Who pays more, who pays less under a land value tax

Revenue-neutral models of shifting the property tax from total value toward land, built from Cook County Assessor and Clerk data for tax year 2024. Two jurisdictions are covered: the City of Chicago's own levy (~830,000 parcels), and the entire Cook County property tax — every taxing body combined, ~1.77 million parcels. Built end-to-end with the LVTShift pipeline described in Progress & Poverty: “You can now vibe-code a land value tax.”

Chicago — the City of Chicago levy

Tax-impact report →

Both reforms (2.5:1 split-rate and 100% building abatement) with charts and category tables.

Explore by community area →

Interactive: pick any of Chicago's 77 community areas and toggle reforms.

South Side vs North Side →

Englewood + West Englewood compared with Lake View + Lincoln Park.

Methodology & limitations →

Full transparency audit: data, levy scope, exemptions, and what the model can and cannot say.

Full model notebook →

The canonical 2.5:1 notebook with all code and outputs.

Classification-preserved variant →

The split-rate run on assessed values, isolating the land-shift from classification removal.

Cook County — the full property tax

Extending the model to all ~1.77M parcels of Cook County (every taxing body's full property tax, tax year 2024). The defensible versions are per taxing body — each of ~900 school/library/park/municipal/county districts shifts its own levy to land within its own boundary, revenue-neutral per district, so every district keeps its funding.

Cook County — per-district, market-value base (C2-MV) →

Each taxing body shifts its own levy to land (market-value base). Results by township.

Cook County — per-district, classification-preserved (C2-CP) →

The pure land shift with Cook County's 10%/25% class ratios kept: housing down, land-heavy uses up.

Cook County — single county-wide rate (C1) →

Illustrative: one rate replacing all ~900 levies. Note this also pools tax base across the county, a far bigger change than a land tax.

What the Chicago model finds

Vacant land and most housing pay more; building-heavy commercial pays less. Under the 2.5:1 split-rate, single-family homes rise ~29% (median), vacant land +135%, while offices and hotels fall ~54–55%.
Downtown commercial gets the biggest tax cuts. Only 10 of 77 community areas see their total bill fall — led by the Loop (−$90M), Near North (−$45M) and Near West (−$39M), where high-value offices and hotels pay much less — while the residential neighborhoods see small increases.
It's geographically progressive in dollars. High-land-value North Side neighborhoods (Lake View, Lincoln Park) bear far more in aggregate than the disinvested South Side, though vacant lots everywhere — concentrated on the South Side — see the largest increases.

Important caveat. The reform is modeled on market value, so it does two things at once: it shifts tax toward land and it unwinds Cook County's classification system (residential assessed at 10% of market vs. commercial at 25%). Much of the housing increase is the classification change, not the land shift — the classification-preserved variant isolates the two. The model also covers only the City's own levy (about 1.5 of a ~6.6 percentage-point composite bill) and runs on gross equalized value (homeowner/senior exemptions not applied). See the methodology & limitations.