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Re: New Tax Rate is Insane!
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Home away from home
 
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Well now that it's fair, they want to change how it's done. They say the old tropes of "we all use the same amount of services so why should our taxes be different". There's a DT attorney on Nextdoor insisting it should be done by income, can you imagine the shitshow that would be? And many of the same complainers would still be complaining.
Posted on: 2018/3/6 18:15
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Yes, except the reval is actually the epitome of fairness. They're upset that everything is fair now lol. [/quot It's fair until values fall. Jeez. How hard is that to grasp?
Posted on: 2018/3/6 18:06
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Tbird, you missed where I asked 'can we assume?' It wasn't a far out question, given the way so many public contracts end up with politically connected firms in NJ.
Posted on: 2018/3/6 16:23
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Holy crap, that is eerie! Down to the same repetitive nonsense from Yvonne! If you took away the dates and updated the numbers, it's a carbon copy of today. And funny how the city didn't learn to do them regularly, even back then.
Posted on: 2018/3/6 16:02
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Just can't stay away
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I have a lot to say about all this but I'm waiting for the final numbers to come in.
However, I found this NYT article from 1989 in the course of my research and thought I'd share. I hope you are as amused by it's familiar themes and names as I was. Jersey City's Revaluation Raising Anger and Despair By JOSEPH F. SULLIVAN Published: May 3, 1989 Few communities approaching a property-tax revaluation have faced a more daunting task than this city across the Hudson River from Manhattan. And few have seen the job, once done, create so much anger, despair and bitterness. Much had changed since 1972, when property was last appraised in this city of 218,500. Some neighborhoods had come back to life; others had decayed. Parts of the industrial waterfront had remained decrepit; others had become crowded with offices and apartments. When the appraisers were done, the value of all real property in Jersey City - homes, businesses, factories and vacant lots - had soared to $5.6 billion from $800 million 17 years before. But the resulting tax assessments varied widely. Real-estate speculation had artificially forced up values and taxes for recovering neighborhoods in the city's center, while on the waterfront, abatements granted to developers held down taxes on luxury condominiums. Some people found their taxes reduced; others complained they were being forced out of their homes. A Challenge From Taxpayers The result, when Mayor Anthony R. Cucci accepted the revaluation last year, was a coalition of taxpayers taking the city's officials into Tax Court. The coalition, the Jersey City Coalition for Fair Taxation, has collected more than $100,000 to argue that the revaluation was badly flawed. Its evidence, said a co-chairman, John Mercer, includes affidavits from more than 850 people whose homes were listed as having been inspected by appraisers, but who say no appraiser visited. Others claim that inspections amounted to someone appearing at their doors and asking how many bathrooms they had. ''Brick homes were listed as wood frame, homes without garages were described as having them, others with 100-year-old plumbing and plaster falling from the walls were assessed the same as those recently renovated,'' Mr. Mercer said. The appraiser hired by the city, Real Property Appraisers, a division of Cole-Layer Trumble of Dayton, Ohio, one of the largest mass appraisal companies in the country, has acknowledged that workers inspected fewer than half the city's 27,000 homes. Harder to Find Someone Home Bruce F. Nagel, senior vice president of marketing and systems, said workers had made repeated visits to homes. But, he said, ''it's becoming increasingly difficult, in an age of working couples, to find someone at home.'' The anger generated by the tax shift has created a complicated issue for candidates for mayor and council in the May 9 election. While downtown residents and some on the West Side and in the Heights section north of Journal Square have received sharp tax increases, a larger number elsewhere have seen their taxes drop. City officials said that an influx of newcomers, particularly in the brownstone neighborhoods around Van Vorst and Hamilton Parks downtown, drove up housing prices in some areas and thus assessments. ''I can empathize with anyone who experiences such a dramatic tax increase, but not necessarily sympathize,'' said Jerry Lazarus, the deputy mayor. ''It's simply justice. Many of these properties were underassessed for years.'' But those who have seen their annual tax bills grow to $9,000 and $11,000 from $2,000 and $3,000 scoff at the idea that all properties were assessed at true market value, as required by law. ''Some officials have said they want to make the 'yuppies' pay,'' said Mia Scanga, an executive recruiter in Manhattan who bought her downtown row house on Mercer Street in 1983. ''They expected us to just open our checkbooks, but they didn't expect us to fight. Old-Timers 'Getting Slaughtered' ''They try to picture it as the new residents against the old-timers, but that's hogwash,'' she said. ''The old-timers are getting slaughtered.'' Stanley Miga, a 79-year-old retiree who lives on Montgomery Street across from Van Vorst Park, saw his taxes grow to $9,000 from $2,500. He said he doesn't know whether he will be able to stay in the four-story brownstone he has owned for 36 years. ''It's a day-to-day situation,'' he said. Father Damian Halligan, pastor of St. Peter's Church on Grand Street, four blocks from the river, said the area's many elderly residents were bewildered and dismayed by the sudden jump in taxes. ''They are afraid.'' he said. ''Most didn't even appeal their assessments and they just don't know what to do. They find it hard to change and to consider suggestions that they take in a tenant to help pay the increase.'' Yvonne Balcer, who saw the taxes on her York Street home rise to $11,000 from $3,180, received a tax bill in July at the start of the 1988 tax year for almost $16,000, retroactive to January when the new values took effect. Big Difference in Greenville ''That's more than I make as a kindergarten teacher,'' said Mrs. Balcer. Including the rent from two apartments in their building, she and her husband, Charles, the city's historic preservation officer, have a total income of $63,000. While Mrs. Balcer was wrestling with her tax bill, however, she learned that her mother's home in the Greenville neighborhood, a stable area of one-family houses that has not seen a lot of newcomers, was assessed at $25,900, even though nearby properties are selling for $100,000. Her mother's taxes dropped to $700 from $2,000. Middle class residents also say they are subsidizing those who are moving into riverfront property that has received tax abatements. To attract development, the city has reassessed the value of waterfront land but abated taxes on buildings and improvements for up to 40 years. Ms. Scanga said that taxes on a $250,000 apartment at the Newport development, for example, are fixed at $3,300, while taxes on a home assessed at the same level elsewhere are $7,500 and subject to annual increases. The city collects payments in lieu of taxes from the developers. Without that $9 million, city officials say, the city tax rate would be $2 to $5 higher than the current $30.52 per $1,000 of assessed valuation. The city's total budget, including school and county payments, is about $425 million, with about $173 million raised from property taxes. Homeowners, Landowners Hurt A survey by the coalition found that the revaluation raised the value of vacant land, by 11 times; residential property by 6 times; commercial property by 5.5 times; industrial property by about 4.5 times, and apartments by 4.8 times. The analysis shows commercial, industrial and apartment owners getting a tax break at the expense of homeowners and owners of vacant land. Officials of the city and the appraisal company said the business community is paying virtually the same percentage of city taxes after the revaluation as before. Relations between the city and Real Property Appraisers soured last year and the city is holding onto about $400,000 the company says it is still owed. The matter could end up in court. The coalition and Peter A. Casamasino, the city tax assessor, say that the revaluation resulted in assessments that were about 70 percent of true value instead of 100 percent. Mr. Casamasino said that 2,000 properties were still being reinspected and that the effort was reducing the gap between assessments and true market value. Mr. Nagel of Real Property Appraisers said the company was hired to provide true value figures as of Oct. 1, 1986 and had done so. The city amended the 1986 figures to serve as 1987 figures for the purpose of sending out the 1988 tax bills by studying a number of new property sales between January and June 1987, he said, and this created the gap between the assessments and true market value.
Posted on: 2018/3/6 15:46
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Home away from home
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No relation. But facts never get in the way when MonHannity gets going. His little nicknames are so cute - my daughter used to do that when she was seven.
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Posted on: 2018/3/6 15:34
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We should not. Apparently it's a man by the name of Edward J Florio. http://www.fkrlaw.com/edward-j-florio/ I don't know who the guy is, or if he's related to any other Florios in NJ, but he has no apparent connection to Canal Crossing. From what I can tell, he's just an attorney.
Posted on: 2018/3/6 15:24
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Not too shy to talk
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2015/8/13 12:28 Last Login : 2020/11/13 15:27 From Jersey City, NJ
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ASI hasn?t updated the Excel sheet in 11 days. When can we expect the rest of downtown to fill in, and has anyone received assessment letters before their property has appeared on the spreadsheet?
Posted on: 2018/3/6 12:07
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Florio, Kenney and Raval-can we assume 'Florio' is Jim 'fillm flam' Florio, who is also a partner behind the group developing Canal Crossing in Greenville/BeLa?
Posted on: 2018/3/5 15:55
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Newbie
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Sorry for the late response, I was on vacation last week. Nowhere in my post did i label it a white attack on anything. Did not even use the word white. My first sentence labeled gentrification as I intended: by class. I highlighted race to point out that many POOR poc were some of the first victims, but as I said in the same sentence, poor is poor and knows no racial boundaries. You attributed a lot more of your own thinking to my post than was necessary. I do take issue with your last statement. Those were not "obvious facts" about anything. First, nowhere did I make any claim about a monolith of new white people. Not even something close to that claim. Again, adding your own words and calling them mine. And it has always seemed to me and people i talk to that the majority of new people have been White and Chinese, with a smaller subset being Indian. Black and Hispanics have not made up a large subset of newcomers. I really don't know how you came to that conclusion, nor how you can say that is an obvious fact. I mean none of this are facts, we're basing it on what we see.
Posted on: 2018/3/5 15:41
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As reval heats up, Jersey City finds new attorneys to handle tax appealsAs Jersey City struggles to deal with anger over the incoming results of the property revaluation, the city has dropped the outside attorney who has handled tax appeals for the city for four years. Since October 2013, Matthew O'Donnell, of Morristown firm O'Donnell McCord, has represented the city in front of the Hudson County Board of Taxation when property owners seek new assessments. It has been a lucrative gig for his firm, which made $260,720 in 2015 alone, city records show. The council last night approved contracts with two firms that will replace O'Donnell: Eric M. Bernstein & Associates, of Warren, and Florio Kenny Raval, of Hoboken, each for $75,000. http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/20 ... al_attorney_as_reval.html
Posted on: 2018/3/5 10:50
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TRANSPARENCY is what has been missing for decades. The property card is confusing as hell. It should show the implied current value, 15% appeal value, hi-level budget breakdown, and links to additional resources. The online card should have a simple online click to appeal button that at the very least walks you through the forms needed and steps to take....
Posted on: 2018/2/28 19:12
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I don't see a disagreement here. We want to get what we pay for, and only pay for what we get. (As a city, I'm not supporting the "I don't have kids so why should I pay for schools" crowd) We need transparency. Why is the cashflow of the Parking Authority not in the budget? That's just one simple example. Trained forensic accountants get baffled by the crap here.
Posted on: 2018/2/28 17:34
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It was in BeLa.
Posted on: 2018/2/28 17:18
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Home away from home
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I don't intend to speak for all "liberals" (I prefer "progressive"), but the problem you point to can be looked at two ways, Brewster. There are places that are solidly Democratic that have high taxes and people don't really complain all that much. Those are places where people actually get good services and infrastructure for their money. I'd be happy to continue paying what I'm paying if we had the type of schools, government services, public safety and infrastructure you'd expect for the money. So - yes, by all means, let's root out waste and corruption. Let's also get rid of incompetence wherever possible. But let's also set the bar higher - Jersey City has a long way to go in the improvement department before we start looking to cut back.
Posted on: 2018/2/28 17:17
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Isn't that the place where steve originally lost the bidding war for his home here? Must be a hot market LOL. I would love to see the documentation on that whole debacle. #promisebroken
Posted on: 2018/2/28 13:56
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Not too shy to talk
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Simple solution.
Sell your million dollar house Downtown and buy in Greenville.
Posted on: 2018/2/28 12:58
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Irony, but also hope. Being liberal doesn't necessarily mean you are required to be braindead and roll over for corrupt, bloated government as long as it's Democrat. It would be amazing if an outcome of all this is a surge of citizen oversight of where our money actually goes. It's hard to even find out! The maze of agencies and authorities are literally designed to prevent auditing. I have no trouble believing upwards of 20% of our workforce is unnecessary. Did you read the Times article on the 2nd ave subway where they found that 200 of 900 workers making $1000/day had no job descriptions and were immediately laid off? No one could even tell how long they'd been there. Is it hard to speculate JC & Hudson County has similar? How did ex Councilman Steve Lipski go from drunkenly pissing on Dead fans to Vice Principal at a County High School?
Posted on: 2018/2/27 23:38
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True, and I pointed out that myself in my previous post. But the facts clearly borne out that DTJC is an overwhelmingly liberal, Democratic-voting population. And, more often than not, you are much more likely to come across that type of person advocating for more services. So, there is a certain irony in witnessing the complete about-face from so many DTJC homeowners now clamoring for fiscal restraint, smaller government, and lower taxes.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 22:43
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Home away from home
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Amen
Posted on: 2018/2/27 17:54
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Home away from home
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I generally agree with your sentiment, but must highlight the irony that you've already made it a point several times in this thread to say "the liberals" this and "the liberals" that. It adds nothing of value to the conversation.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 17:31
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I think it is simplistic, and not at all helpful, to try and cast this situation as a matter of race, or to pit competing narratives of a "puerto rican aunt" versus "old lady Sally". Sticking to the facts is simple enough, and tells anyone willing to listen the plain truth: the reval is a matter of fairness. Poorer areas of JC have subsidized DTJC by paying higher effective rates for well over a decade, when the law stipulates that every homeowner should pay the same effective rate. Also, it is disingenuous to try and cast gentrification as a whites-only "attack" on a "native" population. Cities continually evolve, and surely anyone would agree that the JC newcomers are not a monolith mass of white people. To claim that is silly, and a distraction to this conversation. Heck, if anything, you could claim that a large amount of the JC newcomers of the past decade are non-white: Indians, Chinese, blacks, hispanics, etc. Anyone claiming otherwise is blind to obvious facts.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 17:13
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Just can't stay away
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agreed 100%.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 16:17
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Home away from home
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That is certainly a possibility, but I'm not sure. I do know that my neighbors on both sides were paying very high taxes, as both of theirs went down. One neighbor did a gut renovation prior to her inspection, and her taxes still went down.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 16:12
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I love seeing the people on NextDoor who call it a "Middle Class Gentrification".
Natives like myself have been speaking of the gentrification of Jersey City for a decade now. Many poor Jersey City families have had to move out because they could not afford it anymore. Most were POC but poor is poor and knows no racial boundaries. My family was originally from DT, and now most don't even live in JC anymore. Anytime I raised these concerns online or in a group setting, I was always told variations of "oh well, the city is more safe now and theres more places to eat so the gentrification was a good thing". Twitter (usually on Fulops tweets), NextDoor, Reddit it was always the same story. Now that the bill has come for those who benefited, we're seeing protests and media coverage. People in this thread and other places have been making the argument that "Old lady Sally has lived here her whole life, why should she have to sell her house". I made similar arguments for years. But in my case "Old Lady Sally" was "My Puerto Rican Aunt", and my argument fell on deaf ears. Because of this, I'm finding it very hard to feel sympathy for the DT owners. The NIMBYS of DT have demanded so much from their politicians. Bike lanes, revamped parks, additional policing, festival after festival, road work. It has always seemed like a major portion of the city's expenditures have been centered Downtown. And the rest of the city has footed the bill. Not anymore.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 16:07
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Are you sure it wasn't reassessed at some point?
Posted on: 2018/2/27 15:45
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Home away from home
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Got my letter in the mail yesterday. I'm over by Lincoln Park. I was not surprised to see my taxes go up (only $200 for the year), but the surprising part was the small increase over the previous assessed value. The $200 per year increase also came with a +$400k increase in the assessed value. The former homeowners were paying 2018 level taxes for the last 30 years. WTF
Posted on: 2018/2/27 15:07
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You make a good point - with all the new building going on - the western area of Downtown, Journal Square and some of the Heights might all see higher taxes in a second Reval.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 14:47
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Wasn't ASI supposed to be done notifying homeowners of their new assessed values by 2/19? My entire block still isn't in the spreadsheet (last updated on Friday 2/23), and I haven't gotten my letter yet.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 14:45
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I also do wonder if all those DTJC homeowners getting excited (and, feeling hopeful for a reprieve) after Fulop announced his intentions to hold a second reval even realize that such an undertaking could actually backfire and yield even higher taxes for them. If things play out as some think, and the tax increases do nothing to home valuations due to the pent up demand and limited inventory, you could very well end up seeing a relative uptick in DTJC values. After all, the same factors that can impact valuation due to the new 2018 tax plan will apply to all real estate across the region. All things being equal, DTJC will continue to attract more newcomers, so even if values were impacted negatively in DTJC, the same will likely be true of other areas in town.
People hoping for some relief in a second reval should be very wary.
Posted on: 2018/2/27 14:33
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