Common Ground USA is an all-volunteer organization that promotes land value tax shifts, rent-sharing land trusts, and other commons-based approaches to social, environmental and economic issues.
Recent
Research
Setting up a Rent-sharing Farm Trust in Minnesota
A report prepared on behalf of Common Ground USA
Municipal Land Trusts
A Feasibility Study for Adoption by City of Saint Paul
The Power of Land Value Taxation to Spur “Missing Middle” Housing
Original Research from
Common Ground OR-WA
Incentivizing Local Zoning Reforms with Land Value Taxation
A Common Ground OR-WA Working Paper
From the Common Ground USA Blog
Here’s How Your State Could Reduce Taxes For Most Taxpayers And Stimulate Your Economy While Maintaining Complete Revenue Neutrality.
Your state can gain these 2 advantages by taxing land assessments more and what is produced (like buildings) less. Find out the various ways to do this. It would be completely revenue-neutral since an economically beneficial tax would be reducing economically harmful taxes.
Green Party and Other Environmental Organization Platforms for Commons Rent/Land Value Tax Policy
This document is a compendium of the Platform Planks of eleven Green Party and related other groups from six countries during a 40-year period that advoc
Land Value Capture, Explained
What is “land value capture”? How does it work? And why have so many communities across the world applied this financial approach? This video explains land value capture and provides examples from within the “toolbox” of instruments available to governments. It shows how communities have used land value capture to promote social equity and finance affordable housing, infrastructure, and other public goods.
Tax Induced Opportunities for Expanding Community Land Trust Housing in Portland, Oregon
For several years property tax reformers have been calling for a land value tax (LVT) to counteract rapidly rising home prices. A property tax system that raises the tax rate on land and lowers the rate on structures dampens the upward pressure on lot prices, encourages owners of high value sites to put idle land into productive use, and to build more intensively.
The Ownership Society
Originally published on The Rochester Development Blog, a blog about, you guessed it, development in Rochester, authored by Joseph Moore, a member of Common Ground – New York. Follow them on Twitter @CommonGroundNY
I’m just going to start this one by saying that people roping off a section of the natural world and calling it “theirs”, aka land ownership, on a society wide basis has proven to be, well, bad.
Should Sales Tax Fund Schools in Virginia?
Senate Bill 472, which allows any Virginia locality to raise its sales tax 1% to fund school construction projects, passed the Senate with a 28-12 vote. This does away with the previous practice of the assembly passing sales tax increases in a piecemeal fashion. However, the sales tax itself is possibly one of the worst tools to use to fund our schools.