The Fair-Share Map

Almost every home in Elmira is assessed for less than it would sell for. That is not the problem. The problem is that the discount is uneven. This map shows, house by house, who is taxed on a bigger share of their home's value than their neighbours are, and who is taxed on a smaller one. It is not a claim that the city collects too much.

First, the Question Everyone Asks
When you see that most homes look over-taxed, the natural reaction is: wouldn't fixing this just mean the city collects less money?
No. Fixing the assessments does not change how much the city collects.

Property taxes don't work the way most people assume. The city does not pick a tax rate and collect whatever that produces. It works in the opposite order. First, the city decides how much money it needs to run — that total is called the levy, and it's set in the annual budget. Then the rate is calculated backward from the levy: rate = levy ÷ total assessed value.

So if a reassessment makes the total assessed value bigger, the rate falls to match. The city still collects exactly the same levy. This is why reassessment is called revenue-neutral — it cannot, by itself, raise or lower the total tax take.

What a fair reassessment does change is who pays which slice of that fixed total. Homes currently assessed at a higher share of their value than their neighbors would see their bills fall; homes assessed at a lower share would see their bills rise. The pie is the same size. It just gets cut more evenly.
What the Map Shows
Every City of Elmira home that has sold since 2018, coloured by its assessment as a share of what it actually fetched — measured against the typical home.

Each dot is a measurement, not an estimate. Where a home sold, we know what it was worth, so we can divide its assessment by that price and get its real assessed-to-market ratio. The typical Elmira home is assessed at about 46% of what it sells for, and each parcel is coloured by how far its own ratio sits above or below that. Older sale prices are restated in today's dollars first — city prices roughly doubled over the window while the roll barely moved, so without that correction this would mostly be a map of when each house sold.

One thing to know before you look up your own house. Almost every home in Elmira is assessed for less than it would sell for. So a below-market assessment is not by itself a sign of anything, and it is not what the colours show. They show the share. A home assessed at 55% of what it would sell for is still well below market — but the typical home is at 46%, so that home is taxed on a bigger slice of its value and pays about a fifth more tax per dollar it is actually worth. On this map, that is what "over-taxed" means.

Why only the homes that sold? Because a sale is the only thing that tells you what one particular house is worth. Any method that estimates a home's value from its assessment gives every home with the same assessment the same answer — which cannot show you that this house has a new roof and the one next door has a hole in it. That is the whole question a fairness map has to answer, so this one is built from sales.
40% of sold homes assessed at a higher share of their value than typical, so they pay more tax per dollar the home is worth
25% assessed at roughly the typical share (±10%) — paying about their fair share
36% assessed at a lower share of their value, so they pay less tax per dollar the home is worth

Red parcels carry more tax per dollar of real value than the typical home. They cluster in the lowest-value, most distressed neighbourhoods, where market prices fell but frozen assessments did not. Blue parcels pay less per dollar of value, because they gained value faster than their assessment followed. A fair reassessment would shift burden off the red and onto the blue — with no change to the total the city collects.

The Map
Click any parcel to see what it sold for, what it is assessed at, and how its ratio compares to the typical home. Toggle the bands in the layer control.
Tips:
  • Red = assessed at a higher share of its sale price than typical (over-taxed)
  • Blue = assessed at a lower share (under-taxed)
  • Turn off the "Roughly fair" band to see the over- vs under-taxed split clearly

Why there are no owner names here. Our other maps carry them, because ownership patterns — LLCs, absentee landlords, exempt institutions — only become visible when parcels are named, and the county publishes the same record on its parcel search. This map is different: it pairs a recent sale price with a verdict on one household's tax position, and that is a profile rather than a record. Addresses only.

Open full-screen map →

Why It Skews Toward the Poor

The pattern is not random. When a city stops reassessing, assessments drift away from market values at different speeds in different neighborhoods. Areas that have appreciated see their assessments fall further below market every year. Areas that have declined see their assessments stay close to — or above — actual value, because the frozen number never came down as the neighborhood did.

In Elmira that maps directly onto income and neighborhood lines: the red parcels are concentrated in the poorest, most disinvested blocks, while the blue parcels sit in the areas that have held or gained value. The result is a quiet transfer of tax burden from wealthier households to poorer ones — the same regressive pattern documented on the Assessment Regressivity page, shown here parcel by parcel.

The fix is reassessment, and it costs the city nothing in revenue. It simply resets every assessment to the same share of current market value, so two neighbors with equally valuable homes pay equal tax. The Reassessment page models what that would do to individual tax bills and the citywide rate.
Method & Caveats

1,418 City of Elmira single-family parcels that sold at arm's length between 2018 and 2025 (NYS ORPTS SalesWeb), taking the most recent sale where a parcel sold more than once, joined to the 2025 assessment roll for its current assessment and location. Sale prices are restated in 2025 dollars using an index built from the sales themselves — the median of sale price ÷ assessed value by year, which controls for which houses happened to sell in a given year because the roll barely moves. Ratios are compared to the citywide median (46%) and binned by relative deviation: over ±25%, ±10–25%, and within ±10%.

The trade-off this map makes. It covers about 1,400 homes instead of all 9,000, because only a sale reveals what a house is worth. Homes that sell are not a random sample of homes that don't — a house sold after a renovation, or sold cheap between family members despite the arm's-length flag, will sit somewhere it doesn't belong. The value is in the pattern, which neighbourhoods are systematically over- or under-taxed, not in any single dot.

Why the ratios are compared to 46% and not to 100%. Almost every Elmira home is assessed below what it would sell for, so a map drawn against "assessed at full value" would be blue everywhere and would tell you only that the roll is thirty years old. Comparing to the typical home is what isolates unfairness between neighbours from the citywide staleness they all share. It is also the legal test: New York lets you grieve an assessment on the ground of unequal assessment, which asks exactly this question.