"The thing generally raised on city land is taxes," Charles Dudley Warner wrote 110 years ago. True then. True now. Never mind the grass, the trees, the shrubs, the vegetable gardens. What nourishes the municipal body is a bountiful tax harvest. But wait: Hartford, Conn., is raising a preposterous, or at least heretical question: Can the city dweller matter even more than the dollar itself?
In economically hard pressed Hartford, spirits have risen a bit this spring. Why? Consider the case of Mary Haley, a slender, brown-haired woman who wears her 41 years well. She arises early, shoos her three resident children (ages 17, 14 and ten) off to school. She orders one to remember to feed the dog, then bustles around a six-room frame house at 61 Monroe Street in a working-class area. The house is 64 years old and tax delinquent. After picking up a stray article of clothing here, dusting a table top there, Mary too is off—to work for the city of Hartford, which could throw her out of her home but won't. Mary Haley is one of 98 property owners who will pay an in-kind tax this year by doing carpentry, delivery, light painting, custodial or clerical work for the city. Hartford, it seems, thinks it is important that they stay put, even though they cannot pay their tax bills in cash.
The overseer of the unique and practical program that allows indigents to work off their tax bills in part-time services to the city (they receive no cash) is David Hargreaves, 34. Says Hargreaves, saying it all: "These people are rich resources." Mary Haley is, anyway. Three years ago, a divorce propelled her into the baffling world of taxes, mortgages, bills. "I knew a lot about taking care of babies," she says, "but I didn't know much about anything else." Untrained, with only a high school education, she was stunned when the $1,100 city property tax bill arrived. "I didn't know what to do. I thought I would have to sell." But she and the children did not want to move. Besides, "How many people want to rent to a divorced woman with four kids and a dog?" The dog would have to stay too; the children made that clear. "You go if you have to," they would say to her. "But the dog stays."