Elmira Tax Analysis

Assessment data for all 40,033 parcels across 14 municipalities — 2021 to 2025.

40,033
Taxable parcels
$6.14B
Total assessed value
$8.13B
Full market value
$100,700
Median home assessment
14
Municipalities
What This Site Is About
The numbers behind a city at a breaking point — and what its leaders could do about it.

The City of Elmira has one of the highest property tax rates in New York State¹ and one of the highest poverty rates in the Southern Tier (30.2%, ACS 2024 5-year).² Those two facts are connected. Decades of policy choices — frozen assessments, unchallenged exemptions, an inequitable county revenue split — have hollowed out the tax base that city services depend on. The people left holding the bill are the ones with the least ability to pay it.

This site uses the public assessment record, historical data, and real sales transactions to document what is happening and show that the tools to change it exist. Reassessment, PILOT agreements, and a renegotiated county sales tax split are not radical ideas — they are standard policy options that comparable cities have used. The barrier is not legal or technical. It is political. Elmira's elected leaders have the tools. The question is whether they will use them.

Explore the Data
Each section documents a different part of the picture.
🏛️
City of Elmira
Frozen assessment roll, 39% exempt value, blight proxy, and what reassessment would mean.
📉
The Long Decline
How Elmira lost half its population since 1950 — deindustrialization, the 1972 flood, white flight, and the county fiscal relationship that compounded the damage.
⚠️
Why It Matters
The freeze is still frozen. The exemptions still exempt. What the tools are, why they're not being used, and who benefits from the status quo.
📈
Multi-Year Trends
Assessment changes from 2021 to 2025 by municipality and property type. Where is the tax base growing?
💰
PILOT Analysis
$340M of Elmira's assessed value is permanently exempt. What voluntary payments from hospitals and colleges could recover — and how other cities have done it.
📊
Assessment Regressivity
A $40K home pays 72% more property tax per dollar of value than a $300K home. Six thousand actual sales prove it.
📐
Tax Value per Acre
The Arnot Mall produces $72K/acre. A downtown Elmira apartment block produces $7.9M/acre. The "miles per gallon" of fiscal productivity.
🏙️
Strong Towns Analysis
Does downtown density outperform suburban big-box retail on a per-square-foot tax basis? Charts and map.
🗺️
Interactive Map
All 39K+ geocoded parcels. Toggle layers, click any property for details, spotlight big-box stores.
Assessment by Municipality
Total assessed value and parcel count, 2025 roll year. Villages are shown separately — in NY, villages share an assessment roll with their parent town but are distinct taxing jurisdictions with their own governments and services.
Municipality Parcels Total Assessed Avg per Parcel Share

* West Elmira is an unincorporated hamlet within the Town of Elmira — it is not a separate municipality and its parcels appear under Town of Elmira.

Top 10 by Assessed Value
Largest single-parcel assessments in the county. Several are fully or partially tax-exempt — see the taxable value breakdown for the full picture.
Data & Methods

Data Source

NYS ORPTS assessment rolls via data.ny.gov (dataset 7vem-aaz7). 2025 roll year shown here; 2021–2025 used for trend analysis.

Municipality Names

Place names resolved from SWIS codes, not the raw municipality_name field. Villages (Horseheads, Elmira Heights) correctly split from their parent towns.

Coordinates

NY State Plane Central (EPSG:2261, US survey feet) converted to WGS84 using pyproj. 98.2% of parcels have valid coordinates.

Source Code

download_data.py — fetches from API
visualize.py — charts & map
visualize_trends.py — multi-year charts

¹ Elmira's average full-value tax rate ranked 9th-highest among NYS cities in 2009–13 (NYS Financial Restructuring Board, 2016), and 8th-highest by effective rate in a 2020 ranking (Empire Center).
² Poverty rate: U.S. Census, ACS 2024 5-year estimate (Elmira city 30.2% vs. ~14% statewide).