Property Taxation and Efficient Urban Land Allocation: The Land Value Tax Revisited

Introduction During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, a great deal of literature was devoted to the virtues and deficiences of the general property tax and its proposed replacements — a system of land value taxation, or the more extreme single‐tax advocated by Henry George. The controversy may seem academic to many who claim that the property tax is adequate and fulfills its purpose to the city — as its chief source of local government revenue. But the relationship between the far‐reaching economic effects of the property tax and the economic forces which help shape urban development warrants further study in order to clarify the issue for urban planners and developers attempting to solve cities' problems.