geocon

The idea is to tax land as a percentage of its value (notably, not its size). This is because land is a necessary good which is exclusionary: because there is a fixed supply of land, it can only be owned at the expense of someone else.

So, let's take the scenario you gave: it depends very much where the mansion and the trailer are. Generally, people build mansions on high-value land and trailers are on low-value land, so the mansion will be taxed more than the trailer (a half acre in LA has a much higher value than a half-acre in rural Nevada where I live). If they are on the exact same lot, though, then yes they would pay the same tax. The idea is that taxing this way incentivizes the best use of land. Imagine that you have identical plots in New York, one is a big apartment complex, and the other a parking lot. With a property tax, you take a huge tax penalty for building, and so the housing complex pays a lot of taxes and the parking lot almost nothing. With a land value tax, however, the parking lot and the housing complex pay the same amount in tax, so it incentivizes the owner of the lot to build a more profitable housing complex there as well, and they take no tax penalty.

Prop 13 in CA is a law that freezes property tax assessments at sale, so you have people who are paying taxes on a home currently worth $2 million as if it were only worth the $150k they bought it for in 1980. This means it is always better just to rent the house out than sell it, since you have a huge tax benefit, making housing almost impossible to buy. Worse, you can pass the frozen assessment on in your will. So it is almost literally creating a quasi-landed gentry class.

It may lower property values some, but in the long run even homeowners will be better-off as other, more burdensome taxes decrease. Sure, increasing land taxes may not be that popular, but pair it with abolishing income taxes? That's a different political proposition.

It's also why my first step is not to sell it as the implementation of a new tax; rather, it is an exemption to buildings. People don't like new taxes, but everyone loves exemptions!

Political problems are often difficult to solve but that by no means makes them impossible.

That would be a terrible idea, frankly, because it will cause gradients of overbuilding/land abandonment and underuse. Think about it this way: you have a city where land is worth $30/sqft/yr in the center, $10 at the edge and $20 in between. If you set the tax at $20/sqft/yr, you will not incentivize people to build enough in the center of the city. It will be just fine in the middle, but it would be impossible to earn enough money from land to pay the tax on the outside of the city, so people would just abandon the land or try to build way more than you would actually want there (in which case the supposed land tax is actually cutting in and taxing labor and property as well)

Sure, but durable goods aren't necessarily investment goods. Homes do depreciate in value- their quality declines and they become increasingly expensive to maintain, and they simply don't have the same amenities as newly-built homes without increasingly expensive remodeling.

What makes "homes" appreciate in value is almost never the building itself, it is the land.

Failure to understand imputed rents is a huge problem whenever housing discourse comes up.

To clarify, it's not a flat dollar amount per square foot, it's a flat percentage of value. An acre of land in Wyoming is not taxed the same $/sqft as an acre of land in NYC.

Implement a land value tax by exempting buildings and improvements from paying a property tax, shift state income and sales taxes onto land value, and ease zoning regulations.

Er, an LVT doesn't tax the house at all, that's precisely the point. It only taxes the land... It's literally just a property tax that doesn't tax the house.

Rent control is, I regret to inform you, also NIMBY; it benefits current residents at the expense of future ones.

Do you think the government owns you too, since they take a portion of the proceeds of your work and will put you in jail if you don't pay it?

How dare people get concerned over something so trivial as "having someplace to live"

The point of an LVT is to incentivize the efficient use of land and to compensate the public for the recognition of exclusionary title to use of a location. This doesn't change based on who it is that is using the land or what they are using it for. Take a $20 million plot of land in LA; it makes no sense to exempt a person with a mansion there from paying a tax and penalizing a developer who builds a huge apartment building that can house 50 families! By keeping the LVT flat and not exempting particular uses, you avoid distorting the market and- in the case of a homestead exemption- punishing people who build apartments over single family homes, etc.

Please, taxing something doesn't mean the government owns it. Does the government own someone's home because they have to pay property taxes to the city for paving the streets and running the garbage service?

Behold the rise of neofeudalism: you can already see it in California, thanks to Prop 13.

Land value tax would fix this.

This is very inferior to just a regular land value tax if you understand the incentive structure