Objection: Land value can't be assessed accurately
The most common practical objection to LVT — that you can't separate land value from building value — and the empirical and methodological responses to it.
The Objection
A land value tax requires assessing land separately from the buildings on it. Critics argue this is impractical: in dense cities, land rarely sells unimproved, so there are few "pure land" sales to benchmark against. Inaccurate or arbitrary assessments would make the tax unfair and legally vulnerable.
The Response, with Evidence
The objection is serious but is generally treated as a solvable engineering problem, not a fundamental barrier.
1. It is already done at scale. Estonia (pure land tax since 1993), Denmark's grundskyld, and several Australian states assess land values separately as routine practice. Most US assessments already publish a land/improvement split.
2. Land is easier to assess than buildings, not harder. In Does Georgism Work? Part 3 (2022), Lars Doucet makes the key counter-intuitive point: land value is spatially smooth — neighbouring parcels have similar land values — whereas building value varies house-by-house. That smoothness means location-based methods (comparable vacant-lot sales, teardown sales, and the "residual" of sale price minus depreciated structure cost) can estimate land value with accuracy comparable to or better than whole-property assessment.
3. Modern methods exist. Computer-assisted mass appraisal (CAMA), hedonic regression, and cooperative-game approaches such as the Shapley-value land/building separation (Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2020) formalise the split.
4. Errors are bounded and contestable. Because land is immobile and visible, gross mis-assessment is easy to challenge; assessment quality improves with investment (the focus of the Center for Land Economics, co-founded by Doucet).
Net Assessment
Assessment difficulty raises the cost and care of implementing LVT well; it does not undermine the case. The objection is best read as an implementation agenda, not a refutation.
See Also
Sources
- Lars Doucet (2022), "Does Georgism Work? Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value Be Accurately Assessed?", Astral Codex Ten — wiki summary · original
- Kumar et al. (2020), "Land and building separation based on Shapley values," Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature). Article
- Lincoln Institute of Land Policy — assessment research. wiki summary