Detroit is planning on an LVT project. It still has to pass a few legislative hurdles, but Mayor Duggan is pushing hard. You can read all about it here:
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/10/05/detroit-wants-to-be-the-first-big-american-city-to-tax-land-value

This market resolves N/A if the LVT project is not implemented by the expiration date.

This market is one of a series of markets based on the very confident predictions found in the Marginal Revolution comments section on the subject (mostly, but not always, about how it will fail). I'm turning each of these into a market. (Group link for all these markets)

Commenter Carl Pham:

I think you've put your finger on in general why this is yet another whistle past the graveyard, except to the extent it's a boondoggle for someone or other who figures out how to leverage the system in ways not intended.

If I'm going to develop a plot of land for any purpose other than living on it myself, the initial expense of the land, and even the taxes on it, are pretty much noise in my calculation. If I'm building houses, what I want to know is for how much can I sell them? If I'm building businesses, what I want to know is, for how much I can lease these buildings, which will be determined by how much revenue businesses can see making in that location.

All of these figures depend on things like what the nearby population is, how affluent and interested in home ownership and/or patronizing nearby business of a sort not already present, how much crime there is, how desirable the neighborhood is to walk around in, et cetera. What others have indentified as the "human capital" that surrounds the land.

Detroit's problems may, at some distant point in the past, have been fixable by tweaking the tax code, but at this point I think believing that will work requires a level of faith that shame a saint.

Carl is essentially claiming that developers will be unmoved by the LVT program, and implies that the rate of development will not increase in response to the LVT. He also specifically says "the initial expense of the land, and even the taxes on it, are pretty much noise in my calculation."

Two years after the implementation of the LVT project, if ALL of the following conditions are met, this market resolves NO, otherwise it resolves YES:

• The average rate of development increases

• The number of vacant and/or blighted lots decreases by at least 25%

• At least two prominent developers who have built multiple projects in Detroit are interviewed and each specifically says that the LVT incentivized them to build more, or that land prices were an important part of their decisions