Public Wealth of Cities

Dag Detter in his book "The Public Weath of Cities” argues that if cities managed government owned properties better, they could earn enough revenues to completely replace the money earned from property taxes:

“McAdams commissioned an inventory of government-owned real estate in Salt Lake County. The county then projected the value of these assets if they were used in the same ways as privately owned properties within 500 feet of government real estate. The comparison yielded a “conservative” estimate that the value of the county’s holdings was $45 billion, a figure almost 45 times the county’s annual budget.

“Whether that’s the exact number or not, there’s real value there,” McAdams says. “If you put a third of those assets into a mechanism yielding a three percent return, you’d have a new revenue source of roughly $450 million a year, more than we were generating from property tax.” (This isn’t theoretical — a single long-term lease of a city-owned parcel that was achieved based on the work McAdams began is bringing in $500,000 a year.)” (Smith, 2023)

Other Resources

”Accounting for Public Assets, with Dag Detter” by Public Money Pod

Talking Headways Podcast interview with…

Diana Ramirez, Executive Director of the Harris County Department of Economic Equity and Opportunity
former Salt Lake County Mayor and Congressman Ben McAdams
Matt Prewitt, President of RadicalxChange
Joel Rogers, Director of COWS at the University of Wisconsin Madison

…to talk about how cities can a) inventory existing government owned assets, b) better harness those assets for the public good.

References