Ah LVTs, my favourite hobby horse.

It can be done. Where I live, the 'state-level' government survived going to an election with an explicit policy of replacing 'stamp duty' (a tax on the value of property sales) with a land value tax increase. Actually, they've survived two so far. They approached it exactly as you supposed: the tax will be phased in over something like 10 years.

FWIW, the two 'political' lessons I got out of it were:

(a) Surprisingly, builders' associations (and the like) should theoretically be very supportive of a switch to LVT, particularly if it's replacing property value taxes (which tax the total value of land and improvements, rather than just the unimproved value of land). They were supportive in our case at any rate. Because a LVT results in high-value land being put to its most productive use (e.g. 'land-banking' becomes profit negative, it incentivises inner-city redevelopment etc.), it means more business for builders (and this would be sustained in the long-run).

(b) Special measures have to be taken to protect people on fixed incomes who occupy high-value land (i.e. pensioners/retirees still living in the family home). This is partially for political reasons: the most effective way to 'negatively campaign' on the issue is to talk about how the LVT will force granny out of the family home. But there are also legitimate fairness concerns too: people who happen to own high-value land during a switch-over will suffer a 'windfall loss'. Although there's a perfectly reasonable counter-argument to this (IMHO), it's way too complex to be politically useful (and far too long to go into here).

I think one approach could be a sort of 'reverse mortgage until death' transitional arrangment: anyone on a retirement pension (or whatever reasonable criteria) prior to the LVT becoming 'official policy' would only have to pay some manageable proportion of the total land-tax due each year. The rest would accrue as a liability against the person's property, to be collected either at time of sale (which would now be voluntary), or from their estate (i.e. when they die). Obviously it would have to be carefully worded, but I think it's a fair compromise that the public could understand.

The downside to this (or any other 'transitional arrangment') is that it would delay some of the economic efficiency gains from a LVT: namely, the efficient reallocation of land (i.e. a retired couple would otherwise have an incentive to 'downsize' from their mostly empty 5 bedroom house to a townhouse or apartment, allowing a family currently crammed into a 2 bedroom flat to move somewhere more appropriately sized).

On the purely 'heartless economic side', it's such a great tax because:

- It's one of the few taxes that results in a more efficient allocation of resources (most other 'large' taxes usually generate some amount of dead-weight loss e.g. income tax, company tax etc.)

- It's a very stable tax base, as the base is completely immobile (you can't live in the US from a property located in India) and the tax is very difficult to avoid (it's pretty difficult to hide a large block of land or sneak it off to a tax haven somewhere). Also, if the rate is set so that it only taxes 'land rents' (unearned profits that accrue to landholders, in the form of higher land prices, due to improved amenities in the surrounding area), then it can actually increase economically activity due to the improved allocative efficiency discussed above. Again, most other taxes do the opposite (excluding Pigovian taxes, most commonly known as 'sin' taxes).

- LVTs are also a 'cycle-neutral' tax. Property taxes and stamp duties, on the other-hand, are pro-cyclical (i.e. when the economy is booming, tax receipts rise considerably, and when the economy is in recession, tax receipts fall). In practice, I think this results in boom-bust cycles that have much higher peaks and much lower troughs, simply because politicians will spend the money if it's there, but seem to be highly averse to taking on debt (so pro-cyclical taxes mean the economy is more overheated during boom-times, and more depressed during busts because of the contraction in government spending).

- [This is my own crazy opinion that other LVT proponents may very well disagree with] I think LVTs would improve macroeconomic-stability and increase economic productivity in the long-run. So much private capital investment gets poured into totally unproductive property speculation; capital that could otherwise be put towards some productive use (e.g. business investment via loans of equities etc.). And if you look at the past-century of economic history, you'll notice that an alarming number of recessions and depressions occurred because speculative bubbles in property markets popped (the 1890s depression, for example). Although speculative bubbles can form for other reasons, my view is that rising land prices are one of the primary triggers of property market speculation (or, at the very least, these rising land prices cause speculation to be more intense and prolonged).

So yer. LVT.