Open-Source Tool LVTShift: Model Your City's Land Value Tax

2025-06-05
Open-Source Tool LVTShift: Model Your City's Land Value Tax

This blog post details using the open-source tool LVTShift to model the impacts of a land value tax (LVT). The author showcases analyses of South Bend and Syracuse, demonstrating how LVTShift simulates various LVT policies (revenue-neutral, different tax burden shifts, etc.) and their effects on city residents and economies. The post thoroughly explains data acquisition, processing, model building, and analysis, including code examples and data sources. Readers are encouraged to model their city's LVT using LVTShift and share their results.

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Development

Rediscovering Lost Wisdom: The Somers System of Land Appraisal

2025-06-01
Rediscovering Lost Wisdom: The Somers System of Land Appraisal

This article delves into the Somers System of land appraisal, a method used at the turn of the last century. Unlike modern computerized methods, the Somers System relied on community consensus to determine land values. The process involved two phases: a town hall meeting where citizens collectively assessed street values, followed by an algorithm calculating individual parcel values based on the resulting map. While largely forgotten, the author explores its viability in data-sparse environments and attempts to recreate it using modern GIS technology, questioning its accuracy against market values and exploring its potential for modern property or land value taxation.

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