Does Georgism Work, Part 3: Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately From Buildings?

[Guest post by Lars Doucet - empirical follow-up; scored on the same axes.] Addresses the 'greatest objection': can land be assessed separately from buildings accurately enough to tax? Combines primary research (attending Ted Gwartney's 5-week assessment seminar; auditing his own Texas county's practices) with a literature survey: the Total = Land + Improvements residual identity; the market / cost / income approaches; how to test assessments (ratio studies, sub-2% owner-complaint rates); staffing needs (British Columbia: 1 assessor per 7,250 people); and a tour of modern mass-appraisal methods (multiple regression, nonparametric kernel regression, adaptive weights smoothing, semiparametric regression, and an AHP-based iLVM for data-poor developing nations). Honest 'plausible but not a slam dunk' conclusion, with the key point that targeting 85% LVT leaves a safety margin against over-assessment. Adds substantive responses to comments (zoning, transitional politics, and a sharp 'fully general argument against change' rebuttal on the corruption objection). IMPACT: the methods surveyed here are now operationalized for real assessors via CLE's open-source OpenAVMKit and Doucet's ValueBase (used by ~36 assessment offices) - this essay's content is directly changing appraisal practice.

Quality 76 · Excellent. Low-Excellent: the broadest and most practical of the three, dismantling the strongest feasibility objection with both fieldwork and a methods survey; slightly more diffuse than Part 2, and the algorithm tour gets into the weeds. The closing comment-responses add real value. ~76.

Claude’s paradigm shift 44 · Moderate. Moderate, lower end. A survey of existing assessment techniques plus some original legwork; the methods pre-exist. (That these methods are now being deployed for real assessors is real-world impact - scored in A, not B.) ~44.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. The broadest, most practical Georgism follow-up, dismantling the strongest feasibility objection (can land be assessed separately from buildings?) with both fieldwork and a methods survey — part of the corpus feeding a materially-consequential movement. Real significance via that role, but a specialist brief — modest RWI.