Building for Belonging: Lightning Lectures

[Lightning Lecture]: Why you should tax land, and how you should value it
3:20 pm ET | Drafting Room

The US has a massive housing shortage, yet our cities are blighted by vacant or underutilized land. Much of this land is deliberately held idle by speculators, who will buy a vacant lot, wait for the neighborhood to gentrify, and flip the vacant lot for a profit without the speculator doing any work to increase the value of the land. What can we do about these related problems of housing shortage, blighted and underutilized land, and extractive speculation? Urban planners and economists on the left, right, and center suggest that part of the solution lies in Land Value Tax (LVT). This lightning lecture will begin with an overview of LVT from Josie Faass, Executive Director of the Progress and Poverty Institute, a foundation dedicated to researching and advancing the social and economic philosophy of LVT and related policies. The lecture will finish with a presentation by Valuebase, a startup at the forefront of property assessment technology. Valuebase recently raised $6M in funding and provides cutting-edge land and property valuations to local governments across the country. Their team is passionate about upleveling property assessment and brings a wealth of expertise in mass land and property appraisal to the table.