In the past 6 months, a lot has happened.
First, the organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person.
Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation.
Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills is expected to pass which would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. We, the Center for Land Economics, have been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are working with a coalition of nonprofits and working with local officials to study and address these issues.
New York has a bill to enable five cities to enact split-rate taxes. We are working with city councilmembers from Syracuse and Rochester to pass resolutions to express interest in being one of those five cities. We are also in contact with a couple of other New York jurisdictions with interest.
Minnesota has legislation to enable cities to implement land value taxes. We expect the bill to become limited to Minneapolis with interest from Minneapolis in implementing.
There are a few other cities we are operating in. We have helped another organization prepare for a meeting with the Mayor in Tennessee by doing impact analysis of land value taxes in the city. We have a meeting with the officials from South Bend who have expressed support for land value taxes. Finally, we are in conversation with a State Senator in Colorado who is a champion of land value taxes.
Meanwhile, Lars has soft launched his open-source project, OpenAVMKit, which uses a unified schema to do assessment accuracy reports and automated valuation methods for any property tax data given. Valuation of land is the key binding constraint to successful implementation of land value taxes. We plan to be the leaders in this space with strong benchmarking capabilities and a repo that can enable the open-source community to make the best automated valuation methods.
Along with these efforts, we have expanded the movement. We have posted to the Progress and Poverty Substack growing the subscriber base to around 5,000 subscribers. We have spoken to over 25 local advocates interested in working on land value taxes in their local communities.
Yet, there is a long way to go. We need to start earning income through technical assistance contracts as our grant funding expires. We need to continue pushing for a state to implement, and we need to be prepared to tell the success story for when they do.