Human beings have to live somewhere and gathering them together in a small urban footprint is better for the climate, not worse.

How do those small urban footprints survive though? They bring in outside resources, external zing the impact elsewhere and adding in the cost of transporting goods into and waste out of the urban centers.

There isn't a magic answer to it, but simply saying dense areas use less footprint for shelter ignores all the other necessities and conveniences consumed by the people living there.

5 single-family homes will consume the same amount of food and water as 5 units in a few duplexes or a five-over-one. The SFHs will consume more energy for heating and cooling (related to larger footprints) and use more resources to send power and water (larger distances to send power and water.) An SFH consumes more resources than a multifamily-housing unit holding the same number of people.

That really does entirely depend on the size and style of the SFH, location on the land, lifestyle, etc.

Single family homes are often easier to power off-grid with solar if that's on the table, though again with regards to externalities the solar power equipment likely sends those costs to multiple countries on the other side of the planet.

They would still use more energy in total, since flats insulate themselves to a certain extent due to having less outside walls & tend to be smaller requiring less energy to heat the space. You can also power flats with renewable energy. At this point less total energy is good regardless.

Suburbs also bring in outside resources. The difference is that distributing those resources and collecting waste within the city is less costly than distributing resources and collecting waste within the suburb.

Suburbs may very well be the worst of both worlds, being more spread out but still not spread out enough to be fairly self sufficient.

Almost nobody are or want to be "fairly self sufficient". The proportion of people even trying are a rounding error.

Spread-out suburbs require more heating, transportation infrastructure, and more physical land to exist than alternatives. You can argue for them based on other gactors, but they use more resources, full stop.

Spread out rural housing does not mean less transport to bring in outside resources, but vastly more because most goods are still "outside resources" even if you literally live on a farm, and most people don't.

Yes but the sewage from a block of flats takes less transportation for the equivalent amount of people living in suburbs with thousands of square m for a single house

LVT doesn't encourage infinite development on all land - it encourages the efficient use of land.

If you replaced property taxes with land value taxes and held revenue equal:

For rural areas, not much would change. Land is cheap and taxes would remain low.

For suburban areas, there would be a moderate shift in tax burden. People with homes on large plots of land would pay more; people with homes on smaller plots of land would pay less.

For urban areas, the changes would be drastic. Because land is limited in urban cores and appreciates in value every year, there's an absurd amount of speculation. An LVT would discourage this by making it costly to hold onto undeveloped or underdeveloped land just for future price gains. As a result, we could expect a surge in the development of vacant or underutilized plots, leading to a potential increase in housing availability and a decrease in rental prices. This would both alleviate housing shortages and reduce the speculative bubbles that can distort urban real estate markets.

With %100 LVT, city will be owner of most land in 1 year. With 10% LVT - in 10 years. Value based tax means that value is transferred from owner to a new owner no matter what. Owner is just working for a new owner.

From memory, the Georgist belief is that whoever collects the tax will spend it, and the spending will distribute the value in a way which is...not necessarily equal, but is closer to equality than the status quo was.

The wealth transfer is a feature rather than a bug, in this case. Speculators sitting on unimproved or underutilised land are seen as literal rent-seekers, and taxing them is seen as reclaiming a natural monopoly at the same time as removing the leeches who're sucking up big chunks of a city's growth.

Well, property taxes in my city are around 1% currently. Does that mean the city will own 100% of land in 100 years? Probably not. For lots of reasons.

That applies to any kind of work currently also..

From a climate perspective, cities should incentivize people to develop their land into dense/efficient usages because urban dwellers have the lowest per capita environmental impact. The alternative is suburban or rural dwelling which requires more resources and more duplication.

Duplication often leads to resilience in a system, and can lower the infrastructure required since the centralized resources aren't being shipped across the country.

Optimizing for profit in urban land use excludes the production of raw materials almost entirely. Meaning that raw materials have to be grown or raised elsewhere, transported into the city, and the waste has to be removed afterward.

Wouldn't it be more beneficial purely from an environmental angle to produce more food and resources in the urban areas to minimize external costs? And if so, wouldn't the current system disincentivize this in favor of higher profit per square foot businesses, regardless of the environmental impact?

> Why should a city incentive land owners to develop and commoditize their land?

Because otherwise newcomers are stuck paying high rents to people who got there first, causing misery and impoverishing young people to the benefit of the old. And when young people lack opportunity, violence happens.

> why not incentive the opposite and incentive leaving the land natural?

We do. All over the place. But for the cost of a square mile of Central London being natural, we could have a dozen square miles of natural land just 50 miles away. Because way more people want to live in Central London than a commuter town.

Generally, land is valuable (and therefore under this scheme highly taxed) because people want to live there. And if they can't live there, they'll live somewhere else, likely involving a longer commute that is worse for the environment.

Wanting to live somewhere and reducing climate impact are different though. If you build a city full of dense housing, where does all the food and water come from? Or the electricity, furniture, and clothing?

Costs can be externalized, but at the environment level they still exist even if outside the city of consumers. It's also often the case that externalizing those costs adds even more impact as the product has to be shipped in and the waste shipped back out.

> If you build a city full of dense housing, where does all the food and water come from? Or the electricity, furniture, and clothing?

I don't understand your argument. Are you saying that people that don't live in cities don't consume, or consume less of, food, water, electricity, furniture and clothing?

> It's also often the case that externalizing those costs adds even more impact as the product has to be shipped in and the waste shipped back out.

They have to be shipped to fewer places and thus save resources. The only way what you are saying makes any sense is either if shipping things to more places somehow save resources or if people that don't live in cities don't need anything shipped.

In general rural areas are poorer, and poorer people consume less.

It may be true from a theoretical viewpoint, but in general cities are richer and consume more.

It's still more efficient for a single factory to fell 20 trees and produce 20 chairs than it is for 20 people to fell their own tree and produce their own chair. Not to mention one person can't specialise enough to produce everything to the same standard as someone who does the same thing all day long, or an automated process which is optimised to do that exact thing at scale.