Even Your Property Taxes Were Redlined

Next City

Property taxes are how most people pay for their local government. These taxes fund a range of local services, from our public schools to our fire departments.
But those property tax systems overburden some – and undercharge others. And when mapped out, these disparities looks suspiciously like another pattern of disparities that you should be familiar with by now: redlining.
It seems counterintuitive, as our senior economic justice correspondent Oscar Perry Abello explains. You've seen the headlines about Black homeowners swapping out their family photos with their white friends' family photos and receiving a higher home appraisal because the appraiser assumes it's owned by a white person. But in property tax assessments, he says, we see the opposite: Local public officials often don't believe Black homeowners' should be valued at the price that it's valued by the market, so they increase amount they charge in taxes. Meanwhile, on the whiter and wealther side of town, the property tax assessor believes that white family's home is definitely not worth that much – and they shouldn't be charged as much in taxes.
In today's episode, we speak with Joe Minicozzi, an urban designer and founder of Urban3, a firm with a mission to explain, visualize, and improve market dynamics created by tax and land use policies. He's working to prove these disparities in land valuation actually exist – that we are in fact subsidizing wealthier, whiter neighborhoods at the expense of historically redlined neighborhoods. Watch our recent, in-depth webinar with Minicozzi to learn more about his findings.
Minicozzi mentions this article: The New York Times : "How Lower-Income Americans Get Cheated on Property Taxes"