But young people aren't the only ones who need to be downtown, as I said, and families were driven out to the suburbs for suitable housing. They have to commute instead, which has caused all sorts of gridlock and the usual problems with urban sprawl.

If the right incentives existed for mixed housing, tax incentives included, then this wouldn't happen, and people of all ages could afford to live closer to where they work, thus alleviating many of those issues and creating more livable cities.

Here in Canada we already do this in one sense by mixing government housing among more affluent neighbourhoods. This has prevented the formation of ghettos, but this same approach hasn't been applied to create an appropriate mix of housing for all different living arrangements.

So given a land value tax incentivises certain kinds of land use, my question is whether it would incentivise using land to make urban centres more livable for all types of people, rather than only certain kinds of people or lifestyles.