Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1354

Carbon of a letter to Harold S. Buttenheim, 470 Fourth Avenue, New York City

February 19, 1941

 

 

Dear Mr. Buttenheim:

 

It was good to get your letter of January 22^nd with its reference to your valuable civic activities even though these made it inconvenient for me to have the pleasure of seeing you again during my last visit to New York.

 

     I, too, have found myself exceedingly occupied but rather in the field of social discovery than in that of organizations for putting specific measures into effect. This interest of mine, while much less spectacular, I am sure you will not regard as less important or less valuable on that account.

 

     However, during my recent two weeks in New York, I had some brief but arresting discussions with several persons of considerable eminence and interest in the administration of real property of a community as the basic and authentic service therein performed. Among them were several of the most prominent real estate men in New York. My engagements with them and in that connection are now bringing me back to New York for the week of February 24^th. In the meantime, here in Baltimore, I have engaged the interest of the president of the Real Estate Board and several of its more prominent members who, as recently as last Monday, held a luncheon seminar for the purpose of hearing and discussing my philosophy of real estate, as their invited guest. Very much interest was manifested, and an evening meeting with a large number of persons is now being arranged.

 

     Just to remind you of my taking the “Gospel to the heathen” in its most practical aspects, I am enclosing, herewith, for your further or repeated reference, my two little articles on “Real Estate, How to Raise and Restore It’s Income and Value.”

 

     During the coming week while I am at the Hotel Woodstock, 127 West 43^rd Street, as usual, I shall be very happy if our engagements can be arranged to include some personal discussion of our common interests.

 

     I want to thank you (or whoever it was) for sending me the report of the Fifth Annual Symposium of the Tax Institute originally founded by you. The work of this Institute certainly has been and will be of utmost public importance. You are certainly to be congratulated on having inaugurated a work of such far-reaching value. My special hope is that the importance of this work — this mitigation of the rigors of taxation — will soon be brought home to the organized community owners who alone are in a position to profit most directly and most abun­dantly from such reduction of community handicaps and amelioration of community affairs. Certainly none others are in such a position to profit as are the real estate owners from all those reliefs and services which make their communities economically more productive and their proper­ties, therefore, of rising income and higher value.

 

     I am pleased to hear from Mr. H. Bronson Cowan of the encouragement that you and your associates have given him towards his investigations of tax matters in the British Dominions of the Southern Seas. I imagine his work will tie in most excellently with that of the Tax Institute.

 

Yours very truly,

 

    

    Spencer Heath

 

 

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