The Tax We Pay the Dead

I like Swan Point. It is one of the prettiest places in Providence: thousands of trees, two ponds, almost a mile of Seekonk River shoreline, and a western half planned by the Olmsted firm. It is also 199 acres of the most valuable land in the state. The city assesses it at $235.6 million. It pays no property tax. Its roughly 40,000 residents are dead, and most of them have been dead for a very long time.

The city never promised them that land forever. The state did: Swan Point's 1858 charter says its property "shall be forever exempt from all taxes." But in 1844 the legislature gave itself the right to amend or repeal any charter it granted from then on. I think it should use that right, slowly and carefully, so that old cemetery land comes back to the people who are still alive to use it.

What the dead cost Providence

Rhode Island law exempts "lots of land exclusively for burial grounds" from property tax, and Swan Point's charter goes further, exempting "all the property of this corporation." If Swan Point paid the commercial rate like any other large landholder, its bill would be about $6.9 million a year. At the residential rate for a rental house, about $3.4 million.

Put that next to the schools. This spring Providence's public schools faced a $16.5 million deficit and warned they could lay off 109 people, including 67 teachers. Swan Point's tax bill alone would close 42% of that gap. It would cover the base pay of all 67 teachers, even if every one of them were at the top of the pay scale. It equals 4.5% of the $152 million the city puts into its schools each year. Statewide, the exemption on private and church cemetery land costs Rhode Island's cities and towns an estimated $10 million to $21 million a year, and more than half of it sits in Providence.

The land matters more than the money.

• Swan Point is 1.7% of the city's land. Add North Burial Ground and the smaller grounds and cemeteries cover about 345 acres, nearly 3% of Providence.
• Swan Point alone is about a sixth the size of the city's entire park system.
• Each grave at Swan Point holds about 217 square feet of the East Side. Each living Providence resident has about 244 square feet of public park.

It is beautiful, but it is not a park. The rules ban dogs, picnics, skateboards and earphones. Jogging is allowed from 8 to 9 in the morning. The gates close at 5pm from October through March. Photographing gravestones is not allowed.

Meanwhile Providence permitted 778 new homes in all of 2025. Almost half of the city's renters are cost-burdened. The median home value is up 61% since 2020.

We have done this before

Swan Point itself is built partly from moved graves. In 1848 the First Congregational Society moved its downtown burying ground there, 660 adults and 327 children. Between 1859 and 1882 Swan Point took in the remains from the West Burial Ground. By 1946 about 4,000 of its 27,134 burials had come from older grounds. Starting that same year, Swan Point sold its own land west of Blackstone Boulevard as house lots. Its lot rules still say a lot "will not be sold until all interred remains have been removed."

San Francisco banned burials in 1900. As Colma's own town history puts it, the land "was too valuable to be wasted on the cemeteries." The Supreme Court upheld the ban, and by the 1940s the city had moved nearly 150,000 bodies to Colma. Colma now has 1,509 living residents and 1.5 million dead. Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor sit on the old City Cemetery.

Washington Square Park was a potter's field with an estimated 20,000 burials, and they are still there. Madison Square Park and Bryant Park were burial grounds too. Chicago's Lincoln Park was the city cemetery. Hart Island, where New York buried more than a million people, moved to the Parks Department in 2021 and opened to public tours in 2023. Nobody picnicking in Washington Square feels like they are robbing a grave.

Most of the world rents graves

The American idea of a grave as permanent private property is unusual.

Two results stand out. Berlin's 2006 cemetery plan released 290 of its 1,037 hectares of cemetery land, 28%, for other uses. Singapore cleared Bidadari, a cemetery of about 147,000 graves, and built 8,872 public homes around a 25-acre park, with a memorial garden that keeps notable headstones. In March 2026, England's Law Commission recommended allowing grave reuse across the country after 100 years.

The plan: the 75-year rule

1. End the exemption, slowly.

   Tax cemetery land like any other land, phased in over ten years.

2. 75 years free.

   Land under graves younger than 75 years stays tax-free. That covers everyone whose children and grandchildren still visit. London uses the same 75-year line.

3. Pay to stay.

   After 75 years, anyone can keep a grave where it is by paying its share of the tax. At Swan Point that is about $170 a year. Families, churches, historical societies and Lovecraft's fans can all keep the graves they care about.

4. Move the rest with care.

   Graves nobody claims get two years of public notice and letters to known descendants. Then an archaeologist-supervised crew moves each person into an individual, labeled ossuary box in a memorial hall on the same grounds. Every headstone is kept. Every name is recorded.

5. Give the land back.

   Freed land goes to public park first and homes on the edges. The tax pays for the moves before it pays for anything else.

Two guardrails:

The space math makes this easy. By my math, all 40,000 people at Swan Point would fit in a memorial hall smaller than one acre. In practice most of the cemetery would stay: recent graves, claimed graves, the historic core and the notable monuments. And the aerial shows something better: about 21 acres of woods along Blackstone Boulevard with no grave sections at all. About 650 homes could go there without moving a single grave. The rest becomes about 108 acres of riverfront park and 28 acres of public woods.

What the living get

Both outcomes are good for the city. If Swan Point keeps its land, it pays about $6.9 million a year. If it releases land under the 75-year rule, Providence gets about 108 acres of riverfront park, 28 acres of public woods and about 650 new homes. Those homes would pay about $3.5 million a year in property tax if they pay what the average condo near Swan Point pays today, $5,365.

Swan Point can afford it

Swan Point's endowment is $147 million. In 2024 it earned $15.6 million on its investments, more than twice the tax bill. So the cemetery has a choice. It can keep every grave and pay its taxes out of investment returns, and the city gets $6.9 million a year. Or it can release land it no longer needs, and the city gets a park and homes. Either way the living come out ahead.

Who the endowment serves

Nobody owns Swan Point. Its stockholders were bought out in 1858, and as a nonprofit it pays no dividends. So the fair question is who its $147 million actually serves. The 2024 tax filing answers it.

• Today's buyers of graves. Sales brought in $3.6 million against $5.45 million of costs. The fund covers the gap, so every new burial is sold below cost.
• The staff and the board. Pay and benefits were $2.8 million, half of all spending. The directors were paid $138,750 between them, for what the filing lists as one to nine hours a week each.
• Lot owners. Their lots are mowed forever, and they elect the board.
• The fund itself. In 2024 it spent about 1% of its value and earned about 12%. From 2010 to 2024 it earned $114 million and drew down $28.5 million.
• Not the city. Providence collects nothing.

What the staff are paid

These are the figures Swan Point reports to the IRS. The top three staff each earn more than twice the median Providence household's income of $66,772.

The objections

"It's disrespectful."

Respect is memory and care. Under this plan every person is handled individually, every name is kept and every family is asked first. The disrespectful version is what Providence did in 1964. Ethicists who study this, like Julie Rugg and Stephen Holland at the University of York, argue that reusing very old graves does the dead no serious harm.

"Families bought those plots forever."

They bought a right to be buried and perpetual mowing. Both survive. The tax exemption comes from state law and from Swan Point's charter, and the legislature reserved the right to amend both before Swan Point existed. It used that same power on hospital and college charters in 2023.

"It's already green space."

Then let's make it a real park, open after 5pm, with dogs and picnics and kids on bikes.

"It's history."

Keep the history. Swan Point is on the National Register, and a park can keep its Victorian landscape, its ponds and its notable graves. Lovecraft's fans bought his headstone in 1977. They can cover his $170.

"Cremation will fix it."

It helps. Cremation is now above 60% nationally and is projected to reach 82% by 2045. That also means fewer burials paying for cemeteries and more empty land held tax-free for burials that are not coming.

What it would take

In Rhode Island: a general law that any city or town can adopt, because the Supreme Court ruled in 2026 that a Providence-only act needs a city referendum. It would narrow the burial-ground clause in RIGL 44-3-3, override Swan Point's "forever exempt" charter clause the way the legislature overrode hospital and college charters in 2023, and amend RIGL 23-18-11.1, which only allows moving a historic cemetery when there is "no prudent or feasible alternative," so that a supervised, recorded move under this program qualifies. In New York: amend Real Property Tax Law section 446.

And New York is the same story, bigger

New York City has 3,916 acres of cemetery, about 2% of the city's land and 4.6 times the size of Central Park. Queens alone has 1,880 acres of it. The rental vacancy rate is 1.4%.

The city values cemetery land as cemetery, about $508,000 an acre, so the exemption costs it roughly $90 million a year on paper. Value that land like the development sites next door and the forgone tax is closer to $1.6 billion a year (my mid estimate). New York even exempts empty land a cemetery holds in reserve for future burials.

Put homes on a quarter of the city's private cemetery land at the density planned for Sunnyside Yard (67 homes per acre, parks included) and you get about 63,000 homes. The City of Yes zoning reform is expected to add about 82,000 over 15 years. The other three quarters would add about 2,800 acres of park, more than three Central Parks.

The dead deserve to be remembered. They do not need 199 acres of the East Side to do it.

Either the dead pay rent, or they make room. Both are good for the living.