United States

Overview

The United States is the country of origin of modern Georgism — Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty (1879) in California and ran for Mayor of New York City in 1886 — and it remains the wiki's richest single source of real-world Georgist policy experiments, even though no US jurisdiction has ever adopted a full national land value tax. Ryan-Collins, Lloyd & Macfarlane's Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (2017) discusses the US, alongside the UK, as a case study in how land-backed mortgage credit and antitrust policy have shaped the modern land-housing-finance relationship (Ch. 5, Ch. 7).[1] The country's Georgist record is fragmented across states and cities rather than concentrated in a single national policy, which is why this page functions as a hub linking the wiki's scattered US material rather than a self-contained case study.

The Pennsylvania Laboratory

The clearest US concentration of land value taxation is in Pennsylvania, whose state enabling law has long permitted municipalities to tax land at a higher rate than buildings (split-rate taxation). Nearly twenty Pennsylvania municipalities have used two-rate taxation, most prominently Pittsburgh, which ran a two-rate system from 1913 until a 2001 countywide reassessment led to its repeal, and Harrisburg.[2] Altoona, Pennsylvania briefly shifted to a pure land-only tax in 2011 before reverting to a conventional property tax in 2016, citing limited impact (because county and school-district taxes still fell on buildings) and public unfamiliarity with the scheme.[2]

Beyond Pennsylvania

• Hyattsville, Maryland was the first US city to enact land value taxation, in 1898, under Judge Jackson H. Ralston; Maryland courts initially struck it down, but a subsequent state constitutional amendment (Art. 15 of the Declaration of Rights) and 1916 enabling legislation for towns remain in effect today.[2]
• Fairhope, Alabama and Arden, Delaware were founded as deliberate Georgist "single tax colonies."[2]
• Alaska has operated the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend since 1982 — not a land value tax, but the country's leading real-world example of a resource-rent dividend distributed as an unconditional per-capita payment.
• Proposition 13 (California, 1978) shows the opposite political pole: the country's most consequential property-tax revolt, capping assessed-value growth rather than shifting the tax base toward land.
• 1886 New York City mayoral election — Henry George's own campaign, and the highest-profile electoral moment in American Georgist history.

The General Property Tax and Its Narrowing

Before the modern, real-estate-only property tax, most states levied a General Property Tax that aspired to reach "all property" — land, buildings, business assets, money, and securities alike. Newly digitized assessment records analyzed by Dray, Landais & Stantcheva (2026) show its revenue rising from under 2% of GDP in 1850 to about 5% in the 1920s, then falling to roughly 2.5–3% after the 1930s as federal spending expanded, new state revenue sources appeared, and a "classification movement" carved out lower rates for intangible financial property that local assessors struggled to value.[6] The paper does not separate land from buildings — its "real property" category bundles both — so it documents the historical taxation of wealth through property generally, of which land is a large but unmeasured part, rather than a land-specific series.

2026: A Wave of State Enablement Legislation

2026 brought the country's most active year yet for state-level land value tax enablement, though still no enacted LVT anywhere in the country. New York, Virginia, and Kentucky each passed or renewed state legislation letting specific local governments adopt land-value-based taxation — see The 2026 State Land Value Tax Enablement Wave for the details (and the important caveat that enablement is not enactment); Kentucky's own page covers how that enabling law sits alongside a same-year assessment-cap debate under its constitution's fair-cash-value clause. Washington State saw a parallel but earlier-stage push the same year: a legal-feasibility analysis for working around its constitutional uniformity clause, a Spokane City Council member's parcel study, and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson's stated intent to pursue a land value tax — none of which had produced even enabling legislation by mid-2026.

Wyoming ran the counter-movement the same year: rather than enabling land-value-based taxation, its legislature and a citizen ballot initiative pursued further exemptions from, and a nearly-successful repeal of, the existing residential property tax altogether, backfilled with sales tax — the opposite direction from every state above.

Missouri: A Free-Market Think Tank's Case for LVT

Kansas City is a lesser-known live case: the city funds two specific street-maintenance levies — the Parkway Maintenance Tax and the Trafficway Maintenance Tax — as land-only assessments, together raising roughly $9.9 million per year as of a 2012 accounting.[4] The Show-Me Institute, a free-market think tank, has repeatedly and publicly urged Kansas City and St. Louis to replace their municipal earnings taxes with expanded land-only taxation rather than the reverse, in a series of pieces spanning 2010 to 2026: Christine Harbin (2010) and David Stokes (2010) both cited University of Missouri economist Joseph Haslag's 2006 finding that the earnings tax depresses city personal income; when a 2012 city revenue commission proposed replacing Kansas City's land tax with higher sales taxes, Stokes and Haslag jointly argued the land tax should be expanded, not eliminated, since "the supply of land is inelastic with respect to price" and citing Henry George, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Joseph Stiglitz as cross-ideological supporters of land taxation; Michael Rathbone (2015) proposed extending land-value taxation authority beyond Kansas City — per Rathbone, the sole Missouri jurisdiction then authorized to levy it — to Boone County as an alternative to corporate tax abatements; and after a devastating EF3 tornado struck St. Louis in May 2025, Stokes (March 2026) renewed the case for a 10-year phase-out of St. Louis's earnings tax funded by a rising land tax, invoking Pittsburgh's split-rate precedent, ahead of an April 2026 ballot measure in which St. Louis voters ultimately renewed the earnings tax.[5] The cluster is a notable data point for cross-ideological LVT support — a self-described free-market institute repeatedly preferring land taxation to income and sales taxes on efficiency grounds — though it remains advocacy rather than enacted large-scale reform: Kansas City's land-only levies are narrow (street maintenance only), and both cities' earnings taxes remain in place as of mid-2026.

Honest Limits

The US case is a patchwork, not a program: Pennsylvania's split-rate cities are real but small and often under-assessed; Pittsburgh's own system was repealed; Altoona's full-LVT experiment lasted five years; and Alaska's dividend applies to oil rents specifically, not land generally. No large US city or state currently runs land value taxation at a rate high enough to test the strong Georgist claims at scale.

See Also

• Show-Me Institute — the Missouri think tank behind the Kansas City/St. Louis earnings-tax-to-land-tax advocacy
• Pennsylvania — the state enabling law and split-rate laboratory
• Pittsburgh — the largest and longest-running US split-rate city (1913–2001)
• Alaska · Alaska Permanent Fund — the resource-rent dividend case
• California — Henry George's own state, the single-tax movement's electoral peak, Proposition 13, and a 2026 land-value estimate
• Proposition 13 — the countervailing property-tax revolt
• Henry George · 1886 NYC Mayoral Election
• Progressive Era Georgism — the movement's historical high-water mark in US politics
• The 2026 State Land Value Tax Enablement Wave · Washington State — the country's most active recent burst of state-level LVT enablement activity
• Kentucky — the enablement wave's Louisville case, alongside its own 2026 assessment-cap debate
• Wyoming — the same year's countervailing property-tax repeal and exemption push

Sources

1. Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd & Laurie Macfarlane (2017), Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, Zed Books — the discovery source for this page (Ch. 5, Ch. 7, discussing US non-recourse mortgage law, Pennsylvania split-rate taxation, and antitrust history); not independently re-read chapter-by-chapter. wiki summary · Publisher/NEF summary
2. Wikipedia, "Land value tax in the United States" — used for the Hyattsville (1898), Fairhope/Arden single-tax colonies, Pennsylvania split-rate city count, Pittsburgh 1913–2001 dates, and Altoona 2011–2016 episode (A-claims; basic facts). Wikipedia
3. See the 2026 State Land Value Tax Enablement Wave and Washington State pages for full sourcing on the 2026 New York/Virginia/Kentucky enablement legislation and the Washington State feasibility/Spokane/Seattle activity summarized above.
4. City of Kansas City, Missouri, 2012 Report to the City of Kansas City, Missouri, Citizens' Commission on Municipal Revenue. kcmo.gov — used for the Parkway Maintenance Tax and Trafficway Maintenance Tax figures (~$9.9M/year combined, land-only assessments), corroborated via KCUR's reporting on the commission's recommendations. KCUR
5. Show-Me Institute articles, all read directly, 2026-08-10: Christine Harbin, "A Land Tax Is Preferable to the Earnings Tax" (Jan. 11, 2010, showmeinstitute.org); David Stokes, "Great Article About the Land Tax in the Kansas City Star" (Feb. 22, 2010, showmeinstitute.org); David Stokes, "Kansas City Should Expand, Not Remove, Land Taxes" (Aug. 2, 2012, showmeinstitute.org); Joseph Haslag & David Stokes, "Kansas City Land Tax Should Be Expanded, Not Eliminated" (July 21, 2012, showmeinstitute.org); Michael Rathbone, "Land Taxes and Columbia" (July 15, 2015, showmeinstitute.org); David Stokes, "It's Time to Phase Out the Earnings Tax. Honestly, Nothing Else Has Worked . . ." (Mar. 12, 2026, showmeinstitute.org) — used for the full 2010–2026 advocacy record summarized above; also see Show-Me Institute for the organization profile.
6. Sacha Dray, Camille Landais & Stefanie Stantcheva, "Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States," Quarterly Journal of Economics, advance article, 4 September 2026, DOI 10.1093/qje/qjag038 — read from the NBER working-paper version, revised May 2026; the QJE typeset text was not consulted. Used for the property-tax revenue-to-GDP series and the classification-movement mechanism behind its narrowing. See the full research summary for the complete sourcing. A-claim: peer-reviewed QJE article; all three authors are Tier 1 academic economists.