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.
