Philly Property Price Maps - Updated and New Ones!

I updated my Philly house price map with November 2017 Office of Property Assessment data.

I also created several new maps.

Change in Assessed Value from April 2014 to November 2017

Philly land value by square foot

Philly land value as a percent of total assessed

A major question for Philadelphia is who is going to pay the taxes to fund our schools? The city has taken over the school board, but now it faces the question of how it will pay for the upcoming budget shortfalls. Ideally we'd create progressive taxes, but our ability to do this is limited by the lack of political will (the Democrats are generally in the pockets of the corporations and upper-middle class) and the state's Uniformity Clause which makes it a violation of the state constitution to directly impose progressive taxes on things like income or property. However there are some workarounds. If we get approval from the state legislature, the city can have tax exemptions (like the current homestead property tax exemption of $30,000). Or we can target the tax at people who can afford it.

So a huge question is whether Philly should switch our property tax system to tax land at a higher rate than buildings/improvements. I made two land value maps to show some of the impact of an increased land tax. In general a land tax would target large corporations and above-average income households. However it also has a side effect of hurting households on the edge of gentrifying areas (and also community gardens and other green spaces). For instance in my neighborhood (West Philly) the area below Kingsessing has land value being a large percent of the total assessed value. This area is being gentrified with massive renovations and some new construction. Increasing the land tax, will push people out.

If you want my data - notably featuring merged property polygons - email me. About 270 mb. Available in CSV or postgresql.

All of the map layers were created using TileMill (and Google Maps API and PHP).