The problem with a LVT is that the Comptroller will look at the apartment block and look at the parking lots, then decide "The land used by the parking lots must be less valuable, otherwise we'd have apartments there" and then nothing really changes.
Its also just not... practical to tax your way out of a problem that you subsidized your way into. When we've spent a century building car-centric cities, ratcheting up taxes on the amenities cars need to function won't make the cars go away. The cars will make you go away. Ultimately, you need to build the mass transit first and incentivize the dense car-hostile infrastructure. Only then can you start penalizing big wasteful parking lots because - by then - they will actually be wasteful rather than a necessary component of the transit infrastructure.
Cheap land should theoretically make building transit easier. The fact that we continue to pave over old rail routes rather than building out rail on old shitty roads is purely a political decision.
Build trains over intercity highways? It's basically impossible with any American politician. A transformation like that would take ten years, but no American politician thinks further than two years ahead and literally won't be in office long enough to implement it.
Consider I-10. It was originally planned to support a rail corridor adjacent to the roadways. Ultimately, the plan was scrapped to build toll lanes where the rail line was supposed to go. An even more glaring example was the Westpark Tollway, which was built over the top of an old rail line that was originally intended to be the Blue Line commuter rail from West Houston into the Galleria Area.
Not only is rail around and through intercity highways possible, it is often the original intent of city planners and civil engineers.
If you want to talk about political possibility, I would recommend attacking it from a budgetary perspective. Pitch rail as big cost savings to the city and promote it as Cost-Neutral or pair it with some kind of tax cut. Voters love that shit. And it works particularly well in a state like Texas, where revenue is driven by property values rather than tax rates anyway. You can toss peanuts to the voters, by way of minor increases in the property tax deduction, while reaping massive windfalls when rail drives up density and more than makes up the difference in cuts as a consequence.
We already have proof-of-concept in this idea by way of the Houston Main Street line, an improvement that created a development boom all through Downtown and Midtown straight out to the NRG stadium and beyond. Property taxes soared while commute times plunged.
The problem with a LVT is that the Comptroller will look at the apartment block and look at the parking lots, then decide "The land used by the parking lots must be less valuable, otherwise we'd have apartments there" and then nothing really changes.
Its also just not... practical to tax your way out of a problem that you subsidized your way into. When we've spent a century building car-centric cities, ratcheting up taxes on the amenities cars need to function won't make the cars go away. The cars will make you go away. Ultimately, you need to build the mass transit first and incentivize the dense car-hostile infrastructure. Only then can you start penalizing big wasteful parking lots because - by then - they will actually be wasteful rather than a necessary component of the transit infrastructure.
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Cheap land should theoretically make building transit easier. The fact that we continue to pave over old rail routes rather than building out rail on old shitty roads is purely a political decision.
Build trains over intercity highways? It's basically impossible with any American politician. A transformation like that would take ten years, but no American politician thinks further than two years ahead and literally won't be in office long enough to implement it.
Consider I-10. It was originally planned to support a rail corridor adjacent to the roadways. Ultimately, the plan was scrapped to build toll lanes where the rail line was supposed to go. An even more glaring example was the Westpark Tollway, which was built over the top of an old rail line that was originally intended to be the Blue Line commuter rail from West Houston into the Galleria Area.
Not only is rail around and through intercity highways possible, it is often the original intent of city planners and civil engineers.
If you want to talk about political possibility, I would recommend attacking it from a budgetary perspective. Pitch rail as big cost savings to the city and promote it as Cost-Neutral or pair it with some kind of tax cut. Voters love that shit. And it works particularly well in a state like Texas, where revenue is driven by property values rather than tax rates anyway. You can toss peanuts to the voters, by way of minor increases in the property tax deduction, while reaping massive windfalls when rail drives up density and more than makes up the difference in cuts as a consequence.
We already have proof-of-concept in this idea by way of the Houston Main Street line, an improvement that created a development boom all through Downtown and Midtown straight out to the NRG stadium and beyond. Property taxes soared while commute times plunged.