The opposite: It does help with commercial property

> if it lowers the value of that land even just to zero, it'll just be undeveloped entirely

It's not that the value of the land is zero, but rather the price can drop to zero. The price is a factor of both the land value and the taxes on the land. For example, suppose you buy land for $50, and you wish to 10x your investment, and won't resell for less than $500 (which nobody will pay). Suppose further that the land value tax is $0/mo. You can sit on the land doing nothing, ruining the community, and it won't cost you much.

Now suppose the land value tax is raised/added to the tune of $1/mo. You would need to find some use for the land that raises more than $1/mo, or else you're losing money every month. Costing money every month means the land is now worth less, let's say $25. But what if you don't want to use the land, because you're a speculator, not a business owner? Well, you can choose to either keep losing money monthly, or sell the land for $25. Economically speaking, you might choose to sell the land if you would otherwise keep it empty for >25 months.

If you choose to sell the land, whether for $25 or $0, then I could buy it and run a business from there, and as long as the business makes more than $1, I stand a chance to profit. Thus, I win, and also the community wins, because the storefront that the original speculator kept empty gets filled with something useful.

In fact, in this scenario, everybody wins except the real estate speculator who was ruining the community by keeping storefronts empty, and that person deserves to lose and be punished. With any luck, the speculator realizes that what they're doing is both bad and unprofitable, and either finds a useful way to contribute to the community, or fucks off forever. Either way, the community wins!

Land value tax, in a world where buildings are financialized (ie. have a mortgage) and used for speculation will make things worse by making everything more expensive, hence making the big losses on underwater mortgages ... bigger. Which, you have my personal guarantee, won't affect the community in a good way at all.

Empty lots aren't empty because their owners hate you, it's because the land value is too low for the mortgage and needs to drop, but can't, they're unwilling or unable to eat the loss. The problem is investors prefer small yearly loss over eating the big loss now. Land value tax supposedly solves that ... by making everything more expensive? Of course it will do the reverse.

Exactly! So we make it more expensive to leave their building empty. Land value tax makes it more expensive to hold the land vacant, thus encouraging the speculator to either use the property (improving the community), or continue lowering rental/sale prices until it rents or sells, or pay higher taxes to the community they're ruining.

> Empty lots aren't empty because their owners hate you, it's because the land value is too low for the mortgage and needs to drop, but can't, they're unwilling or unable to eat the loss.

They're empty because the speculators are asking so much above market price for rent or sale that nobody can afford it. The solution is to institute forces which coerce them to either use it or sell it (potentially at a loss, but not as high a loss as holding it vacant).

> Land value tax supposedly solves that ... by making everything more expensive?

No, land value tax only makes it more expensive to leave the property empty. It doesn't make anything else more expensive. Indeed, it makes it cheaper for a business to buy up an unused property, because the seller would rather sell at a loss than incur a sufficiently larger loss (land value tax) over time.

You're disregarding everything I said. The problem is that "selling at a loss" is a much, much higher loss than the tax over time, which is what's sustaining the bubble for 1.5 years now. Investors are showing the opposite behavior of what you claim, and you are unwilling to even consider the data.

There effectively a land value tax on commercial property. It's called a mortgage. It's just being paid to banks (and the money "destroyed") instead of going to government. It has the opposite effect of what you claim: it makes land values higher despite no development.

You are also totally not considering what happens if your "forced to sell" shit actually goes through. That money is people's pension money and money that is used for social security. If your tax results in those loans disappearing, yes, you may be able to buy the lot cheaply, but only at the cost of destroying a large amount of people's livelihoods.

You don't know what the tax is, so there's no way that you can make that assumption. Like folks here are saying, we just make the tax enough that it's an even higher loss than that.

> There effectively a land value tax on commercial property

Commercial property isn't the issue here. We're talking about penalizing unused commercial property.

> That money is people's pension money

I didn't force people to put their pension money into Blackstone so Blackstone could ruin communities with their speculation. More importantly, communities being ruined here, and the people living in them, are more important than investors in speculation which ruins them. The livelihoods are already being destroyed by them.

Unused commercial property is a subset of commercial property.

And you don't care that people lose their pensions. Ok. I think we're done here ...