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Old Posted Mar 28, 2019, 3:19 PM
allovertown allovertown is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartphilly View Post
If you re-read my posts on this topic, I've never said the city assessors have accurately determine the value of land. I even said I don't have faith in the assessment process. Until they make the assessment process more of a science rather than an art, there's lots of subjectivity and variables to play with which results in inconsistent assessments.
Your argument is nonsense from a logic standpoint. You assert that currently assessed values should remain in place because the city is incapable of accurately assessing the current value of properties. The way the city values properties is an art, not a science, so how could we entrust them to try to accurately determine the value of a parking lot?

But the current assessments were also created by the same art, not science process. So then why would you argue that the current assessment is more legitimate than the other, especially when the actual real world market continues to show the current assessments are wildly out of wack?

No one is arguing that the city should try and guess what the property is worth if it is developed. But the city should try their best to accurately access the value of every property in the city in its current state, and it has clearly been shown that the tax code is far too generous to parking lots. I agree it is hard to determine exactly what the value of something is, but the current values of many of these lots are absurdly low as Londonee pointed out.

Sometimes cities will put their thumbs on the scale a bit to incentivize the right things to be built in the right places. But in this case the city is effectively doing the opposite. By assessing these lots so low, far lower than their actual value, the city is encouraging people to hang on to empty lots and speculate on them. It encourages people to create a parking lot, collect easy money, pay a great low property tax rate, and sit around until a developer offers you an insane amount of money. Why should the city actively disincentivize development in the heart of its downtown?

Even if we can't get the assessment perfect, we can get it a lot more accurate than it is now.
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