As Detroit is Revitalized ...
And my response to the author:
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Dear Ms. Peters,
I'm writing in response to your article about developers' profit-sharing in Detroit. Since you seem interested in the topic of urban housing, I should inform you that the model you described is at its core simply a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), an entity whose private shareholders own equity in a bundle of land titles. This model is very much the status quo and represents the fundamental error in our economic system as a whole.
At the end, you mention how the model "could be adapted" to include other residents. First, it should be noted that a parcel's title owner should never be assumed to be a resident at all -- an assumption your article seems to hold; a community's residents are simply its residents. Second, I applaud you because by saying it could be adapted to include all residents, you have touched upon the beginnings of economic justice and the concept of equal land rights.
Please keep researching and writing about this issue, and I highly recommend you try to understand the concept of "geoism," a.k.a. "georgism" (which is anti-monopolism, and as a result anti-feudalism) and the following related concepts:
- Citizens' Dividend. The equal distribution of land rent. The literal economic implementation of equal land rights. First requires the public collection of land rent. Possible methods include the following.
- Location Value Covenants (LVC's). Ideally, these would be implemented alongside 100% income tax exemptions for the owners and occupants of LVC sites. Best large-scale option, in my opinion.
- Land Value Taxation (LVT).
Community Land Trusts (CLT's) also represent a potential path toward land rights on a smaller scale, although they must be set up the right way.
For practical purposes, "land" most relevantly means "real estate location." FYI. Whenever we discuss "housing" affordability, it is actually land affordability and land rights that are at the core of the issue.
Thank you for your time,
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Perhaps Detroit's most popular historical mayor, Hazen Pingree, was a big supporter of this 'single tax' philosophy, though it was not legal for him to implement it fully. During a recession, he let the city's unemployed use vacant lots held by absentee landlords as "Pingree Patches" to grow food. He reassessed property taxes to focus more on land, and brought railroads (huge untaxed landowners at the time) into the tax base. He pushed for high-quality, low-fare streetcar transit, the efficiency of which led to the city’s explosive economic and population growth. It gave workers easy access to jobs, which ironically, attracted the auto industry that would later conspire to dismantle the streetcars, destroy walkability with wide subsidized roads, and sprawl out the city (chewing up all the available land for miles and miles), causing Detroit's decline. Detroit would be wise to look back to Pingree's model for economic growth when developing plans for their revitalization.
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