We all know the ancient adage: An old tax is a good tax. From the policymaker’s perspective, this old saw probably has some merit; old taxes are more certain and more predictable than most fancy fiscal innovations.
As Leonard Burman of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center once told Marketplace, “it means that if the tax law survives long enough, we might just figure it out.” But from the taxpayer’s perspective, old taxes can also be bad ones — sometimes very bad.
That’s been the case for local property taxes, according to Andrew Kahrl, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia. In his 2024 book, “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America,” Kahrl offers a powerful indictment of property taxation, at least as it exists in the real world. If the property tax has merit in the abstract, it’s much harder to defend in actual practice.
In recent years, scholars across a range of disciplines have laid bare the levers of systemic racial inequality, especially around the subject of real estate. “Housing policies and real estate industry practices,” Kahrl writes, have “powered the growth of the white middle class and white household wealth-building in mid-twentieth-century America while simultaneously constraining Black mobility, deepening racial segregation, and subjecting Black Americans to numerous and devastating forms of economic predation and plunder.” Dorothy Brown has offered a similar indictment of the federal tax system, including its preferences for homeownership.
Kahrl’s contribution to this growing body of literature focuses on the local property tax. Using a range of novel sources, he explores the subject using a three-part analytical lens: how property taxes have been administered, how they have been enforced, and how the resulting tax revenue has been spent. And his conclusion is damning.
Overtaxed And Underserved
“From the late nineteenth century to today, local tax assessors have consistently overtaxed the lands and homes that Black people own and the neighborhoods where they live,” Kahrl writes. At the same time, political leaders have badly shortchanged Black property owners when it comes to spending. “For all the taxes they have paid, Black Americans have struggled to receive anything close to their fair share of the public goods and services that local governments provided,” Kahrl asserts.
Perhaps worst of all, local property taxes have been used as a weapon of fiscal depredation, separating Black Americans from their hard-earned property. “When they failed to pay on time,” Kahrl writes, “African Americans were — and continue to be — subjected to the harshest consequences and most predatory features of tax delinquency laws that, in most states, permit local governments to sell liens on tax-delinquent properties to private investors, who can then saddle delinquent taxpayers with crippling debts and, should they fail to pay, take their property.”
Tax liens figure prominently in Kahrl’s story — no surprise, since they are central to the dispossession that forms the heart of his narrative. Indeed, Kahrl has inveighed against the practice of selling tax liens in a series of articles and op-eds drawing on his research. “Earlier this year, the investment firm Alden Global Capital cut a check for $1.75 million to Cook County, Illinois, for the right to prey on some of its poorest and most disadvantaged residents,” he wrote last year in The American Prospect. “In exchange for paying these properties’ outstanding taxes, Alden Global Capital can charge an escalating rate of interest and attach fees to those debts. If the delinquent taxpayer fails to pay it all back within two years, they can claim ownership of the property.”
The practice of selling tax liens is central to local finance in many areas of the country — and especially in some of its poorest cities. Cash-strapped governments — including many led by Black elected officials — need the revenue from tax lien sales to keep the wheels turning. Local governments have limited options when it comes to raising revenue.
But the results can be devastating for taxpayers. The tax lien industry, Kahrl contends, is a “fundamentally predatory enterprise” that “utilizes the machinery of local tax enforcement to exploit the hardships and misfortunes of struggling homeowners, and extract their wealth and property.”
Bottom-Up Perspective
Kahrl uses a range of aggregated data to make his case against local property taxes (or at least against the way those levies are often administered and enforced). But he also has an eye for humanizing anecdotes — a vital skill when trying to explain taxes to a nontechnical audience. “The Black Tax” tells the story of property taxation from a bottom-up perspective; while Kahrl doesn’t neglect the sort of top-down view that shapes most historical work on policy formulation, he puts individual taxpayers at the center of his narrative.
Indeed, the book begins with a series of telling anecdotes, the first focusing on Jean Wright, a homeowner in Roosevelt, New York, who bought a house in the late 1970s. Wright struggled to make the purchase — and then struggled even more to pay her tax bills. Wright bought the house for $50,000 but found herself also paying $200 every month in property taxes. “From the day I bought this house I knew that my taxes were too high,” Wright said. Indeed, Kahrl notes, “her annual tax bill was roughly the same as that of the typical owner of a $200,000 house in a wealthy white neighborhood in the same county.”
Kahrl uses another anecdote to underscore the dangers of tax delinquency. In 1973 Annie Kennedy made a $2,000 down payment to secure a $10,000 mortgage on a house in Hempstead, Long Island, part of the region’s “Black Belt.” “She continued to work into her seventies and paid off the mortgage,” Kahrl relates. “But when she looked to sell the house in 1986, Kennedy learned that it was no longer hers.” Kahrl continues:
“Years earlier, she had failed to pay a $92.07 school tax bill. Kennedy never received any notices of the missing payment, but that didn’t save her: the law required only that the county send out notices, not that they be received. Nassau County sold the debt to tax-lien investor Charles Solomon, who took ownership of her home for just $92. All those mortgage payments, she remarked, ‘might as well [have been dumped] in a garbage pail.’ ”
Kahrl’s book is filled with similar anecdotes, some even more tragic. But his story doesn’t focus solely on oppression and predation: It also puts a spotlight on resistance. “Black Americans resisted exploitation, guarded against predation, fought for an equitable distribution of public goods and services, and fought to be recognized as taxpayers,” Kahrl writes. The structures of systemic inequality were powerful and resilient, but Black property owners continued to push back.
“In the midst of a crisis of Black land loss unfolding across the 1960s and 1970s South, organizations like South Carolina’s Black Land Services and the region-wide Emergency Land Fund formed and devised strategies for combatting predatory land grabbing,” Kahrl writes. Similar organizations developed in northern cities, where Black Americans worked collectively “to dismantle racist fiscal structures, secure a more equitable distribution of public expenditures, and rid lower-income and Black neighborhoods of predatory tax buyers.”
Exploding A Pernicious Myth
Kahrl is determined to dismantle the myths and tropes that surround taxpaying in America. Perhaps the most powerful of these myths, at least in recent years, is the division of the population into two camps: Those who pay taxes and those who consume government services.
“From the moment Black people began making claims on the state, whites in power have responded by peddling the canard that Blacks paid little in taxes and, by implication, were undeserving of the rights, benefits, and protections of citizenship,” Kahrl asserts. This process of fiscal demonization began after the Civil War, when “white elites deployed racist tropes of Blacks as ‘freeloaders’ to overthrow Reconstruction and build support for tax cuts for the wealthy, alongside funding cuts for public programs and social services.”
Similar arguments shaped U.S. politics into the 20th century. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, champions of legal segregation resisted the Civil Rights Movement by invoking racialized claims about taxpaying; the persistent myth that Black people were underpaying became the basis for efforts “to oppose equal access to public goods, services, and benefits, most especially public schools,” Kahrl writes.
Later, well-organized anti-tax advocates “stoked the perception that Black people paid no taxes and consumed the bulk of white taxpayers’ dollars to gain political power.” Kahrl describes how, once in office, these same political leaders used the myth of Black tax slacking to defend cuts to spending and other measures that deepened inequality by disproportionately harming Black Americans. “These myths have been toxic and corrosive to democracy,” Kahrl writes. “And, as this history shows, they could not be further from the truth.”
Property taxes have exacted a heavy toll on Black Americans. For a century and a half, African American property owners have been paying too much (thanks to distorted assessments and racialized real estate markets) and receiving too little (thanks to the inequitable distribution of public services).
Worst of all, Black property owners have been progressively dispossessed. “In the half-century following emancipation, African Americans managed to accumulate nearly 16 million acres of land across the South,” Kahrl writes. “But as they did, local white tax administrators worked to make it more expensive to hold and easier to lose. Black disfranchisement gave local tax administrators free reign to treat Black people less as constituents to serve and more as subjects to exploit and punish.”
Tax delinquencies were not the only weapon of dispossession, but they were an important one. “For many of the owners of the over 11 million acres of land Black people lost in the twentieth century,” Kahrl writes, “it was a tax bill that they could not pay that sealed their fate and opened the door for land speculators who flocked to local tax sales to profit at their expense.” The total loss (in 2023 dollars) from tax-based dispossession of Black property owners “easily exceeds $300 billion” over the past 150 years, Kahrl estimates.
Kahrl’s book is filled with similar facts and figures. But “The Black Tax” is most effective when Kahrl puts the spotlight on individual taxpayers. “Figures and estimates underscore the gravity of this history,” he writes. “But they cannot adequately convey its meaning. Only the stories of people and places can.”
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