I would much rather have Central Park, an enormous and high-value piece of public land which is a crown jewel of the community and managed by the government as such, than a partial public-ish interest in "open space" or something on each privately owned lot, which is constantly being negotiated between landowners and a planning commission and ends up "meh," and where you aren't allowed to actually go, just look at.

I think this would be an important component of a YIMBY or Georgist future, to have public open space and park resources owned and managed explicitly rather than implied on each parcel.

>>Does it make sense to always optimize for nothing but maximum ROI for each plot of land?

No, but we can have special provisions for public goods like parks. Outside of properties that generate these kinds of public goods, the revenue a property generates is generally a proxy for social good it does. For example, a condo building with 150 residential units and 10 commercial units on the ground floor will do more social good than a parking lot, and that is easily revealed by how much more revenue it generates.

I think we're significantly undervaluing letting land carry on with low-enough human involvement so as to promote biodiversity and resilience, as has been done in numerous cultures around the world for millenia. Sometimes we get too selfish and exploit resources for short-term gain. We're in a tough spot as a species, borrowing heavily against the wellbeing of future generations (I view the health of the air, water, land, and other life as essential to our wellbeing).

That's an absurd example. Central Park isn't undeveloped land. It's a freaking historical site and national treasure.

Why specifically is it absurd, in the context of what LVT tries to achieve?

LVT isn't about whether the land is developed or undeveloped. The idea is to tax it based on its maximally productive usage. So for example if a plot of land has a single house but it could fit an apartment building, it should have an apartment building.

Of course Central Park is a treasure! But based on LVT, open fields in the middle of Manhattan is not the maximally productive economic use for that land. Filling it with high rise apartments would yield far more economic value.

Clearly I'm not promoting that it would be a good idea. It would be a disaster. But it's a great example of why blindly applying LVT to everything is not a good idea.

> But based on LVT, open fields in the middle of Manhattan is not the maximally productive economic use for that land.

I'm not sure this is true though. Manhattan wouldn't be close to what it is today without central park. It's not very hard to make the claim that central park provides more value than putting up apartment buildings would. Central Park makes that island some of the most expensive land in the world.

> Manhattan wouldn't be close to what it is today without central park.

It certainly wouldn't and I wouldn't argue the contrary.

But from the perspective of analyzing LTV and its implications, how would that be written into the tax code formula?

Surely it'd be possible to take some of the Central Park area and convert to highrises without meaningfully diminishing the benefits of having a Central Park. But how much area would be ok to build to maximize economic value? 1%? 5%? 50%? 80%?

Because at the end of the day, a tax law needs rules and formulas to compute the tax, so how do those get defined in a way that preserves open space but pushes for highrise development everywhere else (if that's the goal)?

> But from the perspective of analyzing LTV and its implications, how would that be written into the tax code formula?

I think the way it would work is the government would have to pay LVT on land it owns, and people would have to decide whether the LVT would be worth more than the current use through elections. Sure, NYC could probably get $10 billion or so a year (who knows maybe its $100 billion) if they sold off central park while under this taxation scheme. I think hardly anyone would want that though, and NYC would just continue to pay itself the LVT instead of collecting the money from citizens that bought the park land. By the way this is a gross oversimplification since the LVT collected from the properties surrounding the park, and probably all of Manhattan if not NYC, would be drastically lowered if the park was developed.

> pushes for highrise development everywhere else (if that's the goal)?

I don't think this is the goal. The goal is efficient land use. That might mean high rise development instead of empty lots. It might mean national parks that people cherish. It might mean a great big park in the middle of manhattan. What matters is that the question "is this land being used optimally?" is being considered.