The Single-Tax Colonies (Fairhope & Arden)

Overview

Around the turn of the 20th century, Georgist reformers founded single-tax colonies — intentional communities organised to demonstrate Henry George's ideas in miniature. Rather than wait for national reform, they held land in common and charged residents a single levy on land value.

Fairhope and Arden

• Fairhope, Alabama (founded 1894) was established by the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation. The Corporation owns the land and leases it to residents, charging an annual rent based on land value in lieu of the land being privately owned — and uses the proceeds for community purposes. Fairhope grew into a thriving town, and the Single Tax Corporation still operates.
• Arden, Delaware (founded 1900) by Frank Stephens and Will Price as an arts-and-crafts single-tax community; it too retains its land-rent system and remains an incorporated village today.

Significance

The colonies are living, century-long demonstrations that community land ownership with a land value charge is workable. They are the most tangible legacy of the single tax movement, surviving long after the movement's national political peak faded. Their founding was helped along by the movement's great financier, the soap magnate Joseph Fels, who contributed to both Fairhope and Arden and funded parallel land-colony experiments in England.

See Also

• Single Tax · Henry George · Land Value Capture · Fairhope Single Tax Corporation
• Joseph Fels — the financier who helped fund the colonies

Sources

1. Christopher England (2023), Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism, Johns Hopkins University Press — used for the colonies' founding history within the movement. Publisher