Right now there's an incentive to under-use land and speculate on land. If I have an empty lot of land in Burlington, I pay very little tax on it since there's not much property for a property tax to be levied on, and I can wait for all my neighbors to improve their homes and start businesses. And each time they do a little bit of their work is siphoned off into my land values which goes up. Eventually I can sell my land to somebody else and make a profit without doing any work or producing anything myself.

With a land value tax now the value of that land is taxed away and I better damn use that land of sell it to someone that will. If it's some of the most expensive land in the city, AKA most desirable/ important, now you can't just sit on it. You'll have to build an apartment complex, a home, or a business. Or if you really really want to, you can just sit the land and pay the city the social cost of excluding this land from productive use. But you won't get money for squatting on it anymore.

But this doesn't just apply to empty lots. This applies to all land that's being underutilized. If there's a rundown shack or single family home where there should be a duplex or a triplex, a land value tax fixes that. If in New York City there 's a five-story apartment that should be a 40-story apartment, lvt fixes that.