Sightline Daily, 10 June 2014:  Five reasons to love land-value taxes. LVT can be described as a tax on sprawl; it encourages a more built-up, vibrant downtown, diverting growth from lower-value properties in the suburbs.

TO REVITALIZE DOWNTOWNS, TAX LAND SPECULATION

Excerpt:

Downtown Seattle holds some of the most valuable real estate west of Minneapolis and north of San Francisco. Yet a stroll through Seattle’s urban core reveals unwelcome surprises: rundown, decrepit buildings; empty land parcels; and surface parking lots on prime real estate, like the one below, just blocks away from high-rises worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Is an underused (at midday), 63-spot parking lot the new normal for downtown Seattle? It shouldn’t be. Proximity to jobs, people, retail, and transportation should have made parcels like these ideal targets for new homes or office buildings. Yet a two-decade boom in downtown real estate has passed these properties by. For example, the Eitel Building is a historic building that is a stone’s throw from Pike Place Market, Seattle’s number one tourist attraction, and has been unoccupied above the ground floor since the 1970s. This marks four full decades of neglect and decay.