The Economy of Local Rates 191 
which to put a building covering a larger area, or uses 
the thousand pounds to cover the extra cost of provid- 
ing equally good accommodation on his original site, 
he will have to pay the same amount of additional rates. 
Whenever the comparative advantages of the two 
courses are nearly equal under the present law, the 
balance would incline strongly under the proposed 
scheme in favour of higher building, since no more rates 
would be paid on the higher than on the lower edifice. 
This has been denied, but it is surely incontestable that 
to take rates off buildings and put them entirely on 
land would cause people to use less land even at the cost 
of some greater expense in building. The effect has 
actually been observed in some towns in New Zealand, 
where the scheme has been partially adopted.’ 
Not only would the scheme tend to concentrate 
building in each town : it would also teud to concen- 
trate building in the most purely urban areas as 
against the rest of the country. As a rule, the 
more urban the district the more important are the 
services performed by the local authority. Hence, 
anything which relieved buildings from charges for 
these services would be a more powerful encourage- 
ment to building in the more urban districts than in 
the rest of the country. This, too, has been denied, 
but there surely can be no doubt that if taking rates 
off buildings encourages building, it must encourage 
it most where the rates taken off are heaviest.? 
1 See the report on the Working of the Taxation of the Unimproved 
Value of Lund in New Zealand, New South Wales, and South 
Australia, 1906, Cd. 3191, pp. 27-30. 
3 The only semblance of an answer to these truths which has been 
produced is the rather feeble rejoinder that undue concentration of 
building could be prevented by by-laws rerulating buildings, Anyone