According to the WSJ, New York City is budgeting to collect $30.8 billion in property taxes for fiscal year 2021. These tax bills will go out on June 1 and payments will start becoming due on July 1, which is the start of the city's fiscal year. Here's how the collections break down across houses, apartments, and commercial properties:

Overall -- and despite the fact that values have softened in the wake of COVID-19 -- this year's property tax budget represents a 5.7% increase over FY2020. The reason for this is that each year the city completes its annual assessments on January 5. And so according to the city's January numbers, everything is just fine.

Supposedly this January 5 date is usually non-negotiable. A lawyer is quoted in the Journal article saying that under normal circumstances, if your house were to burn down on January 6, you would still have to pay all of your taxes for the upcoming fiscal year.

Time will tell if this time is different. But it is interesting, though not surprising, to note just how significant property taxes are to New York City's overall tax collections. They represent a little more half of all taxes collected.

New York is close to implementing new "pied-à-terre tax." If the bill passes, which the New York Times believes is likely, cities of a million or more people will be able to levy an additional property tax on non-primary residence homes worth $5 million or more. The additional tax would be based on the following sliding scale:

So let's say for argument sake that you own a pied-à-terre in New York City worth approximately $238 million. Based on the above, your additional tax would be $370,000 + [4% x ($238 million - ~$25 million)]. That's almost $8.9 million. Most of the revenue from this tax is expected to come from this upper (and open-ended) valuation bracket.

New York City estimates that the tax could bring in about $650 million annually. The state in turn believes it could then raise $9 billion in bonds. And the intent is that these additional funds could be used to fund things like transit and housing. I am curious how elastic the demand is for trophy real estate in New York.

Another thing I noticed while reading up on this bill is that the New York State Senate has made it pretty easy to voice your opinion on proposed legislation. On the sidebar of every bill making its way through the system is a box that looks like this:

This is probably the clearest engagement tool I have ever seen on a government website. Do you think something like this could work for new housing?

Starting in the late 1930s, New York City began hiring photographers to document each and every building in the city. It did this to improve the accuracy of its tax assessments, and so every photo was taken with a sign board indicating the building’s block and lot number. The photos looked like this (taken from here):

The initiative produced over 700,000 black and white photos, all of which have been recently digitized according to the New York Times. The Times also recently published this interactive piece where they go back to these archival photos to see how the city has and hasn’t changed. 

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, documenting a city and its buildings was clearly a manual endeavor. Today we have Google Street View (launched in 2007), which has now photographed much of the world. Many countries, including all of North America, are reported as having “mostly full coverage.”

But already autonomous vehicles (and their supporting services) are starting to scan and map our cities in new ways. So it will be interesting to see what ends up getting built on top of this data. I am certain it will empower much more than just better tax assessments.

Happy New Year, friends. Thanks for reading over the last year.

According to the WSJ, New York City is budgeting to collect $30.8 billion in property taxes for fiscal year 2021. These tax bills will go out on June 1 and payments will start becoming due on July 1, which is the start of the city's fiscal year. Here's how the collections break down across houses, apartments, and commercial properties:

Overall -- and despite the fact that values have softened in the wake of COVID-19 -- this year's property tax budget represents a 5.7% increase over FY2020. The reason for this is that each year the city completes its annual assessments on January 5. And so according to the city's January numbers, everything is just fine.

Supposedly this January 5 date is usually non-negotiable. A lawyer is quoted in the Journal article saying that under normal circumstances, if your house were to burn down on January 6, you would still have to pay all of your taxes for the upcoming fiscal year.

Time will tell if this time is different. But it is interesting, though not surprising, to note just how significant property taxes are to New York City's overall tax collections. They represent a little more half of all taxes collected.

New York is close to implementing new "pied-à-terre tax." If the bill passes, which the New York Times believes is likely, cities of a million or more people will be able to levy an additional property tax on non-primary residence homes worth $5 million or more. The additional tax would be based on the following sliding scale:

So let's say for argument sake that you own a pied-à-terre in New York City worth approximately $238 million. Based on the above, your additional tax would be $370,000 + [4% x ($238 million - ~$25 million)]. That's almost $8.9 million. Most of the revenue from this tax is expected to come from this upper (and open-ended) valuation bracket.

New York City estimates that the tax could bring in about $650 million annually. The state in turn believes it could then raise $9 billion in bonds. And the intent is that these additional funds could be used to fund things like transit and housing. I am curious how elastic the demand is for trophy real estate in New York.

Another thing I noticed while reading up on this bill is that the New York State Senate has made it pretty easy to voice your opinion on proposed legislation. On the sidebar of every bill making its way through the system is a box that looks like this:

This is probably the clearest engagement tool I have ever seen on a government website. Do you think something like this could work for new housing?

Starting in the late 1930s, New York City began hiring photographers to document each and every building in the city. It did this to improve the accuracy of its tax assessments, and so every photo was taken with a sign board indicating the building’s block and lot number. The photos looked like this (taken from here):

The initiative produced over 700,000 black and white photos, all of which have been recently digitized according to the New York Times. The Times also recently published this interactive piece where they go back to these archival photos to see how the city has and hasn’t changed. 

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, documenting a city and its buildings was clearly a manual endeavor. Today we have Google Street View (launched in 2007), which has now photographed much of the world. Many countries, including all of North America, are reported as having “mostly full coverage.”

But already autonomous vehicles (and their supporting services) are starting to scan and map our cities in new ways. So it will be interesting to see what ends up getting built on top of this data. I am certain it will empower much more than just better tax assessments.

Happy New Year, friends. Thanks for reading over the last year.