Ted Gwartney
Career real-estate assessor (MAI) who ran British Columbia's province-wide land assessment authority and later assessed Greenwich, Connecticut — practitioner counter-evidence to the objection that land value cannot be separately assessed.
Overview
Ted Gwartney, MAI, is a career real-estate assessor whose decades of practical mass-appraisal work are cited in the Georgist movement as evidence that unimproved land value can be routinely separated from building value at scale. From 1975 to 1986 he served as CEO / Assessment Commissioner of the British Columbia Assessment Authority, where his office valued on the order of 1,350,000 land parcels a year using a computerized land-valuation system with multiple-regression analysis of sales data.[1] He also worked as an assessor in Southfield, Michigan and in Hartford, Bridgeport, and Greenwich, Connecticut (retiring as Greenwich's assessor in 2012), and as a commercial appraiser at Bank of America and City National Bank.[1] He has served as president of both the Council of Georgist Organizations and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, and has taught real-estate appraisal at Baruch College.[1] His essay "Estimating Land Values" is a widely cited practitioner's account of how land value assessment is actually done, and is the text Lars Doucet drew on for the assessment installment of his Does Georgism Work? series.[2]
See Also
- Land Cannot Be Assessed (objection) — the objection Gwartney's career is cited as practical counter-evidence against
- Mass-Appraisal Methods — the statistical toolkit (CAMA, regression) his BC system industrialized
- Estimating Land Values (Gwartney) — his own essay, this wiki's research summary
- Lars Doucet — consulted Gwartney directly for the ACX assessment article
- Schalkenbach Foundation — the Georgist foundation he has served as president of
Sources
- "Ted Gwartney / Biography," cooperative-individualism.org (2000, updated 2002) — used for the British Columbia Assessment Authority role and parcel count, Connecticut/Michigan assessor positions, and Council of Georgist Organizations / Robert Schalkenbach Foundation presidencies (search-indexed summary; direct fetch returned HTTP 403 in this research pass — see note). cooperative-individualism.org
- Ted Gwartney, "Estimating Land Values" (c. 1999) and Lars Doucet, "Does Georgism Work? Part 3," Astral Codex Ten (December 2021) — this wiki's discovery source and research summary for Gwartney as the practitioner Doucet consulted. Research page · henrygeorge.org Gwartney's exact birth year and current status could not be confirmed to wiki standards in this research pass — a people-search aggregator gave one unverified date (June 30, 1940) that is not included here. Direct-fetch confirmation of the full biography page is needed in a future revision.