Yesterday, Pew Charitable Trusts issued a new report on the Actual Value Initiative (AVI), concretely expressing some outcomes of this policy that were already known or at least suspected by many. The primary takeaway from this report (which you can read in full here) is that AVI is shifting a portion of the property tax burden away from commercial owners and onto residential owners.

Share of tax burden shifts

The raw numbers

AVI has been pitched by the administration as a revenue neutral policy, and this is technically an accurate portrayal. But for homeowners as a group, AVI will not be revenue neutral, with an aggregate added tax bill of $72M. The report suggests that the reason for this change is that residential properties have generally been underassessed under the current system, while commercial…

In Center City, the building at 1 South Broad Street represents the fruit of investment, and it might be an indication that the Center City market is prime like a rare London broil. Also known as the Lincoln-Liberty or the PNB building, 1 South Broad is now on the market and could sell for between $70M and $75M, the Philadelphia Business Journal (PBJ) reports. Meanwhile, the new AVI tax assessments indicate that the building is worth only $64M.

1 South Broad

A private New York firm led by David Werner, according to the PBJ, purchased the building in April 2003, for $48M. Looks like Mr. Werner will have a handsome profit coming his way. Home to a Borders for about a decade, a Walgreens will soon appear in a large, multi-story retail space here.

The PBJ says that it’s possible that additional Center City…

That budget problems pimple Philadelphia like a teenager is well documented. Such woes are forcing the closure of 23 schools. City Council budget hearings draw hundreds of protesters. The AVI system is contested (and appropriately so). But all that aside, the Mayor’s Office of Grants is an example of one effort to fill Philadelphia’s cash shortfall.

City Hall struggling

Created last July, the office’s goal is to increase the City’s capacity and capability to compete for federal, state and philanthropic grants as well as to manage this funding with transparency. New city-wide procedures will be instituted regarding the coordination, competition and application for grant funding, and the office will regularly report on the effectiveness of grant-funded projects to both funders and the public.

It’s a “strategic addition,” said Mayor Nutter in a press release. In Fiscal Year 2011, Philadelphia was awarded $1.2B…

About ten months ago, two zoning notices appeared at 1237-39 N 31st St., announcing plans for two single family homes. These homes were to be built by Steph-Sin Development, the folks that constructed the home immediately next door last year.

Over the past ten months, much has happened in this area. Notably, a new supermarket was built across the street and a nearby building was renovated with plans to open a (nearly ready, we’d guess) cafe. Yet for most of those months, 1237-39 N 31st St. remained vacant, with groundbreaking only taking place last month. At present, foundations are clear evidence that the project is moving forward.

Foundations have been poured

Why the delay, you may ask? We don’t know for sure, and suspect we’ll never find out. Steph-Sin purchased these…

Since 2014 property tax assessments were made public a week ago, several media sources (us included) have worked hard to evaluate the credibility and reliability of the new assessments. This task is made far more challenging by the fact that the Office of Property Assessment is only releasing limited data, refusing to compile all of the data on a single disk. Nevertheless, we’ve been doing our best and have come up with some interesting findings thus far.

Today’s It’s Our Money wonders why many properties have been assessed at higher or lower number than they’ve recently sold for. Take two properties on the 2000 block of Pemberton Street for example:

21st and Pemberton

2017 Pemberton St. was purchased in May of 2010 for $379K, but has been assessed at $290,300. It has about 1,150 sqft of living…

A hot area that we seem to come back to every week or so lies between 10th and Broad, Spring Garden and Fairmount. Some have coined this the “Spring Arts” area, while others are content to call it Poplar, and still others insist that it’s an extension of the Spring Garden neighborhood. Whatever you want to call it, it’s seen rampant development in the past couple of years, and today we bring you another example. 643 N. 11th St. sits on the northeast corner of 11th & Wallace, and broke ground a couple of months ago.

The building

Replacing a vacant lot, this structure will eventually be home to two apartment units, which we would guess will be offered for sale as condos. Looking back a couple of years, this corner was pretty bleak.

In the past

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