Louis and I worked together on three of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses near Kalamazoo. These were houses Wright called "U.S.onian," constructed with specially designed concrete blocks. He intended them to be affordable for anyone and everyone. The special blocks were laid dry and were grouted with 1/4-inch steel rod reinforcing between rows. They were very different from the kind of blocks masons were familiar with, and we discovered that carpenters could lay them up faster and better than masons. Because the blocks were laid dry without mortar, they had to be shaved or tipped in order to get a straight wall. We poured grout (dry sand cement) in the spaces created by putting the blocks together. None of this was familiar to masons, but it was easily understood by carpenters. I discovered that I could lay up the blocks faster than anyone else, so that became my regular job, although I also did much of the carpentry work. This wasn't what Wright had intended, however. He had assumed the blocks would be so simple to lay that even the owners could do it themselves. The estimated cost of these houses in the late 1930s, with self-help, was between $15,000 and $20,000. As it turned out, the average cost was close to $30,000. Today they would probably cost around $250,000—but could be sold for half a million or more. Such is the result of inflation.
The first time I saw Frank Lloyd Wright was when the masons who were following Wright's design for another house we were building ran into difficulty. Wright had designed a curved wall using ordinary concrete blocks. As if that weren't difficult enough, they were also to be corbeled (this meant that each row of blocks had to protrude about 1/2 inch beyond the row below). The masons were having a devil of a time, and the owner, who was watching, decided that he'd better call Mr. Wright to make sure the masons were doing it right. Mr. Wright arrived, and while all of us— masons, carpenters, and other workers—gathered to watch, he walked up and down the wall several times without saying a word. Then he turned to the owner, said "Tear it down," and walked away. The masons were angry, of course, but the owner was shocked because under the contract he had to pay for the cost of the new wall.
The only other time I saw Wright was in 1948 when Marj and I were visiting her parents in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We realized that we were not far from Spring Green, Wisconsin, which was Wright's summer home. (He and all his apprentices moved every six months from Spring Green to Phoenix, Arizona). When we realized how close we actually were, we said, "Let's go visit Wright!" Although we didn't have a car, we decided to hitchhike with our two-year-old daughter, Barbara—feeling confident that having her along would help us attract rides, which in fact it did. We arrived after a few short hours, the last ride taking us right to Wright's home.
> We arrived unannounced, but when the apprentice who answered the door recognized my name—because I was working on the second Wright house near Kalamazoo at the time—he graciously invited us in to a large living room. He told us to wait and left to find Wright. Barbara, who always wanted to crawl because she could crawl faster than walk, immediately began exploring the room, leaving it a bit untidy. Before we could clean up the mess, Mr. Wright himself appeared. Looking the whole scene over, he threw his shawl over his shoulders, making a noise to show his disapproval, and walked out of the room without a word. We apologized to the apprentice when he returned to tell us Mr. Wright was unavailable. Then we hitchhiked back to Cedar Rapids.
During my early years of building, the economics of construction began to interest me more as I experienced rising construction costs and observed builders' continuous efforts to hold costs down in order to compete for jobs. I gained an understanding of why building costs were constantly rising from reading Henry George's book, Progress and Poverty. George made clear that it wasn't building costs that were rising but land costs—as an ever-increasing population put pressure on an ever-diminishing amount of developable land. Present-day Georgists advocate a tax on land, called Land Value Taxation, rather than a tax on buildings. They have been successful in introducing this kind of tax in several cities in Pennsylvania within the past few years and can document the improvement in economic development and employment. A new alignment between advocates of a "green" tax (eco-taxation) and Georgists is appearing in some parts of the country, particularly the Northwest. This offers new hope for change.
I had first heard of Ralph Borsodi when I was still in prison. Another conscientious objector, Tim Lefever, was familiar with his "homestead project" in Suffern, New York. This consisted of a twenty-six-acre piece of land that Borsodi and some friends had bought at very low cost in the early years of the Depression. The land, which was divided among twenty-six members of the Homestead Association, as it was called, had been purchased by the Association with borrowed money. Each homesteader paid a yearly (or monthly) lease fee to the Association, which held the land title, to cover the cost of the land and all other costs accrued by the Association. Because the lease tax was set high enough to cover all land and operational costs, a small portion went into a Land Fund to provide insurance against "hard times."
This was the same formula Borsodi used in setting up similar homestead projects such as Bryn Gweled in Pennsylvania and one in Dayton, Ohio. It was also the formula I used in setting up New Communities in Georgia and it became the generic name for all projects which adopted two key practices, namely: 1) the land is held in common by a Community Land Trust but, 2) all improvements are owned by the individuals or family. The third practice I added is open membership in the corporation by-laws to all people living in the region. This has been my major contribution and I believe the result has been a more rapid growth of Community Land Trusts across the country.
The project in Dayton, Ohio, drew the attention of Harold Ickes, whom President Roosevelt had appointed Secretary of the Interior. Ickes gave Borsodi $50,000 to expand his plans for the Dayton area but attached a few conditions that Borsodi found unreasonable. Eventually Borsodi left the project, vowing never to accept money from the government again.
This experience convinced Borsodi that a currency must be independent of government control whereas many, if not most, monetary reformers (such as C. H. Douglas) believe in government control of money issue. This is a basic policy difference that is seldom discussed. Von Hayek, Nobel prize winner, is one of the few economists who agrees with Borsodi on this point. (See Denationalization of Money by Von Hayek.)
When I read Ralph Borsodi's books after being released from prison, I learned of his practical application of Henry George's ideas. Borsodi did all the legal background work to establish homestead projects in Suffern, New York (established in 1933), and Bryn Gweled, Pennsylvania (established a few years later). The idea was to create self-sufficiency by encouraging homesteading—growing large gardens and providing common buildings with space for different kinds of activities, including weaving, canning, and pottery. Part of the motivation for the project grew out of the psychology of the Depression, when on any given day you could walk past derelict human beings on the streets of New York begging for food. Borsodi called the project a "school of living." He organized the land as a corporation and leased it back to individuals. Suffern was twenty-six acres, and Bryn Gweled eighty-some acres.
As I learned more, I found out about similar experiments going back to the late 1800s and early 1900s (one in Arden, Delaware, and another in Alabama). These projects tried to put into practice George's concept of the land value tax, which is the economic basis for the Community Land Trust model now being used throughout the country.
In Tax Shift Alan Thein Durning and Yoram Bauman say: "A property tax is actually two conflicting taxes rolled into one: it is a tax on the value of buildings and a tax on the value of the land under those buildings. The tax shift scenario assumes that the tax on building values—which discourages development—is replaced with a stronger tax on land values, which encourages compact development and contains sprawl."