Thanks for all the details! Limiting a land value tax to densely populated areas is a great detail here. Sorry if I end up with a long list of follow-up questions here, this is really interesting.
So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. In dense areas that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it would still mean that parks would be an unlikely occurrence and likely only feasible when run by the government. I assume most parks in these areas are anyway, so the loss may be limited to smaller neighborhood parks, courtyards, etc.
Finding a clear way to draw a line between what area is dense enough to be taxed and what isn't seems like it would be an ongoing challenge. Not only would you have to define specific measures and thresholds, you would have to eventually move the line as the city evolved. Any thoughts on his this would be done, or already is in areas with a similar tax?
When it comes to "best use" of a piece of land, who decides this? Does that measure really just boil down to whatever spends the most capital to build on the land, without regard for economic or social value, environmental impacts on the land and surrounding area, etc?
It seems like this would lead to a lot of economic and social impacts that aren't necessarily desirable. Is there a clear way to guard this system from building higher and higher economic centers, inflating incomes and forcing even more of a wedge into the wealth gap? In you example, a car wash would be able to employee people at a lower once level in the area where a much more expensive biotech building would mostly employ highly educated people who bring much higher price pressure to the area. Can that be avoided with a tax that incentivizes building more expensive, and likely more technical/specialized, businesses on every plot of land?
Related to that, what's the solution for infrastructure and resource requirements? Large biotech facilities would likely require more power, transportation and delivery access, maintenance, and building materials. If we are simultaneously concerned with environmental impact, creating incentives to build much larger building with much higher resource requirements flies in the face of this. Would we be creating a situation where businesses are pushed to use more energy, concrete, steel, and glass partly because a tax makes smaller businesses less feasible?
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Well that ended up being a bit of a brain dump with questions mixed in. If you made it this far, thanks for playing along!