Two years ago, my wife and I moved to Baltimore. Although we love the small apartment we’ve bought in Tuscany-Canterbury, in two years we are thinking that we will have to move out of the city and into the county. I’d like to ask my city leaders, why shouldn’t I?

If I can flatter myself, I would like to start by suggesting that we are precisely the kind of couple city leaders want here in Baltimore. We are both highly educated, career-focused and upwardly mobile young people in our mid-20s. Combining our salaries, our household income is already $100,000 (pre-tax), which puts us well ahead of the city’s median household income of $59,623 — though solidly in the middle class if you compare our household to the broader metro area which includes the county suburbs. What’s more, we are community-oriented yuppies. We help on our condo board, volunteer with our church and participate in not one, but two local farm-shares!

We came to Baltimore for positions at Johns Hopkins, but we have fallen in love with the many incredible communities and small businesses that make Baltimore such an interesting and resilient city. We love city life, and prefer it to suburbia, but I doubt we will stay in the city unless city leaders find a way to reform our property tax code.

I recently received our new tax assessment in the mail, doubling the assessed value of our 839-square-foot apartment from $75,000 to over $150,000. As a result, we expect our property tax bill to rise from the roughly $1,700 we paid this past fiscal year to nearly $3,500. We will make use of the various credits and programs offered to help homeowners manage property taxes — after all, we are affluent and educated people with the time and wherewithal to do so — but the whole affair has impressed upon us the fundamental flaw in our system of property taxation: taxing the value of improved property instead of unimproved land.

Taxing land, or a land value tax (LVT), is not a new idea. The basic concept is to tax people on how much land they own, not on what they use it for, thereby creating a strong incentive for investing and developing your property — because your taxes will not go up — and penalizing those who leave properties underdeveloped because they will be taxed the same regardless.

This is precisely the reverse of our current system, in which the bulk of one’s tax is paid on the assessed structural value of your property. Under the current system, homeowners are penalized for improving their homes because any new transactions (sale, refinancing, etc.) may trigger a reassessment that raises the property tax. (This, coincidentally, is what happened with our apartment.) What’s more, owners of vacant or distressed properties are rewarded for keeping the value of their houses low. It should be of grave concern to our city’s leaders that our high property taxes and current model of taxing home values mean that the city’s tax policies encourage the ongoing housing crisis. Efforts to tax vacant homes, or to funnel public money into their redevelopment, are a step in the right direction, but even these will fail in the long run because they only fix half of the problem.

The other half of the problem is what I have already alluded to: Baltimore City property taxes stymie investment in real estate and make it disproportionately expensive for affluent people to stay in the city — and thus encourage us to move out even if we’d prefer to stay.

In the next five years, my wife and I hope to start a family and move into a larger home than our apartment. We would love to live in Hampden, but the tax bill on one 1200-square-foot three-bed/three-bath home we’ve looked at there will run us over $6,200 a year. The tax bill on a home twice the size in Cockeysville will be about $4,800. Setting aside the question of public schooling and crime, city leaders are asking us to pay a substantial premium for less space for our growing family if we decide to make our home in the city. Why should we?

I am glad that city leaders are focused on the property crisis, but I am worried that they are too focused on government-funded initiatives. The city can issue all of the bonds it wants and pray, against all odds, that the federal government under the Trump administration will provide funds for redevelopment — but it needs to wrestle with the fact that its taxes actively encourage those with the means to move out to do so. By reforming our tax system and implementing a land value tax, city leaders would be making a persuasive case to those of us who want to stay in the city that they are serious about redevelopment.

Daniel Brennan is a Baltimore City resident.