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The Mormon Church owns the most valuable property portfolio in America
At least $15,700,000,000 in holdings.
More than five years ago, the MormonLeaks organization was founded to investigate and reveal corruption within the Latter Day Saints Church, from gender bias to financial transparency. After weathering baseless legal attacks from the church, the organization redoubled its efforts, changing its name to Truth and Transparency and expanding its remit to all organized religion.
In its latest report, Truth and Transparency chip away at the LDS Church’s financial opacity, revealing 15,963 parcels (1,754,633 acres)of property holdings across the USA, with a minimum value of $15.7 billion.
Truth and Transparency was able to do this sleuthing thanks to a failure in the Church’s secrecy methods. While examining the records of known Church holdings, researchers noticed that each one of these properties was tied to a common address, no matter which holding company or other entity nominally owned it.
By feeding this address into Reonomy’s database of commercial US properties, they were able to pull up a massive data-set of suspected LDS properties. They hand-verified all properties valued at more than $20m, and another 1,000 randomly selected lower-value properties, confirming that they were all owned by the Church.
This makes the Church property portfolio the most valuable land-holdings in the USA, and they’ve only scratched the surface. The Reonomy database does not include residential properties, and it’s possible that the Church has properties that aren’t linked to the common address the researchers used to compile their data.
Truth and Transparency’s report includes an interactive map that lets you explore the Church’s properties. As they say the experience “can be jarring.” They have also published their full data-set:
https://bit.io/egd/lds-landholdings
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).
