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 now always, about how it will fail). I'm turning each of these into a market. (Group link for all these markets)

Commenter M:

I think the last sentence is likely a correct insight of how this collides with real politics.

At the end of the day (when it gets dark), Land Value Tax compared to Property Tax means, for a given equal revenue of tax:

- We won't tax you for making your building nicer or putting more units on it. So more incentives to densify your plot.
- But we will tax you more for putting close to other buildings which are nice and have lots of units on it, because we rate land that's close to buildings like that as having high land value. So less incentives to densify whole neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

You tax something and you get less of it all things being equal (assuming taxes are not used for multiplier spending etc etc and are just a cost). LVT taxes buying, holding and building on land that's close to other amenities (including the amenity of other people).

I am entirely skeptical that LVT will therefore lead to an overall increase in urban density as a whole rather than densifying particular plots; and some plots will instead be left to the city, which will exempt itself from taxation. Will guess that higher order "construction physics" and the overall structure of the economy and technological innovation will continue to dictate urban forms, and taxation incentives will play only a bit part.

(But we need these experiments so the YIMBYites will have real world data to compare to the fantasies and pure projection).

Two years after the project is implemented, this market resolves YES if the average urban density (defined as total built square footage divided by total land square footage) has clearly increased, and it is clear this is not just due to an isolated set of particular plots getting super dense while the rest stays the same or declines in density. Otherwise it resolves NO.