The Strong Towns Question

Does a downtown block generate more tax revenue than a strip mall? The Chemung County data has a clear answer — and it matters for how the county spends money on roads, water, and sewers for decades to come.

The Simple Version
Before the charts and the numbers, here is the idea in plain terms.
Every road, water pipe, and sewer line costs money to build and maintain. That cost doesn't care how much the building at the end of it is worth — a mile of pipe is a mile of pipe.

So the real question isn't "how much tax does this property pay?" It's "how much tax does it pay compared to how much infrastructure it needs?"

A four-story apartment building on a 50-foot-wide downtown lot shares one water connection, one stretch of sidewalk, one section of road — across dozens of residents and businesses. A Walmart on 17 acres needs 17 acres worth of roads, parking lot drainage, water mains, and emergency response coverage — all for one store.

The question this page answers: does the downtown block actually pay more per foot of road and pipe than the big box? In Chemung County, the answer is yes — by a significant margin.
The Theory
Strong Towns is a national organization arguing that cities have spent decades building suburban roads and utilities that can never generate enough tax revenue to pay for their own upkeep.
The core claim: A downtown building on a narrow lot generates more tax revenue per foot of road frontage — and per acre of land — than a big-box store surrounded by parking. Every foot of street frontage requires roughly one foot of road, curb, sidewalk, water main, and sewer line to serve it. A 50-ft-wide downtown building shares that infrastructure cost across multiple floors and many uses. A 600-ft-wide parking lot spreads it across one story of retail.

The per-front-foot metric captures this: divide a property's assessed value by how many feet of street it faces. Higher means the property is doing more fiscal work per foot of infrastructure committed to serve it.

What the Data Shows

Assessed value per foot of street frontage — by property type:

$2,404 Shopping centers
(6 parcels with frontage data)
$1,347 Downtown row buildings
(common wall — 39 parcels)
$1,187 Single-family residential
(19,608 parcels)
$1,065 Apartment buildings
(316 parcels)

Estimated assessed value per square foot of lot — big-box stores:

These stores have irregular parcels with no measured dimensions in the assessor records. Lot size estimated as land assessment ÷ $3.34/sqft, the median commercial land rate from 351 nearby parcels in the Route 17 corridor that do have measured dimensions.

$16.90 Walmart — est. ~17.5 ac lot
assessed $12.9M total
$8.00 Kohl's — est. ~14.3 ac lot
assessed $5.0M total
$7.54 Lowe's — est. ~23.2 ac lot
assessed $7.6M total
$6.84 Target — est. ~17.1 ac lot
assessed $5.1M total
$22.19 Wegmans (Elmira) — est. ~5.4 ac
assessed $5.2M total †

† Wegmans is in the City of Elmira where land values differ from the Route 17 corridor — its estimate is least reliable.

The nuanced answer: Downtown row buildings score ~$10–17/sqft of lot area, and Walmart comes in at roughly $16.90/sqft — surprisingly competitive on raw assessed-value-per-sqft. But this misses the Strong Towns point: a 17-acre Walmart demands 17 acres worth of roads, sewer, water, and stormwater infrastructure, all serving one tenant and one story of retail. A 50-ft-wide downtown building stacks that same infrastructure cost across multiple floors and uses. The per-front-foot metric captures infrastructure cost more honestly — and there, downtown row buildings clearly win over single-family.

The bigger picture: Walmart's $12.9M assessment is real money, but it sits on land that a grid of downtown blocks — each generating $1,000–$2,000/front foot across dozens of parcels — could match or exceed while requiring a fraction of the road and utility infrastructure.
Charts
Two angles on fiscal productivity: per-frontage and per-square-foot comparisons, plus a look at how assessed value splits between land and buildings.
Assessment per front foot and per sq ft by property type
Tax Productivity by Property Type Left panel: median assessed value per foot of street frontage (real data, error bars = IQR). Right panel: per square foot of lot — real data for most types, estimated (hatched) for big-box stores whose lot sizes were derived from their land assessments using a $3.34/sqft corridor land rate.
Land vs structure value analysis
Land vs. Building Value Left: scatter of land vs. structural assessment by property type — properties above the diagonal have more building value than land value. Right: for major retailers, the portion of total assessment that is pure land (higher = building adds less relative value).
Interactive Map
All 39,321 geocoded parcels. Toggle layers to compare downtown density against the Route 17 commercial strip. Click any parcel for full details.
Tips:
  • Toggle ★ Big-box spotlights to see Walmart, Target, Lowe's, Kohl's with estimated lot sizes
  • Toggle ★ Downtown Elmira parcels to highlight the downtown core (929 parcels, $207M assessed)
  • Toggle ★ Village of Elmira Heights to see the village boundary
  • Use the heatmap layer to see overall assessment density across the county

Open full-screen map →

Top 10 by Assessed Value — with Exemption Status
Raw assessed value tells only part of the story. Several of the largest properties are fully exempt from taxation — the county collects nothing from them.
Takeaway: 6 of the top 10 assessed properties generate zero property tax revenue — two prisons, a hospital, a school district, a college, and an airport. The real top taxpayers are Dominion Transmission, CVS distribution, NYSEG, and Horseheads Real Prop LLC.