A tense exchange between Philadelphia’s chief assessment officer and a lawmaker worried about gentrification in her district punctuated a City Council hearing about property taxes.
Councilmember Quetcy Lozada asked James Aros Jr., the assessment chief, about the number of homes his team actually looks at each year. Aros responded that all 580,000 parcels in Philadelphia should be reviewed — in-person or digitally — at least every six years.
However, he went on, the office does not currently track the metric, and he would not commit to a timeline for when they could start collecting that information.
“What I’m hearing is you don’t want to be held accountable,” Lozada said.
“We are committed to transparency,” Aros replied. “We are not trying to hide anything.”
Earlier, Aros refused a request from Councilmember Jamie Gauthier to pause revaluations until progress is made toward improving the assessment process.
“The same people who are already being displaced by the market should not be displaced by the city, and we need you to own that,” she said.
In recent times, Philadelphia has not hiked the property tax rate; however, the city has completed multiple reassessments that have generally resulted in higher bills for residents. New valuations were sent out earlier this year, with the median homeowner owing an extra $97, officials said. Two years prior, the levy for the average single-family home in the city rose $330.
During Monday’s hearing, legislators frequently referred to a 2024 report that found that assessments were less accurate and more regressive in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black, Hispanic and low-income residents.
Even before then, lawmakers had had concerns about what Councilmember Rue Landau described as the “opaque process” the Office of Property Assessment (OPA) uses to determine a home's monetary value.
On Friday, Mayor Cherelle Parker’s Home Assessment Bias Task Force put out its report, in response to the 2024 analysis, completed by the Reinvestment Fund, Community Legal Services and the Center for Economic Policy Analysis.
The document, which includes a host of recommendations, details an “irreconcilable difference” between OPA and multiple task force members over whether the office can self-monitor for racial disparities in assessments.
OPA leaders contend that considering race violates their professional standards. The task force encourages the city to seek out legal and industry advice on that position. In the meantime, a third-party consultant should be retained to analyze the impact of revaluations on racial and economic groups, the report says.
The Parker administration has already put out a call for proposals from firms interested in conducting a comprehensive review of the mass appraisal system, including a study to find out if any changes could be made to reduce discriminatory impacts. The task force did not find any evidence of intentional bias.
OPA uses a computer-assisted model to generate values based on sales and market data. Aros told Council that the valuations have met or exceeded industry standards since 2023, improving with each reassessment cycle.
Aros testified that OPA has been fighting — unsuccessfully, so far — to gain access to property information included in the federal government’s appraisal database and the multiple listing service, or MLS. Getting more details about a home’s characteristics would help improve the accuracy of the office’s models, he added.
Lawmakers suggested that OPA, in the notices sent out to property owners, include a personalized explanation of why a value is changing and provide the resident’s estimated tax bill. The latter proposal has raised concerns from the city’s attorneys, Aros said.
Near the end of the hearing, which lasted more than three hours, homeowners and landlords shared stories of bewildering assessments and the burdensome appeals process.
In 2023, Sandra Carter was told that she was going to be charged $7,195 in real estate taxes for her family home in the East Parkside section of West Philadelphia, up from $632 from the year prior.
“I’m still shaking when I read those numbers,” Carter said. “My sister almost had a nervous breakdown over this. She was petrified.”
After jumping through a number of bureaucratic hoops, the city agreed that the home was worth $150,000, not $514,000, as originally assessed, she recounted.
“No one should have to go through this terrible ordeal,” Carter added.
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