Land is the one thing Elmira can't make more of. This page uses the city's own 2025 assessment roll to ask a simple question of every parcel: how much value does it put on each acre — and how much city street, pipe, and sidewalk does that acre cost to serve?
The test
Within the same city and assessment roll, compact blocks produce far more taxable value per acre and per foot of frontage than parking-heavy, spread-out uses. The comparison makes the trade-off visible.
Start with a familiar comparison, then explore the citywide map.
Take the supermarket test →Every comparison here stays inside one city and one assessment roll on purpose. Elmira hasn't had a citywide reassessment in years, so its recorded values can't be compared apples-to-apples with Big Flats or Horseheads, which reassess on different schedules. Keeping the whole analysis inside Elmira removes that problem: every parcel below is measured against its own neighbors on the same roll.
A downtown apartment block puts ten times as much assessed value on each acre as Aldi, the most compact of the city's supermarkets, and twenty-eight times as much as the Wegmans plaza. The stores aren't cheap buildings — Wegmans is assessed at $5.2 million. But that value is spread thin across eighteen acres, most of it parking. Value per acre is what exposes that: the same dollars, divided by the land it takes to hold them.
The pattern is consistent. Compact downtown rows carry about $1.12 million per acre. Offices and apartments follow. Ordinary single-family homes hold roughly $292,000 — more per acre than warehouses ($154K), far more than parking ($89K), and about fourteen times a lot of vacant land ($21K). The land-hungry, auto-oriented uses that dominate the edges of the city are the ones that carry the least.
Value per acre · nine land uses
Almost everything the city builds and maintains for a property runs longitudinally past its front: the street itself, the water main, the sanitary and storm sewers, the sidewalk, the plow route, the streetlights. So a fair way to ask "what does the city get back for the infrastructure it maintains?" is to measure value against frontage — assessed value per foot of street the property faces.
On that measure the gap is just as wide. A downtown common-wall block returns about $2,291 of assessed value for every foot of street the city maintains in front of it. A parking lot returns $276. Vacant land returns $68. Buildings that share walls and stack uses put more taxpayers behind each foot of pipe; buildings that sprawl put fewer.
Value per foot of frontage · the infrastructure the city maintains
Assessed value ÷ recorded lot frontage, median by land use. Large-footprint supermarkets are left off this chart on purpose — see the note below.
Put a house on a bigger lot and two things happen at once. Its value spreads over more land, so value per acre falls — from about $318,000 per acre on a typical small lot (0.1–0.2 acre) to about $96,000 on a large one (0.75–1 acre). And it widens, so the city has to maintain more street in front of it: median frontage rises from about 50 feet to about 140 feet.
Here is the part that makes the comparison hard to argue with. The large-lot houses are not cheaper houses being penalized by a per-acre measure — they are better houses. Median assessed value climbs right along with lot size, from $46,000 on the smallest lots to $83,000 on the largest band shown: nearly twice the house. And it still loses. Despite being worth almost double, the large-lot home puts under a third as much value on each acre while making the city plow, repave, pipe, and light nearly three times as much street frontage. More cost, less value, no extra taxpayers to spread it across.
Scope, stated plainly: this is City of Elmira single-family parcels (class 210) on the 2025 roll, from 0.1 up to 1 acre — about 5,300 homes. Lots at or below 0.1 acre are excluded because very small geometries magnify acreage errors. The chart stops at one acre on purpose. Elmira is small and built out, and above an acre only ~34 single-family parcels remain — with a median assessed value of $168,500, 3.6× the typical city home. Their value per acre reads higher for that reason alone. Including them would draw as a reversal of the trend when it is really a change of subject.
City of Elmira single-family homes by lot size
Two lines, same parcels: value per acre (down) against median frontage the city maintains (up). Tap or hover for the number of homes in each band.
Elmira is not short of land. It is short of productive land. When a downtown lot goes vacant or becomes a parking lot, the city loses a building and trades its highest-value-per-acre land for some of its lowest. The same street and the same pipe still run in front of it, and still have to be maintained. Every acre pushed toward the low end of these charts collects less and costs the same or more to serve.
This is also why zoning and parking rules are a fiscal question and not only an aesthetic one. Rules that mandate parking, forbid mixed use, or set large minimum lots cap how much value each acre is allowed to carry. They also lock in the infrastructure the city has to maintain to serve it.
Source: City of Elmira parcels on the 2025 NYS ORPTS assessment roll (data.ny.gov
7vem-aaz7), joined to Chemung County parcel acreage and lot frontage, compiled into
per-acre.json by
scripts/visualize_per_acre.py. Full method on the
Data & Sources page.