Miller & Hoskins — College-Town Land Value Tax Shift Simulations (South Bend, IN and Princeton, NJ)

Summary

This entry covers two linked, revenue-neutral parcel-level tax-shift simulations, jointly announced on the Progress and Poverty Institute (PPI) blog: "New Reports: Land Value Taxes in College Towns." Greg Miller, president of the Center for Land Economics (CLE), led Toward Smarter Taxation (dated April 25, 2025), a South Bend, Indiana study with Notre Dame's undergraduate Student Policy Network (SPN), modeling land taxed at 4x the rate of buildings. Stephen Hoskins, a PPI researcher, authored A Land Value Tax Shift for Princeton, NJ, splitting Princeton's 2024 municipal rate of $0.578/$100 of total value into $0.860/$100 of land value plus $0.291/$100 of improvement value. Both PDFs were fetched and read in full (South Bend: 60 pages; Princeton: 10 pages). [VERIFY: dating] — the South Bend report and the joint announcement are dated 2025 (blog metadata: 2025-05-16); the Princeton PDF's file metadata shows a 2026-01-27 creation date at a re-uploaded "-2.pdf" URL after the original link 404'd — the basis for treating these as 2026-cycle reports.

Both organizations are explicitly Georgist advocacy bodies: PPI's lineage runs through the Schalkenbach Foundation ecosystem, and CLE's stated mission is promoting land value taxation. Neither report is peer-reviewed; SPN is an undergraduate club whose report was prepared for CLE and South Bend's city planning office as a client deliverable.

The Core Argument / Findings

South Bend (4:1 land-to-improvement ratio, $16.7M revenue held constant via a hypothetical circuit-breaker-exempt referendum levy). Vacant land's median tax bill rises 127.8% and parking lots' 96.6% (a separate per-square-foot table gives smaller figures using a different denominator: +110.92%/+34.93%). Large multi-family (20+ units) properties see the biggest median cut (-15.5%). Among owner-occupied homesteads, 52.53% see an increase versus 47.47% a decrease, averaging +4.10%; among non-homestead (mostly rental) single-family parcels, 84.25% see a decrease, averaging -11.31%. Tax change correlates positively with neighborhood income and negatively with percent-minority population. The report's own caveat: 92% of South Bend parcels already sit at Indiana's circuit-breaker caps, so an ordinary split-rate conversion would mostly be absorbed by existing refunds — the reported effects apply only to the report's alternative referendum-levy scenario.

Princeton (land taxed roughly 3x the improvement rate, 7,950 taxable parcels analyzed). Apartments' average municipal bill falls from just under $16,000 to about $12,740 (-20%); commercial properties fall from $12,690 to $11,980 (-6%); vacant land rises from $1,150 to $1,710 (+50%). Residential parcels see a mixed +1% average change (+$40, to $4,940): of 7,135 residential parcels, 2,411 see their bill fall (typically ~10%) and 4,724 see it rise (typically 10-25%). Hoskins's stated rule of thumb: "homeowners whose house is worth more than half of their total property value will enjoy a tax cut, whereas those for whom land is the majority of property value will see their taxes rise." One named example: a permitted-but-unbuilt redevelopment site (12% building share) rises 37%, to $15,288 — the largest single-property dollar increase in the dataset.

Miller's shared framing for both cities is "LVT is a Density Discount": the studies are designed to show land taxation shifts burden off built, occupied, rented property and onto vacant, under-built land.

Relation to the Georgist Case

These are advocacy-institute simulation studies, not independent or peer-reviewed research — the same genre as Bowman & Bell's Virginia parcel studies: a static, revenue-neutral, parcel-level re-allocation of an existing tax base under a simulated rate schedule. Unlike Bowman & Bell, a National Tax Journal replication designed to test whether a prior finding generalized, Miller and Hoskins work for the advocacy organizations commissioning the reports and wrote them to demonstrate that a shift benefits development and (in South Bend) lower-income areas. They are cited here for the shift arithmetic and as a record of the advocates' own analysis and framing ("LVT is a Density Discount," Miller's phrase) — not as independent confirmation that an LVT shift causes development, migration, or welfare effects. Both are directionally consistent with the Pennsylvania split-rate incentive-effect literature (see Split-rate taxation increases urban construction), but neither models any actual behavioral response; both are pure current-year tax-bill reallocation exercises.

Nuances and Limits

• Static incidence, not behavioral prediction. Neither report models how landowners might redevelop, sell, or pass costs to tenants — the same limit the wiki flags for Bowman & Bell and England & Zhao.
• Advocacy provenance. Neither report underwent peer review or independent government review; the shared announcement states its purpose is to show "land value taxes are a good policy for these cities" — a conclusion held before, not derived neutrally from, the modeling.
• South Bend's circuit-breaker caveat limits real-world applicability, since the modeled effects depend on an alternative referendum-levy mechanism rather than an ordinary tax-code change.
• University tax-exemption angle is thin in both reports. Neither quantifies its host university's own exempt-land footprint; South Bend's report notes only in passing that religious/educational buildings are fully exempt under Indiana law, and Princeton's notes Princeton University's "large parcels" are visible on its value map without separate exemption analysis. [VERIFY: whether core campus buildings are included as taxable parcels in either dataset] — not confirmed from the source text.
• Small, self-selected base: two college-town case studies from the same two-author collaboration, announced together; no claim to generalizability is made.

Bears On

• Benefit: A land value tax can be progressive — the South Bend study's income-and-minority regression is directionally supportive, but as an advocacy-commissioned, non-peer-reviewed single-city simulation it belongs alongside, not in place of, the peer-reviewed Bowman & Bell/England & Zhao evidence already on that page.
• Objection: LVT hurts the "asset-rich, cash-poor" — the Princeton and South Bend homestead figures (4,724 of 7,135 Princeton residential parcels rising; 52.53% of South Bend homesteads rising) are relevant raw material for this objection's steelman: a meaningful minority-to-plurality of owner-occupied homes pay more under both modeled shifts, even where the citywide average is small or negative.
• Concept: Split-Rate Taxation — both reports are worked numerical examples of a 4:1 (South Bend) and roughly 3:1 (Princeton) split-rate design applied to real assessment rolls.

See Also

• Split-Rate Taxation
• A land value tax can be progressive
• Bowman & Bell — Distributional Consequences of Converting the Property Tax to a Land Value Tax
• Split-rate taxation increases urban construction
• Objection: LVT hurts the "asset-rich, cash-poor"

Sources

1. Greg Miller and Stephen Hoskins (2025), "New Reports: Land Value Taxes in College Towns," Progress and Poverty Institute. Article — used for the joint announcement framing ("LVT is a Density Discount"), the summary figures for both cities, and confirmation of Miller's Center for Land Economics affiliation and Hoskins's Progress and Poverty Institute affiliation; fetched and read in full this session (page metadata dates the post 2025-05-16).
2. Student Policy Network (University of Notre Dame), prepared for the Center for Land Economics and the City of South Bend, Indiana (2025), "Toward Smarter Taxation: An Analysis of a Split-Rate Property Tax Structure in South Bend, IN." PDF, landing page at landeconomics.org/southbend — used for all South Bend methodology, tables, and figures (Fig. 7, Fig. 8, Fig. 9, Table 3, Table 4, Table 6, the circuit-breaker caveat, and the Conclusion); fetched and read in full (60 pages) this session.
3. Stephen Hoskins, Progress and Poverty Institute (2026 file timestamp), "A Land Value Tax Shift for Princeton, NJ." PDF — used for all Princeton methodology, Table 1, Table 2, and the three named example properties; fetched and read in full (10 pages) this session. The URL given in the task and in the original blog post (.../A-Land-Value-Tax-Shift-for-Princeton-NJ.pdf, no "-2") returned HTTP 404; this "-2.pdf" URL, located via web search, returns the same report with file metadata indicating a 2026-01-27 creation/upload date.
4. Bowman, John H. & Bell, Michael E. (2008), "Distributional Consequences of Converting the Property Tax to a Land Value Tax," National Tax Journal 61(4). Wiki summary — used as the comparison genre for static, revenue-neutral parcel-shift simulations and for the "jurisdiction-dependent, not proof" framing applied to this entry's findings.
5. David Roberts (Volts podcast, June 2026), "Want less sprawl and more urban infill? Try a land value tax!" — interview with Greg Miller (Center for Land Economics) and Spokane City Council member Kitty Klitzke. volts.wtf — further listening: the lead author presenting the same LVT case to a general audience (podcast, navigation-tier; not used for any claim).