Arden’s Single-Tax A Cure For Urban Blight?
When Mayor Mike Duggan talks about his accomplishments in Detroit, the list is both impressive and sad. He had the streetlights turned back on, and reopened closed parks. In the decade since he took office, the city has demolished some 25,000 blighted homes whose rusty debris and incubation of crime drag down neighborhoods.
The progress would be even greater, the mayor argues, if the city hadn’t been smothered by speculation. In the years after the Great Recession, tens of thousands of Detroit properties were bought by absentee landlords and faceless LLCs. The owners are so negligent and hard to find that the city mows their lawns without asking.
Mr. Duggan gets angry discussing the subject. In speeches and community meetings, he paints a stark, moralized contrast between the businesses that invest in jobs and the sit-and-wait landowners whose paydays rely on others’ efforts.
“Blight is rewarded, building is punished,” he said in a recent speech, repeating it over and over for emphasis.
The refrain is a windup for Mr. Duggan’s scheme to fix the blight: a new tax plan that would raise rates on land and lower them on occupied structures. Slap the empty parcels with higher taxes, the argument goes, and their owners will be forced to develop them into something useful. In the meantime, homeowners who actually live in the city will be rewarded with lower bills.
That is the philosophy that was championed by Henry George: “Tax the land, not the labor upon the land.” That is also the philosophy that has been the hallmark of the Ardens since their founding.
Today, Arden is one of three neighboring villages (Arden, Ardentown, Ardencroft) that try to live by George’s teachings, through a structure in which each town’s land is held in a trust, and lots are leased to residents. They pay a tax on the value of their plot, but nothing on improvements.
I think that the Detroit mayor adopting his modified version of Georgism is a stroke of brilliance, if he’s able to do it. I think other cities would do well to follow suit.
I would also be remiss if I did not share a photo of Arden’s beloved current ambassador of Georgism:
Mike Curtis, a third-generation member of the Georgist movement, lives in the Village of Arden, in Delaware, a longstanding Georgist colony.Credit…Sarah Silbiger for The New York Times.
