September 19, 2018
Page 13
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O PINION
The Wealth Hiding in Your Neighborhood
Absentee billionaires
buying condos
C huCk C ollinS
The rich are hiding trillions
in wealth.
You’ve probably heard
about their offshore bank ac-
counts, shell corporations,
and fancy trusts. But this wealth isn’t all
sitting in the Cayman Islands or Panama.
Much of it’s hiding in plain view: maybe
even in your town.
America’s big cities are increasingly
dotted with luxury skyscrapers and man-
sions. These multi-million dollar condos are
wealth storage lockers, with the ownership
often obscured by shell companies.
In Boston, where I live, there’s a luxury
building boom. According to a study I just
co-authored, out of 1,805 luxury units —
with an average price of over $3 million —
more than two-thirds are owned by people
who don’t live here.
One-third are owned by shell companies
and trusts that mask their ownership. And of
these units, 40 percent are limited liability
companies (LLCs) organized in Delaware.
Why Delaware?
Criminals around the world set up their
shell companies in Delaware, the premiere
secrecy jurisdiction in the United States —
by
where you don’t have to disclose who the
real owners are. As a result, human traffick-
ers, drug smugglers and tax evaders all
enjoy the anonymous cover of a Dela-
ware company.
Many of these companies use il-
licit funds to purchase real estate in
North American cities to launder their
ill-gotten money.
In New York City, dozens of luxury
zerland.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Finan-
cial Crimes Enforcement Network has in-
creased its scrutiny over real estate markets
in Miami, New York, and parts of Califor-
nia, Texas, and Hawaii.
But that just makes the rest of the country
more attractive for secret cash — even far
from big cities. In a small Vermont town, I
met a Russian investor who lives in Dubai.
According to a study I just co-
authored, out of 1,805 luxury units —
with an average price of over $3 million
— more than two-thirds are owned by
people who don’t live here.
towers have been connected to global mon-
ey laundering. In Vancouver, B.C., Chinese
investors disrupted the city’s housing mar-
ket so badly that the province established
a foreign investor tax and a tax on vacant
properties.
With European countries now insisting
on more transparency, illicit cash is now
cascading into the United States. In fact, the
U.S. is now the world’s second-biggest tax
haven and secrecy jurisdiction, after Swit-
He was buying up thousands of acres of
Green Mountain farmland.
Our communities are being fundamen-
tally transformed by land grabs and luxury
building booms. These drive up the cost of
land in central neighborhoods, with ripple
impacts throughout a community. And this
worsens the already grotesque inequalities
of income, wealth, and opportunity.
Our communities should defend them-
selves.
Property ownership should have to pass
the “fishing license” or “library card” test.
In most communities, to get a library card or
a fishing license, you need to prove who you
are and where you actually live.
In Boston, they’re pretty strict — you
need to show a utility bill with your name
on it. Cities should require the same for real
estate purchases.
At a national level, bi-partisan legislation
from Senators Marco Rubio and Sheldon
Whitehouse would require real estate own-
ers to be disclosed when buyers use shell
corporations and pay millions in cash. That
would be a welcome development.
Better still, cities should tax luxury real
estate transactions on properties selling for
over $2 million to fund local services. Such
a tax in San Francisco generated $44 million
last year that’s been used to fund free com-
munity college and help the city’s neglected
trees.
Communities could discourage high-end
vacant properties by taxing buildings that sit
empty for more than six months a year. Cit-
ies like Vancouver have created incentives
to house people, not wealth.
We need to defend our communities for
the people who live in them, not just store
their wealth there.
Chuck Collins co-authored the report
Towering Excess for the Institute for Policy
Studies. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
Young Voices Help Create Nation They Deserve
Children fighting for
freedom
m arian W right e Delman
I wrote recently about a
few of the brave children
who helped change our nation
during the Civil Rights Move-
ment. There are many, many
others whose examples should inspire us
today. Claudette Colvin – sometimes called
“The First Rosa Parks” – was a 15-year-old
black girl who challenged bus segregation
in Montgomery, Ala. on March 2, 1955,
nine months before Mrs. Parks.
Claudette boarded a Montgomery city
bus and refused to give her seat to a white
person when ordered by the driver to do so.
Claudette had been studying the U.S. Con-
stitution and the connection between con-
stitutional rights and segregation in school,
and insisted she had a constitutional right
to her seat because she had paid the same
fare. She became the first of several women
arrested for refusing to abide by the state’s
segregation laws and one of four plaintiffs
in Browder v. Gayle, the case that success-
fully overturned bus segregation laws in
Montgomery and Alabama.
Later, when Claudette described her de-
cision to stay in her seat that day, she used
a powerful image: “It felt like Sojourner
Truth was on one side pushing me down
and Harriet Tubman was on the other side
by
of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”
Claudette was just one of many young
people determined to prove in the
wake of Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion that they would no longer be
confined to “separate but equal.” On
Aug. 27, 1956, twelve black students
desegregated Clinton High School
in Clinton, Tenn. making it the first
public high school in the south to de-
segregate. Two years later the school build-
ing was bombed; no one was arrested.
But the Clinton Twelve were the leading
requiring federal troops to be called in to
escort the Little Rock Nine to class.
Other students fought for other free-
doms. In January 1965, a group of stu-
dents at the all-black Henry Weathers High
School in Issaquena County, Miss. began
wearing Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee freedom pins to class. A repri-
mand by school administrators sparked an
outpouring of support from other students
and community leaders causing 300 stu-
dents to be suspended for wearing and dis-
tributing banned “freedom” buttons.
The fearless Unita Blackwell, then
a SNCC field officer and parent of one
of the students, filed a lawsuit to allow
suspended students to return and wear
the pins and to demand that Issaquena
County schools finally desegregate.
edge of a change wave that could not be
stopped. A year later, nine black students
who enrolled at Central High School in
Little Rock, Ark., despite white mob vi-
olence, captured national headlines after
Gov. Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas
National Guard to block their entry into
the school. The students refused to give up
The fearless Unita Blackwell, then a
SNCC field officer and parent of one of
the students, filed a lawsuit to allow sus-
pended students to return and wear the
pins and to demand that Issaquena County
schools finally desegregate. She and other
community leaders helped open an alter-
native Freedom School to educate those
who boycotted the high school while the
fight went on. Unita Blackwell would lat-
er become the first black woman mayor in
Mississippi.
Even the youngest children were de-
termined to make a difference. Sheyann
Webb, “The Smallest Freedom Fighter,”
was eight years old. Sheyann was the
youngest to join the march from Selma to
Montgomery on “Bloody Sunday,” March
7, 1965. After the day’s violent events she
went home and wrote plans for her own
funeral, but returned for the final Selma
march without her parents’ knowledge or
consent. She was suspended from her el-
ementary school for participating in the
Selma march but kept fighting for freedom.
We should make sure children today
know these and many other stories about
courageous children from the past. We are
at another inflection point where children’s
voices are desperately needed to help cre-
ate the nation they deserve.
Let’s applaud those young people who
have stepped forward to end epidemic gun
violence in schools and churches and on
streets they must walk; protest the sepa-
ration of children from their parents; and
seek to ensure the right to vote is exercised
by all who have it. I hope they will con-
tinue to stand, march, and work together
seeking freedom and justice for all. We
adults should follow their examples.
Marian Wright Edelman is president of
the Children’s Defense Fund.