Great. Now retired grandma , who happened to buy a house in a forgotten part of town that suddenly became a bohemian mecca, is stuck with high taxes. She can't move because she doesnt know how to drive and can't take a bus in the suburbs...now must pay half her retired in come due to land value taxation.
This literally describes 2 people I know.
Grandma didn't do anything to you or me.
Why would you punish granma who just want to live out her retirement ?
Why not just go after the foreign demand to hide cash, making housing expensive for everyone else ?
For every "retired grandma who happened to buy a house in a forgotten part of town that suddenly became a bohemian mecca", I can show you dozens if not hundreds of grandmas who already got pushed out of town because of skyrocketing rents - thanks in no small part to your homeowning grandmas stubbornly insisting on living in a single-family home in the middle of Downtown, on a lot that could and should be housing dozens or hundreds of households.
And I haven't even begun to dig into the socioeconomic safety nets like citizens' dividends that a land value tax could readily fund, thus producing a negative tax burden for all renters and the vast majority of homeowners.
Why would you punish those hundreds of grammas who just want to live out their retirements? Not to mention the thousands of working Americans who just want a place to live that doesn't entail multi-hour-long commutes?
> She can't move because she doesnt know how to drive and can't take a bus in the suburbs
There are these things called "moving companies" which would be happy to move her and her stuff into an apartment nearby. With the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in equity she's accumulated due to her property appreciating in value, she can almost certainly afford to hire such a company to move her and her stuff. With LVT motivating the construction of said apartments to amortize said LVT across as many tenants as possible, she will have no trouble finding a new home - and the denser urbanization would mean that the grocer and pharmacist and GP and such would be right around the corner instead of involving a half-hour bus ride through sprawling suburbia.
> Why not just go after the foreign demand to hide cash, making housing expensive for everyone else ?
Because that is far from the only cause of housing shortages. You could play whack-a-mole with ad hoc taxes specifically targeting foreign investors and domestic investors and property management companies and Old Money billionaires and wannabe AirBNB moguls and agricultural conglomerates and commercial/industrial landlords and everyone else directly profiting on the very land speculation driving costs of living through the roof... or you could just tax land value, and thus address all that in one fell swoop with a tiny fraction of the bureaucratic overhead and with countless social and economic benefits on top of that.
That can be fixed - namely, via land value taxation, at a rate as close to 100% as possible.