End Property Tax

Geraldine Tyler was ninety-four years old when the government came for her home. She owed $2,300 in property taxes. The county sold her condo for $40,000—and kept every penny, including $25,000 that belonged to her. Bennie Coleman, a retired Marine, lost his Washington, D.C., duplex over $134. Uri Rafaeli lost his Michigan home over $8.41. These are not outliers. They are the logical outcome of a system that treats homeownership as perpetual tenancy—where paying off your mortgage means nothing, where your tax bill can double because a stranger bought the house next door, where the government can take everything you've built over a debt you could have paid with pocket change. Property tax is the hidden rent. Call it what it is. End Property Tax exposes how America's oldest tax has become a machine for displacing families, stripping wealth from vulnerable communities, and enriching predatory investors. From the D.C. tax lien scandal to Detroit's mass foreclosures—where one in three properties was seized—Evan Swensen documents the human wreckage of a system other developed nations abandoned generations ago. But this book does more than diagnose. It answers the hard question critics always ask: Where would the money come from? Drawing on international models, state-level experiments from Texas to Florida, and economic research, Swensen shows that protecting homeowners is not only morally necessary—it's fiscally possible. Australia exempts owner-occupied homes from land tax entirely. Germany's effective rate is one-thirtieth of America's. Singapore taxes owner-occupants at a fraction of what investors pay. These nations fund their schools, pave their roads, and pay their police—without threatening to take grandma's house. A home paid for should be a home kept. This is not a radical proposition. It is the promise America made to homeowners and quietly broke. End Property Tax is the case for keeping that promise—and a roadmap for how to do it.