Decades of Wisdom from an LVT Advocate: Josh Vincent

An interview with Josh Vincent, who has been successfully advancing Land Value Tax shifts in cities across Pennsylvania for decades and getting cities to think larger about the role of land.

Applications for the Land Economics Fellowship are due March 1st at Midnight.
Progress and Poverty Institute research proposals are due April 6th.

Foreword:

When I started the Center for Land Economics, I spoke with Georgists across the country who have spent years working to turn good ideas into real policy. No one inspired me more than Josh Vincent.

Josh has worked with cities across America to show, in practical terms, how land shapes local economies and how better public finance can help communities thrive. Over a year and a half after our first conversation, Lars and I are proud to welcome Josh to the Center for Land Economics Board of Governors. In many ways, our work stands on foundations he helped lay.

In our many conversations, it became clear that Josh’s legacy should not remain in meetings and policy memos. It should be shared widely, especially with those who are ready to do the hard work of change.

So I recorded this interview with Josh. I hope you enjoy it.

---

Greg Miller (00:00)

Hi everyone, I’m Greg Miller, the executive director of the Center for Land Economics. I appreciate you all tuning in today. I’m excited to be talking with Josh Vincent, who will introduce himself in a second, but I first have to disclose that he is also on our board of governors at the Center for Land Economics. And we added him to our board because he’s been one of our main inspirations in the work we do as somebody who’s been doing this work for decades to great effect. And so with that being said, I’m excited to be talking today to Josh.

Josh, why don’t you start us off with giving us a quick introduction about who you are, what you do, and what you have been doing for

Joshua Vincent (00:32)

Thanks Greg. Thank you for the invitation. I’m honored to be here. I’m Josh Vincent and I’m the director of the Center for the Study of Economics. We’re a 501c3 Economic Research Foundation. And I’d say the center is a hands-on kind of group. We don’t do any high and mighty abstract stuff. Most of my time in the center’s time is spent exploring the feasibility of administering and implementing the land value based system of taxation, be it through the process of property tax or reduction of even more corrosive forms of tax, like the sales tax, income tax or business tax. And so that’s kind of nonprofit we are. We were very public facing. Yeah.

Greg Miller (01:16)

Yeah, that’s great. And I’ve always been drawn both to your work, but also to your story. How does one go from being a normal person to being a Georgist and then from being a Georgist to being a full-time practitioner for decades on Georgist policy? Not just thinking about the idea, but really doing the hands-on work. I’m curious to hear your story.

Joshua Vincent (01:29)

Come on.

That’s a really good question of how I came to this ship or this island. In the prehistoric days, the 1980s, I had incidentally studied Georgism as a student of American history at Oberlin. My professor in the history of economic thought was Dr. Robert Neal, who late lamented Dr. Robert Neal, but was a great student of American political history and economic history. And he told the class one day as he was assigning papers that he was really bored with rehashing of Marxism

from anxious young sophomores. I thought that was kind of cool because I was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist.

and he sort of brought me up standing, stopping, and said, okay, so instead he suggested to several students to approach socialism from a non-surplus theory of where the increased value of a product occurs. Where does that increased value go? Does it go to wages? No. Does it go to the capitalist? No. And that’s really how I

got introduced to Henry George as a highfalutin idea. approach socialism from a non-surplus theory of where the increased value goes. So from Henry George, I agreed that the increased value goes to landowners in the form of economic rent. Coincidentally, at the time I was working for First Albany Corporation, which is an early form of a private equity corporation.

And I was doing my summers off with about 10 other kids.

We were conducting basic pragmatic research on the value added of Battery Park City. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but at the time it was a modern miracle. They put in a bunch of fill near the World Trade Center into the Hudson River and they created new land. And so First Albany Corporation commissioned us to see if it was worth anything. And it turns out that just creating this land skyrocketed the land value.

because they created the value. So I did that and put the paper together for Professor Neal and I got a B plus I think. So that’s how I got into it originally.

Greg Miller (04:02)

From a B plus in college to being probably the main practitioner for decades of the cause. How did that then transition you from this one paper to discovering that you can actually do this work in the real world?

Joshua Vincent (04:18)

Yeah.

⁓ good question. ⁓ I had been, once I left college, I did what I think most people did in the 1980s because at that time, if you could read, write and communicate well, you could get any kind of a job. And I was trying to be a punk rock star in New York City in the 1980s, so that required a day job. And my day job was

for the National Insurance Research Council. And so I just paid the bills by doing really immoral work, exploring toxic exposure lawsuits, creating abstracts to defend insurance companies against payouts. And I said, my God, this is immoral. So how can I do this? And ⁓ at the time I’d heard about from...

Greg Miller (05:00)

Yeah.

Joshua Vincent (05:09)

about the Henry George Foundation of America. Because I was still interested, I thought it was a good idea. And the Henry George Foundation at that time had also taken on a C3 wing, was CSE, the Center for the Study of Economics. And they were working, really going from city to city in Pennsylvania, because that was the only state where you could implement the land value tax shift.

And so Dr. Steve Cord, who had just retired from Indiana University of Pennsylvania as an economic historian.

He was kind of the Johnny Appleseed of ⁓ Georgism at the time. He was tired of showing up to dry academic meetings and journals talking about whether Henry George was a good idea. He wanted to put it into practice. And so the best way to do that was to get the numbers and go from town to town. And at the time, as you may know, all these cities in Pennsylvania, they had just had their

budgets blown up. They had the guts of their existence blown out by the collapse of the steel industry. So there was no work and there were no taxable buildings left in these towns. And so he said, look, you’ve got to fill up these vacant lots to pay the bills. And that was really the essential idea. A lot of these cities were facing issues where they had to lay off police. They couldn’t pay their power bills to, know, Allegheny, light and power. So

That’s what he did. He had retired. He was approaching 70. So he wanted a young buck that had a working Toyota Camry to continue that work. And I just went from town to town doing the research at the time. And this is, I’m dating myself. This is pre-Excel. This is a long time ago. And we had to do it on paper and do random properties, you know, like each property at the top and bottom of the page.

right out in the long hand what the effect of a land value tax shift would be. At that time Dr. Kord was he was hunting bigger game. He went to the former Soviet Union and he was part of the team that helped Estonia adopt the land value tax on a national level. So I was left to sort of you know hold the shop together by getting towns in Pennsylvania to expand or adopt land value tax. I like to credit myself because I think I really helped helping the council people, progressive institutions, and conservative businessmen in Allentown to adopt LVT as part of their Home Rule Charter. And that was really the start, just learning politics, learning how to do mass communication. We did mailings to the voters in LVT.

was voted in in 1996 by the electorate of Allentown because it had been vetoed six times by city council who were working not in the best interest of the city but in the best interest of their golfing partners, if you will. And that’s local politics. So we did an end run around the establishment and using politicians and people from the left and the right, we got Allentown to adopt and then expand. Same with Harrisburg, Steelton, Altoona, and a few other towns. There have been some rescissions, but essentially, what we’re trying to do is help cities approach the new realities.

Greg Miller (08:49)

Yeah. I mean, and this is why I wanted to have this conversation. Cause if there’s one person that people should emulate, if they really care about getting land value tax implemented in their current area and their region, it’s the work you’ve done. so, you know, applause to you for that. And I’m curious to know when you were working in these cities in Pennsylvania, you know, there’s been some writings out there, but I’ve also heard you just talk about the impact to these cities when they have implemented land value tax, whether it be in Allentown, of course, Pittsburgh’s talked about all the time.

But there’s also smaller cities that have implemented. so what have these results shown and what have you seen when you tell these stories to other city council members in Pennsylvania of, look down the road and look at what they achieved. What have you found?

Joshua Vincent (09:32)

That’s a good question. You have to remember that the original mission of CSE was to show that it could work.

And the best way to do that in our institutional view was to help manageable jurisdictions, small cities, towns, adopt the program and provide an experimental background where people could check the results of LVT. Did it do anything? Did it do nothing? Did it hurt the town? And none of these questions were answered before CSE. So I guess we can take credit.

take credit for what’s happened since I came on board and took over. But what happened to these towns now, primarily because politics and economics are the same thing, political economy, who benefits from a land value tax? And the answer is, is was quite clear. It still is. Most voters, and that means homeowners, most property owners have to save on their tax bill.

You know, if people are going to go to the trouble of changing the tax system or adjusting the tax system, there has to be a benefit. Qui bono? Who benefits? And the answer has to be...

the voters because elected officials are responsible to the voters, whether we like it or not, but at the municipal level more so. And so because we could go to a city council person and say, look, these are the numbers and the council person would read the, by that time, Excel sheets and say, wow.

Greg Miller (11:07)

Yeah

Joshua Vincent (11:09)

90 % of my homeowners will save. 60 % of my businesses, home owned small businesses will save. He said, I see votes in this. I see a path out and a path to attract investment into our town. I don’t know what you know about Pennsylvania, but it’s not exactly at the cutting edge.

of much anymore. And some people say the best days of Pennsylvania towns are behind them, but I don’t believe that’s the case. And the city leaders didn’t. There was a chance, but they had to make their towns competitive, especially in the sense of urban sprawl, because even in small Pennsylvania cities, people left to go outside the city boundaries when times were tough. And so the city had to become competitive in the tax picture with the surrounding jurisdictions. and the rationale and the explanation of Mayor Reed and Harrisburg was if I can persuade and demonstrate that if you put a six-story building up in our downtown, it’s going to be cheaper than putting it up in the suburbs, then you’ve got the key to golden prosperity is the urban institute called LVT. And that’s what happened. And if you can in your action as a city leader or something, if you can say to a business or a homeowner, your taxes are going to be lower here in a city with established infrastructure and services than in the surrounding suburbs that are basically cornfields turning into tract homes, then that’s a great advantage. And that’s been the great advantage in Pennsylvania. And now we’ve been, of course, trying to expand it into other states. and all of that. But if you think about and you know stop me if I’m going too fast or too far.

Greg Miller (13:06)

No, keep going.

Joshua Vincent (13:08)

Land value tax, I think, is taking root these days because we’ve provided these real-life examples of where it’s used, studied, and expanded. The arena of possibility has expanded these days from the nation-state to the subnational, regional, and municipal.

We’re in the age of de-evolution. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Devo, but I am. And I took the, they’re a new wave band from the 1970s. And I took inspiration from their message of everything falls apart, which is true. That’s a scientific concept, a philosophical concept of de-evolution. For example, the central government in London and the UK devolved powers to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Greg Miller (13:38)

Okay.

Joshua Vincent (13:59)

And that’s what’s happening now. The gearbox of national government is kind of frozen and it will be for the foreseeable future. So who’s going to be left to...

I don’t mean to put it crudely, who’s going to be left to make sure that the toilets work and that the streetlights stay on? It’s going to be cities, counties, and states. So they’ve got to have tools at their disposal to change the systems of revenue so that it doesn’t repel investment, people, and capital, and instead attracts them. And that’s really what we’re doing.

Greg Miller (14:35)

Yeah, and there’s a through line I’m seeing in a lot of what you’re saying right now, which is you took an incremental pragmatic approach. You found problems that cities faced and said, we have a solution for that. And then you took that one step at a time, starting with cities as some quite small cities. And now we see where we’re at at national level, which we could talk about in a moment. But there’s also this big idea of Georgism.

And I think a lot of people I talk to who are Georgists, in the same way Marxists are Marxists, think that system is so designed that it’s so bad that we need to tear it down. there’s, you know, an incremental approach when it work and Georgia wants to see us get towards that, that single tax. And so I’m sort of curious to know what the healthiest way for Georgia is to hold on to their sort of moral vision of what they see in the world, but also be credible. And they talk to city officials and how you think about that incremental approach that you’ve taken as compared to other Georgia’s who frankly, you know, just want to see the single tax and

Joshua Vincent (15:12)

Right.

Greg Miller (15:34)

tear down the federal system until we get there.

Joshua Vincent (15:36)

Yeah, if you’re a Georgeist, you know, in the full sense of the word, I’m a land value tax technical advisor. I try to change tax policies. So people that are Georgeists sit and wait for the call from the Oval Office.

they’re going to sit and they’re going to sit. There are ideologies ⁓ that people have experimented with. Georgism is an ideology. It’s a it’s a view of how the world can work in our time. Well, in my time, you live in a posthistoric time, Greg. So in my time, there were two basic ideologies, Marxism and globalism, neoclassical economics.

Greg Miller (16:09)

Yeah.

Joshua Vincent (16:16)

And I think that socialism has been dealt with under the broad umbrella of the God that failed. There was a great series of essays about how communism and socialism just doesn’t work, no matter what college kids of all ages say.

And so that’s been covered, but I think that we haven’t really had a history yet of the collapse of the globalist vision and ideology of free trade, which is not free trade, actually. It’s a globalist, neoclassical economist view. And it doesn’t work and it hasn’t been covered yet. I think that Thomas Piketty’s book,

the capital of the 21st century, I took a stab at it.

But a famous economist like Joseph Stiglitz criticized Piketty’s book, as could I, because he left land, rent, and natural resources out of his analysis. And Stiglitz was very clear, you’re not going to get the whole picture without putting that factor of economics into the discussion and into the debate. And he left economic rent out of his work. Economic rent works

in a village and it works across the world and economic rent is there. It’s like a physical element like cadmium and so that economic rent belongs to everybody, you know, unless you’re a

I suppose a full-on libertarian or Ayn Rand style person, libertarian. It belongs to the whole world. We didn’t create this rent. It’s there and it’s just for us to pay for essential public services. So yeah, Georgism is an idea. You know, the single tax and it’s or at minimum the large tax base coming from land. But

I don’t want to work on theories because I can’t. You if I drop into a city council work session, lots of people come up to city council work sessions with all kinds of ideas about how the earth is hurtling into the sun. If we’re not careful, you can hear a lot of stuff at city council meetings, but.

None of it’s real. Well, I shouldn’t say none of it, but a lot of it’s simply not real. You know, they’re worried about things that towns can’t affect. So governments know what’s wrong metaphorically. Like I said, if the toilets don’t flush, if the streetlights haven’t got power coming into them.

That’s important. That’s real life. So fixing these things and delivering for the common good at this point in time requires local solutions. Now with states and localities, we’re still mimicking tax policies that were invented in the 1920s. It’s hard for me as an old guy, but that was 100 years ago.

At least I knew some people that were born in the 1920s. But the 1920s were 100 years ago, and that’s where our tax systems at the state, local level, county level were invented. Sales tax, business privilege tax, local wage tax, and the current property tax. So our work at CSE is not fixing the property tax per se. It’s about sourcing revenue from that

looping feedback effect of land value capture and return. We’re capturing that land value and I know land value capture is phrase planners use, but we’re returning it. We’re returning it back to the city and to the people, to the citizens. So I think that that’s what works for us and as some people have said, pragmatism with a vision.

Greg Miller (20:05)

Yeah, precisely. then I suppose on the flip side, you know, there are people who are already Georgia’s, and then there are people who just follow New York Times. And there’s a lot of concerns, and there’s city council members who follow New York Times, and they’re weighing whether they should care about education, criminal justice, any number of different issues, climate change, AI safety, that’s sort of all around, right? There’s always an infinite amount of things to be worried about. And so if you’re

You know, for a listener out there who is, you know, listens to this and also cares about other policy issues. Why do you tell them that land value tax is something they should actually spend time on? Like, why is this so important that folks should actually devote time on it and city council members should prioritize it when they’re looking at their docket?

Joshua Vincent (20:37)

Right.

That’s a great point. ⁓ Once again, I spent a lot of my time at city council meetings and all of these issues funneled down into one thing. Where are we going to get the money?

And it’s funny, when I was a kid, Mario Cuomo was one of my heroes as governor of New York. He was a very pragmatic, in my mind’s eye, Democrat. And he said, yes, all these proposals that you’re bringing up, prison reform, labor reform.

affordable housing, housing the unhoused. These are all important things. You tell me how to pay for it. And at those council meetings, nobody has an idea of how to pay for it. They just demand it. So as

a Georgist in the field, I’d say this is how you pay for it. You provide them a way to pay for it that works. Income taxes, business taxes, sales taxes are either regressive or unworkable in an age of mobile labor and mobile capital. So a land value tax capture and return is something that you can do in each and every town and you can affect small things. mean, the village of Ebbensburg

in Cambria County has a land value tax. It’s a small one though. It pays for plowing the streets, fixing the sidewalks, you know, and paying for the dog catcher. It can affect a little stuff, but it can expand to anything.

a person or a government would like. That’s why the state governments of Australia are funded not wholly, but majorly by a land tax.

inflated up to any level. And as I was referring to earlier, Estonia, they pay for the cost of municipal government across the nation. It’s a national fund that pays for local services and it comes out of land values, full stop. That sounds beautifully elegant. And it is. And land values never flee, they never go extinct.

Well, they can flee, I suppose, if there’s a tax policy in a place that’s so terrible, you get tax exiles and land values can drop as a result. But to forestall that.

I think that what you’ve got to do is use what you have in a community and that’s land values and you can prove it in numbers. That’s the I think the crucial thing. The property tax is actually a pretty good vehicle to work through. Once we work through it, we should get rid of the traditional property tax. The tax on buildings is awful.

⁓ And it’s a factual thing because a building is a combination of labor and capital. If you don’t take care of the building and you don’t invest in it, it’s going to fall down. It’s going to flee. So a building is actually mobile in that sense, constrained only by the powers of gravity. So what we have left is the land value. And that is something that we have to persuade people is something

doable. And I think we’ve done that. Because of urbanism, highest heightened interest in urbanism, the heightened interest in smart cities, and the heightened interest in smart growth, people have got to make the most out of what they have created. You know, a great plan creates land values. That’s everybody knows that. A great idea produces value. So what are you going to do with that value?

As I said, claw it back, which sounds kind of violent and negative. It’s not. You’re just getting what you provided. It’s sort of a user’s fee for land. And you take back some of that value that you donated to the community as a government, and you hand it out to the citizens in the form of more city services or better city services.

Greg Miller (24:47)

Yeah, as we like to say, returning the value of land to the community that makes it valuable or the city that makes it valuable. There’s also something in that answer that relates to California’s current efforts for a wealth tax. You you talk about different taxes, but I think in general, we can think about the Pennsylvania experience. You know, if people talk about all the time with LVT, I’m curious your take on the California experience with property tax in general. And, you know, they’re now

their push for a wealth tax now to make up for their budget and their massive amounts of wealth, but meanwhile, extreme amounts of inequality. So, curious to hear your thoughts on California in that sense.

Joshua Vincent (25:14)

Right.

Yeah, I’ve thought about California. I think any of us working in the ⁓ tax sector have. California cut its throat to satisfy a very select group of vocal

taxpayers, homeowners, specifically middle-aged and elderly homeowners. Should they be protected? Sure. If they’re going to be losing their homes or something, we should put in protections. But their alternative was property 13, which was implemented in 1976. And at that time, California had the best roads in the United States. It had the best public schools in the United States. And it had

a university system that was the envy of the world.

that has changed utterly. As far as league tables, California is near the bottom in quality of infrastructure, quality of public schools, and the ability of local governments to do what they’re supposed to do, which is fix things. So because Prop 13 limited property tax increases, assessment increases, and so on,

They had to resort to higher and higher wage taxes, business taxes, and that drove people out of the state, people that were paying their, that paid taxes. So what’s happening in California now is, my gosh, we’ve lost all these people that can pay wage and business taxes. What’s left? Now, of course, land values are left, but nobody, nobody thinks that.

lot of people do, but most don’t. So what’s left are fixed assets like wealth. You know, if you’re a Google guy or a tech bro and you’re living in San Jose, you’ve got a lot of wealth. You you’ve turned the world around in 25 years from an industrial economy to a knowledge-based economy. And as a result, you’ve made a heck of a lot of money. So what are you going to do with that wealth? Well, you’re going to buy a bunch of stuff.

That’s what people do. Now a wealth tax is something that you can flee from and that’s what I think is going to happen. I think Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, has just bought a giant mansion in Miami merely because of the threat of a wealth tax. And so I think that’s what California is going to see.

Now their wealth tax won’t collect land values necessarily or at all. It’s going to collect

what could be the products of capital and labor, which can be usefully recycled back into the California economy. But instead, people are going to Texas and Florida. And I think that’s going to leave California bereft and leave it worse than it is today. California is a terrible place to be working class or poor.

I mean, they’ll keep you alive. You could say that about California. The welfare system keeps you alive. They give you, you know, canvas for your shelters on the street.

That’s all they do. They make sure that you don’t erupt in violence. And they also have encouraged people that we want to stay in the community, know, parents that want to have good schools, employers that want to have well-trained workers.

what reason is there for them to stay? the wealth tax, think, just going to be a, I don’t know if it’s fatal, but it’s going to be a very dangerous page to turn. And so that’s why I think going back to the property tax makes a lot of sense. California doesn’t have much of a property tax.

It’s up there with poor southern states like Louisiana or Mississippi, with poverty-stricken states like New Mexico, some of the poorest places, toughest places to live in.

And interestingly, the property taxes in California are on the same level as Hawaii. And Hawaii has huge levels of wealth and income inequality and housing unaffordability of any state in the nation.

Hawaii is not a paradise. It’s sort of an extreme version of California. They have almost no property tax and so they tax wages and the ultra wealthy of course can hide their wages in wealth and California’s idea is okay we’re gonna go after the wealth. Good luck on finding it.

and good luck on keeping these people in California. They’re going to go elsewhere. You Texas has high property taxes. I think the sixth highest property tax rate, effective tax rate in the country. But why are people fleeing to Texas? There are no income taxes. They have reasonable business taxes. And the same with Florida. There’s no income tax.

I think they’re going to be cutting their throats if they get rid of the property tax in Florida, but that’s a story for another day.

Greg Miller (30:34)

Yeah.

Yeah, well, I like this idea. think it’s interesting this idea that perhaps the reason why California needs a wealth tax to begin stems back to Prop 13 decades ago, and that rather than making the system better now, they’re just spiraling and all of these is just going to create a chain reaction that just loops in on itself. It’s interesting. ⁓

Joshua Vincent (30:53)

Yeah.

Yeah, I think you’re

right. You know, they’re getting desperate.

Greg Miller (31:00)

Right. And then we do have Florida. I mean, let’s talk about it, right? So there is a movement, not just in Florida, perhaps popularized by Ron DeSantis, who’s a national conservative figure, but there are a lot of folks talking about property tax burden and burden particularly increasing on homeowners who feel the burden increasing at least. Perhaps it’s because of revaluations, perhaps it’s because COVID boosted their land values substantially, but

then there’s this real push. And as you said, like the building taxes bad. And so, you know, is Ron DeSantis right? Are these conservatives right? property taxes bad? But why is there a push all of a sudden? And what do you make of this movement?

Joshua Vincent (31:41)

You referenced ⁓ COVID earlier and COVID accidentally drove up property values and that is that’s still with us. so property values increase. What happens when values increase, taxes increase. Very few jurisdictions at the state level or below tie ⁓ value increases with tax reduction.

So governments have been flush with money. They’ve been taking in almost too much money. If you’re going to have a reassessment or if in fact values are just rising, then you have to have an anti-windfall on the government, prevent the government from collecting a lot more money. I have five dollars worth of carrots and all of a sudden those carrots are worth ten dollars, the government should not take

more of the carrots and that’s what’s happening. If values change, government has to be responsible, I think, and sort of cool their jets on what they take in property assessments.

⁓ Florida has exploding property values until now. Now they’re entering a bit of a slide and a bit of a crash in some areas of the state because so many people are moving there. And if people move to a place, they increase scarcity of the land. Land values go up. And folks don’t know instinctively, I think, that land and buildings are two different animals. And so that’s that is the problem of the property tax.

keep

your house fixed up. If your house is a nice house, you shouldn’t be taxed on it. So DeSantis is half right. A lot of national conservatives are sort of correct, but it’s a disaster to get rid of the property tax. And I think that’s been proven. Texas has been trying

I think constantly over the past 15 years to limit the property tax. And what are you going to tax instead? You’ve got to do two things. You’ve got to slash government spending, which means cutting spending on the goodies that all citizens like. Or you’ve got to slash taxes, and you can’t do one without the other.

Greg Miller (33:34)

Yes.

Yeah, and it’s interesting to think about the property tax that way, which is the property tax is the one tax that people feel the most in terms of what they actually get out of it. I pay income taxes every year and I don’t know what the federal government provides for me outside of, you know, what I read in the property tax. you were to cut city budgets, the sewage wouldn’t be running as often. There’d be more roads failing and lights not on, you know.

Joshua Vincent (34:09)

Yeah.

Greg Miller (34:20)

And so I like to think of the property taxes as a beautiful tax in that lowercase C conservative way, I suppose.

Joshua Vincent (34:26)

Yeah, and I like it too because, as you say, service is rendered by the government.

paid through the property tax, hopefully the land value tax, is visible in better roads and better services. And if government learns not to waste money, which they haven’t learned to do yet at any level, then the property tax can be a reasonable

main source of revenue. know, user fees, sewage fees, garbage fees, we can debate about that. But I think the property tax should be the anchor of any sensible tax policy. I mean, if you look at Europe,

They have very, very low property taxes. And as a result, they’re very world economy dependent, these nations. And the localities have almost no power to raise taxes. It’s all a matter of the nation’s capital dispersing money. I think our nation does a pretty lousy job of dispersing money, but Europe does it even worse. That’s why the property tax is not

exist

in places like Greece and Italy. And that’s a shame because the local town knows what they need, the town government, but they’re not going to get that resource, their own resource, and be able to use it to spend on improving the city.

Greg Miller (35:50)

Yeah, Lars and I have folks reach out from those countries, know, who are Georgists, and Lars and I look at each other and say, wow, do we have it lucky here in the United States? Because we at least have that gratis and infrastructure to think about land value tax. But there you’re creating a whole new system of taxation that includes its assessments.

And perhaps that’s a good transition point to think about. You’ve learned a lot in dealing with opposition and dealing with land value taxes over the years. You’ve seen a lot of barriers, whether they be technical or political or administrative, or whether it just be purely rhetorical. And so I’m wondering, what have you learned? What are those main barriers you’ve found? And then how have you gotten around, gotten about getting around those barriers?

Joshua Vincent (36:15)

Yeah.

The main barrier is that everybody hates taxes and everybody hates the property tax. Usually it’s paid in quarterly installments or monthly installments on a mortgage. And an expensive mortgage makes people irked because the mortgage companies, they’re very clever. send out, this is what your mortgage payment goes to. And property taxes are a large part of that pie.

when you’re retired, and this is crucial, and your mortgage is paid off, the government sends you a bill once or twice a year, and you open the envelope and your eyes pop open. What? I don’t even have any kids in school, that kind of thing. So that’s where the problem is. Any kind of tax is unpopular.

I think it’s the sticker shock of getting one tax bill or two tax bills a year that really drives people nuts. And it should really. But they don’t know that a sales tax, which you don’t even you don’t know how much you spend a day in sales tax. So you don’t even recognize if it’s two or three times what you pay in property tax. You don’t realize if your income tax is two or three times what you pay because it’s

taken out of your your check before you get paid. So the property tax doesn’t have that kind of deception built into it like other taxes do. And I think that’s that’s a big issue. Now explaining to or discussing not explaining but conversing with people. Do you want services? Yes. How should we pay for it?

And they say, well, property tax, I hate it. How about a land tax? In other words, let’s exempt your building. Let’s universally exempt every building in town from taxation. And people really actually start to think about it. And then they think about the fabric of their community and what makes it good or bad. We were talking about

city problems.

If you have city disinvestment and abandonment, which we have suffered over the past 30 years, what does that mean? Well, homeowners know they keep their house up. They love their house. But if across the street there’s an absentee and lets the property go to rack and ruin, they know exactly what happens with that house across the street. They don’t pay anything in taxes. That’s unfair. It sounds unfair. It sounds un-American.

So when we flip

that script and talking to people in towns or to city council people, you know, let’s not defend the results of bad tax policy and bad actors. Let’s rely on a stream of revenue that is there. It comes out of your current property tax. Let’s just eliminate the building entirely or as much as we can. And then that’s kind of hard for people to get across. Can you separate land and building values?

I think as you and Lars know with your valuation tools, it’s pretty routine now or automated to separate land values into building values. There are

whole departments in Australian universities that study this, how to split land and building values. It’s doable. I think it’s a false argument that, you can’t determine the split values. We can do it. And when you look at the numbers and communicate, people, say, OK, I live at 23 Elm Street. What’s going to happen to my house?

You’re going to save $500 a year. You’re going to save $2,000 a year, sometimes even more. And people go, great.

But then I always say, you want to see what happens to the slum property that’s owned by somebody 500 miles away? Yeah, what happens to that? Their taxes go up three or $400 or $500 a year to make up for what you saved. So the same amount of revenue comes into the city. Once city officials are insured that the same amount of money, it’s revenue neutral, is assured, then they’re a lot more open to it.

math at that point.

Greg Miller (40:55)

Yeah, that’s interesting. Of course we face these same problems, but in our view, we can overcome all of them. So along those lines, if you were speaking to an urbanist, Georgist, or whoever that reaches out and says, hey, I really like this idea of shifting our property tax burden. What’s your playbook? What should folks be doing? What’s the first steps they should be taking? And how should they think about really making change in a city government? How do you make change in the city government?

Joshua Vincent (41:13)

Yeah.

You start with the champion. I think that’s been inevitable. Now, in the earlier part of the 20th century, you had people that understood what Georgism was, people across the spectrum. And so they said, ⁓ we can do this and provide the numbers and they go, ⁓ cool. And so they implement.

But working it right now is finding a champion, getting a meeting, and having that champion, that local champion, be it a council person or a state representative or county council person, sort of carry the torch. And you’ll find elected officials, and a lot of elected officials are absolutely dedicated to the citizens, and they’re absolutely dedicated to their jobs.

and they don’t get enough credit. I know that there’s a lot of brick bats thrown at them, but they don’t get enough credit for trying to improve the city. But they need to understand the tools that are available. And once they do, they’re very loyal. Pat Toomey was a businessman in Allentown. He owned four or five bars.

And that was his life path. And he got angry at the business taxes that he had to pay every time he fixed up his business. So he ran. He passed a Home Rule Charter Amendment in Allentown. Then he ran for Congress and then he ran for Senate and he became a senator and he carried with him all that time the idea that taxes should not be an obstruction or a

hindrance

to people’s aspirations. And he became eventually a very, you know, a right wing Georgist, if you will, president of the Club for Growth. But he did that with the understanding that government has to operate, it has to be there, it has to provide services, but it should, to the greatest extent possible, not interfere with the market, not interfere with people’s life choices. And I

that’s what we can provide from the village level on up really. And that champion will then say this is a good idea. And in fact in Pennsylvania a lot of the effort was helped by having you know the mayor of Harrisburg or Pat Toomey when he was in Congress write letters to mayors saying hey this has helped our town we didn’t have to spend any extra money.

It’s not a new tax. It’s just the property tax reconfigured and tooled for the 21st century.

And it worked in my town. That’s all I can tell you. And I’ve been mayor for 40 years, whoever, and and I’ve been voted into the US Senate. Hasn’t hurt me. But I think that’s what you need. And writing letters to colleagues has helped dramatically in places like, they haven’t adopted yet, but in places like ⁓ Pittsburgh, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and other cities, Hartford, Connecticut, letters from

mayors that use LBT really encourage them to get enabling legislation passed at the state level. That’s what you need first and foremost because I assume this is going out to a national audience. In a lot of states you have to make sure you can do it legally first and I think a lot of the work on the ground now.

Greg Miller (44:47)

Yeah, and-

And for a lot of listeners

that that challenge of, okay, so I just need magically this champion to appear sounds daunting. Right. But I think that what you would propose is throughout this conversation, you’ve talked about, are problems that city council members face and you could go talk to your city council member and discuss this idea with them in terms of what’s the problem they’re facing and find out if they might be a champion of this cause. then, and then once they are, sounds like.

These champions just need support. need the data analysis. They need any other level of support that helps push this forward because they’re dealing with hundreds of pieces of legislation or consideration. So is that correct? Is that how you go about it?

Joshua Vincent (45:25)

Yeah.

Pretty much, ⁓ first and foremost, I would preface all of that by saying that there has to be a problem to be solved and an apparent problem to be solved. And these days it’s usually fiscal. And so a council person will be upset that a lot of neighborhoods are burning down and being abandoned. How do we fix that? What’s the problem?

And is the solution more revenue? Often, yeah, it is. And is it through the very structure of your tax system? Yeah.

a lot of the problems are baked in to how we fund government. So we do have to modify that. And that’s why going to a land tax helps address existing problems that everybody knows exists, but they don’t have a clue of how to replace it. So just a little data would work. I was doing some research on

I won’t name it because I think it’s secret now on a city in Virginia, a small city in Virginia, and they’re interested because ⁓ as you may know, there’s a statewide, there’s a lot of efforts in Virginia to expand the land value tax and permit it for other cities. Five cities already have permission to do it. So I’ve done the, run the numbers, know, looked at the properties, looked at what a land value,

tax would be and it’s just algebra as I said earlier it’s just math and then make you know planning style maps of the community and charts and tables showing that it will benefit monetarily people that live in the community and at the same time will prod recalcitrant or bad property owners to act or to sell to someone who will.

I mean, that really addresses a lot of the basic problems a city has. If you’ve got, we were discussing earlier today, Baltimore City in the neighborhood of Mount Clair, there’s a fellow that owns 100 properties. He bought them for $1,000 when Baltimore was really desperate. And now he wants $100,000 for those vacant lots, just strip clean, vacant lots. Well, why should

should

that $100,000 go to this person who is an LLC in suburban Maryland? He should get a fair price for that land, but no more than the fair price. You he should get a profit, yeah, but not an incredible windfall profit such as he would enjoy. So that’s what we want to reverse. And community organizations that hear about us will tell their councilmen about it.

and the councilmen if we need legislation will say okay let’s go to the state capitol let’s get to work let’s change the law and that’s how you get support to identify a problem in the community offer a solution that’s a somewhat georgia solution and then see it through and you know hold hands if you have to yell and scream if you have to and let other people do the heavy lifting because that’s what elected officials

officials are for.

Greg Miller (48:46)

Right. And I’ll give the listeners a cheat code, which is there is also a moment for urbanism and yimbyism and housing affordability. So go find your city council member who cares about that. And that might be the first council member to reach out to.

Joshua Vincent (48:58)

absolutely.

Urban planners, they come up with these great ideas. But again, I’ll go back to Mario Cuomo. Great. How am going to pay for it? And they’re stuck for an answer or they don’t answer. And so if they’re stuck for an answer, you just simply offer up this resource that nobody has tapped yet. And that’s the land values under our feet.

Greg Miller (49:09)

Yep.

And on those lines, you’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past year, there’s been six to eight states considering legislation for LVT enablement. That to me, as somebody new to the movement, feels like a lot. I’m wondering if that feels unusual to you. It’s obviously built on a lot of the evidence from Pennsylvania. And if it is unusual, what’s causing it? Why are we seeing so much within the past year versus three years ago?

Joshua Vincent (49:30)

Right.

Yeah.

I think the interest has come out of all of what we’ve talked about. In other words, people are not looking at Washington for solutions anymore. The levers of government at a lot of levels are just not doing anything anymore. So I think that why you’re hearing about it more is that the Yimbe community wants to build more housing.

denser housing and want to get value for money for the improvements like sewers and schools and so on that have been created. How can we get people to utilize this infrastructure and making it cheaper to build is a surefire way to do it, to take advantage of that. So that’s why I think the new urbanists, a lot of smart growth advocates, strong towns, which is a very popular

concept which is similar to ours. It’s a big idea, writ small. And Strong Towns argues rightfully, we’re creating all this value.

land value and it’s going to waste. How can we collect that land value? So I think that that’s been the change and that’s why I think you’re seeing it in frankly in states that I wouldn’t have imagined seeing it happening. I’d say interest now is probably as great as it ever has been since Pennsylvania cities in the 80s and 90s.

Greg Miller (51:09)

Yeah, and we’re excited about that as I’m sure you are. Well, I’ll give you a moment as we wrap up. If there’s anything else that listeners should understand both about your work, about what it means for them, and also what feels important for people to understand about this moment in the path forward for land value taxes. Any closing thoughts?

Joshua Vincent (51:28)

My closing thoughts are clear. This is doable. A lot of stuff that is being proposed is pie in the sky or close to it. The New York City mayor, for example, wants a wealth tax to be passed by the state to authorize the city to collect a wealth tax. Well, it’s not going to happen.

You know, they’re very sensitive to the needs of taxpayers, including wealthy and powerful taxpayers. So this is doable. It’s doable right now in New York City. And that’s just an example where you have to you don’t have to do all this huffing and puffing to get money to pay for a program that you want.

It’s there and that’s what I would leave you with. The data is there. It’s in your town and a little bit of legwork can get it done. And if you reach out to the various tax oriented policy shops out there, yours, mine and others, you can get the answers quickly if it makes sense. If people don’t pay more, it makes all the sense in the world to do this and at any level of government.

local county state. I stay away from Hatchell.

Greg Miller (52:40)

Yeah, well, we appreciate your time, Josh. I mean, this you’ve been very helpful for the Center for Land Economics and Formation and thought about how we go about these issues, of course, laying the foundations over decades that everybody’s sort of building upon. So very much appreciative of that. And I think listeners will have learned a lot from this conversation. We’ll push it out to the progress and poverty substack. And so for listeners of this.

Joshua Vincent (52:45)

Thank you.

Greg Miller (53:05)

If you want to keep an update on what’s going on in the land value tax world and thinkings about this, can subscribe to the Progressive Poverty Update. And if you want to see more about what Josh Vincent’s been up to, you can check out his website ⁓ at the Center for Study of Economics. And he’s got some data and reports up there, but he’s also got writings sort of scattered around the internet and other places. So I recommend those as well.

Joshua Vincent (53:25)

Yeah, that’s the way to go now. I use my LinkedIn site actually. It’s gotten 4,000 views for each article in the past couple of months. I’m happy.

Greg Miller (53:35)

Great, yeah, go find Josh Vincent on LinkedIn and thank you

Greg Miller is the Executive Director of the Center for Land Economics.