Property Tax Inequities Stir Movement for Change in Asheville
It’s Monday morning, or Saturday afternoon—whatever time you prefer to pay your bills. You open your letters or accounts and muddle through the process of sending your paycheck out to a multitude of essential expenses. It’s tax season, so you’ve added that to your list, as well. One of your expenses happens to be your property taxes.
Have you ever wondered how your property taxes are calculated? How is it that the bill you receive for the value of your home is determined?
Joe Minicozzi, founder of the data analytics firm Urban3, wondered the same thing when he discovered his property tax bill had gained a stark increase when his neighbor’s had not. This disparity sent Joe on a mission to bring light to the opaque tax assessment system in his city of Asheville, North Carolina. It led him and his colleagues on a months-long journey, which has developed into a large-scale collaborative project of diving into assessment inequities across Western North Carolina.
Fair property tax systems are crucial to developing a financially strong community, as property taxes represent a large source of public revenue for most local governments. Just Accounting for Health (JAfH) is a consortium partnered with Urban3 that will dive into researching tax inequities specifically in relation to Western North Carolina, as well as exploring implications of this system across the country. Strong Towns is proud to be a key partner in this work. The project will be aimed at better understanding the presence and effects of biases in tax assessment standards. Further along in the research JAfH will be answering the question, “How do systemic biases in local property tax policies and practices influence health equity in Western North Carolina?”
This project begins with an extensive analysis of tax procedures in eighteen counties located in North Carolina. The Just Accounting for Health project will be in motion for the next eighteen months, and over that time there will be several community summits focused on identifying actionable solutions to local tax inequities. In the end, the consortium will utilize the results and feedback from these studies to create a toolkit for local municipalities focused on bringing about more equitable tax policies.
This extensive project was put into motion when Dogwood Health Trust awarded an $850,000 grant to the Just Accounting for Health consortium, which includes: the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville) Department of Health and Wellness, the Asheville Racial Justice Coalition, Urban3, and Strong Towns.
To view a more extensive highlight of the historical timeline of this project, visit the Just Accounting for Health website here.
Last year, our summer intern Sarah Davis wrote about Urban3’s initial research on low-income households being overvalued in their tax assessments in Western North Carolina. Urban3 discovered that while lower-cost homes were being overvalued, higher-cost homes were being undervalued.
To demonstrate this tax imbalance, we presented several graphs and introduced what Urban3 calls a “J-Curve.”
(Click to enlarge.)
When taking a look at this curve, as Davis wrote, “you’ll notice that homes above $200,000 are being assessed for well below their selling price, and homes below $200,000 have a much higher sales-to-valuation ratio. In other words, higher-income households are getting a break in county taxes, while lower-income households are getting inflated assessments and seeing their taxes increase.”
We continued the discussion by explaining how this issue of assessment iniquities plagues communities nationwide. This was first brought to light by Christopher Berry, of the University of Chicago, who published a salient analysis on tax inequities throughout hundreds of counties within the United States. Last summer, Davis also wrote about how this is a compounding issue for minority communities, who tend to make up a large portion of the over-assessed population.
Davis’ last article on the topic tackled potential solutions to the property tax inequities laying dormant in our own communities. We examined 5 key approaches that the analytics team at Urban3 developed to help dispel this issue.
One possible solution was to “take a systems approach.” Many counties have different systems for tax assessments so it is important to examine our own local governments and evaluate what could be the best solutions for our unique environments.
Strong Towns is proud to be a part of the Just Accounting for Health project over the next year and a half. We will be reporting on the research derived from this project, along with connecting it to other narratives throughout the country. If you’re interested in tagging along, sign up for email alerts at justaccounting.org.
(Cover image source: Unsplash, with edits.)
Seairra Jones serves as the Staff Writer/Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.