What Makes a Strong Town?

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns recently gave a speech to the annual summit of lawmakers at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). The audio was recorded and the folks at Strong Towns graciously combined the audio with the video of the slides used during the presentation. I thought it was a great overview of the really great ideas advocated by Chuck and so I’m posting it here hoping you will take a look:

He touches on a lot of great concepts. One of the things I have been thinking about is the way our property tax structure disincentivizes good development - particularly good architecture. Chuck just briefly touched on this idea towards the end of his presentation but I wanted to expound on that briefly. The problem with taxing improvements is that the more the landowner invests in the structures on their site the more tax they have to pay. This is counter-intuitive as we want to encourage landowners to develop their land to the highest potential especially in areas that have already invested in public infrastructure. One of the thoughts I’ve had is that perhaps the tax system should be based on a sliding scale of sorts. Properties that are in town or in areas with great amounts of infrastructure investment should be taxed mostly on land value with a very small percentage of the tax on property improvements. Properties that are further out would be taxed more like the current system with a smaller percentage based on land value and an additional percentage based on improvements. Properties that are beyond the reach of most infrastructure would pay most of the tax on improvements and very little on the land.

This would do two things. First, it would not be punitive for making improvements that actually contribute to a better place. This includes improvements that are somewhat intangible such as fine architectural details and good quality building systems. Second it would put pressure on landowners that are in town and have great infrastructure service to actually develop their property as the tax difference between a developed parcel and undeveloped parcel would be much smaller than currently (effectively raising taxes on undeveloped land while keeping developed land at or below current levels). I obviously don’t have anything more than a rough framework but I think such a tax system would better reflect and recoup the public investment in infrastructure.