Elmira Tax Analysis

A data look at how the City of Elmira taxes property — a frozen assessment roll, a heavily exempt base, and who ends up paying the bill.

$912.7M
City assessed value
38.9%
Off the tax rolls (exempt)
$47,000
Median home assessment — frozen since 2021
56%
Assessed share of market value
30.2%
Residents in poverty
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.
📊
Assessment Regressivity
A $40K home pays 72% more property tax per dollar of value than a $300K home. Six thousand actual sales prove it.
📉
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.
📐
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.
💰
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.
🗺️
Interactive Map
All 39K+ geocoded parcels, colored by property type. Toggle types and click any parcel for details.
📈
Multi-Year Trends
Assessment changes from 2021 to 2025 by municipality and property type. Where is the tax base growing?
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).