I think another question would be: why are they in NYC today? Let's say that rents go up in NYC. Suddenly companies have a real incentive to leave and move somewhere with cheaper rents. What's to stop Manhattan from slowly becoming empty again...

From my other comment: if you don't believe that location has value in a remote-work world, then companies are just doing something ridiculous renting expensive office space in cities.

> But why would any of this continue to exist if landowners have no interest in improving the value of the land? Lower Manhattan today is worth billions, but 50 years ago parts of it were empty enough to be used as lofts by squatting artists.

The disincentive that you see is in our current system, not Georgism. You note that Lower Manhattan has seen its value increase a lot due to improvements created on that land - improvements that you're afraid wouldn't happen with Georgism, yes?

Under our current system, I pay $10,000/year in taxes on my $1M empty lot (it's all land value since it's an empty lot). If I build a 40-unit apartment building, the land is worth $1M and the building is worth $10M. Now I pay $110,000/year in taxes. I have a huge disincentive to improve the land. With Georgism, my taxes don't go up if I build something on my empty lot so I'm incentivized to build something on the empty lot.

Now, you'll likely say that if I build something on my lot, the value of the land will rise because it's now in a nicer area. That's true, but the value of the land will rise a tiny bit compared to the value of the additions I've made to the land. Under our current system, I'll get taxed on the $10M building value plus the land value. If the land value goes up 10%, we're talking about taxes on $11.1M in our current system vs. $1.1M under Georgism. Again, even if you argue there's some disincentive under Georgism, it's way less disincentive than our current property tax system.

What Georgism does is account for where land is becoming more valuable/popular - and maybe for you "popularity" is a better way of thinking about it since you might be skeptical of "value" if you have a very strong bias toward remote work. At some point, Lower Manhattan started becoming more popular. Why? That doesn't matter. While Lower Manhattan was cheaper than it is today, there were so many other parts of the planet way cheaper than Lower Manhattan so people had incentives to go somewhere else, but still chose Lower Manhattan despite the cost.

As Lower Manhattan became popular, Georgism would have provided more incentive to improve properties. If you own a vacant lot in an area that's becoming popular, you see your taxes rise fast. If you own a $1M vacant lot that becomes worth $5M and the $1M vacant lot next to you became worth $5M and put up a $250M office building, you both pay the same taxes. The person who built the office building gets lots of money for that building so the taxes are pretty low. You'd want to put up an office building or housing or whatever so you can take advantage of that too!

Land value taxes provide a much greater incentive to improve the land than property taxes since property taxes will be based on the land value plus the improvements. By not improving the land, you save money with property taxes. With Georgism, you pay the same taxes whether the land is improved or not. Maybe your improvements do increase the land value somewhat, but when everyone around you is improving the land, that's a much larger impact than just the improvements on your land.

But wouldn't that disincentivize everyone from improving their land? Again, property taxes are a much larger disincentive. Georgism means that if you improve your own land, maybe your raise the value of your land (and everyone around you) by a marginal amount. Property taxes mean that the amount you pay in taxes will go up many times higher when you improve your property rather than by a tiny amount. Property taxes mean that you could see your taxes go up 10-100x rather than maybe go up 1-10% due to your impact on the land value.

Again, why aren't companies leaving NYC today? Most companies are paying rent on their office space, not owning it. As such, the underlying tax structure doesn't impact them. Companies already face rising rents giving them a real incentive to move somewhere with cheaper rents. Why don't they move to 100% remote? Why is Google paying tons of money for offices in NYC when they could just have remote workers or open offices in the middle of nowhere? It's because Google sees value in having those offices. You might disagree, but the reality of our world today is that people are valuing those spaces highly.

All of the incentives that you worry about would be less under Georgism than under our current system. Under Georgism, people have a bigger incentive to improve land than our current system. Under our current system, companies already face high rents incentivizing them to leave cities - but they see more value in staying.

Now, there are some businesses that might own their building/land in NYC. Think a garment company that's been around for a hundred years or a kosher food processing business that's been around for a hundred years. They might have a one-story building in what is now a very expensive part of NYC. However, they already face huge incentives to leave NYC for the suburbs as developers are willing to pay more for their land than their entire business is worth. With Georgism, the incentive could be higher since they're currently facing low property taxes since their land is barely improved (by NYC standards). However, Georgism can actually make it easier for companies like this to stay in expensive areas - in a slightly modified form. They can't have a one-story building by themselves, but it would be cheaper for them to have one story inside a larger building.

Georgism is about incentivizing better land use in popular areas.