Random thought. What if we taxed property based on the area per person of the property, as opposed to sale value?

Edit and quick intro to those who mostly rent: most real property in the US, especially residential property, is taxed yearly based on some variation of something called "fair market value," usually assessed by a local tax assessor's office

I'm proposing that a property would be taxed for every square meter of space per person in the designated property unit. It can't be totally simplified, but should be fairly straightforward. There could also be progressive brackets. It might not make make sense to apply it strictly per person, but rather for a typical use. That is, we would assume "single family residential" properties to house 3.4 (totally made up number) people per house and property.

The goal of this is to find a fair, market-driven incentive to build density into urban cores.

A similar approach could be applied to commercial space (but probably not industrial).

It could be coupled with a sales tax (currently missing in most real property tax regimes, at least in the US) to capture runaway property valuations in certain jurisdictions.

Alternatively, we could drop the property value based tax rate (but not eliminate it), and then add a per person-area surcharge.

It's not meant to increase revenue, although it could certainly be used that way. It could also be use to decrease revenue, and maybe that would be a good way to sell it. But at the end of the day, developers and residents would both have an incentive to pursue as dense development as possible, even if there is not a density driving pressure of desirablity, which only exists in a few really cool urban cores.

Ok, not utopia per se but a post-scarcity-ish economy where people have their basic needs—food, shelter, healthcare—met virtually automatically. A world where, sure, maybe you have to earn money for certain very scarce luxuries like a tropical island trip, jewelry, nightly wagyu steak dinners, or a penthouse overlooking Central Park, but you get enough basic income to eat healthily and decently every day, have a modest but comfortable home, and not stress out about going to the hospital — and then you can choose if you want to work to earn money to buy additional luxuries or just spend your time to do sports, make art or music, pursue an academic interest, counsel or mentor others in your community, or devote yourself to nature conservation.

I want to get this conversation rolling regularly because it's evident that we're on a cusp of a new economic era — one where AI and automation could free us from a lot of menial physical and intellectual labor and the pretense that everyone has to work to earn their continued existence. It's evident that not everyone has to work. If anything, our economy could be more efficient if incompetent or unmotivated folks just stayed at home and got out of other people's way. I think we all know someone who stays in a job because they need it but are actually a net negative on the organization.

It's an open-ended topic, and there's a lot to talk about in this series—like, how would we distribute the fruits of automation? How would we politically achieve those mechanisms of distribution? What does partially automated healthcare look like?—but I think it'd be good to first talk about current economic inefficiencies that should and could be automated away.