It has been a learning experience in these first six months.
Setbacks:
The most important setback was the State of Michigan’s failure to allow the city of Detroit to enact an LVT. Had Detroit been able to do so, they would have been an important example for other areas looking to adopt an LVT.
The “start small” strategy was smart as far as it went - we have reached out to numerous local activists and politicians who have expressed interest in an LVT for their city. However, the vast majority of states would require a change to state law, or even the state constitution to make an LVT legal. Not having looked deeply into the topic, my operating assumption was that the State of Alaska, whose property tax laws I know intimately, was likely the median in terms of allowing local governments to let their freak flag fly. It turns out that the State of Alaska is probably 1 of 50 in terms of allowing local governments to experiment with property taxes. This is a problem for any sort of short-term strategy - changing state law is significantly more involved than changing things on the local level.
I am new to lobbying, and while I’m not naive, the extent to which approaching an elected official with a great idea and a song in my heart is not effective has been surprising to me. I was fully prepared to make the argument “this reform will help you win elections,” rather than “this reform is fundamentally fair and will make everyone better off.” But it is hard to get in the door to even make that argument in the first place.
I have been dismayed by the knee-jerk reluctance of some urban liberals to this idea. Ultimately this is a market-based solution, and some anti-poverty groups seem more interested in ending capitalism than in fighting poverty. This is not a death knell for the idea, but it is a quarter from which I did not expect resistance.
Responses/Successes:
As mentioned, one of the reasons I was optimistic about wider, faster success was the latitude afforded local governments in Alaska. I have garnered interest in an LVT from several members of the Anchorage Assembly, and they will be looking at it as part of their tax reform package under their new mayor.
The strategy has changed to trying to work with local groups who are not necessarily elected officials, on the idea that they are experienced, and are constituents who will at least themselves get meetings with local officials. For example, we have been working with 5th Square in Philadelphia, an urbanist PAC, to try and explore the possibility of enacting an LVT there.
We have also been working with Pro-Housing Pittsburgh to explore the possibility of re-enacting the LVT in Allegheny County.
A message that has turned out to be important/winning has been that most of the benefit of LVT is achieved by taxing the very most important/valuable land. Aligning incentives to develop this land to its highest and best use has a much higher payoff than doing so with land 30 minutes outside of a city, or, say, farmland. And for now, a lot of the resistance is probably going to come from the suburbs or rural areas. Getting wins in the city core is going to be easier than trying to reform everything. In the future if there comes a time to reform taxation of suburbs or farmland with an LVT, some of the wrinkles will have been ironed out by the urban cores.