David Blake ought to get a medal just for managing to own a building and run his pharmacy in crime-infested East Harlem for 21 years. Instead, his only reward from the city was a 28 percent increase in property taxes this year, after they tripled in the past five years. And the assessors never even noticed two of his building's four stories were torn down in 1982. Blake's is just one of the many tales of woe and waste New York Newsday found in its computer-assisted investigation of commercial and apartment assessments over the past six months.
The tapes were no piece of cake. Each property had as many as 394 fields of data. We had to break them into smaller tables. The nice part was that the tapes contained much more than assessed values. For the Tax Commission story, I used a field identifying the attorney for the case. It was easy to group and sum by these to find the attorneys who did the most business. The project was done on a NEC 386, 25 mhz computer with XDB software.
Providing invaluable assistance was Tom Braden, a University of Missouri Journalism School graduate student who worked with us as an intern. As the city struggled with perhaps its worst budget crisis, we decided to examine assessments and taxes on commercial and apartment properties since they provide 83 percent of the city's $7.6 billion in property taxes. From the start, I wanted to use computer tapes to look at assessments in ways that hadn't been tried much before.
Several excellent computer-assisted stories have looked at how close assessments on houses are to their sales prices. Instead, we looked at where the tax hikes would fall, how assessments and thus taxes were reduced and were all exemption warranted. We found: In a year of record tax increases, the poor will bear the brunt. Assessments and thus taxes will increase more in many of the city's poorer areas than in the wealthy ones.
The Tax Commission, the tiny politicized agency, that reduces taxes up to $260 million a year, robbed the city of at least $50 million in the past decade through unwarranted cuts. The city lost at least $8 million in tax revenues on buildings owned by one of the city's largest property owners because of a law giving them a specially tailored exemption. The landlord, Alex DiLorenzo, also owns the building where 87 people died in the tra, social club fire last year.
The tapes also contain exempt codes for properties, designating them non-profit or one of a multitude of other ways of escaping taxes. By just paging down the properties with one non-profit code, Braden saw DiLorenzo had lots of exemptions and wondered how he could qualify. Since New York City has what may be the most complicated assessment formulas anywhere, I had to do many calculations. I was pleased with XDB's handling of complicated formulas.
But it won't easily calculate the median, the statistical standard for comparing assessments in various areas. For the Tax Commission story I faced the additional challenge of finding computerized information on property incomes. Commercial assessments are generally based on how much a building makes. I planned to use the assessors' formula to find when the Tax Commission cut too much. The information wasn't on the tapes and not, at first, readily available.
But I found a consulting firm had gotten it from the city. With some insistence, I too had it in a few days. These kinds of stories can be tried in other cities, depending on what data is computerized. Any suggestions? Call me at (718) 575-2571.