One Year of Land Value Tax Advocacy
How you can support us on Giving Tuesday
Happy Giving Tuesday!
Greg and I have a singular mission here at the Center for Land Economics: make Georgism happen, not tomorrow, but today. We started our organization with a mad plan:
Sprint all out for one year
Accomplish as much as possible
Ask the community to support us for one more year
We’ve now reached the end of that first year. As we officially celebrate our first anniversary at the Center for Land Economics, let’s reflect on our accomplishments and chart a path forward for the coming year.
We’ve done a lot in a year
First, check out our annual report — it’s a simple six-page PDF that gets straight to the point. Please share it with anyone and everyone you think might be interested in our work. Especially your rich friends—you’ll be giving them the gift of being able to genuinely say they supported Georgism before it was cool.
If you’re already impressed enough by that, you can donate here, our preferred donation method. The Center for Land Economics is a tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofit (EIN: 39-3672325).
Or, you can become a paid subscriber to this very blog! That works, too.
Of, if you don’t have any money, you can become a free subscriber, or just share the blog or our annual report with a friend! That’s also a great way to help.
Alright, enough of that. It’s been a year. What do we have to show for ourselves?
Serious Momentum
We maintain a web page that tracks legislative momentum—seven states now have active legislation pertaining to LVT, and two more have emerging interest. We are actively involved in many of these states. LVT is no pipe dream, but a live and growing policy1.
Revived Progress and Poverty Substack
The first thing we did after starting the CLE was to revive this substack, committing to a weekly posting schedule. The blog now has more than 5,500 total subscribers, and has garnered over 150,000 views in just the last six months. Here’s our top 10 most popular posts this year:
Want to Model a Land Value Tax Shift in Your city? Here’s How
How Baltimore Assessments Accidentally Subsidize Blight—And How We Can Fix it
In the News
Land economics was all over the news this year, and we had a bit to do with that. In Baltimore, we uncovered significant issues with the valuation of vacant land. Maryland’s state valuation agency, SDAT, publicly pledged to fix those issues.
Meanwhile, property tax reform has been making headlines left and right, as advocates in states like Florida, Texas, and Ohio have called for the complete abolishment of property taxes. We pointed out the hidden pitfalls of such a rash move, and argued for Land Value Tax/Universal Building Exemption as a sensible alternative, in this year’s #3 article:
So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes
Although the biggest haters for property taxes are on the right, apparently so are some of its most prominent defenders! We documented the surprising phenomenon of an inter-conservative split in this year’s #9 article, as right-populist YouTubers and the Charlie Kirk show pushed back against governor Ron DeSantis:
The Right Wing Schism Over Property Taxes
Elected Officials ♥ LVT
The most recent election swept several Land Value Tax supporters into office, namely Katie Wilson in Seattle, Jacob Frey in Minnesota, and Sean Ryan in Buffalo, New York (and maybe the new president of South Korea?). Meanwhile, Ohio Republican State Senator Louis W. Blessing, chair of the ways and means committee, just proposed a state constitutional amendment enabling LVT.
We covered that and more in this article:
BOOM: LVT Candidates Get Elected - Landscape #5
Back in September we joined our colleagues at the Progress & Poverty Institute to host our first of many LVT Landscape Live events, which serves as an educational roadmap for local land value tax advocates, as well as an opportunity to platform local candidates for office from around the country who support LVT:
Land value return is needed, pragmatic, and achievable
Mass Appraisal for the Masses
Continuing with our mission of technical education, our most popular articles were all about the nuts and bolts of property valuation. Our article series, Mass Appraisal for the Masses, broke down the arcane and intimidating world of real property and land valuation into simple and clear terms for regular people and elected officials:
We got a lot of great feedback about these articles, and even got invited onto the Complex Systems podcast with the incredible Patrick McKenzie to talk about them!
We’re currently editing “Part 4: How do assessors value land right now?,” so look for that soon!
OpenAVMKit
Why just read about property valuation when you can try it yourself? In August we released OpenAVMKit, a free and open source mass appraisal library that we built from scratch this past year. We’ve been steadily adding features, improving performance, and fixing bugs ever since, thanks in no small part to our wonderful contributors. If you’re a coder or analyst who loves this kind of stuff, please don’t hesitate to join us on the OpenAVMKit Discord!
OpenAVMKit has also started to make some waves in the world of professional mass appraisal. I gave a presentation on it at the national IAAO conference, co-hosted by my good friend Jimmy Williams from Philadelphia’s Office of Property Assessment. Immediately after the talk, we were approached by representatives of a Florida jurisdiction who wanted to adopt the library for their own use; they have since contributed back multiple significant improvements, and have engaged me in many fascinating discussions about novel land valuation methods we’ll be trying out in the new year (and which we’ll be writing about extensively).
Taking the show on the road
This last year we attended the IAAO national conference, YIMBYTown, The Strong Towns National Gathering, and the American Planning Association conference. We plan to do even more next year.
Every month we are hearing from state senators, city councilors, mayors, economists, academics, activists, and more, who want to know how they can help. Between ourselves, our friends at Common Ground, the Progress & Poverty Institute, and the indefatigable keyboard warriors manning the subreddit, more people are being exposed to our ideas than ever before.
The Path Ahead
You just saw what we were able to accomplish with a shoestring budget and a maniacal zeal to prove all the naysayers wrong. Imagine what we could do with some funding at our backs.
Here’s what we’re asking for: two full time salaries, for me and Greg.
If we can hit that, we can make it another year. If we’re lucky enough to raise more than that, we can expand our ambitions.
Here’s all the stuff we want to do:
1. Organization and Onboarding
Our inboxes are increasingly getting pinged by local advocates and elected officials. It’s now getting to the point where we need to invest in not only connecting all these people with one another, but also providing them with hands-on practical training materials. Every fresh advocate should be able to receive a “what can I do?” packet with immediate, clear, and actionable tasks they can do to advance the cause. Funding will help us produce the high quality organizational materials and infrastructure this movement needs to properly capture, focus, and nurture all this inbound energy.
2. Writing and Advocacy
We’re not just blogging here at Progress & Poverty substack, we’re performing original research and shaping the national conversation. Funding will help us not only keep up the pace of our writing, but also expand its scope and depth.
3. Research
There’s still a lot of open research questions pertinent to LVT that we really ought to settle as soon as possible. Basic funding will help us make progress on those, and bonus funding could let us support other researchers directly.
4. Travel and Conferences
We’ve found that YIMBYs, “Abundists,” Strong Towners, and Urbanists make for easy converts to our cause, and the more we can attend their conferences, the more of them we can recruit, and just as importantly, the more we can learn from their political playbooks. Travel and conferences cost money, so the more funding we have, the more we can do.
5. Open Source Software Development
We have a lot more software cooking than just OpenAVMKit. We’re also building easy to use, free and open source tools for civil servants, such as OpenRatioStudy, which helps automate assessment oversight standards. We’ve also built CivicMapper, which visualizes urban land values in real-time 3D:
We’d love to map your city too, but it costs money every month to host this. Your financial support will make it possible for us to continue providing tools like this, as well as to expand their scope.
I want to reiterate that we are all about building public goods. All the research, writing, organizing, and software development we do is in the open. We don’t want to be a bottleneck, we want to be a fountain that overflows into a rising tide that lifts all boats2.
Give the gift of Georgism
How can you help us out? If you’d like to donate, please use our preferred donation link here:
You can also subscribe to this blog, and consider becoming a paid subscriber!
And if you can’t afford to give us any money, not to worry. Sign up as a free subscriber, share our articles, or, if you’d like to volunteer and have ideas for how you could contribute to the cause, reach out to us and let us know.
Additional funding will also enable better metaphors.
Imagine how much better this metaphor could be with additional funding.
Y'all are doing God's work. I will totally become a paid subscriber once I've made some progress on my poverty.
Footnote # 1: organ
Footnote # 2: skyscraper