Directors: Stephen Janis & Taya Graham
Writer: Stephen Janis
As was proved in mind-numbing fashion by the documentary See You White House, film-makers having a personal connection to their topic doesn’t guarantee that it’ll be interesting to anyone else.
Taya Graham is the voice of investigative financial documentary Tax Broke and she’s clear from the outset that, as a proud Baltimorean, she wants to find out what’s going on with her city. During the course of the film, we discover that Baltimore is doomed to struggle due a post-war limit on the city’s geographical spread. This has created a stark divide between the city, with a poor and shrinking population, and the surrounding counties full of wealthy burgeoning suburbs. The divide is exacerbated by property taxes being over twice as high in the city as in the counties. Baltimore’s answer to the question of how to regenerate the city appears to be by offering huge tax breaks to developers. The accusation from many contributors to the film is that this is diverting money from public projects to guarantee and boost the profits of already mega-rich property tycoons. Robin Hood in reverse.
Now this is of course one of the great themes of the neoliberal age. Socialism for corporations funded by austerity for the hoi-polloi. As such, a film on this topic could have an appeal that extends more broadly than its specific locality. But that’s one of the hardest challenges for a documentary – balancing a specific focus on a simple compelling story with an overview of the broader context. It seems to me that co-director, writer and editor Stephen Janis doesn’t quite manage to hit this sweet spot. While we get an acknowledgement that similar tax breaks are used by cities across the US, there’s very little detail on whether or not they’ve ever been effective. At the same time, although we focus on a few specific situations in Baltimore, it doesn’t feel like we ever get deeply invested in any of the stories or characters we encounter.
The film starts with a deluge of information, along with some very hurried visuals, but we don’t really learn a great deal from it. We hear the acronyms TIF and PILOT but these aren’t explained at all. Only later do we learn that TIF stands for Tax Increment Finance, a scheme which “allows a developer to put future property taxes into the property itself”. It’s not until the half-hour mark that “legendary investigative reporter” Jayne Miller, who joins Janis and Graham and injects some welcome clarity and dynamism, describes Payment In Lieu Of Tax.
I suspect that there are two particular difficulties for the film. One is the sheer absence of information. Financial activities of this nature are routinely swathed in secrecy and there are only so many times you can put up a caption saying ‘we asked so and so for comment but didn’t hear back’. The other is that it isn’t necessarily aimed at the general viewer but as a campaigning tool in the locality. The film’s coda shows people attending its first screening and setting up a pressure group. Many of these folk are probably already fairly familiar with the concepts and terms so need rather less in the way of explanation. Sometimes the most important impact a film can have is making people involved in a struggle feel that they’ve been seen and their lives have been documented.
Tax Broke will hopefully be an important resource for people trying to improve life in Baltimore. As a film, it would be more appealing with greater clarity and ideally more of a personal story. If the film-makers had asked themselves at every step “how will this come across to someone who knows next to nothing about the topic?” they could have created a more satisfying work.