Affordable Housing Institute : US

Every now and then one hears of an innovation so incisively nifty one simply stops and applauds:

 

That’s worth mashing a cupcake for!

 

Such as this technological innovation brought to the knotty problem of fair real estate tax assessments, as featured in the New York Times:

 

THERE are about 300,000 row houses in Philadelphia, which means there are about 300,000 row house owners in Philadelphia who would like to see their tax assessments lowered.

 

As we’ve previously discussed, local property taxes are a percentage of assessed value, so everyone would like his or her own property assessed at or below its true value.  With 300,000 homes to assess, if we presume half an hour per property and eight hours per day, that’s 20,000 person-hours — ten people full-time year-round — to provide the assessments.

 

It takes this many assessors!

 

Most localities thus use periodic assessments, leading to debates:

 

Until recently, assessors had to accept homeowners’ claims or visit the properties themselves.

 

But in 2003, the city hired the Pictometry International Corporation, a company in Rochester, N.Y., to provide images of every building in the city.

 

One little plane, and all those pictures!

 

Once a year, Pictometry flies a Cessna 172 over Philadelphia, taking thousands of black-and-white photographs.

 

 

The low-altitude shots, unlike satellite images, show buildings at about a 40-degree angle.  Pictometry’s computers organize the photos so they can be searched by address. Nearly 200 employees in Mr. Mescolotto’s office have the software on their computers.

 

As computing power goes to infinity, so does automation … and with it, precision approaches 100% (error rate asymptotically approaches zero).

 

This non-intrusive, public-information computer-scanned system means that objective (and therefore quantifiable) data is instantly available, so just as the valbots can use public information to estimate home prices, so do the assessors.  In so doing, they can raise taxes on the under-assessed:

 

BIRD’S-EYE VIEW Barry Mescolotto says Philadelphia uses aerial imaging.

 

Mr. Mescolotto said that the Pictometry system, which costs Philadelphia about $100,000 a year, “probably paid for itself within about two weeks.”

 

“If you have a dog, or a locked fence, we may not be able to get into your backyard to see something you’ve built,” Mr. Mescolotto said. But Pictometry flies over dogs and fences.

 

In addition to home improvements, the software has also helped his office pick up more than 100 cell phone antennas that have been erected on existing structures.  Each tower, he said, “adds so much value that, tax-wise, it’s the equivalent of finding a new house.”

 

Big income potential here.

 

Among the rights granted by property ownership is that of improvement, and when there is a discontinuity (in this case, a technological one), there can be ‘windfall’ income to the property owner — just the sort of thing people would decline to mention to the revenuers.

 

Not to mention the tarring and feathering

 

Pictometry’s software makes it possible for assessors not only to see buildings, but also to measure them, down to the hundredth of a foot.  But trying to zoom in on people’s faces causes the photos to dissolve into pixels.  “It’s not at the resolution where you can look in windows, or read license plates,” said Kenneth M. Wilkinson, the property assessor of Lee County in Florida. “The system preserves privacy.”

 

At least for now … but not for long.  Some years back Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, was quoted as saying, “You have no privacy.  Get over it.”

 

Mr. Wilkinson has made the Pictometry images available to the public over the Internet.  (To see images of properties in Lee County, visit the property assessor’s site, leepa.org, and then click on Pictometry.  Registration is free.) The site has received millions of hits, according to Mr. Wilkinson.

 

And that makes a few people unhappy. One of his employees, he said, received a telephone call from a retired New York City policeman, who didn’t want people to see that he had two Cadillacs in his driveway.

 

Ah, the stories we tell about ourselves.

 

My friend and science fiction writer Alex Jablokov long ago said, “Efficient technology is like the flu — sooner or later everyone gets it.”  By extension, efficient technology goes from novelty to luxury to necessity at warp speed:

 

By law, the county had until Jan. 1, 2005, to adjust the assessed valuation of every property affected by [Hurricane Charley in August, 2004].  Without Pictometry, “there is no way we could have had it done in time,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

 

In addition, Mr. Wilkinson said, petitions to lower assessments have declined since 2001, to about 500 a year from an average of 2,000 a year. “People are surprised how well we know their property,” he said.

 

Next stop, automated assessment.

 

We’re from the county assessor and we’re here to help you.

 

Recently, Mr. Wilkinson’s office has been using Pictometry’s “change detection” feature: After flying over the county, the company prepares a list of properties that appear to have been altered since the last fly-over.

 

“The software takes us right to those properties,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “We can look, and see that you’ve added a pool.”

 

The first time [Scott Yamamoto, the property appraiser for Geauga County, Ohio, which is east of Cleveland] office used the change-detection feature, he said, his office “picked up about $1.8 million in property value that we could not see from the ground.”

 

That translated into $35,000 in tax revenue last year for his rural county.

 

Fuzzy boundaries are bad boundaries, and conversely, sharp boundaries inspire confidence in the system:

 

He said many taxpayers like the software, “because when they call you to talk about their property, you know right away what they’re talking about.”

 

But not everybody:

 

Some of them get in touch with Philadelphia’s Board of Revision of Taxes.  A caller may say, “Our house is in the worst condition of any on the block,” said Barry Mescolotto, the board’s assistant administrator.

 

These days, Mr. Mescolotto has a good answer: “I’ll say, ‘I’m looking at a photo of your house, and it looks to be about the same as all the others.’ ”

 

“That usually ends the conversation,” Mr. Mescolotto said.

 

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