Today, we are thrilled to launch CivicMapper, a new interactive tool that brings cities to life through 3D visualizations. The idea emerged naturally from our work at the Center for Land Economics, where Lars and I constantly model urban land values and development patterns. We wanted a way to see our cities in a way that was intuitive, spatial, and instant. CivicMapper is the result.

It is built for planners, journalists, policymakers, and anyone who cares about how cities grow and why they sometimes fail to.

What CivicMapper Does

CivicMapper lets you explore geospatial data as extruded 3D bars, each representing the land value or property characteristics of every parcel in a city. You can:

• Scroll, pan, and rotate the map from any angle

• Click any parcel to reveal its data

• Expand to full-screen mode for immersive exploration

• Adjust visualization settings, including:

  • Value field (land value, improvement value, total market value, and more)

  • Opacity

  • Height scaling

  • Filters for specific property types

  • Removal of extreme outliers that distort the visualization

CivicMapper also includes a second set of maps that highlight vacant and underutilized parcels. These maps aggregate the total value of land that sits idle or underbuilt within the city, showing how much economic potential is currently going unused.

Below is an example of what CivicMapper reveals about Spokane, Washington’s vacant and underutilized land.

More than 12 percent of Spokane’s total market value is tied up in parcels that are vacant, used as surface parking, or developed far below their potential. Not only is a lot of that land value concentrated in the downtown core, this is occurring at a time when housing prices are rising quickly and working families are feeling the strain of limited supply. The disconnect is striking– high land values are a signal of high demand locations, yet development lags behind.

CivicMapper helps make this mismatch visible.

Why Visualize Land Values

Cities tell stories through their land values. Few people have demonstrated this more clearly than Joe Minicozzi of Urban3, whose presentations show how value per acre shapes municipal budgets, infrastructure costs, and development patterns.

A core insight of urban economics is that land value is not arbitrary. It is a price signal created by thousands of individual decisions about where people want to live, work, shop, and invest. When land values rise in a particular area, it is usually for one of three reasons:

1. Access to jobs, customers, amenities, or transportation

2. Demand from people and businesses who want to be nearby

3. Productivity created by clustering, density, and shared infrastructure

In other words, high land value is not the cause of economic activity, but a measurement of it.

This is why you see skyscrapers in Midtown Manhattan but not in the middle of the desert. The land value is not high because someone built skyscrapers, the skyscrapers get built there because there’s high demand for them in these scarce locations. The land value simply reflects that demand.

Building intensity follows land value, not the other way around.

Understanding this point helps correct many misunderstandings about land value taxation. A land value tax will not spontaneously turn Spokane or Syracuse or South Bend into Manhattan, because tax policy cannot invent demand. It cannot create the billions of dollars of economic gravity that makes a downtown skyline profitable.

What tax policy can do is remove barriers that prevent supply from responding to genuine demand. Land value tax eliminates the penalty for building, which encourages the market to fill in the gaps. It makes extremely valuable underutilized land less attractive as a long-term speculative asset, encouraging speculators to either build on their land now, or sell it to someone who will.

But all of that only matters in places where demand already exists.

This is where CivicMapper becomes a powerful teaching tool. When you overlay land value with actual development on the ground, the patterns become obvious. In a healthy urban landscape, you expect to see tall or dense buildings where land is most valuable, tapering off as values fall. That gradient is the economic shape of the city.

If a parcel with high land value is being used as a surface parking lot, the issue is not a lack of demand. It is a misalignment between what the market wants and what the built environment currently provides. That misalignment can come from artificial constraints like zoning, tax policy, financing, or simply inertia.

CivicMapper makes these mismatches visible, but the contrast becomes even starker when you compare its visuals to Google Earth.

Below, you see Google Earth’s downtown–a whole lot of asphalt–contrasted with the same downtown view visualized in terms of land values–the most valuable part of the city.

Once you recognize that development intensity should track land value, the next question is how cities can bridge the gap between what land is worth and what currently sits on it. The right answer in most places is not skyscrapers. It is incremental development, a planning philosophy endorsed by StrongTowns which emphasizes steady additions to urban development rather than large, speculative projects.

A Note on Anomalies

There is one caveat to this work: we are simply visualizing existing official data, which is to say assessor’s land valuations, and there can be considerable variation in accuracy and consistency between different jurisdictions.

In Spokane, WA’s case, we have found them to have consistent land valuations. Two nearby plots tend to have similar prices per square foot, but other cities may see larger disparities between two nearby plots.

Inconsistent land valuations can be caused by inaccurate assessments, but they may also have more innocent explanations. Sometimes anomalies are simply caused by quirks in the structure of the assessment reporting itself. For instance, sometimes a really small parcel will contain the land value of a neighboring parcel that shares a common owner. And sometimes the anomaly is the fault of our visualization itself, such as with edge cases like condominiums that require special handling we may not have gotten to yet. Regardless of the kind of anomaly, the easiest way to find them is to put them on a map and make them obvious.

We intend to make many improvements over time, and we appreciate your feedback (and your patience) in this regard.

The Road Ahead

CivicMapper is just getting started. We plan to:

• Add more cities

• Expand available datasets

• Improve rendering performance

• Provide new analytic tools for researchers and planners

• Allow comparisons across cities or time periods

Our hope is that CivicMapper becomes a tool for understanding how land values shape the urban environment. If you want to model your own city and have access to the geospatial data, check out the open-source version we put together: putitonamap.com.

We want this to empower better planning decisions in our cities, and to do that, we welcome feedback. Reach out with ideas on how this tool can be more powerful.

Greg Miller is the Executive Director of the Center for Land Economics.