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.
“The phrase we use is ‘Land should eat,’” Mr. Duggan, 65, said in a recent interview at his office.
Seemingly without knowing it, Mr. Duggan, a Democrat in his third term, was espousing what generations of policy minds consider one of the best ideas nobody will listen to: the land-value tax.
The notion that land is an undertaxed resource — and that this distorts markets in destructive ways — unites libertarians and socialists, has brought business owners together with labor groups and is lauded by economists as a “perfect tax.” And yet despite all that agreement, there are just a handful of examples of this policy in action, and none in America that match the Detroit proposal in scale.
This is at least in part because the land-value tax has historically been associated with Georgism, an ideology whose adherents are regarded as the tinfoil-hat-wearers of economics. Strict Georgists don’t just believe land-value taxes are a good idea; they believe that if America were to throw out all taxes, then replace them with a single land-value tax, it would end poverty and recessions for good.
The fundamentalist version of Georgism, like the fundamentalist version of anything, is plainly unrealistic. But the broader Georgist framework is full of insights about urban economies and how to improve them.
Over the past year, Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at the real-estate brokerage Redfin and one of the most widely quoted voices on the housing market, has become one of the land-value tax’s most outspoken advocates. She trumpets the policy on podcasts, headlines panels with names like “the tax policy that can fix housing” and tweets memes of President Biden in front a whiteboard with the words “land-value tax” on it.
In an interview, Ms. Fairweather said she did not consider herself a Georgist, single tax and all that, but said land-value taxes were so smart that one of her favorite parts of arguing for them was they allowed her to “always be right.” They encourage housing development instead of discouraging it, she noted. They don’t discourage work or investment, like taxes on income and capital gains. They’re also hard to dodge, since land is hard to move.
“It’s like there’s this tool in our toolbox that could help solve a lot of our problems, and we refuse to pick it up,” Ms. Fairweather said in an interview. “If more people understood how useful this was, they would advocate it.”
Strong feelings about land taxes are something the American public used to have. Georgism gets its name from Henry George, who in the 1890s turned a book, “Progress and Poverty,” into a populist movement. George’s argument was that since land derives most of its worth from its location and the surrounding community, that community, and not the owner, should realize most of the benefits when values rise. His fix might sound wonky — tax the value of land but not improvements atop it — but it made him a celebrity in the 1890s.
There used to be Georgist newspapers. There are still Georgist foundations, Georgist conferences and Georgist schools. If you’ve ever played Monopoly, you have been unwittingly George-pilled: A Henry George fan invented the board game, in hopes of spreading his teachings.
Over the past few decades, as Georgism has faded from a mass movement to a relic, the ideology has been carried on by clubs and nonprofits whose dwindling membership was mostly composed of old men.
But amid a continuing crisis in affordable housing, a generation of young professionals has burrowed into housing policy, and gotten interested in the YIMBY movement, for Yes in My Backyard, that advocates for denser neighborhoods and zoning changes. As YIMBYs have grown from a curiosity to a legislative force, a subset of them and others who are angry about the cost of living have discovered Georgism. Suddenly there are organizations like Young Georgists of America, modern-day pamphlets like the Henry George podcast and the Progress and Poverty Substack, and an agreement that the shoshinsha emoji (which looks like a shield) is how Georgists will identify themselves online.
Young and old, Georgists come across as both radical and refreshingly pragmatic. They are interested in a specific problem: the cost of land and housing. But they embed that within a worldview that seeks to balance morality with commercial growth and rejects off-the-shelf -isms (capitalism, socialism, libertarianism) as unsatisfying or incomplete. Most are progressive liberals, while some lean libertarian. Their desire for an alternative makes them sound rational in some cases (land-value taxation is a good idea) and bizarre in others (we should get rid of every other tax).
Mayor Duggan knew none of this. When I asked him if he’d heard of Henry George at the beginning of our interview, his answer was “nope.” He was surprised to learn that he had become something of a Georgist hero, and that his plan was being cheered as a step toward restoring Georgism to the American conscience.
“This isn’t any deep philosophical movement,” Mr. Duggan said. “I’m trying to cut taxes.”
‘You Are Welcome Hither’
Driving along woodsy back roads in a Model A Ford, Mike Curtis, an 81-year-old retired arborist, seemed to be winding through a portal to the Georgist past. A third-generation member of the movement, Mr. Curtis used to work at the Henry George School in Philadelphia and lives in the Village of Arden, in Delaware, a sort of Henry George colony founded in 1900. (The motto is “You Are Welcome Hither.”)
The drive was the final leg in a morning-to-afternoon tour that included a stop by the Henry George Memorial Green and a walk through the outdoor theater where village founders staged Shakespeare plays. (“They figured if you could be comfortable onstage and project your voice to a crowd, what better way to prep yourself to talk about Henry George?” a guide informed me.) We ended at Mr. Curtis’s house, where the décor has a theme: There are single-tax posters, a Henry George light switch, Henry George quotes, Henry George mugs and a shelf of home videos with titles like “Law of Rent,” “3 Land Value Tax Movies” and “Taxes-Taxes-Taxes.”
Born in 1839 in Philadelphia, George — a self-made man without a formal degree in economics — started his swashbuckling career when he left home as a teenager to work on a ship headed to India. He acquired a pet monkey at port and returned home with scenes of poverty seared into his brain. (“One feature, which is peculiar to Calcutta, was the number of dead bodies floating down in all stages of decomposition,” he wrote in a journal.) What he saw in India helped inspire his theories on growth, but it wasn’t until George sailed to California — where, after brief run of gold prospecting, he settled in San Francisco and became a journalist — that these ideas found their full expression.
The central question of George’s writing was why rich cities seemed to create poverty instead of ameliorating it. In “Progress and Poverty,” published…