Long read on the effects of mountaintop removal on a family in W Virginia…the land they owned was eventually enclosed by mining operations, and they were offered a buy out. They won the battle — to keep the land — but lost the war, as they watched it become degraded by the mining operations, tailings and runoff that destroyed the natural unspoiled beauty that made the land valuable to them.
In the end, nine family members agreed to sell, but six refused, and Jerry was one of them. Arch [Coal] sued all of them, arguing that storing coalmine debris constituted, in legal terms, “the highest and best use of the property”. The case reached the West Virginia supreme court, where a justice asked, sceptically, “The highest and best use of the land is dumping?”
Phil Melick, a lawyer for the company, replied: “It has become that.” He added: “The use of land changes over time. The value of land changes over time.” — emphasis added
Surely, the justice said, the family’s value of the property was not simply economic? It was, Melick maintained. “It has to be measured economically,” he said, “or it can’t be measured at all.”
He’s not wrong. Much as I hate to find common cause with a lawyer for a coal company, land use evolves over time. I disagree that wilderness areas are used as dumping for poisonous metals but perhaps if we had a better understanding of the highest and best use of land that extended to not using it at all, we might be better off. For all the talk of urban growth boundaries, a land use tax that forced idle or disused land in cities back into productive use could be used to enforce that boundary.
The question of “highest and best use” is really at the heart of what I want to discover here. And we know that land use changes over time. Even in a suburban yard, a section of the property might be a parking space one year and a garden the next. A corner lot could become a local shop (void where prohibited by zoning). So with land in cities, where there was once farmland or one-story shops and now we see tall buildings and nothing green other than a few street trees or window boxes.
The city or county needs to manage the highest and best use on behalf of everyone but exercising that power is difficult. The land and its value would need to be separated, where the title and right to use it remains with the owner but the value — something the owner doesn’t create and has no right to claim — reverts to the commons through a ground rent or land value tax. If the city needs housing more than it needs car storage in otherwise densely-used areas, it should be able to assess tax on that value. If a developer offers $1 million/acre a year in ground rent and the owner of a surface parking lot is only paying $73,000 in property tax for a .3 acre parcel by the waterfront, the highest and best use would be whatever pays $300,000 a year. If the owner wants to pay that for its current use, that’s fine. It will likely go up year on year as other parcels are developed to their highest and best use. And that assessed tax is just on the land, not any improvement that could be built there. A split rate tax that also taxes development (at a lower rate) would be best but for now, I would be happy to see a ground rent that gets land turned to productive use, rather than as part of some speculator’s portfolio.
Any city that has a housing shortage or homelessness emergency with surface parking lots on its most valuable land is failing the people who live there, housed or otherwise.