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"at least in Detroit, they're looking to try it." Is Detroit a place with a really tight housing market? It wasn't that long ago that neighbors were offering p
by troupe 3y ago
"at least in Detroit, they're looking to try it."
Is Detroit a place with a really tight housing market? It wasn't that long ago that neighbors were offering potential purchasers of near by houses dinner every week for a year to encourage them to go ahead and buy it because they didn't want more empty houses on their block.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoLovely. "A place that doesn't have the problems Georgism is designed to solve is planning to test Georgism." That's going to make it close to a meaningless experiment. [Edit: Including politically meaningless. No matter what happens, one side or the other will use "wrong circumstances" as an escape hatch to deny the general applicability of the results.]
- tivert 3y agoFirst two paragraphs of TFA: > 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.