Grand Rapids wasn’t built by billionaire philanthropy. It was built by public investment, tax dollars, and a manufacturing base that generated the donor fortunes in the first place. David Marcus makes the opposite case in his Fox News column of October 16, 2026 — “Why Abdul El-Sayed’s anti-billionaire screeds may not play in Grand Rapids” — arguing that the DeVos, Van Andel, and Meijer families built the city through giving, and that El-Sayed’s anti-billionaire politics would wither it. He builds the case on a stroll through the Public Museum, past a docent named Joan and a mastodon skeleton and out to the waterfront cranes, and on a construction worker who jokes that half the big projects in town carry one of the three donor names.
Let me concede the true half first, because it is genuinely true. When a local family funds a museum the region otherwise could not afford, that museum is real, and it does things a fragmented, multi-jurisdiction government struggles to do. Joan the docent is not wrong that the families “fill gaps.” Civic philanthropy at the city scale works often enough to be worth defending on its own terms.
And then you step outside, and the argument falls apart.
Look at what Marcus actually saw. The museum sits on public land. The Ford Presidential Library across the street is a federal institution. The cranes on the waterfront were working on publicly financed projects. The schools that educated the construction worker’s children are paid for by Michigan taxpayers. The water he drank came from a municipal utility. The sidewalk he walked on is a line in a city budget. Every single thing that makes Grand Rapids livable was paid for, first and last, by collective taxation.
Where did the donor money come from? Grand Rapids was the furniture capital of the world for most of the twentieth century. The DeVos and Van Andel fortunes came from Amway, the multi-level marketing company they co-founded. The Meijer fortune came from grocery retail, started by a Dutch immigrant barber named Hendrik Meijer. West Michigan ran on furniture, auto parts, medical devices, a dense network of small and mid-sized employers, and a habit of civic volunteering that long predates any foundation. The philanthropy came after the wealth. Calling it the cause is like crediting the restaurant’s patron for the kitchen because he tipped the chef. Marcus photographs the museum; he never asks who paid for the road outside it.
The gifts are not free money either. Donations are tax-deductible, and the private foundation holding the gift pays no tax on its investment income. When a family gives ten million dollars to a museum, the public treasury loses roughly three million in foregone tax revenue. Economists call that a tax expenditure. Citizens should call it what it is: public money, routed through a private foundation, with a name on the building.
And here is the part Marcus never asks about. Who built the wealth? The same families that fund the medical centers have spent a generation opposing union organizing at their own companies. The same families that fund civic projects have been leading advocates for school choice, which drains money out of the public system the rest of the city depends on. The same families that cut the checks lobby, successfully, against progressive taxation in Lansing — the tax base that pays for the sidewalk. The philanthropy is a fraction of what was taken out. It is the golden cage returned to the village after the robbery.
Marcus reaches back to the Astors and the Carnegies to put Grand Rapids in a great American philanthropic tradition. He skips the underside. The Astor fortune came from the fur trade, built on dispossession of Native land. The Carnegie fortune came from steel, and it broke at Homestead. Philanthropy was always the visible face of a fortune whose other face was extraction. The same pattern runs through Grand Rapids today, only with foundation tax forms where the Homestead strikebreakers used to stand.
Even the geography will not cooperate with the column. In the next town over, Holland, sixty-thousand-dollar houses sit two blocks from six-million-dollar lake houses — Marcus’s own interview subject, Maggie, flags this. The philanthropy is real. So is the inequality. They sit on the same street, and Marcus points at one and pretends the other is not there. No foundation check has closed that gap, and none will, because a gift is not a tax base.
The whole column then leans on a leap Marcus never once defends: that wanting fewer billionaires would mean no civic gifts. El-Sayed’s claim is about the macroeconomy. It is not a plan to raid the Public Museum. Three families funding an exhibit does not tell you what happens when wealth concentrates past the point a community can absorb, or when the same foundations bankroll the politicians who then starve the tax base the city actually runs on. If Marcus really believes the foundations are what makes Grand Rapids work, he owes us the next sentence: what happens to the city when the tax base they keep helping starve finally gives out?
That is the real choice, and it is not philanthropy versus nothing. A donor decides what gets built, where, and for whom. A school board and a city council decide what gets built, where, and for whom — one person, one vote. When a city leans on donors, it gets the donors’ priorities. When it leans on democratic taxation, it gets the residents’. The neighbors’ civic energy — the PTA, the volunteer fire auxiliary, the church potluck, the union local, the small business association — is the thing that actually built the place. The billionaires’ names are on the buildings because they paid for them. The neighbors’ names are not on the buildings because they built them, and that is a feature, not a bug.
So what do we build instead? The boring list, which is the only list that has ever worked: a much larger housing supply, regional transit, public schools funded at a level the foundation buildings imply, and a tax code that stops rewarding the wealthy for parking capital in foundations and starts rewarding them for circulating it in wages. Keep the museum — it is worth keeping. The argument being made on its behalf is not. Michigan voters deserve a debate that admits both the gift and the inequality, instead of a column that weaponizes a mastodon skeleton to deny either.