On August 22 at 12:00 p.m. ET, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy will host a webinar with the US Department of the Treasury and other external partners to talk about the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds.
The State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) program, authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act, delivers $350 billion to state, territorial, local, and tribal governments across the country to support their response to and recovery from the COVID-19 public health emergency. Eligible uses include replacement of lost public sector revenue, infrastructure investments, and affordable housing programs. The Treasury is focused on ensuring that all funds are obligated by the December 31, 2024, deadline.
Investing in and expanding access to affordable homes is a key goal of the Treasury Department and the Biden-Harris Administration. Governments across the country are leveraging SLFRF award funds to preserve existing affordable housing and construct new projects. This webinar will be an opportunity to learn about how these resources can be used to achieve housing stability and affordability goals.
During this webinar, the US Department of the Treasury will provide an overview of the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. ROC USA and Next Step will share examples of how to use these funds for affordable housing programs. Finally, Guidehouse will provide additional educational information about the recovery funds and best practices.
More information about how the funds can be used for affordable housing programs can be found online.
Imagine having a giant dashboard that reveals buildings and open space and property ownership—all the critical components of the physical landscape, what’s happening literally on the ground, across cities and towns, rural areas, farmland, and forests.
That future has arrived, in the form of geospatial mapping, where technological advances have turbocharged the field. Analysts are using powerful computers, satellite imagery, and artificial intelligence to identify patterns and trends that inform land use policy decisions.
The technology allows local decision-makers to move more swiftly to develop effective policies and initiatives, according to Jeff Allenby, director of innovation at the Center for Geospatial Solutions, speaking on the Land Matters podcast.
Jeff Allenby. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.
“What excites me the most is how we have this power at our fingertips to really allow our partners to do more with the resources they have, the staff that they have, and the time that they have, and to get more to solving challenges versus just dealing with data management,” Allenby said.
The utility of the work was evident recently as the Biden administration sought to encourage cities and towns to build more housing. The White House cited findings revealed by the Center’s innovative Who Owns America® analysis that catalogued land owned by local, state, or federal government entities in the US—and further identified the parcels that were actually available to be developed, in already settled areas and near some form of transit. A typical parcel was an unused parking lot or decommissioned public works garage; wetlands, parks, and other essential uses were excluded.
Analysts concluded that close to 2 million homes could be sited on the identified publicly owned land (about 276,000 buildable acres), which is equivalent to estimates of the housing supply shortage that is helping keep prices so high. That number would jump to nearly 7 million if the parcels were developed with more density.
Similar property ownership mapping efforts by CGS identified the amount of buildable land owned by faith-based organizations in Massachusetts and Arizona, to test the viability of the so-called “Yes in God’s Backyard” movement, which encourages housing development on land owned by churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues.
“The power of the Who Owns America analysis is that you can begin to ground some of these abstract policy conversations in reality and move from saying, ‘We want to develop religious-owned properties for affordable housing,’ to tangible steps to make it happen,” Allenby said.
Property ownership by institutional investors has also been a subject of investigation, as CGS examines the trend of corporate entities buying up houses and charging often-exorbitant rents, in legacy cities and elsewhere. By analyzing information like owner addresses, the CGS team can show how, in some cases, institutional investors have snapped up most of the homes across several blocks.
The team can set criteria and filters to look at the potential of a range of other land use elements, such as underperforming strip malls or enclosed shopping malls, unused parking lots, or brownfields, Allenby said. CGS can also show how tweaking local zoning opens up land for different kinds of housing, including two- to four-unit multifamily townhouses, accessory dwelling units, or manufactured homes, which are an affordable alternative to standalone single-family homes.
For more on the Center for Geospatial Solutions, which was founded at the Lincoln Institute in 2020, visit www.cgsearth.org.
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.
Lead image: Mapping by the Center for Geospatial Solutions has identified government-owned land across the country that is suitable for potential development. Credit: Center for Geospatial Solutions.
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Eventos
State Housing Policy Workshop
Setembro 19, 2024 - Setembro 20, 2024
United States
Offered in inglês
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When housing production at the regional level does not meet demand, there can be serious consequences for a state’s economy. Rapid price escalation in metro areas across the country has raised political concerns about housing affordability and pushed states to reconsider their role in housing markets. State policymakers are contemplating ways to encourage local governments to increase supply.
This workshop brings together state housing officials to discuss implementation and compliance challenges and explore ways to effectively track and evaluate the outcomes of newly adopted state housing policies.
This annual report documents the wide range of property tax rates in more than 100 US cities and helps explain why they vary so widely.
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in collaboration with the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence, announced the release of its newest 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study for taxes paid in 2023.
The new report estimates the effect of assessment limits that cap annual growth in the assessed value of individual properties and shows how they create large disparities in effective tax rates for owners of similarly valued homes. These limits shift the tax burden away from long-time homeowners and toward owners who recently purchased homes.
The largest disparity evidenced in the report is in Miami, where someone who just purchased a median-valued home would pay nearly three times more than someone who purchased an identical home 12 years ago—the average length of ownership there—despite both homes having an identical value in 2023. The new homeowner would pay $9,205, compared to $3,104 for the long-time owner. In six other cities a newly purchased median-valued home would face an effective tax rate at least twice as high as the rate for an equivalently valued home owned for the average duration in the city. Thirty large cities in the report have assessment limits, and the policy shifts the tax burden to new homeowners in all of them.
“The tax disparities from assessment limits are increasingly a barrier to homeownership,” said Adam H. Langley, associate director of tax policy at the Lincoln Institute. “The added property tax burden placed on new homeowners comes on top of sharp increases in mortgage costs in recent years. Assessment limits also make existing owners less likely to move if it would mean giving up tax savings accrued under those limits, which further constrains the supply of entry-level homes available for purchase and drives up prices.”
In addition to highlighting disparities created by assessment limits, this report provides the most meaningful data available to compare cities’ property taxes by calculating the effective tax rate: the tax bill as a percentage of a property’s market value. Data are available for 74 large US cities and a rural municipality in each state, with information on four different property types (homestead, commercial, industrial, and apartment properties), and statistics on both net tax bills (i.e., $3,000) and effective tax rates (i.e., 1.5 percent).
The study found that the average effective tax rate on a median-valued homestead was 1.29 percent in 2023 for the largest city in each state, with Detroit, Newark, Bridgeport (CT), and Aurora* (IL) all having effective tax rates at least twice the average. Conversely, eight cities have tax rates that are half the study average or less, led by Honolulu, Charleston (SC), Boston, Salt Lake City, and Denver. The average effective tax rate for this group of large cities fell 2.5 percent between 2022 and 2023—from 1.32 percent to 1.29 percent—and nearly twice as many cities had decreases (33) than increases (17).
Highest and Lowest Effective Property Tax Rates on a Median–Valued Home (2023)
*Note: The rankings for both residential and commercial property include 53 cities—the largest city in each state plus Washington, DC, and the second-largest cities in Illinois and New York because property taxes in Chicago and New York City are structured differently than property tax systems in other parts of those states.
Commercial property tax rates on office buildings and similar properties also vary significantly across cities. The effective tax rate on a $1 million commercial property averaged 1.81 percent across the largest cities in each state. The highest rates are in Detroit and Chicago, where rates are more than twice the average for this group of cities. Rates are less than half that average in Cheyenne (WY), Charlotte, Seattle, Boise, and Wilmington (DE). The average commercial tax rate for the 53 cities fell 1.5 percent between 2022 and 2023, with declines in 30 cities.
Highest and Lowest Effective Property Tax Rates on $1 Million Commercial Property
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