I still think it's splitting hairs. There's all kinds of ownership mechanisms.
The thing I don't like about yours, if I'm understanding correctly, is that people are invested, but with no initial investment. Alaska oil is there by nature. Sharing revenue with citizens seems reasonable. But cities are there because they were built. The land by itself is worth very little until it's built out. If you don't factor that, you are ignoring reality.
And, "Excess revenues, after the city’s operational needs are met, flow back to residents as dividends." Have you noticed that city's operational needs are never met? They always 'need' more. So, forget about dividends.
And if I can't vote in this Utopia; if other people are making the plans and I don't get a say-so, count me out.
Taking these order...
- I hear you saying it sounds like splitting hairs; my response is that none of this makes sense if you don't look at land value as something fundamentally different from capital and, therefore, see the second order effects the flow from the questions of a) who gets to collect it / monetize land and b) how it's spent / disbursed.
If insufficiently set that up in the top half of the post, I'll unfortunately not up to the task here in the comments. So, maybe some other time.
- As to who ought to get the benefit of land value, I'm not sure if your concern is about incentives (things don't get built if the builders don't get the land-specific upside) or normative (a citizens dividend disbursement is unfair because a random person didn't help build some apartment building or road on the other side of town.
For the incentives question, all I can say is this happens all the time in places both within and without the U.S. Developers build, they get the upside from the development they undertake, but have to pay for the use of the land in perpetuity. Municipal land leasing well established practice.
For the normative concern, well, that's a discussion about the nature of land value. At the end of the day, everyone in a city contributes to the value of land in that city in an individually unattributable way. Yes, the public park makes everything immediately around it more valuable, but you put that park (or road, or apartment building or sewer system) in the middle of the sahara desert and no value has been created. Land values are created communally in a whole that's greater than the sum of it's parts kind of way that makes it impossible to disentangle some original source.
- and on excess revenues, that's why I pulled the numbers for St. Paul. Value of land in a non tier 1 US city is significantly higher than what the municipal government annually spends. Now, I want to triple underscore this is a hypothetical intended to provoke thought, not a set of policy proposals. If cities everywhere suddenly expropriated way more land value overnight, that would likely cause a financial crisis since so much american land is securitized as collateral for financial instruments.
- and the voting thing., I’m not following.