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.”