- When we talk about blight to beauty, beauty is spreading across the city.

So Detroit's recovery's done, right?

I can sit down, I can end the speech.

(audience chuckles) Well, we still have a couple problems and we have one that is a ticking bomb that really does threaten everything else that we're doing.

And that's our property tax system, okay.

Everybody who owns a house or has a business in Detroit, you know what I'm talking about.

For more than 50 years, the property tax system has two defining characteristics.

Blight's rewarded, building is punished, Blight's rewarded, building is punished.

We've done it for 50 years and it's how we got lots of blight and not many buildings.

So you wanna know how far outta whack our millage is.

Troy Levonia, they're in the 50s as far as the mills they levy.

Farmington, Ann Arbor in the sixties, Ferndale, Warren in the seventies.

And Detroit stands alone at 86 mills.

It is far more expensive to build a house and sell it in Detroit or to do any kind of business in Detroit.

And here's the worst part, we tax buildings, but there's a secret, we don't tax blight.

We have an exemption built into the law.

And so you look at the Hudson's Motor Plant, which is known as Cadillac Stamping was in private hands since 1986 and sits vacant.

Why do they pay taxes and keep it vacant for all those years?

Or Michigan Central vacant for 30 years.

Continental Motors vacant for 25 years and the owners pay the taxes.

And the Packard plant been closed for 60 years.

The owners owned it and pay the taxes for 55 years.

And the reason is, we don't tax blight, we only tax building.

So we're talking about changing a tax structure that's been in place for 50 years and that means there's gonna be winners and losers.

And so my first point is that what we do, we're gonna give people time to adjust.

Even those who have been taking advantage of the system.

And so what we're proposing is that whether you're getting a cut or whether you're getting an increase, we want it phased in over three years.

You'll get a third of the cost to benefit in '25 a third in '26, a third in '27.

I'm not trying to mess anybody up by flipping a switch overnight 'cause people have made decisions over a lot of years under the old system.

But here's my plan, it's really simple.

Cut taxes on buildings, 30%, triple the taxes on the land.

That's it.

Whole thing.

Cut the taxes on the building, 30%, triple the taxes on the land.

So how do we do it?

We take out Detroit's 20 mills, we take out the state's six bills, take them to zero.

And we replaced them with 246 mill levy on the land, but nothing on the buildings.

It has the effect of a 30% property tax cut on the buildings To make up for what we lose on the buildings, we triple the tax on the lands.

Sounds horrible, right?

How can you triple the tax on my land?

Do you know what happens when we put this into place?

The guy who's paying 30 bucks a year is paying 85 bucks a year.

I'm still spending a hundred bucks to cut his damn lot, okay.

(audience chuckles) So it sounds like a lot, but it really to me is a reasonable number.

We can give these homeowners $500 to $2,000 dollars a year in savings.

Think about that.

And wealth building in the city of Detroit, what that adds up to.

'Cause most people, the generational wealth is in their homes.

And we can triple the taxes on the people causing their blight.

And we can build a system where good investors can succeed without celebrating with tattoos.

(audience chuckles) That's my goal.

And if we do it right, this Land Value Tax can spread beauty to every quarter of the city.

So we asking for your help as we hit our Lansing legislators, so that 10 years from now, there's a mayor standing here who's showing you nothing but development from one end of the city to the other.