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IamSauerKraut t1_j6hybhn wrote

Reply to comment by AskMoreQuestionsOk in Want growth in Erie? Cut taxes on homes and jobs, hike taxes on land instead by ToffeeFever

>So the landowner sitting on a dead factory needs to pay taxes on it,

In PA, the owner of that land is paying tax on it. Cannot be otherwise under PA assessment law.

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AskMoreQuestionsOk t1_j6hze5k wrote

Right, so you’d be taxing the land more and the building less. Which is the opposite of what you usually see - put on an addition, your taxes go up.

In most places, where you tax on improvements, the cheapest option might be to sit on an empty lot or dead building because as soon as you put something on it, your taxes go up. That might be risky in a low population area where you might not be able to get staff or customers. But tax the land, then you don’t have as much risk involved.

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Alfa505 t1_j6i1ggz wrote

If you have a home and buy the lot next you and merge them, your taxes still go up. I get the vacant building issue but I also thinks this hurts redevelopment and definitely farmers.

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AskMoreQuestionsOk t1_j6ib0rw wrote

You probably need to put something in to protect farmland, otherwise you end up like NJ, where you can’t make a profit and have to sell it to build homes or solar farms or something that isn’t a farm.

But why do you think it hurts redevelopment?

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IamSauerKraut t1_j6i2czj wrote

>put on an addition, your taxes go up.

In much of PA, that is not how assessment law works.

There are 2 laws applicable to assessments: the General County Assessment Law at 72 P.S. Sect 5020 and the Consolidated County Assessment Law at 53 Pa. C.S. Sect 8801. The GCA applies only to Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties. All properties in a county must be uniformly assessed regardless of its use as residential or commercial. Beyond that, it gets a bit complicated.

An active business will be taxed more than a vacant building because of the 3-prong approach used in some counties, but there is no allowance for "taxing the land more and the building less." Also, in most counties, putting on an addition will not automatically - if at all - result in your property tax going up. The amount of the assessment can be appealed; indeed, a number of businesses appeal on an annual basis.

The last time I took a deep dive on the assessment issue, a majority of PA counties had not conducted a county wide reassessment for over 20 years. They were still issuing property tax bills based on FY 2000, or earlier! - market values.

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AskMoreQuestionsOk t1_j6iab4p wrote

If you don’t mind, what do you mean by uniformly assessed?

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IamSauerKraut t1_j6k4xzw wrote

There is an entire chapter in the PBI book on uniformity, along with a volume of case law and Article VIII, Sect 1 of the PA Constitution, but generally it means all properties in the same category must be assessed similarly. For instance, if your assessed fair market value for a 1 acre lot with a medium-size house is one value but a similar neighbor's house is noticeably less, then there is a uniformity issue. Same class, same assessed value.

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