparency mapping tools, including CivicMapper (3D land-value visualization across nine cities, including New York, St. Paul, and Cincinnati) and the open-source, MIT-licensed "Put It On A Map" suite (a parcel explorer, data fetcher, and GIS format converters), pitched by co-founder Lars Doucet as a persuasion tool because most people underestimate how sharply land value concentrates in city centers.[8] The Center has also published empirical studies of assessment failures — including analyses of the systematic undervaluation of vacant land in Baltimore and across Maryland (2024–2026), arguing that such undervaluation shifts tax burdens and rewards speculative blight.[5] It has also partnered with student policy teams on city-level parcel simulations, including the University of Notre Dame Student Policy Network's South Bend and Princeton reports and, most recently, an analysis of a hypothetical land value tax shift for Cincinnati, Ohio (July 2026, also published directly on the Center's own site as "From the Ground Up"). That report drew the partnership's first independent press coverage — WVXU (Cincinnati's NPR station) covered it on July 20, 2026, reporting a cautiously supportive reaction from Cincinnati City Council member Mark Jeffreys and an update on the pending Ohio SJR 7 constitutional amendment its scenario depends on.[6]

Significance

Where older organisations preserve and teach the tradition, the Center for Land Economics aims to operationalise it — turning Georgist theory into deployable assessment technology and policy guidance for the 2020s. Its work was recognised with a 2025 J.M.K. Innovation Prize.[1]

See Also

• Lars Doucet — co-founder and Georgist writer
• Objection: Land value can't be assessed accurately — the objection the Center's assessment work directly addresses
• Land Value Tax — the policy the Center's LVTShift tool models
• Common Wealth Canada — a comparable data-driven organisation focused on Canada
• Miller & Hoskins — College-Town LVT Shift Simulations and Notre Dame SPN's Cincinnati LVT Analysis — the Center's partnered student-policy parcel simulations

Sources

1. Center for Land Economics — official site, home and "Reports." landeconomics.org — used for the Center's mission statement, core thesis, and its 2025 J.M.K. Innovation Prize recognition (fetched this session).
2. "Announcing the Center for Land Economics," Progress and Poverty Substack, 24 February 2025. progressandpoverty.substack.com — used for the February 2025 launch date and the founding by Greg Miller and Lars Doucet.
3. Center for Land Economics, "About Us." landeconomics.org/about-us — used for Greg Miller's prior HUD Office of Policy Development and Research role and the co-founders' backgrounds.
4. Center for Land Economics, "LVTShift." landeconomics.org/lvtshift — used for the description of the open-source LVTShift land-value-tax modelling tool and its capabilities.
5. Center for Land Economics, "Reports." landeconomics.org/reports — used for the Baltimore and Maryland vacant-land undervaluation studies (2024–2026) and their argument about burden-shifting and speculative blight.
6. Becca Costello (2026-07-20), "Land value tax," WVXU (Cincinnati Public Radio, NPR member station). wvxu.org — used for the Cincinnati report's press reception, Council member Mark Jeffreys's reaction, and the Ohio SJR 7 legislative status update; see full treatment on the Cincinnati report's research page.
7. Greg Miller, "You Can Now Vibe Code a Land Value Tax Shift Analysis," Progress and Poverty (Substack), 11 June 2026. progressandpoverty.substack.com — used for the LVTShift AI-agent commands and their requirements (Census API key, AI coding agent).
8. Lars Doucet, "Just Put It On a Map," Progress and Poverty (Substack), 12 March 2026. progressandpoverty.substack.com — used for the CivicMapper and "Put It On A Map" tool descriptions and Doucet's persuasion-through-mapping argument.