Here's a dumb idea:

- Take the most recent sale prices of all neighboring parcels within a quarter mile

- Take the land-area weighted average price per square foot

- Assess the given property as its land area times that average

Practically, this can be assessed without ever visiting any of the properties, and there are no games for either the assessors or the owners to play to manipulate it. Each neighbor serves as an example of the potential use (and therefore value) of local parcels. Yes, your hole-in-the-ground gets taxed the same as a skyscraper of the same size. Have you considered building something useful on it?

(Yes, as usual, parks, churches, and other non-economically-extractive community amenities would be exempt from _paying_ the tax, but that doesn't change the assessment)

It’s simple, hard to game, and executable which puts it ahead of many other ideas on the topic.

But: Land above a subway station or in a main business square is worth A LOT more than the same amount of land 1300 feet away. Waterfront land is wildly more valuable than the land just across the street. In districts with front setbacks, corner lots are less valuable per square foot than mid-block lots.

And I’d really hate to own a normal mini-skyscraper 4 blocks away from the skyscrapers overlooking Central Park and have my building’s land be valued as the average of the sum of all the units overlooking the Park.

But your “dumb” idea is smarter than most I think.