Reassessment Tips & Tricks

So, now that you have your new assessment in hand, there are several things that you can do to help lower you property tax liability for 2012.  No, I'm not talking about appealing your assessment or making sure that you're signed up for all the appropriate tax exemptions and abatements that the City and County have to offer.  I'm talking about real, tangible ways to lower your taxes. For example:

(1) Burn down your house.  Because of the way that the City, County & School District structure their taxes, the value of your property is greatly influenced by the value of any structure that sits there upon.  So, if you have a building worth $80,000 and land worth $20,000, the combined value of the property is $100,000 and your taxes are $2,941.  Now, let's say that somehow you don't have a building anymore.  Well, then your taxes would rest solely on the value of the land ($20,000) and be only $588.20.  The savings of $2,352.80 are well worth the initial investment of a few gallons of gasoline and a packet of matches.  (Note: Most insurance agencies, fire departments, and neighbors generally frown upon arson so do your homework first.)

(2) Vandalism.  If arson doesn't sit well with your insurance company, vandalism is also a good way to help drive down your property value.  While you'll never be able to zero out the value of your structure, allowing a few windows to go broken, a porch to sag, or trash to be strewn upon your front lawn will be more than enough to reduce its value to a negligible level.  If you're lucky, you can get the neighborhood children to help you by throwing rocks at your house or spray painting graffiti on your front door.  Moreover, by decreasing the value of your property, you help to decrease the value of your neighbors' properties, allowing them to decrease their tax liability as well. 

(3) Become a violent crime king pin.  Any realtor will tell you that the three secrets to real estate are location, location, location, but those three secrets also play a part in your property assessments.  Highly valued locations are, unsurprisingly, generators of higher tax revenues; lower valued locations are the reverse.  So, if you want to lower your assessment, try making your surrounding neighborhood, what the Realtor's Association technically calls, a "shit hole."  The easiest way to do this is to become a violent crime king pin, committing all types of violent and property crimes in your area from murder to loitering and everything in between.  This will drive down the livability of your neighborhood thereby lowering the value of your location, which in turn will lower the amount of taxes you must pay. 

(4) Leave your Christmas lights up year round.  This is similar to point #3, only much more drastic and egregious.  No one really wants to live next to "those" neighbors.

(5) Hire disreputable contractors.  According to City code, when you do any improvements to a property you're supposed to let the Bureau of Building Inspection know what you're planning so that they can issue the appropriate permits.  As a side effect, these permits also flag the County Assessor's office so they know that you're making repairs or improvements to your little hovel.  As soon as they see that your contractor is done making improvements to your house, an assessor goes out and *BAM* hits you with a reassessment.  But, let's assume that you use a contractor that's less than reputable... say one that doesn't have -- let's say -- "time" for all that -- let's say -- "paperwork".  Now, what the County assessor's office doesn't know, isn't going to hurt you.  Sure, you may have a botched wiring job from an uncertified electrician or your new toilet may now be leaking on your media room, but the point is that you'll be screwing over the City, County, and School District for literally hundreds of dollars. 

(6) Become a multinational corporation.  Since the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, becoming a multinational conglomerate has become easier and easier.  A clever homeowner will be able to use his new found status and capital to twist some arms down on Grant Street and procure political favors, tax incentives, and other favorable conditions to help you eliminate your tax liability entirely.  Now, as a job creator bringing untold (read: "unsubstantiated") investment to the region, you will be hailed as a captain of industry and a keystone of Pittsburgh's economic success. 

(7) Organize as a tax exempt non-profit.  This is only slightly less evil than point #6, unless your organization's stated goal is to kick puppies or provide health care. 

(8) Become a municipality.  Similar to #6 & #7, when you consider all the cities, boroughs, towns, Authorities, School Districts, and other government related organizations, there are currently something like 84 billion "municipal entities" in Allegheny County alone, each with swaths of tax exempt properties on the rolls.  People aren't going to notice if there are a couple more.  You just need a friend or two at the State Legislature (I'd recommend an Orie) to write some enabling legislation for you and you're all set to form your own little town.  This exact strategy worked very well for Pennsbury Village.   

(9) Convert to "virtual" properties.  I'm not all that familiar with Facespace, Mybook, Friendster or any of those social media, interactive thingamadoodles, but I understand that there are places you can go where you can "farm" "land" and "raise" "crops" and do a bunch of "things" that you would do with ordinary real property.  This virtual world is unreachable by the Allegheny County Real Estate Department and Department of Property Assessment, so, if you have the opportunity, sell everything, convert yourself into tiny pixels and live on a virtual farm... until the man from the virtual bank forecloses on you and you have to move out to California with the iJoads. 

(10) Buy a houseboat/RV.  The tax man can't tax what they can't chase down. 

So, there's some suggestions.  I'm sure the less ambitious among you will just hitch up your pants and pay the extra tax, but then you're probably the stupid ones. 

Assessing Re-assessments

If you're like me, you're 5' 11", named "Steve", live in the city and received a notice of Property Reassessment from Allegheny County as a belated Christmas present this week.  (Frankly, I would have much rather received the three French Hens or the eight maids a-milking, but the County's on a shoe string budget, so I won't begrudge them for that.)  If you're even more like me, you opened up your assessment and noticed two things: (1) that you now the proud owner of the Taj Mahal (or at least close enough for tax assessment purposes) and (2) the County is in absolutely no way responsible for this *COURT MANDATED* reassessment. 

Indeed, if you don't have him on your junk mail list already, you probably also recently got a letter from Hizzoner Luke Ravenstahl informing you that he had nothing to do with the reassessments, so don't blame him when your taxes go up and he is forced by the Courts to roll around naked in the resultant piles of windfall cash.  I'm sure that Luke is just sobbing himself to sleep every night with the thought that his short term budget problems are temporarily relieved. 

Even more not to blame are the folks like Dan Onorato who fought so hard to keep assessments from incrementally ticking up so that one day in the future when he was out of office, the whole damned thing would blow up in everyone elses' faces.  (Note to Highmark: make sure that any golden parachutes handed to Danny Boy are long term pay outs.)  But you know, hey: at least they can say that they never raised property taxes. 

Even even more not to blame are all the people that paid $X for houses who are now shocked and appalled that the County believes that their homes are actually valued at $X like their deed transfer tax said they were.  Where does the county get the nerve to trust that the amount that a buyer is freely willing to pay for a good is actually indicative of its value?  Are we in some sort of Communist dictatorship where market value is determined by some all controlling "invisible hand"? 

The message here is clear: please ignore all economic and political realities and just be outraged. 

Schoolhouse Rocks

From the P-G-est P-G that ever P-G'd:

The Pittsburgh Public Schools board has approved changes aimed at making the district more financially sustainable, including closing seven schools, opening a new elementary school, eliminating single-gender classes at Pittsburgh Westinghouse 6-12, selling two school buildings and changing some school feeder patterns.

The school assignment changes approved Tuesday night are for the next school year.

Ultimately, the changes are part of a plan that calls for eliminating about 400 school-based and central office positions to stem the district's growing operating deficit...

The two schools which the board agreed to sell are Pittsburgh Reizenstein in Shadyside to Walnut Capital and RCG Longview for $5.4 million, and the Ridge Avenue building on the North Side to the Light of Life Ministries for $1.1 million.

The Reizenstein developers plan to demolish the building and replace it with a $119 million development that includes housing as well as office and retail space.

The board rejected bids on Schenley in Oakland, Belmar in Homewood, Madison in the Hill District, Mann on the North Side and Morningside.

The new K-8 school approved Wednesday will be in the building now housing Pittsburgh Langley High School in Sheraden, which will close at the end of this school year. Langley High students will be reassigned to Pittsburgh Brashear in Beechview...

In addition to Langley High School, schools that will close at the end of June are:

• Pittsburgh Oliver High School on the North Side, with students assigned to nearby Pittsburgh Perry, which will continue its magnet program open to students throughout the city. Some students will travel to the Oliver building for career and technology programs as well as for JROTC.

• Fort Pitt PreK-5 in Garfield, with students assigned to Pittsburgh Arsenal PreK-5 in Lawrenceville, Woolslair K-5 in Lawrenceville and Fulton PreK-5 in Highland Park.

• Pittsburgh Schaeffer K-8 in Crafton Heights, with students assigned to the new K-8 school in the Langley building. Both the Schaeffer and Sheraden buildings that housed Schaeffer K-8 will close.

• Pittsburgh Stevens K-8 in Elliott, with students assigned to the new K-8 in Langley, Westwood K-5 and South Hills 6-8 in Beechview...

So, if you're counting: that's one high school left on the Northside, none left in the Western neighborhoods, and the elimination of 3 grade schools in the West (taking the number down to 3, I believe).

Now, I don't begrudge the BoE for reducing school space; a declining population necessitates fewer capital resources (i.e., you don't need as many school buildings). Further, I don't necessarily want to get into the discussion of whether neighborhood schools are the model that Pittsburgh should be trying to use; I'd say that there are benefits to that and benefits to larger feeder patterns.

What I'm concerned about, however, is the larger amount of real estate that that's under the control of the BoE that now going to be vacant. These are now, like Schenley H.S. before them, going to be large, vacant, money sucking holes in the Schools District's budget; while there may not be students in there, you still have to light them, heat them, secure them, and make sure, in general, they don't fall down.

I guess my complaint here is that the BoE is making its decisions in a vacuum: the closing of these schools will have a long term effect on the economic conditions of several of these neighborhoods. Without a plan to figure out the next highest and best use for these properties, they will continue to sit as vacant, non-tax revenue generating properties. Now, you would hope that they would enter into this with some sort of end game that both divests themselves of these loser properties and helps out their colleagues in the City Government to generate some economic development.

But this is the School District; anything other than education is furthest from their minds.

Well, education is definitely in the top ten, anyway.

Anyway, my point is that as one of the major landowners of non-taxable properties in the City of Pittsburgh, I can only hope that the BoE has some sort of plan as to how they're going to deal with these properties.

My guess is that they don't and our School District taxes are going to go towards unnecessary expenses.

More Proof the Real Estate Market is F@(&ed Up

Just when I thought I wasn't going to have anything to write about tonight that didn't have to do with "improprieties" at Penn State* there's this:

The city Urban Redevelopment Authority board will vote Thursday on a recommendation to enter into exclusive negotiations with PMC Property Group for the acquisition and redevelopment of the John P. Robin Civic Building at 200 Ross St.

PMC is proposing to convert the building, which houses City of Pittsburgh, URA, and city housing authority offices, into 100 residential units plus possible first-floor commercial space. It is offering $1 million for the building.

I've been in that building once or twice in my local government career and I can say without fear of contradiction that it is the third or fourth worst government building in the City. I can only assume that PMC is shorting asbestos in an attempt to corner the Mesothelioma market.

---
*There was no way I was going to be able to make that funny.