Could also introduce a mechanism for homeowners to correct the official city record, with documentation. Under a LVT the incentives would be in place for this, because undocumented improvements generally improve the structure value of the house, which homeowners are not taxed on, yet if the structure value is subtracted from the recent sale price it would reduce the land value, which homeowners are taxed on. (This is not the case with a straight property tax, where homeowners have every incentive to lie about improvements to avoid a re-asssessment.) And it's in the city's interest to have accurate records about the state of each home.

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sokoloff 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, the incentive just has the opposite sign now. Find a way to take basement storage and turn it into just barely legally qualifying as bedrooms and bathrooms, even though every human would immediately classify and value it as if it was ordinary basement storage. Same with the living room/den/family room. In a lot of places you’d just need to make a small back-to-back closet and ensure egress is met (or grandfathered as-built) and they’d legally be able to called bedrooms. My 4 BR, 2.5 bath house becomes a 7 BR, 3.5 bath place, saving the new buyer (or me) on land taxes forever, making them (or me) willing to pay more to do that pointless remodeling.

“Why does this basement hallway have 4 half-baths and 4 tiny bedrooms full of shelves, 2 bedrooms right off the main entry, and no living room? Taxes.”

I just can’t see how to eliminate human judgment from the valuation process of the parts when humans are unavoidably the ones valuing the combination.

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nostrademons 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It comes back to "AI" meaning "aggregated intelligence" rather than "artificial intelligence". Statistical valuation approaches basically mean replacing the judgment of one assessor with the aggregated (through some smart averaging process) value of many purchasers. Aggregates are much more robust to both manipulation and misjudgment than the individual data points used to make them. Ergo, simply replacing one person's judgment with thousands of peoples' judgment will make the process more accurate.

	▲	sokoloff 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Assuming that works for the determining of the standardized, publicized assessment method, I think it stops working as well when people look at the published assessment method and have huge incentives to find ways to boost the assessed value of improvements, thus reducing the value assigned to the land when they appeal based on the notion that the arms-length purchase for the combination was $X and the publicized value of the improvements calculates out to $Y, therefore leaving only $Z for the value of the unimproved land. Actually, now that I think about it more, the output of the model would have to be a direct estimate of $Z (rather than an estimate of $Y, which is surely easier), making some of those concerns moot when the most recent sale was long ago (but not for new transactions). I still can't figure out what the appeals process when the model gets it wrong (or is perceived to be wrong) is going to be based on. It seems like we're likely to end up right back at "human judgment", though perhaps that of an actual judge trying to interpret the parcel's value taking into account the model's output and the arguments of the plaintiff land owner instead of a city assessor trying to argue comparable sales with a land owner, which is a process most everyone can wrap their head around and have a pretty good feeling how they'd fare if they took it all the way to court.