An article today asked “how much of the City’s property is untaxed?” The answer, as pointed out in the article, is 40% in terms of percentage of the total assessed value in the City: in dollar terms (see table 7 on page 113 as well as our chart on the website) there is $12.5 billion in exempt property. The amounts of course include government, hospitals, higher education, religious property, etc. as we covered in our 2003 report on the City and in subsequent research. The 2017 County certified values has exempt property at $12.2 billion, a slight decline from the 2015 total.
The article goes on to talk about PILOT programs and land banks as to how, in the former, charitable non-profits contribute to local government, and the latter, how unproductive property that may be tax delinquent can be moved to that tax rolls. The County, which handles assessment and record keeping function for every municipality including the City (and thus produces taxable and exempt value for taxation purposes for itself, the municipalities, and the school districts in the County) is in the midst of a review of property granted exemption as purely public charities.
