In Penntown, a mostly Black neighborhood in North Philadelphia, newer million-dollars townhomes have raised the values of homes across the street, in some cases doubling their tax bills. — Tribune Photo/ Adbul R. Sulayman
Rosalee Cooper, president of the Ridge Allegheny Hunting Park Association, expects her property tax bill to double from last year because of the reassessment. — Tribune photos/Abdul R. Sulayman
Rosalee Cooper, president of Ridge Allegheny Hunting Park Association.— Tribune Photos/ Abdul R. Sulayman
Rosalee Cooper, president of the Ridge Allegheny Hunting Park Association, says many of her neighbors are worried and confused about the city’s reassessment of their homes. When she checked on the city’s website, the value of her home was $127,000, about double from last year, when it was $64,000.
“That means my tax bill will double,” Cooper said. “A lot of them are complaining that with the taxes going up that they are not going to have money to fix up their houses because they have to pay whatever the taxes come to be and we know that they are going up high. We have a lot of seniors on fixed incomes. They are barely making it. Some have to choose between their medicine and their taxes.”
According to Cooper, most of her neighbors have seen similar increases and some who can’t qualify for home equity loans are turning to reverse mortgages, which often result in a family losing the home if their heirs can’t pay the interest that accrues until the borrower dies or leaves the home. The community group has held a half-dozen meetings with city officials to discuss the reassessments.
They are not alone.
Earlier this month, Mayor Jim Kenney said the average residential property value in the city increased by 31%, in the first citywide reassessment in three years. The tax bills are due March 31, 2023.
According to a review by the office of City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, the largest percent increases are concentrated in neighborhoods in North Philadelphia, West Philadelphia and South Philadelphia.
Those communities have large concentrations of Black, brown and fixed-income residents.
In addition, the controller’s review noticed inconsistencies in valuations. For example, 4,200 properties, including 3,300 residential properties, had valuations of $0. The controller’s office put out an interactive map that details the increases in every section of the city.
“When we looked at property assessments in 2019, we found that our poorest neighborhoods had the worst assessments — our most vulnerable residents were paying more than their fair share of property taxes, compared to wealthier neighborhoods,” Rhynhart said. “At this point, the Office of Property Assessment has not released its methodology or data to show these earlier issues were addressed.”
According to Rhynhart, while it is possible that there are large increases in assessed values for tax year 2023, it is unlikely that the market changes over the last three years alone account for the doubling of assessed values in certain parts of the city.
“Couple that with the opaque process and inconsistencies in land valuation and one thing is clear: the reassessment process needs to be better,” Rhynhart said.
Kevin Lassard, a spokesperson for Kenney, said the city’s rapid growth has made reassessment difficult, but the city has programs designed to give residents relief.
“We recognize that accurately capturing the city’s extraordinary property value growth — which reflects well on Philadelphia being a place of choice — may at the same time present financial hardships for many Philadelphians, which is exactly why the administration has proposed relief measures that return to taxpayers every city general fund dollar the new assessments are projected to generate,” he said. “Those measures include increasing the homestead exemption by more than 40%, increasing the amount dedicated to LOOP by 20%, reducing the wage tax to its lowest rate in over 40 years, increasing outreach funding to sign people up for already extensive relief measures, and working to ensure that more seniors enroll in the senior tax freeze.”
Residents will receive notices from the city about the new valuations by Sept. 1. Appeals must be filed with the board of revision of taxes by Oct. 3.
More info is available at www.phila.gov/2022-05-03-property-reassessments-and-relief-programs-what-you-need-to-know/.
“Many of these homeowners — living in working and middle class neighborhoods — that are facing increased assessments have been the backbone of Philadelphia’s tax base for decades,” said Councilmember Cherrelle L. Parker. “What really angers me though is that these homeowners are likely being over-assessed by the public sector, while at the same time, they are being under-appraised by the private sector. This means they are being over-taxed while also facing stifled generational wealth accumulation. Working with my Council colleagues, I will do everything in my power to ensure that these increased assessments do not translate to increased taxes for working and middle class Philadelphians. Nothing is off the table — whether that means increasing and expanding programs such as LOOP (Long-Term Owned Occupant Program) and the Homestead Exemption, or lowering the tax rate.”
Several property owners said they had already seen higher tax bills in the past few years due to the explosive growth of development targeting residents with higher incomes, compared with the average neighborhood income.
For example, residents in the Yorktown section of North Philadelphia had already seen similar increases in the last few years because of investors buying up multiple properties and renting them out to multiple Temple University students, driving up values and taxes. Now their tax bills are doubling again.
Sandra Mills, a retired union organizer who lives in Southwest Philadelphia, said the unfairness of the latest assessment pointed out in the city controller’s map is atrocious.
“What I am hearing is about a bunch of programs that nobody is going to qualify for. Everything has an asterisk by it, or is based on income-eligible,” Mills said. “That assessment is totally unfair, it’s racially biased. We need a clean sweep movement in this town. It is a betrayal. The people we sent down there to represent us they haven’t done that.”
For a property owner in North and West Philadelphia, the reassessment has caused rent increases of 4%, instead of 2%, which is still barely keeping up with inflation and hurts the owner’s chances of keeping and attracting tenants.
In Penn Town, a neighborhood in North Philadelphia near Sixth and Popular streets, new million-dollar townhomes have driven up values and taxes for homes across the street in the past few years, said Jake Adams, who lives there and owns Barber’s Hall in North Philadelphia.
But it is a double-edged sword. Some in the neighborhood have sold homes for close to a million dollars, he said.
The average American considers property taxes as the “least fair,” according to a May 2022 report on property tax equity in the city by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, because lower value properties often have higher assessments and tax burdens, compared with higher value properties.
In addition, Pennsylvania, like many states, doesn’t require regular revaluation cycles — at least not short, regular cycles.
“During long intervals between assessments, property values in urban centers diverge widely,” the report stated. “Those in gentrifying neighborhoods and prime locations often appreciate quickly, whereas those in poor neighborhoods and less desirable locations rise very little, if at all. Recessions could also exacerbate the quality of overall property assessment when assessments do not keep up with sharper declines in property.”
The Fed advocates more frequent and regular reassessments.
One problem in Philadelphia is that much of the explosion in development is happening in low and moderate income areas that typically have large numbers of African Americans and other people of color.
“In Philadelphia, historical lags in property assessment had resulted in systematic inequities in the city’s property tax system,” the Fed report said. “Between the 1980s and 2013, Philadelphia did not conduct any comprehensive reassessment. As a result, the assessed value listed on most property tax bills was significantly lower than the true market value and properties with similar market values were often assessed and taxed with dramatically different values.”
The fund is taking applications for developing affordable housing in Philadelphia. — Tribune Photo/Abdul R. Sulayman
James Sanders, senior vice president for community lending at Univest Bank in Montgomery County.
— Submitted Photo
A new $10 million fund geared toward Black, brown and small developers seeking to build affordable housing is now taking applications, according to the fund’s chair.
Mo Rushdy, chair of the non-profit Philadelphia Accelerator Fund, said the idea for the fund came from City Council’s recognition a few years ago that there is a shortage of affordable housing in Philadelphia.
The city said it needed 30,000 affordable housing units built by 2028.
Currently, much of the affordable housing being built in the city is by developers whose mission is doing so, he said. The rest is being built by private developers who bid on city requests for proposals to build affordable housing.
“So essentially the private sector was never a serious part of building affordable housing in this city,” Rushdy said.
Typically, about 250 affordable homes a year are now being built in Philadelphia.
But Rushdy said it isn’t enough.
“So you need about 3,000 to 4,000 affordable homes a year in production to catch up to the need in Philadelphia. The city is sitting on a lot of vacant land,” Rushdy said.
“The idea came out of City Council, but the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund was formed independently,” said Rushdy, who is also managing partner of RiverWard Group and an advocate for affordable housing.
Under a city law enacted in October 2019, a developer who commits to building a project with at least 51% affordable housing can get a city-owned parcel of land for a $1.
“It creates a vehicle where it opens up the door where the private sector can go in with its muscle and its financing and build hundreds, if not thousands of affordable homes,” Rushdy said. “So when it was passed it created a whole affordable housing blueprint.”
Now the door for the private sector is open.
“But that sidelines the Black and brown and small developers that don’t have the access to capital that a lot of other developers have,” Rushdy said.
So the Philadelphia Accelerator Fund is designed to help small developers, primary Black and brown, to finance the predevelopment and land acquisition costs, although it does not replace a construction loan. The fund will make introductions for clients to banks that finance affordable housing and help to navigate the process.
The fund is financed by $10 million from the city to cover any loan losses. And Citizens Bank and Univest Bank have each contributed $5 million.
Other partners of the fund are Mission Driven Finance, Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., High Impact Financial Analysis and Octo Design Group.
“Citizens makes a range of investments in communities across its footprint,” said Frank Quaratiello, a Citizens Bank spokesman. “The bank is committed to creating a diverse and equitable world and that is important to what we do. We see this and other investments as furthering that goal.”
James Sanders is senior vice president of commercial lending at Univest Bank, a full service community bank based in Montgomery County with offices in South Philadelphia and Mount Airy.
“We saw it as an opportunity to invest in an organization that is doing something exciting and extraordinary for small and diverse businesses in the city of Philadelphia, which is part of our service area, and we are excited about that, ” Sanders said.
Sanders said the bank might consider investing more money if the loans are good and are repaid with minimal defaults.
The loans are open to historically disadvantaged groups, with a focus on Black and brown developers, along with non-profit and small developers. Approval is based more on experience, technical knowledge and project viability than on the credit score of the developer.
For more information and to apply, go to the website www.phlfund.com.
The Philadelphia Accelerator Fund has a goal to raise about $30 million to $35 million by the end of 2022, $60 million by the end of 2023 and $100 million by the end of 2024.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York speaks on the Senate floor Wednesday.
— PHOTOS: Senate Television via AP
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaks on the Senate floor Wednesday.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., at a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing May 10 on Capitol Hill in Washington. — Elizabeth Frantz/Pool via AP
WASHINGTON — Democrats’ first attempt at responding to the back-to-back mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, failed in the Senate Thursday as Republicans blocked a domestic terrorism bill that would have opened debate on difficult questions surrounding hate crimes and gun safety.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tried to nudge Republicans into taking up a domestic terrorism bill that had cleared the House quickly last week after mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and a church in Southern California targeting people of color. He said it could become the basis for negotiation.
But the vote failed along party lines, raising fresh doubts about the possibility of robust debate, let alone eventual compromise, on gun safety measures. The final vote was 47-47, short of the 60 needed to take up the bill. All Republicans voted against it.
“None of us are under any illusions this will be easy,” Schumer said ahead of the vote.
Rejection of the bill brought into sharp relief the prevalence of mass shootings in the United States, with the Senate in the unusual position of struggling to keep up with the violence — voting on legislation responding to shootings in Buffalo and California that have been overshadowed by yet another massacre, this time at a Texas elementary school that killed 19 children and two teachers.
Schumer said he will give bipartisan negotiations in the Senate about two weeks, while Congress is away for a break, to try to forge a compromise bill that could pass the 50-50 Senate, where 60 votes will be needed to overcome a filibuster.
A small, bipartisan group of senators who have for years sought to negotiate legislation on guns met Thursday following the vote and emerged with areas “of potential agreement.” Those appeared to include providing grants to states to implement red flag laws — designed to keep firearms from people who could harm themselves or others — and updating an effort to expand background checks for commercial gun sales, including at gun shows and on the internet.
“We’ve got about 10 members, equal numbers on both sides,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who is leading the negotiations. “We have a good list of things to work on.” He added that the group plans to follow up with a phone call next week.
Murphy has been working to push gun legislation since the 2012 attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators.
Another member of the group, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told reporters early Thursday that a bill he has been working on for the past decade to expand background checks for firearm sales still does not have enough support to advance in the Senate. “I couldn’t count 60 at this point,” he said, “but I hope we’ll get there.”
But none of the lawmakers could say definitively if any of the efforts will have the 10 Republican senators it needs to pass.
In one sign of GOP resistance to shifting the gun policy debate, several GOP senators came to the floor Thursday to discus other topics — immigration, border security and, in the case of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the nation’s struggle with inflation.
The domestic terrorism bill that failed Thursday dates back to 2017, when Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., first proposed it after mass shootings in Las Vegas and Southerland Springs, Texas.
The House passed a similar measure by a voice vote in 2020, only to have it languish in the Senate. Since then, Republicans have turned against the legislation, with only one GOP lawmaker supporting passage in the House last week.
“What had broad bipartisan support two years ago, because of the political climate we find ourselves in ... or to be more specific, the political climate Republicans find themselves in, we’re not able to stand up against domestic terrorism,” Schneider, who came into office in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, told The Associated Press.
Republicans say the bill doesn’t place enough emphasis on combating domestic terrorism committed by groups on the far left. Under the bill, agencies would be required to produce a joint report every six months that assesses and quantifies domestic terrorism threats nationally, including threats posed by white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups.
Proponents say the bill will fill the gaps in intelligence-sharing among the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI so that officials can better track and respond to the growing threat of white extremist terrorism.
These efforts would focus on the spread of racist ideology online like replacement theory, which investigators say motivated an 18-year-old white gunman to drive three hours to carry out a racist, livestreamed shooting rampage two weeks ago in a crowded supermarket in Buffalo. Or the animus against Taiwanese parishioners at a church in Laguna Woods, California, that led to the shooting death the following day of one man and the wounding of five others.
While Schneider acknowledged that his legislation may not have stopped those attacks, he said it would ensure that those federal agencies work together to better identify, predict and stop threats.
Under current law, the three federal agencies already work to investigate, prevent and prosecute acts of domestic terrorism. But the bill would require each agency to open offices specifically dedicated to those tasks and create an interagency task force to combat the infiltration of white supremacy in the military.
GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky slammed that aspect of the bill, calling it an “insult to every police officer in this country,” and an “insult to everyone in our armed services.”
The proposal would stop short of creating new federal statutes needed to prosecute domestic terrorism in the same way the U.S. prosecutes attacks inspired by foreign groups. It would not create new criminal offenses or new lists of designated domestic terrorist groups. And it would also not give law enforcement additional investigative powers.
But supporters say it would be important toward helping the government broadly assess, for the first time, the volume of domestic terrorist attacks and threats in the U.S.
“This alone is not going to do much to actually directly combat the threat of domestic terrorism but to me, this is like step one,” said Mary McCord, who served as a senior Justice Department national security official in the Obama administration and into the early Trump era.
“I believe that addressing cycles of harm starts with healing those who have been hurt,” Councilmember Kendra Brooks said. “And in places like North Philadelphia, entire ZIP codes are traumatized by the constant presence of gun violence.”— SUBMITTED PHOTO
At-large Councilmember Helen Gym issued a subpoena to Philadelphia Parking Authority for financial records.
At-large Councilmember Kendra Brooks used her platform during Thursday’s City Council meeting to speak out against the gun violence tragedies in both Philadelphia and nationwide.
In Philadelphia alone, there were six shootings last weekend, a three-victim shooting earlier this week near two schools, and at least four fatalities on Wednesday, bringing the city’s homicide total to 193 in 2022.
This week, there was a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 people, including 17 children, and a race-related mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, less than two weeks ago that claimed 10 lives.
Brooks pointed at the Republican Party, which she referred to as “poisonous” for the resistance to enacting common-sense gun laws.
At-large Councilmember Derek Green said the carnage Americans see nationwide and that Philadelphians see “are directly related to the inaction of one legislative and one political party.”
Green added that you couldn’t be pro-life and not stop the constant lives lost.
“As our country processes both rage and grief, we must recognize that unspeakable acts of violence against children are the responsibility of adults,” Brooks said.
Brooks will host a Restore Our City event on June 4, with a march and a community conversation.
Gun violence survivors, elected officials and community leaders will assemble from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. to try to heal the trauma associated with gun violence.
The rally will begin at the Temple ER and end at the Broad/Germantown/Erie Triangle.
“I believe that addressing cycles of harm starts with healing those who have been hurt,” Brooks said. “And in places like North Philadelphia, entire ZIP codes are traumatized by the constant presence of gun violence. And as my colleague Councilmember (Curtis) Jones’ 100 shooter report shows, over half of the shootings in our city stem from arguments, and many shooters have been victims of crimes themselves. I hope this event can repair damaged community relationships, bring resources to those in need, and empower all residents who lead the charge for community safety.”
In other council news:
Unclaimed property
At-large Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson’s bill to account for the city’s unclaimed property unanimously passed on Thursday.
Last week the Philadelphia Tribune reported that the bill would account for over $6 million in unclaimed property.
The bill requires the director of finance to submit an annual report to the City Controller and City Council of all unclaimed property owed to the city, a status update regarding claims in process, and the total amount of revenue returned to the City of Philadelphia.
“Now more than ever, it is important to ensure our residents get what they are entitled to financially,” a spokesperson for the controller said. “The Office of the City Controller is happy to assist in this effort and help hold our partners in state and local government accountable.”
Gilmore Richardson said at least $6 million in unclaimed property is due back to the city for the period from 1999 to 2020.
“All of those funds will be returned to our general fund as a result of this legislation and the work of the City Treasurer’s office,” Gilmore Richardson said at the meeting Thursday. “I do not want to go another 21 years, leaving any additional city money on the table. And with this bill, there will be a required reporting process to ensure that the city is always claiming what is rightfully ours.”
City Treasurer Jacqueline Dunn said at a Finance Committee hearing that she supported the bill.
“We support this bill as it will institutionalize the process to ensure the city timely reviews and claims any funds held by the state unclaimed fund each year,” Dunn said.
Parking authority records
At-large Councilmember Helen Gym issued a subpoena to the Philadelphia Parking Authority for financial records.
Earlier this month, the City of Philadelphia and PPA jointly came to a resolution over the repayment of $10.8 million in funding the parking authority wanted back from the Philadelphia School District.
At the time of the resolution, PPA Chairwoman Beth Grossman said, “this is a legal and responsible resolution for all parties that benefits the school children of Philadelphia. The PPA will continue to work with the City and School District whenever possible to enhance revenues and improve customer service to the multitudes of people who live, work, visit and park in Philadelphia.”
Gym announced a formal investigation of the PPA in February. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, June 22, at 10 a.m.
“The issues at the Parking Authority are far bigger than their latest multi-million dollar fiasco with the District,” Gym said. “Tuesday’s subpoena seeks to answer longstanding questions and concerns into the PPA’s finances. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, there is no room for error.”
FILE - Connecticut Sun guard Yvonne Anderson, left, drives against New York Liberty forward Natasha Howard, right, in the second half during a WNBA basketball game, Tuesday, May 17, 2022, in New York. Yvonne Anderson understood that making a WNBA roster as an undrafted rookie was going to be tough and getting that chance a decade after she left college would be even tougher. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
