I cant recall who but some ingenious game developer wrote an article arguing that a design with land tax makes people (players) do interesting thing with land. Without it the game world just ends up owned and stale. I see a parallel with [insane] real estate prices but also with taking land from one person and giving it to another.
Me and a friend used to play a game called Wurm Online (the guy behind Minecraft worked on that before branching off); in that game you could build things like a house, but over time, weathering would slowly break it down so if you abandoned it, everything would just be removed.
I mean the game is janky but the concept was really interesting.
