Back in the 1990s, I lived in the midwest. The state built a freeway through a bunch of cornfields, and long before the road was even done, there were suburban subdivisions sprouting up. My professor points this out, and says this highway had been in the regional plans for 20+ years, and 'capitalists' had bought or optioned all this farm land decades ago. That form of land speculation makes sense to me, but I've never been able to reconcile it with Georgism.
Georgists would argue that the rising land value came from public investment (the highway), not private effort, so the unearned gains from speculating on that land should be taxed. The idea isn't to stop people from buying land, just to capture the value society created.
In those cases what I’ve seen is as long as the land stays farm land, it is taxed at a low farmland rate, and the moment that the land is subdivided and sold houses on it it gets taxed at the much higher single-family home rate.
However, the price to buy the land starts to head towards what it will be worth it developed as soon as the freeway becomes real.
