Anson Stevens-Bollen
Cover, July 12: “Santa Fe Mural Tour”
A Public (art) service
Profound thanks for your brilliant compilation of public murals in our city! You have produced an invaluable guide, inventory and public record. Not I but other art history researchers are on a quest to locate and document existing, long-removed or destroyed public art in this most complex of American cities and its many peoples.
The archival material is diversely rich, though spotty, and many published historical reviews of these records are unmistakably corrupted by colonialism and racism. But not your survey. SFR remains a critical resource and treasure for all your readers across many matters of import, whether ostensibly frivolous or otherwise.
Deborah Tefo, Santa Fe
News, July 12: “Mansion Tax in for Fight”
Taxonomy of gains
The median price of a home is already closing in on $900,000, so an excise tax [on sales over $1 million] would target almost half the market this year and by the next few years more than half the market.
In addition, someone like me who bought before the market rose would be far more able to pay the excise tax than someone who bought a house for over $1 million and then resold it for close to their purchase.
[It’s a] good deal for long-time owners like my wife and me, but would it be fairer to focus a tax on realized gains from a sale, so maybe “anyone earning more than $500,000 in realized gains on a sale must pay a tax of 3% on the amount of gains?”
Douglas Garfinkel, Santa Fe
