We're directly inspired by Urban3 and our hope in releasing these tools is to enable more people to be able to do this work directly themselves and share it with their elected officials!
If you're talking about the Manhattan effect specifically, I'm sure that zoning has a large effect on the extremeness of it. If you're talking about "land gets exponentially more valuable in the city center", then you see that pattern everywhere and indeed we saw it in the historical pre-zoning period as well. Agglomeration effects are sticky regardless of what time period you're in, what changes is the coefficients on the exponential equation.
Author here: most people know that the city is "more" valuable, but drastically underestimate how valuable. I've asked people how much more valuable they think Manhattan is than the Bronx and they will say things like "5x" or "10x", which is off by an order of magnitude.
They also underestimate what this means. In many cities you can have 50%+ of land value concentrated in a rather small portion of area, and this has huge implications for what would happen is you, say, changed property tax policy to shift the tax burden towards land and away from buildings. Most people assume it would kill the suburbs, but in many of our models single family homes come out slightly ahead, or stay neutral.
It's not just zoning, though that exacerbates it. City centers are where economic activity tends to be concentrated so even without zoning you would see these exponential land value effects as you approach the centers of economic activity (and indeed, we did see these same relative patterns prior to the passing of modern zoning laws).
Both. They do understand that it’s worth “more” in the city but they vastly underestimate the magnitude, and they vastly underestimate what that means in terms of where the total bulk of land value is concentrated, and therefore what the distribution of winners and losers will be in any tax shift scenario.
Author here. Our blog generally concerns property tax reform for our regular readership which is admittedly less clear to a new reader coming in cold: the intuitions I’m referring to is the average homeowner kind of assumes any tax reform (such as shifting taxes off buildings and onto land) is designed to impoverish them personally. The purpose of these maps is to show such people where land value in cities is really concentrated - Ie, not the m the suburbs. Mono centric city value might be intuitive to academics, but it’s not among regular everyday people.
The main purpose of the 3D is to communicate the extreme differences in scale of value, which chloropleth alone doesn’t always get across as it flattens the magnitude disparity. Keeping true north to avoid confusion is a good point.
This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.
Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.
This is my company: www.landeconomics.org
This is my book: www.landisabigdeal.com
This is my personal website: www.fortressofdoors.com
This is a game I worked on: www.defendersquest.com