Reddit reviews Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation

I am kind of agnostic on land value tax vs. land + building tax at the moment. William Fischel lists several downsides of land value taxes in Zoning Rules!:

• Property taxes are easier to administer because land + building sales are easier to observe than land only sales.
  
• Property taxes are more popular because people do want mansions to be taxed more than small houses on an equivalent lot.
  
• With zoning that limits development potential, property values often reflect the value of the land and what you are allowed to do with it anyway. In other words, “What should the land be zoned for?” is the bigger question than “Land tax vs. property tax?”
  
  Adam Ozimek also listed Some Advantages Of Property Taxes Over Land Value Taxes:
  
  
• Since buildings tend to last a hundred years, old buildings are more like land than capital. The creation of a land value tax instead of property tax on old buildings would just be a tax cut on old buildings. It would not do much to incentivize building.
  
  So I would be fine with a land value tax, or a split roll that taxed buildings less than land, or a property tax that exempted new buildings for a number of years.
  
  But the reason that I mentioned all those other alternatives to property and land value taxes is that local voters could actually impose them, whereas Proposition 13 prohibits any state or local government from reassessing property or raising a land tax.

For transportation, look for the work of:

• Mike Manville
  
• Jonathan Levine (he has a pretty big project coming out in 2019)
  
  For land use look at works by:
  
  
• Sonia Hirt
  
• William Fischel, especially The Economics of Land Use Regulation. This is a great book, although Fischel is a bit too much of a proselytizer of single family home ownership for me.
  
  I have also just recently come across the blog of Minneapolis planning commissioner Nick Magrino, but his head seems to be in the right place.
  
  Be wary of any bullshit about the future being in autonomous vehicles.

> So what is the solution, then? If you can't improve neighborhoods because of possible gentrification, do you just stop investing in decent working class neighborhoods until they become ghettos?

Increasing the supply of housing throughout the city and moreover removing the parts of the zoning code that strangle housing supply.

Seriously, no one gave a shit or heard of "gentrification" till the '80s when zoning changes made building taller buildings really really fucking hard. That's a subsidy to existing landlords (and generally property owners). NYC is a city of renters and ought to be able to do better through voting.

This one is pretty good Zoning Rules! by William A. Fischel.
It touches on the economics of planning and explains a lot of the real issues that you deal with in the field... like why NIMBYism everywhere.