Manifest Destiny Has a Tax Strategy Now
Sometimes the people betting on a community’s future are actually betting on its failure.
In his latest Substack post, Southland Development Authority CEO Bo Kemp examines a pattern he says he has seen throughout his career in economic development.
Drawing on his experience in Gary, Indiana, and examples stretching from American westward expansion to modern charter cities, Kemp argues that economic decline is not always simply something that happens to a place.
Sometimes, decisions and incentives can accelerate it.
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Manifest Destiny Has a Tax Strategy Now
How much of the decline we see in places that need economic development is bad luck — and how much of it was engineered by people who wanted the land cheap and the rules gone?
By Bo Kemp
I have spent a good deal of time thinking about why so many places that once built wealth for millions of people are now considered “distressed” or “blighted”.
Most people assume that decline is largely bad luck. A plant closes in a company town, the economy shifts, the population leaves, and the town is left holding the bill. Sometimes that is exactly what happens. But after years of doing development work across post-industrial cities, I have reached a less comfortable conclusion:
Most places in transition are a mixture of bad luck and self-inflicted wounds. And far more often than we want to believe, the decline is engineered or accelerated on purpose by a small group of people who want land that is cheap, rules that are few, and residents who have little to no say.
The Moment I Began to See It Differently
What I am about to describe will sound fantastical at first but truth is stranger than fiction.
While working in Gary, Indiana, I encountered a group of investors (a generous term to be sure as they were more like vultures) who had been quietly buying abandoned property at county tax sales for years, often at enormous discounts. On the surface that looks like a long-term bet of the reemergence of the city. Someone betting on Gary’s comeback is the kind of investor a struggling city says it wants.
Then I learned what the real plan was said to be.
As it was described to me (and allegedly…), the idea was to accumulate enough parcels and then pay as little of the property taxes as possible, for as long as possible. Every unpaid bill would drain a city budget that was already stretched. They did this by contesting the tax assessment of each parcel they owned and refusing to pay taxes on any of the parcels until the tax assessments were finalized for ALL of their parcels. A short-staffed assessor's office had to review thousands of parcels a year for just these investors. By the time they finished, the next year's bills had gone out and been appealed, and the whole cycle started over. The goal was not to wait for Gary to fail. It was to help it fail faster. Somewhere along the way, they had convinced themselves that if the city collapsed and the state stepped in, they would be allowed to keep the land and form their own municipality. They would write the rules, collect the revenue and govern the people who remained.
I want to be careful here. I cannot tell you how organized the plan was, and the legal theory behind it is shaky at best. That is not the point. The point is that a group of people looked at a majority-Black city of about 70,000 residents and saw a problem that was not poverty or disinvestment. The problem, to them, was that someone else was in charge.
Once I saw that, I started seeing the same pattern everywhere.
The Oldest Lie: “Empty Land”
Every one of these “projects” begins the same way. Someone looks at a place full of people and rich with resources and calls it empty.
In 1845, a newspaper editor named John O’Sullivan wrote that it was America’s “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent. The West was described as wilderness waiting for civilization. The Indigenous nations who had governed, farmed, hunted and traded across that land for thousands of years were written out of the picture. The law then caught up to the story. The Homestead Act handed out land that had been taken, and the Dawes Act of 1887 broke up reservations into individual plots. Tribal landholdings shrank from roughly 138 million acres to about 48 million in less than 50 years.
The language has changed since then. “Wilderness” became “blight.” “Savage” became “failed.” “Unsettled” became “underutilized.” The move underneath is the same:
Describe the people who are already there as absent, or as not using the land well enough, and taking it starts to be presented as progress.
On the island of Roatán, off the coast of Honduras, investors backed by a venture fund whose supporters include Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen built Próspera. It is a private charter city with its own rules, its own courts and its own regulatory menu. It was marketed as a startup city on underused coastline. Next door, the Afro-Caribbean fishing village of Crawfish Rock watched forested hillside get cleared for a 14-story tower. Garifuna organizations, representing an Afro-Indigenous people who have lived on this coast for more than 200 years, have fought zones like this as a threat to their ancestral land.
In Gary, the empty land is the vacant lot. But Gary was not emptied by nature. It was emptied by redlining, deindustrialization, highway routes, disinvestment and white flight. Then it was “rediscovered” by people who describe themselves as pioneers.
The land was never empty. It was emptied first.
The Playbook: Starve It, Then Claim It
Once you know the pattern, you can read it as a playbook. It has three steps, and they have barely changed in millennia. Only the tools have changed. Treaties became tax codes. The cavalry became arbitration lawyers.
Step 1: Declare the people in charge unfit to govern.
Every takeover needs a reason why the current stewards do not deserve what they have. Tribal nations were called “savages” who could not make proper use of the land. Honduras gets called corrupt and dysfunctional, a country that needs outside investors to build real institutions. Gary gets called a failed city, and the phrase is repeated so often that it starts to sound like a diagnosis instead of an opinion.
Some of these criticisms have some truth in them. Honduras does have real governance problems, and Gary has had its share of issues. But look at what the story does. It moves the conversation away from how do we help these people govern better and toward why should these people govern at all.
Ask: When someone calls a community “failed,” who benefits if everyone believes it?
Step 2: Starve the institution.
A government that works cannot be replaced, so the second step is to make sure it cannot work.
On the frontier this meant destroying the buffalo herds that Plains nations depended on and then cutting the rations promised by treaty. Hunger did what battles could not.
In Honduras it looks like a lawsuit. After the Honduran Congress repealed the law allowing zones like Próspera in 2022, and the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in 2024, Próspera’s developers filed an international arbitration claim of roughly $10.8 billion under the CAFTA-DR trade agreement. Reporting has put that figure at close to twice what the Honduran government spent in all of 2022. A claim that big doesn’t need to win to work. It only has to hang over a poor country’s budget long enough to make the government negotiate.
In Gary, it looks like a tax bill left unpaid on purpose. The city already depends on property taxes for nearly 60 percent of its budget, compared with a national average around 31 percent. It has been squeezed since Indiana capped property taxes in 2008, and since then the state’s Distressed Unit Appeal Board has required a fiscal monitor to oversee Gary’s finances. In a city that fragile, a bloc of owners who deliberately pay as little as possible is not a nuisance. It is a strategy. Every unpaid bill is a police shift, a fixed streetlight or a demolished eyesore that never happens, and that decline becomes more proof for Step 1.
That is what makes the playbook so effective. The starving produces the evidence of failure that justified the starving in the first place.
Ask: Is this community’s budget crisis only a result of its decisions, or also of decisions made to it?
Step 3: Arrive as the rescuer and write the rules.
Once the institution has failed, the people who helped it fail step forward with a solution: let us run it. Give us a charter, an exemption, a special zone, a new municipality. We will bring investment, efficiency and order.
What they almost never offer is partnership. The residents don’t become co-owners. They become customers, tenants or a workforce, living under rules they had no part in writing.
This is where the philosophy matters. Many of the people behind these projects see themselves as libertarian-leaning builders, and many draw openly on Ayn Rand. Her novel Atlas Shrugged divides the world into “makers” who create value and “takers” who consume it. The heroes go on strike, let the world fall apart without them, and withdraw to Galt’s Gulch, a hidden valley where the producers make all the rules. They come back only when society is ready to accept their terms.
Read that plot again next to the Gary plan. It is Galt’s strike carried out with a property tax bill.
The idea that some people are simply more worthy of writing the rules is the thread running from manifest destiny to startup cities. It shows up today as network states, seasteads, charter cities and proposals for “freedom cities” on public land. Not everyone who holds libertarian views wants any of this. Plenty of people who value freedom and limited government would be horrified by it. But the makers-versus-takers story has a blind spot big enough to hide a colony in, because it never asks who built the place before the “makers” arrived.
Indigenous nations stewarded the West. Garifuna and Afro-Caribbean families built lives on Roatán’s coast. Steelworkers and Great Migration families built Gary into a city that helped make the American century. They were the makers. The people who show up later with a charter are something else.
Ask: In this deal, who writes the rules, and who has to live by them?
Engineered or Unfortunate? Usually Both
I am not arguing that every struggling town is the victim of a conspiracy. Steel moved overseas. Automation is real. Rural economies built on one crop or one mine go through real shocks. Leaders make bad decisions.
But “it just happened” is a very convenient story for the people who profit when it happens. Many of the places now labeled distressed were once thriving. They made steel, grew food, moved freight and built middle-class wealth for millions of families. They did not fall on hard times at random. Along the way, specific decisions sped up the fall, and specific people were positioned to catch the pieces.
Here are the signals I have learned to watch for:
The buyers are patient in a way that the market isn’t. They keep piling up distressed parcels for years with no plan to build, operate or improve anything.
The strategy depends on the institution(s) failing. The return comes from the city, county or country collapsing, not from the property getting better.
New governance keeps coming up. The conversation keeps drifting from investment to control: special districts, exemptions, receivership, new charters.
Residents are never in the room. No community ownership, no local hiring commitments, no seat at the table. Only a promise that things will be better once someone else is in charge.
The failure story gets louder as the decline speeds up. Every setback becomes proof that the current stewards were never fit to lead.
If you see two or three of these at once, you are not looking at bad luck. You are looking at a plan.
Why This Matters Beyond Gary
Let me be clear: I love Gary and the people of Gary. Being originally from Detroit and working in similar communities around the country much of my professional life, I have developed an affinity for places that have this profile and potential. There are communities like Gary all over this country, and I dare say all over the world. Old industrial cities. Farm towns whose main street emptied out. Coastlines with more natural beauty than political power. Each of them is an opportunity to somebody. And somewhere, people are already scheming to secure that opportunity for themselves by controlling the land, the rules and the workforce.
The tragedy is that the same land, the same capital and the same ambition could produce something very different. In every one of these stories, there was another option on the table: partner with the people who are already there. Invest alongside them. Share the ownership, the governance and the upside. It is slower and it takes more humility. It also builds wealth that lasts, because the people who live somewhere have a stake in it succeeding.
That is the work I believe in, whether it is regional cooperation through the Southland Development Authority or helping one person design a path to financial freedom. Real wealth-building does not require treating your neighbors as obstacles.
Potential in a community is not an invitation to take it. It is an invitation to build with it.
The Move
This week, pick one place you care about: your hometown, your block, the city where you work.
Look up who has been buying property there at tax sales or through bulk acquisitions over the last five years.
Ask what they have built, improved or operated on it.
Show up to one public meeting where decisions about that land get made.
The “investors” in the Gary story were counting on nobody paying attention. Attention is the first form of resistance.
Final Thought
I started by asking how much of the decline we see is misfortune and how much is engineered.
My answer: more of it is engineered than most of us want to believe. The oldest trick is convincing everyone that the land was empty, the people were unfit and the takeover was rescue.
The land was never empty. The people were never unfit. And the future of these places should be written by the people who live there.
A question for you: Have you watched a place you love decline, and looking back, can you see who was positioned to benefit?
Reply to this email or leave a comment. I read every response, and they shape what I explore next.
Bo Kemp is an entrepreneur, investor, civic leader, and life operating architect. He serves as CEO of the Southland Development Authority and hosts The First Million Is Always the Hardest and founder of the ACHIEVE Summit. His work focuses on helping people, businesses, and communities turn potential into agency, ownership, and lasting value.
The views expressed here are my own. They should not be interpreted as official positions of the Southland Development Authority or as legal, tax, or investment advice.
Read More From Bo Kemp
Bo writes regularly about economic development, entrepreneurship, wealth-building and the forces shaping communities like Chicago’s Southland.
For more essays and insights from Bo, follow his Substack here.
About the Southland Development Authority
The Southland Development Authority, a not-for-profit economic development organization, is committed to driving equitable and sustainable economic growth in the South Suburbs of Chicago. Through innovative programs, strategic partnerships, and impactful direct investments, the SDA is building a vibrant, inclusive economy that drives wealth growth for individuals, businesses, and municipalities. Combined with the benefits of the South Suburban Land Bank and the Monarch Fund, the SDA serves as a model for regional development.
