So you want to tax the rich. Good instinct, but you're at a disadvantage. The rich have many options for reducing their tax bill, you can find articles online like this one outlining 10 different ways; for example taking out a loan against shares so now you have debt instead of income, and you didn't sell the shares so you don't have realised capital gains.

They can also try to just leave if you tax them, though how much they actually do is hotly contested. Norway's wealth-tax hike was followed by some high-profile departures, but its wealth-tax revenue rose afterwards, because the base is broad. The UK's "non-dom" reforms set off a wave of "millionaire exodus" headlines, but the figure everyone quoted came from a firm that sells golden passports, and its method (counting where millionaires say they work on LinkedIn) doesn't track where they actually live. The honest summary: income, capital and wealth taxes are partly avoidable, and the evidence on how much is murky and politically charged.

And that murkiness is exactly the case for Land Value Tax. You're up against the most well resourced people on the planet, with financial institutions/lawyers/accountants to help them, who can lobby for laws that help them, and can move to the most beneficial place for them. So stop fighting over whether they'll flee, and tax the one thing that can't flee: land. It might be the only tax you can't avoid:

• it's land, so you can't move it to another tax jurisdiction
• you can take out a loan against it, or pull the other financial tricks, but none of them help: the land tax isn't triggered by a sale or any "realised" event. It's an annual charge on the asset itself, so there's nothing to defer or hide behind.
• you can move ownership to a shell company in a tax haven, but that just means the shell company has to pick up the tab.
• you can sell the land: good! That puts it in the hands of someone who'll actually use it instead of sitting on it. You can't make more land, so we want what already exists to get used.

And another thing about land is that it is also collateral. Fail to pay the tax bill? Guess you lost your land then. The state doesn't even have to go looking for it: every plot is already in a land registry, title and all. In some countries that registry is even public. Here's Sweden's Lantmäteriet, where Swedes can just log in and see who owns what.

Since the above is very international, let's focus in on Germany and Berlin.

The primary tax sources for Germany are VAT and income taxes. VAT is regressive, as it's a flat tax regardless of your ability to pay. And while income taxes are progressive, that breaks down at the top. Not because the rich are cheating, but because most of their money isn't "income" in the taxed sense: it's investment returns, dividends and capital gains, which Germany taxes at a flat 25%, not the progressive rate that tops out above 45%. germanwatch.org finds the effective rate is 43% for middle-class families and 26% for billionaires, and Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit find a similar gap comparing a typical millionaire with an average working family. The system under-taxes wealth held as assets, and land is exactly that kind of asset.

Now, two honest objections, before you conclude I've found the perfect tax. First: "the landlords will just put it on the rent." In Germany they legally can; Grundsteuer gets passed to tenants through the Betriebskosten, and a land value tax would presumably show up on the same bill. But the line on the bill isn't the same as who bears the cost. Landlords already charge what the market bears; a higher tax doesn't let them charge more, and they can't respond by supplying less land, because nobody makes land. The standard result is that a tax on land value stays with the landowner and shows up as a lower land price instead. This deserves its own post, because if you advocate LVT in Germany you will hear this objection within the first five minutes.

Second: nobody dodges a land tax, and "nobody" includes the retired couple who own their flat, not just the housing giants. True. LVT isn't aimed at the rich; it's aimed at land, and it hits everyone who owns some. Its progressivity isn't designed in, it falls out of who owns the land. In a city of homeowners it would look nothing like a tax on the rich. So two questions decide everything: who owns the land here, and is that really where the wealth is?

Let's look. berlinnewsdaily have a post on "Who owns Berlin Rentals", which they had to piece together from sources like the "Who owns the city?" analysis, because Germany's land registry, the Grundbuch, isn't public. The result: about 6% is "individuals with 1 apartment" and the rest is companies/individuals with significantly more. This 2021 article from the Financial Times says that 85% of Berliners rent, so a small number of entities own a large amount of Berlin's land, and rent it to everyone else. Berlin is not a city of homeowners.

And that land is exactly where the wealth is piling up. Another of their posts, based on Deutsche Bundesbank's Distributional Wealth Accounts (DWA), finds that over the last 10 years wealth in Germany roughly doubled, and 57% of that wealth is in "Real Estate (Housing)", but I guess I'd have phrased that "Real Estate (Land+Housing)". So an unavoidable tax on land isn't just unavoidable here: it lands squarely on the wealthy.

And that's only the housing. Berlin's land also sits under office towers, shopping streets, hotels and industrial estates, and nobody's Oma owns an office block on Unter den Linden. Whatever share of the city's land value is commercial is corporate wealth by definition.

Berliners have noticed who owns their city, of course. In 2021, 59% voted to socialise the holdings of the biggest landlords: the "Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen" referendum. Almost five years later, not a single flat has changed hands. Not because it's unconstitutional; an expert commission concluded in 2023 that it's legally possible. But it means invoking a never-used article of the Grundgesetz, paying compensation that could run into the tens of billions (how many is itself fought over; the commission thought even below-market compensation permissible), and years of litigation before the first apartment moves. And so far, the Senat has simply refused to write the law.

But here's the thing: you don't need to take the buildings. You can tax the land rent from under them. That's not expropriation, it's just tax law, and Germany has already stress-tested it. Baden-Württemberg's new Grundsteuer taxes only the land value, ignoring the buildings entirely, and in May 2026 the Bundesfinanzhof confirmed it's constitutional (readable summary at LTO).

• Taking the apartments: legally heroic, politically stuck, billions in compensation.
• Taxing the land under them: already happening in one of Germany's largest states, blessed by its highest tax court, and nobody gets compensated for losing the right to collect rent on something they never created. And Berlin could simply do the same: it currently uses the federal model, which taxes the buildings too, but the opening clause that let Baden-Württemberg go its own way is open to every Land. The legal road has already been paved.

Conclusion

So we've got a small number of very wealthy entities, holding a lot of valuable land, paying relatively little tax, and renting that land to the 85% who don't own any. Berlin already voted to take the buildings back, and got stuck. But the land is still sitting under those buildings, and it's the one asset the wealthy can neither move offshore nor hide behind a loan. Taxing it is the one route Germany's courts have already waved through. So if you want to tax the rich, tax the land.