They put a pox on all of our houses
Share with others:
Like many homeowners in the city of Pittsburgh right now, I'm confused.
I was confused as soon as I saw the assessment on the tiny vacant lot near my home where I put a small flower garden rose from $900 to $5,500. I bought it in late 2005 for $800 -- the going rate hereabouts.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and that's confusing. You feel the same?
I understand that the countywide reassessment was court-ordered and ultimately inescapable. But when did any court decree that Allegheny County had to screw up the reassessment six ways to Sunday?
Common Pleas Court Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr. ordered the reassessment more than four years ago, so our esteemed county leaders had plenty of time to prepare. Since virtually all of those leaders hail from the same party and face little risk at the polls, they had nothing to lose by calmly and carefully complying with the court's order.
They very obviously didn't, and that confuses me.
With Carnegie Mellon University as the magnet, Pittsburgh can boast the country's greatest concentration of computer geniuses outside Boston's college quads and California's Silicon Valley.
What I know about computer programming could fit in a thimble -- with enough room left for my thumb -- but I bet Pittsburgh's abundant brainiacs could have put together a bunch of algorithms that would've assisted our less-than-brilliant public servants in telling the difference between Spring Garden and Shadyside, or Manchester and Mount Washington.
But the county didn't ask for any help, which is confusing, considering how obviously they needed it.
As the cliche tells us, the three most important factors in a property's market value are location, location and location. The fact that people were apparently elected to office or hired by the county to do reassessments without having heard this cliche is really, really confusing.
City residents were the first to get the bad news, since the city and the school district issue their combined tax bill before the rest of the county. Officials say the total assessed value of the city's residential properties went up 46 percent, but as another old saw has it, "the devil's in the details."
I looked up a couple of posh Shadyside streets on the county real estate website and clicked randomly through dozens of addresses, comparing their 2011 and 2012 "market values." And in my unscientific but fairly random sampling, I found increases ranging from 10 percent to 33 percent. Two "outliers" had their assessments doubled -- to well over $500,000 -- but most of the properties I checked were easily under the city's 46 percent overall hike.
First Published January 2, 2012 12:00 am
