On November 9 Mayor Daley released his 2005 budget and declared that all Chicagoans would have to pay higher fees and taxes so the city, strapped in hard economic times, wouldn’t have to make huge service cuts. He didn’t mention that when it came to property taxes some Chicagoans were going to arbitrarily pay more than others.
A computer systems analyst with a passion for public policy, Tripp did an extensive Internet search to figure out what various politicians are paying in property taxes. He used voter-registration lists and financial-disclosure statements to find out where they lived and the Cook County assessor and treasurer Web sites to find how much they pay in property taxes. (He didn’t check every elected official in the city because he couldn’t find every home address.)
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Governor Rod Blagojevich got a 25 percent increase on his Ravenswood Manor home. But his father-in-law, 33rd Ward alderman Richard Mell, who lives about two miles to the south in the gentrifying neighborhood of Avondale, saw his taxes fall by 10 percent. Blagojevich’s house is larger than Mell’s bungalow, but we’re talking relativity here. Mell’s neighborhood is one of the hottest in the city, hotter than Blagojevich’s, so why the discrepancy?
Taxes on the house of 46th Ward alderman Helen Shiller went up 71 percent, while taxes on the home of county commissioner Michael Quigley went up 10 percent. Shiller lives in Uptown, Quigley two miles south in Lakeview. Both neighborhoods are hot, and property values have accelerated at roughly the same rate over the past three years. Go figure.
In May the General Assembly quietly amended Houlihan’s proposal. House speaker Michael Madigan and senate president Emil Jones, backed by Governor Blagojevich, thought the cap would be regressive, so they put a “cap on the cap.” It’s not actually a cap on the cap on assessments; under the law Blagojevich signed this summer the legislators increased the home owner’s exemption from $4,500 to $20,000, which was supposed to attack the problem of big tax increases from a different direction. But the jump in housing prices in some neighborhoods has been so high that even the larger home owner’s exemption won’t prevent a big tax increase–as Rush and Claypool, among others, have discovered.
At the risk of sounding naive, I doubt it. My hunch is that the people at the assessor’s office are struggling with a hopelessly flawed system, and we ought to give them the benefit of the doubt. If the assessed value of homes in Rush’s neighborhood rose more than those in Daley’s this time around, it’s probably because the assessor’s office was for some unknown reason slow to see that the cost of property in Bronzeville was rising fast.
According to Tripp, the system’s even harder on commercial property owners. As part of another study, he looked at a stretch of commercial properties–small, locally owned eateries, shops, stores, offices, and an auto-repair business–on the 5000 block of North Clark. The expanded home owner’s exemption doesn’t apply to people who don’t live on the property they own, so they don’t even get that break. All of the owners on this block saw their total taxes for the year go up; most doubled, and the increase ranged from $11,365 to almost $39,000. “They either pass the tax hikes on to customers by raising prices, or they go out of business,” says Tripp. “It’s not good for the city.”
