land value tax – The Menace of Privilege

Tribune and “Illinois Answers” explain why value of improvements should be excluded from assessments

“Cook County assessor misclassifies hundreds of properties, missing $444M in one year alone,” says the Chicago Tribune. The report is joint with Illinois Answers. $444 million is a lot of money, about 1/2 of 1% of all the assessed value Countywide. And assessment data is public, so the journalists could easily find examples of inconsistencies.

Evidently, Fritz didn’t do as good a job as we wish. The journalists didn’t report any comparable error rates for other jurisdictions; perhaps they couldn’t find any. Some Cook County taxpayers were unpleasantly surprised when, the Assessor having suddenly discovered their improvements, they received big bills for back taxes.

The report includes a chart showing annual number of improved properties discovered and amount of back-taxes billed for each year going back to 2006:

From the Chicago Tribune / Illinois Answers report.

From this it appears Fritz’s record is pretty much in line with the results of prior Assessors. He says there are 1,864,161 taxable parcels in the County, so in his worst year he discovered missed improvements on 0.1% of them.

Note that the Tribune/IAP folks mislabeled the chart; the assessments probably weren’t “omitted,” but the properties were underassessed because improvements weren’t recognized.

The report includes a number of complaints by former County employees and some local officials, essentially agreeing that Fritz did an imperfect job. There’s even a time-series of aerial images of a subdivision in Lynwood, showing very clearly that houses have been built, but didn’t yet show up on the tax rolls. For a village of 9116 people, and their school districts, this subdivision of a few dozen houses might be a significant fiscal consideration. And for the new homeowners, the back taxes will be a burden.

(The report implies that in this case the ball was dropped by the Bloom Township Assessor, an intermediary between Fritz and the municipality. )

The journalists also start, and conclude, their report with the case of one property owner who has experienced serious tax increases and is considering moving out state. Yes, excessive and wasteful government spending, and high taxes, is a big problem here. But fixing assessment errors affecting 0.1% of the parcels will do little to address it.

We could make a couple of observations here.

What if Cook County could drop improvements from the tax base, assessing and levying only on the value of land, what the each parcel would be worth if vacant? Probably none of the problems described in this report could have occurred. And instead of increasing “the number of budgeted field staff from 34 in 2023 to 38 in 2024,” Fritz could have laid off most of the field staff, putting a few to the task of correctly valuing land. He’ll also need (probably already has) somebody to monitor the County Clerk’s Tax Map Department, to be sure parcel boundaries and numbers are up to date.

How does the government’s ability to accurately administer the property tax system compare to the income tax system, or the sales tax system? Nobody knows. While nobody really understands how income taxes work, the revenue agencies release only aggregate data, so we know nothing of any invidual’s situation unless the person chooses to publish her income tax returns, as some politicians do, or somebody violates the rules and liberates confidential information. Even sales tax information for individual taxpayers is largely confidential. To guess how well these taxes are administered, one could search for /IRS agent indicted/ on luxxle or freespoke .

And here’s a report asserting that over a recent 18-month period, more than 1% of Internal Revenue Service employees had “confirmed tax noncompliance issues.” (Apparently most of them kept their jobs.) If 1% of IRS employees are “cheating,” I doubt that the percentage for average taxpayers is less. So it seems that overall, Fritz is doing a better job than the Feds.

Maybe he should ask the State to make his job easier by removing improvements from the real estate tax base.

Georgist looks at “Escaping the Housing Trap.”

This new book by Strong Towns head Chuck Marohn (and Daniel Herriges) is worthwhile for anyone who wants to understand where America’s “housing crisis” came from. The history is important: How did we get here? He goes thru how housing was financed a hundred years ago, federal programs enacted in response to the 1929++ economic depression and subsequent disruptions, subsequent federal programs, and the dilemma we have today.

About 2/3 of American households are homeowners, they have (or hope to obtain) “equity” in their property, and they really don’t want to see the economic value of their holdings decline. Many of them are already stressed by the cost of paying their mortgages, taxes, maintenance expenses, and other costs of living. Not to mention the cost of owning and operating automobiles, as in most communities life without one is quite inconvenient.

The remaining third are renters (plus the unhoused). Many of them are also under economic pressure, as rents in recent decades have outpaced incomes. They might like to see housing prices decline, or more precisely to see the housing they want become easier for them to afford.

So there are big interests who want housing costs to decline, and who don’t want the price of housing to decline.

Part of the problem, as Marohn sees it, is that nowadays housing is built, financed, and often managed at a national scale. These folks are professionals who can deal with complex zoning and building code requirements. So part of the remedy is for local governments to make it easier for small-scale, local builders to make housing. This would include allowing an increase in density by right, such as backyard cottages, accessory apartments, or a two or three unit building in areas which have been restricted to single family.

This isn’t wrong, and I have enough personal experience dealing with building and zoning officials in a “progressive” community to know that improvements would be helpful. Even Brandon Johnson claims to be aware of the problem.

Working thru the book, I kept wondering what happened to the land value tax, which I know Marohn has supported. When I got to the example on “Financing Backyard Cottages” where he notes that one advantage would be additional property tax revenue, it sure looked like LVT has been tossed aside. Finally, toward the end of the penultimate chapter, he says “the land value tax… is perhaps the best mechanism to overcome neighborhood stagnation and decline.” Well it was nice he was able to fit this in.

I do recommend this book to anyone interested in realistic ways to get more housing built, or just in finding out how we got where we are. However, if you want to know how the whole problem could have been avoided by getting public revenue primarily from the value of land and other privileges, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

Property tax can’t be equitable, Kaegi asserts

former Schulze bakery — Disused Chicago bread factory to become data center. Image credit: Emily CC BY-NC 2.0

In a new article (archived copy, also included in this pdf) for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi asks “In a digital economy, how can cities create a more equitable property tax system?” Of course he does not try to define “equitable,” but one infers from the article that it means “funded more by those benefiting from the digitalization of the economy, and less by those who actually perform useful work.” A desirable result, to be sure, but how does he propose to accomplish it? He also seems to assume that government-funded schools are a good thing, or at least that parents shouldn’t be held individually responsible for arranging their own children’s education.

He proposes to get more revenue from the big infotech companies, specifying Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, and Facebook, but by implication the numerous other organizations who have prospered by taking advantage of the internet (as well as their lobbying capabilities to stifle competitors). He doesn’t think that local or state government is equipped to collect much of this revenue. Further, he assumes that a real estate tax to fund “education” can only be implemented at the school district level, and couldn’t be countywide, regionwide, statewide, or in any respect subnational. He concludes that the U S government needs to send large quantities of money to America’s cities, particularly including Chicago and the rest of Cook County.

“The federal government … is best situated to tax incomes generated by activity like digital commerce, virtual meetings, and footloose service providers [and]…will need to build fiscal mechanisms for a digital world that separates economic activity from physical space. ” (Presumably these wealthy and influential companies won’t use their influence to deflect the tax burden to others. )

OK, so Cook County local governments don’t get revenue from this digital economy? What about the 11 (soon to be 12) data centers in Elk Grove Village (archived copy), paying real estate taxes and utility taxes, as well as taxes imposed on persons working to construct and operate them. This report (archived copy) counts 52 data centers regionwide as of February 2021. Both reports note that several kinds of tax favors are provided, without indicating that they’re necessary since the digital economy requires facilities in appropriate locations.

And Amazon and other on-line retailers don’t generate taxes? Those of us who’ve bought something on line in the past couple years have noticed that the e-commerce giants collect and remit state and local sales taxes, typically in excess of 10% here. Last year the BGA counted (archived copy) 36 warehouses in the Chicago area built for Amazon since 2015 (and noted “at least $741 million in taxpayer-funded incentives”). This of course doesn’t count warehouses used by non-Amazon sellers such as Walmart and Target. Again, it’s likely that most or all of these facilities would have been built without subsidies, since warehouses have to be located appropriately with respect to markets, labor supply, transportation, etc.

Kaegi is legitimately concerned about the fragmentation of Cook County’s tax base, noting that “The lower the value of real estate in a community, the higher the effective rate to provide a comparable level of school services. This results in
great disparities.” But that problem isn’t inherent in the real estate tax; it’s inherent in the fragmentary structure of finance, funded largely by local real estate tax. A statewide real estate tax, such as Illinois had until it was replaced by a sales tax in 1933, could reduce or eliminate the disparities. A number of states retain statewide real estate taxes, but the problem of disparities can also be addressed by a tax-base sharing arrangement, as has operated for half a century in Minnesota.

“[W]e must continue to push for local-school funding that is not rooted in local land values,” writes Kaegi. Actually, if an effective disparity-reduction arrangement is in place, the opposite might be true. I have previously posted a table and map illustrating that, if taxes were based on land value rather than land+improvement value, the burden on homeowners in communities of low income and color would be lessened. And of course if the burden of sales taxes could be replaced by a tax on land value, the benefit to moderate-income households would be enhanced.

So we have an Assessor, running for re-election, who doesn’t believe the taxes he helps calculate are a good way to fund local services. I had hoped for better (but didn’t really expect it), as the quality of assessment seems to have improved during his tenure. He does have one announced primary opponent.

Cheap housing is on cheaper land

UPDATE Aug 29 2021: If anyone familiar with Chicago doubts that removing improvements from the tax base will ease the burden on low-income homeowners, this map will be instructive. The original, mapless post from Aug 25 follows.

We sometimes are told that a land value tax (LVT) would punish the poor person who has a small rundown house on a high-value lot, while benefiting the person next door who has a large fancy house on an identical lot. And that’s not wrong, it’s just atypical. In practice, we believe, poor people mostly live in neighborhoods where housing is cheap and land is cheaper, thus they would tend to benefit from a shift to LVT.

As the quality of Cook County assessments has been improving, we expect to be able to show this by analysis of that data. In the meantime, we have some estimates of land and improvement value from William Larson and colleagues at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Using appraisals produced for mortgage underwriting, they estimate land and improvement values for homes in most zip codes (and census tracts) nationwide. Their source data includes only single family properties which were appraised for mortgage purposes. They consider only parcels where the improvement is less than 15 years old, and exclude vacant land as well as land where the appraised value is very close to the assessed value (in case appraisers might have relied on low-quality or obsolete assessments). Also excluded are zip codes with an insufficient number of single family home transactions.

The chart below shows, for Chicago zip codes, the ratio of land value to total value (vertical axis) and total value of the property (horizontal axis. What stands out is that the ratio tends to be lower where the properties are cheaper. That is, a revenue-neutral shift of property taxation to land values only, ignoring value of improvements, would tend to reduce the taxes on low-value zip codes, while increasing it in higher-value areas.

The table below shows the data for each zip code, sorted from high proportion of value in land to low. Clearly the more affluent areas have lower proportion of improvement value, and the areas with low income population have a higher proportion of improvement value.

Estimated land value proportion and related data for single family properties in Chicago zip codes
ZIP Code	Lot Size	building sq ft	floor area ratio	Property Value (As-is)	Land Share of Property Value
60640	4300	2320	0.540	$809,500	50.70%
60614	2920	2950	1.010	$1,516,300	47.10%
60613	3740	2590	0.693	$1,128,200	46.90%
60625	4220	1860	0.441	$528,000	46.30%
60618	3580	1890	0.528	$615,800	45.90%
60660	3820	1940	0.508	$553,500	44.50%
60657	3210	2600	0.810	$1,133,300	44.40%
60622	3120	2330	0.747	$911,800	41.80%
60631	5620	1690	0.301	$390,700	40.90%
60610	2250	2900	1.289	$1,443,300	40.20%
60646	5370	1820	0.339	$445,900	39.80%
60647	3250	1880	0.578	$600,800	39.20%
60654	1990	3580	1.799	$1,661,200	37.40%
60630	4310	1550	0.360	$315,500	37.20%
60642	2230	2140	0.960	$667,200	37.20%
60641	4230	1640	0.388	$316,400	35.70%
60605	1840	2200	1.196	$774,700	35.30%
60659	4310	1800	0.418	$367,500	35.10%
60626	5410	2050	0.379	$407,400	34.20%
60656	5100	1500	0.294	$334,600	34.20%
60612	2910	1920	0.660	$424,300	33.90%
60645	4420	1870	0.423	$373,600	33.70%
60634	4240	1470	0.347	$264,100	32.40%
60608	2960	1530	0.517	$302,200	31.70%
60615	4460	2630	0.590	$615,700	31.50%
60616	2570	1950	0.759	$447,900	31.40%
60607	1970	2140	1.086	$641,400	28.90%
60655	5140	1490	0.290	$258,000	28.80%
60707	4940	1600	0.324	$258,700	28.70%
60637	3920	1970	0.503	$350,000	26.30%
60609	3320	1450	0.437	$209,700	25.20%
60639	3900	1420	0.364	$202,900	25.20%
60638	4280	1340	0.313	$225,100	24.70%
60632	3860	1300	0.337	$173,600	20.60%
60643	5960	1600	0.268	$200,800	20.60%
60652	4730	1330	0.281	$176,400	18.30%
60629	4040	1340	0.332	$155,300	17.40%
60651	3920	1440	0.367	$158,300	16.90%
60653	3290	2360	0.717	$390,100	16.60%
60644	4580	1650	0.360	$137,400	16.00%
60633	4690	1320	0.281	$120,200	15.20%
60649	4960	1870	0.377	$170,800	13.80%
60623	3510	1340	0.382	$118,500	13.60%
60624	3300	1540	0.467	$122,200	12.80%
60621	3880	1490	0.384	$69,300	11.50%
60617	4200	1360	0.324	$116,300	11.20%
60619	4320	1430	0.331	$127,700	10.50%
60636	3540	1270	0.359	$65,200	10.30%
60620	4180	1410	0.337	$117,800	10.20%
60628	4320	1340	0.310	$99,800	9.20%

source:	https://www.fhfa.gov/PolicyProgramsResearch/Research/Pages/wp1901.aspx

A Chicago zip code map is here.

Also of interest, even tho the low-value areas have a high ratio of improvement to land value, this isn’t because of large houses on small lots. The floor area ratio is generally lower in the areas with lower land value proportion.

Overall, the above data is consistent with Georgists’ assertion that low-income residents usually benefit from a switch to LVT. I might be taking a further look at this dataset.

Sun-Times report inadvertently helps show the benefits of simple LVT as a revenue source

Image credit: Purple Wyrm CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

According to a Sun-Times report, Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi acknowledges that his “Senior Freeze” program, under which old property owners claiming household income under $65,000 can get a big break on property taxes, is “riddled with errors.” Highlighted is a multi-million dollar condo in Water Tower Place, whose owners pay only $2502/year. While it’s certainly possible that these folks might have income under $65,000/year, that seems unlikely, as they also own a Florida condo valued at over $1 million. Their Chicago property apparently also benefits from the temporary removal of toilets during a 2017 remodeling. It seems that the Assessor never noted that the toilets were replaced (or perhaps they were not?)

While the WTP property is clearly an extreme case, the senior freeze program transferred $250 million from owners of 144,904 properties who participate in it to the remainder of the 1.77 million taxable properties (of which 1.6 million are residential) in the County. With the total property tax revenue at $15.6 billion, this amounts to about 1.6 % of total taxes collected. The Sun-Times article provides several other examples of affluent old people who benefit from the program.

Clearly this is a problem of bad policies ((discriminating against renters, the nonelderly, and people who find it difficult to complete simple bureaucratic forms), and taxing improvements), combined with governmental malfunction (Kaegi hasn’t been able to get the program under control, partly because there is no mechanism for the County to verify incomes).

It should not be necessary to mention, but I will mention anyway, that the Sun-Times report relied on property tax data being, for the most part, publicly available. While far worse scandals likely could be found regarding income tax, many of these can’t be documented unless taxpayers “voluntarily” release their information, or it is (probably unlawfully) liberated.

Not the first daylight robbery, but a good one

I’ve long considered Dominic Frisby, perhaps the only working comic who’s also a financial writer, to be a Georgist. Several years ago he posted a nice video explaining the land value tax. Now he’s gone deep into a history of taxation and its effects, in Daylight Robbery: How Tax Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future Readable and succinct, but somehow by the end Frisby has forgot about his video.

The title is appropriate, so good that over a dozen older books already carry it, but the subtitle may be unique. Frisby asserts quite a few facts new to me, and for the most part provides references (altho some are a bit summary, showing only the domain name such as cbs.com, or time.com, where one might need to search around a bit).

The book starts with the story of Hong Kong, a British colony which prospered thru free markets and lower taxes (The point stands, even tho in recent years external demand pushed housing costs to obscene levels, and in recent months political and governmental interference made conditions even more difficult.) Going thru tax history, Frisby of course discusses the effects of the window tax (“daylight robbery”), and explains why it was considered to be fairer and easier to administer than its predecessor. He tells us about tax revolts and England’s first income tax, all records of which were apparently destroyed (source citation is a two-volume history that I can find only in Latin). He explains the cause of the U S War between the States (which Lincoln waged more for revenue purposes than in any opposition to slavery.) He notes that Hitler was tax-exempt, and the Guardian used a Cayman Islands entity to (apparently legally) avoid taxes.

After lots more stories about taxation and its role in history, moving to modern times, Frisby explains (as if any of us need to know) the burden that taxation of productive activity places on people trying to, well, be productive. He talks about the digital nomads and crypto currencies which make collection of production tax more difficult, and about digital transactions which make the collection easier.

Finally he proposes a Utopian tax system. Is it collection of all economic rent as the sole source of public revenue? Not really. He wants VAT (not to exceed 15%, and including narcotics) and income tax (also not to exceed 15%). So the record-keeping burdens and complexities of those will remain, tho perhaps a bit reduced because the impact of error is less. To these he wants to add L U T (Location Usage Tax), which is basically LVT but with perhaps a clearer name, and which would be set at some percentage of the land rental value. He wants voters to choose the percentage, apparently a single rate nationwide. And since he aims to keep governmental expenditures below 15% of GDP, it’s unclear that there would be any L U T at all.

“The location usage tax does not apply just to land, but to any asset granted by nature — the airspace the mineral wealth, and even the broadcast spectrums.” He doesn’t seem to have any problem with private collection of rent for “intellectual property,” even tho I P is a privilege granted and protected by the government, thus straightforward to track and assess– if there’s any justification for I P at all.

It seems that much of the land in Britain is “unregistered,” in that the owner isn’t known, and in Utopia this will be remedied by identifying every owner. I’m not sure why that’s necessary. A tax bill could be posted for each parcel, and a copy mailed to the owner should s/he request it. After due and repeated notice, If the bill isn’t paid, the land could be taken over by the Crown (or whatever they call it over there), and auctioned to somebody willing to pay the tax. (If nobody’s willing to pay the tax, it needs to be reduced.)

Would I like to live in Frisby’s Utopia? Well, of course here in the U S we have no VAT, and the retail sales tax is generally less than 15%. But income tax can be higher, and we have various other taxes which Frisby proposes to eliminate. And LVT has other benefits in addition to the revenue it generates. So on the whole, it’s a better deal, a step in the right direction. But Utopia? Go back and watch the video.

(Note: This review is of the 2019 edition of the book. The Publisher’s web site indicates that a new edition will be released later in 2020.)

Some effects of high and misconfigured real estate taxes

Delinquent taxes soaring in Cook County

Reportedly, taxes of 163,036 parcels in Cook County were not paid on time. This comprises 2018 taxes which should have been paid in 2019. and amounts to 8.7% of all parcels in the County. For a dozen south Cook County municipalities, this amounts to 20% or more of total parcels. Counts by municipality are posted separately for south, west, and north Cook. All sources show the percentage of parcels with unpaid taxes within the City of Chicago as 9.9%.

Separately, the reports show that only 7.8% of the delinquent taxes offered for auction in 2018 were bought by investors, which might imply that the remaining parcels are considered worth less than the taxes owed.

Unfortunately the source doesn’t tell us how many of the parcels are vacant, residential, commercial, or other uses, and gives no historical context, so we don’t really know how any of these figures compare to prior years. But regardless, the current numbers are alarming.

Suppose that the real estate tax system was changed, so that improvements would be tax-free while the value of land as vacant would be heavily taxed to make up the difference. For vacant parcels, construction of houses or other structures would not increase the tax. For parcels which contain improvements, taxes likely would be lower than now, and improvements would again be tax free. Just a thought.

Maybe expanding tax-exempt institutions raise land prices?

Crains tells us that a strikingly-designed two flat, less than 30 years old, is worthless. Well, they didn’t say it quite that way, but it was sold for $1.9 million to a buyer who will demolish it. So the $1.9 million was for the land. I don’t know whether any developer of housing or anything else taxable would have paid nearly that much for the site, but the buyer was tax-exempt Illinois Masonic Medical Center. Their exempt status of course made the land more valuable to them. Which raises the interesting question of whether buying land in the path of such an institution’s expansion might be a profitable strategy. Of course, a fair-minded community might decide to tax land used for hospitals at the same rate as land used for housing and other useful things. But we’re not there yet.

“Taxes – De Standaard” by Stijn Felix is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Putting government pension costs into perspective

Wirepoints recently issued a helpful report showing state and local government pension debt per Chicago household. They estimate the burden at $144,000 per household. This is a big number, but one could suppose that a prosperous household, over decades, could bear such a burden. Some could, but probably not those below poverty level. Take them out of the picture and the per household amount rises to $172,000. Excluding households with incomes below $75,000, or below $200,000, and the per-household amount rises further, to $393,000 and $2,022,000 respectively.

Here’s their chart: pension debt chart

Of course this doesn’t consider land values, nor businesses. If prime Chicago land is worth $1,000/sq ft, that’s 5.38 sq miles. But more typical land value is much less, probably no more than $25/sq ft. (it seems that nobody has tried to estimate citywide values). That would be 112 square miles. Once we subtract land owned by governments, churches and other exempt nonprofits, we might be approaching the total value of all land in Chicago. And that’s just for pensions, not bonded debt, nor needed capital improvements. Real estate buyers know, or certainly should know, about these encumbrances.

Of course money can be raised from business taxes, but that’s hardly a way to grow economic opportunity for Chicagoans. I would consider any tax revenue from “gaming” as a kind of business tax.

The lesson Wirepoints draws from this is that pensions have to be downsized somehow, which required amending the state constitution. And they go further, comparing government salaries to those of the private sector:

some local gov't salaries compared to average workers

So it looks like we’re going to have to confront a large number of people with guns and firehoses and control over our children, who have been getting a lot of money from us for years and may prefer not to moderate their demands.

Tho I don’t know how, this problem will be solved. Maybe MMT will yield a continuing stream of funds to bail us out. Maybe inflation will accelerate such that the fixed 3% compounded pension increase isn’t a burden. Maybe Chicagoans will decide that they just don’t want so many government “services.” Maybe politicians will decide to remove all taxes from productive economic activity, taxing only the value of land and other privileges (such as the private monopoly over street parking fees), which will grow the economy (while reducing the need for emergency services) sufficient to make pensions a non-issue.

And when it is solved, those who own land and other privileges will benefit most.

Why trust corrupt governments to honestly administer a land value tax?

bar chart of what folks say they're afraid of — source: Chapman University Survey of American Fears

I don’t know that governments are always and inevitably corrupt, but there sure seems to be a lot of corruption going on. It isn’t a new development; maybe it’s worse nowadays or maybe just more visible.

So how can we single taxers say that we want the government to collect all, or nearly all, of the economic rent? Don’t we know that it will be stolen or, at best, wasted?

Not necessarily. Consider the following:

In the U S at least, real estate tax is administered and collected at the local — that is, substate– level. This is where the records and expertise needed to operate a land value tax exist.

Unlike income tax or sales tax, nearly all the data involved in real estate taxation is public information. Most of this data is accessible to everyone with internet access, generally without fee. I can see how much real estate tax my neighbor paid. I cannot see how much income tax they paid. The same goes for sales taxes and most other kinds of taxes. So cheating in real estate tax can be seen. That doesn’t mean it will always be impossible for people to cheat, but it provides a much greater possibility that cheating will be observed and rectified.

Government corruption seems to be a function of government size. A survey earlier this year found that “87% of voters nationwide believe corruption is widespread in the federal government. Solid majorities believe there is also corruption in state (70%) and local (57%) government.” Looked at the other way round, only 13% of us believe the federal government is possibly honest, compared to 30% for states and 43% for localities. I actually believe that one of the local governments to whom I pay taxes is pretty honest and efficient.

State and federal governments might logically collect some of the economic rent. Examples currently include severance taxes and could reasonably include rents for electromagnetic spectrum should our rulers become persuaded to levy and collect them. Existing federal agencies are able to review and evaluate collection efforts.

Notes on Cook County Assessments

Selection from Olcott’s Land Values Blue Book, 1936 edition, Numbers represent values per front foot, to be adjusted as described in the book.

Assessor Fritz Kaegi appears to seek assessments that are more consistent with applicable laws and ordinances, and easier for taxpayers to understand. This might be a good thing, tho one hopes that, once taxpayers understand how assessments are done, they’ll demand a more helpful system, one which doesn’t punish homeowners and businesses for building or improving.

Traditionally, Continue reading Notes on Cook County Assessments