It makes no sense in a world where collectives of people can make sane decisions in a timely manner.
We don't live in that world - for anything to get done, there must be a very small group of people with authority to decide what color to paint the bike shed. Land ownership is important exactly because it gives responsibility over what happens in a geographic area to a single entity, and excludes most people from providing paralyzing "input".
The article proposes taxing the unimproved value of land at 100% which I think gets around that problem totally.
Paine also wrote a pamphlet about how the U.S. government actually owned all the territorial land the British thought they still owned after the revolutionary war. So, he did believe in owning property as it turns out.
And do we really want to adjudicate this issue by tallying the number of U.S. founding fathers who believed in property rights? It's a meaningless metric, and I don't think the results would fall in the author's favor anyway.
Also, owning land is not a modern concept. Stone age humans fought over territory: night raids, throat slashing. It's a human constant. The modern idea of property ownership is a less violent method of staking a claim, backed by the threat of force by the government. Generally an improvement.
I think this article is making a bad suggestion in a dumb way.