City of Elmira — Open Elmira

The Simple Version

Three problems. Here is each one in plain terms.

Problem 1 — The city guesses low on what homes are worth. Every year, Elmira charges property taxes based on what it thinks your house is worth. But those estimates haven't been seriously updated in decades. Homes that are selling for $130,000 are still taxed as if they're worth $55,000. That means the city is collecting far less than it could — and the gap grows every year that prices rise and the estimates don't.

Problem 2 — Nearly 40% of the city's property pays nothing. Hospitals, colleges, churches, and government buildings don't pay property tax. That's the law. In Elmira, those properties make up almost 40 cents of every dollar of property value in the city. The remaining 60 cents has to cover the full cost of city services — for everyone, including the tax-exempt properties that use those same services.

Problem 3 — The city's growth has stalled while the suburbs grew. Between 2021 and 2025, Chemung County's total taxable property value grew by $782 million. Almost none of that growth happened in Elmira. It happened in Big Flats, Horseheads, and Southport — where the malls, hotels, and new subdivisions are. The city's share of the county's tax base has been shrinking for years.

Problem 1: The Frozen Assessment Roll

The city has not conducted a mass reassessment in many years. As a result, assessed values are locked in place while the actual real estate market has moved significantly.

The median single-family home in Elmira has been assessed at exactly $47,000 every year from 2021 to 2025. Over the same five years, the assessor's own estimate of full market value rose from $55,294 to $83,900 — a 52% increase. The assessment didn't move because the city's assessment roll is effectively frozen until a mass reassessment is ordered.

Equalization rate by municipality, 2025 (single-family, median):

56% City of Elmira
assessed at 56¢ per $1 of market value

73% Town of Southport

85% Town of Big Flats

88% Town of Horseheads

100% Towns of Van Etten & Veteran
recently reassessed to full value

Is Elmira cheating by assessing low? No — this part is legal, and the state corrects for it. New York lets every city and town assess at its own level. The law only requires fairness within each municipality: all Elmira properties should be assessed at roughly the same fraction of their real value, whatever that fraction is. For the tax bills that cross town lines — the school and county bills — the state uses each municipality's equalization rate to put everyone back on the same footing.

Here is how that works for two identical $150,000 homes, one in Elmira and one in Horseheads. The Elmira home is assessed at $84,000 (56% of its value); the Horseheads home at $132,000 (88%). Before the school and county bills are split, the state divides each assessment by the local rate — $84,000 ÷ 0.56 and $132,000 ÷ 0.88 both come back to $150,000 — so both owners pay the same school and county tax. Different assessment levels between towns, same bill.

Where the stale roll actually causes harm is inside Elmira itself — and that, the equalization rate cannot fix, because it is one citywide average. The city's assessment roll is a patchwork of whenever each parcel was last formally valued: recent for some properties, decades ago for others. Even a sale is no guarantee of an update — of 2,354 residential ownership transfers from 2021–2025, only 44 (1.9%) received any assessment change at all. So two identical houses on the same street can carry very different assessments simply because one was touched at some point and the other wasn't. Neighbors end up subsidizing neighbors.

Median Assessed vs. Full Market Value, 2021–2025 Solid = assessed, dashed = full market value. Elmira's assessed line (red) is flat while its market value climbs; neighboring towns track market value closely.

Assessment-to-Market Ratio by Municipality (2025) The city (red) sits near the bottom at 56%; several rural towns that recently reassessed are at 100%. Dotted line = fully current.

Why the Freeze Persists

A stale assessment roll is a political choice, not an accident. Understanding why it persists helps explain why rate increases are easier than reform.

Mass reassessment is legal, feasible, and routinely done by other NY municipalities — but Elmira has not done one in many years. The reason isn't technical or financial. It's political: a reassessment redistributes the tax burden. Long-time homeowners, who tend to vote in higher numbers, are the ones whose assessments have drifted farthest below market value. A reassessment raises their bills. Recent buyers, who paid market-rate prices and were assessed accordingly, would see their relative share go down — but they are a smaller and less politically organized constituency.

There are structural reasons too:

Reassessment has upfront costs. The city must hire contract assessors, notify every property owner, and staff an appeals process for the inevitable challenges. For a city with budget pressure, this looks like a significant investment for a politically painful outcome.
The "reassessment doesn't raise revenue" framing obscures who it helps. It's technically true that a mass reassessment doesn't change the total tax levy — the city sets a rate against the new base to collect the same amount. But it does raise taxes on specific households (those with stale, low assessments) and lower them on others. The winners are largely invisible; the losers are loud.
Raising tax rates is politically easier in the short term. Rate increases spread the pain across everyone proportionally — no one gets singled out. The city can point to rising costs and a fixed rate of assessment growth. The cumulative inequity is diffuse and hard to mobilize around.
The freeze quietly penalizes visible investment. A sale almost never triggers a reassessment, but a major renovation can — so the rare home that does get reassessed upward is often one whose owner just invested in it, while identical but untouched houses stay frozen at decades-old values. The result is an arbitrary, vintage-based inequity that discourages the very upkeep a shrinking city needs.

The city has been raising tax rates in each of the last several years. Rate increases and assessment freeze are not separate problems — they are the same problem: a city avoiding structural reform and borrowing from the future by piling more cost on the existing taxable base. See the Frozen Assessments page for a detailed look at how the freeze creates wildly unequal treatment between neighbors on the same street.

Problem 2: The Exemption Burden

Nearly 39% of the city's assessed value generates no property tax revenue. That burden falls entirely on the remaining 61%.

$355M in value is off the tax rolls — $339.6M fully exempt across 656 parcels, plus another $15.5M sheltered through partial exemptions. Beyond government property, roughly $177M is held by private tax-exempt institutions — a major hospital system, a college, a medical school, religious congregations, and a layer of economic-development deals. Unlike public buildings, these are exemptions a PILOT negotiation could actually reach.

Largest non-governmental fully-exempt properties:

A note on IDA and housing abatements:

Beyond the institutional exemptions, at least $34M in apartment buildings are fully exempt through economic development deals — held by the Chemung County IDA, the Elmira Housing Authority, and various non-profit housing developers. These represent deliberate policy choices to attract or preserve affordable housing, but they further compress the taxable base. Whether the economic benefit justifies the tax forgiveness is a legitimate question.

Fully Exempt Assessed Value by Category Health care leads at $70.3M — the Arnot hospital system accounts for ~$54M of it. Hover a slice for its share.

How $912.7M in Assessed Value Breaks Down Taxable, partially-exempt (sheltered), and fully-exempt shares of the city's total assessed value.

The city's 10 largest properties by assessed value — and whether they pay:

Generated directly from the 2025 assessment roll. … of the 10 biggest numbers on the city's roll produce zero property tax.

The actual top 10 taxpayers — ranked by taxable value:

What's left after exemptions: the properties that actually carry the city's levy.

Problem 3: Low-Value and Vacant Properties

Even among properties that are technically taxable, a significant share carry assessed values so low they contribute almost nothing to the tax base — and may represent vacant or blighted parcels.

85 single-family parcels (1.5% of all single-family homes) are assessed below $20,000 — in a market where the median assessed value is $47,000 and the median market value is $83,900. A further 1,521 parcels (26% of single-family homes) sit between $20K and $40K, assessed at less than half of typical market value. These deeply discounted assessments are consistent with vacant, fire-damaged, or severely blighted properties that haven't been formally demolished.

Note: the assessment data alone can't definitively identify vacant or abandoned parcels. A low assessed value could also reflect a genuinely modest but occupied home, or a legitimate partial exemption. The pattern is suggestive, not conclusive.

The within-street inequity Full analysis →

Comparing each home to the median assessment for its own street reveals a different kind of problem: not just low-value outliers, but wildly inconsistent assessments between neighbors.

57× Spread on Clinton St
$5,000 to $285,000 on 132 homes

17× Spread on Third St
$8,000 to $134,000 on 104 homes

56 Homes assessed below 40% of their street median
(likely stale or vacant)

298 Homes assessed above 150% of their street median
(over-assessed relative to their street)

The real equity problem isn't just that some homes are under-assessed — it's that the burden falls almost randomly. New York doesn't reassess a property when it sells, and Elmira rarely updates one on its own — only 44 of about 2,300 ownership transfers from 2021 to 2025 saw any assessment change at all. Each home's value is essentially frozen at whatever it was when the property was last formally reassessed: recent for a few, the 1990s for the identical house next door. Two homeowners on the same block, in equivalent houses, can easily have a 5× or 10× difference in their assessment — and therefore their tax bill — based entirely on when each assessment was last set.

The 298 households assessed above 150% of their street median are, in effect, subsidizing their under-assessed neighbors. A reassessment would shift some burden off the over-assessed and onto the long-time owners whose assessments have sat lowest the longest — which is why reassessments are politically difficult even when they're economically fair.

Distribution of single-family assessed values in the City of Elmira (2025). Red bars highlight the under-$20K tail (a blight/vacancy proxy); pink marks the $20–40K range; blue is the $40K-and-up typical range. More than a third of the city's single-family homes are assessed below $40K.

Source: NYS ORPTS assessment roll (data.ny.gov 7vem-aaz7), City of Elmira 2021–2025, compiled into elmira-fiscal.json by scripts/visualize_elmira.py. Full method on the Data & Sources page.

What Reassessment Would and Wouldn't Do

A common misconception: reassessment doesn't raise taxes. It realigns who pays what.

$29.84M City tax levy — unchanged by reassessment

$53.50 → ~$51 Combined rate per $1,000 — barely moves
(reassessment to 85% of true market value)

~half / half Homes that would pay less vs. more — the burden shifts, the total doesn't

Reassessment shifts burden, it doesn't create money. The city sets its levy in the budget, and the rate is back-calculated to collect exactly that. Because Elmira's homes already sell close to their assessed values — per actual sales, not the state's flat 56% equalization rate — a sales-based reassessment barely changes the size of the tax base or the rate. What changes is the distribution: properties are taxed at their true relative values, so owners of under-assessed (mostly higher-value, appreciated) homes pay more and owners of over-assessed (mostly lower-value) homes pay less. The equalization rate also improves, correcting the state-level calculations that distribute school and county tax burden across jurisdictions.

What reassessment can't fix is the exemption burden. The $355M of exempt value doesn't become taxable with a new assessment. The prisons, hospitals, and college would still pay nothing. Reassessment addresses equity and accuracy; the exemption burden is a structural feature of the city that requires different tools — most notably PILOT negotiations with the largest exempt institutions.

Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) are voluntary payments that exempt institutions can agree to make to offset some of the city services they use without paying for. They can't be legally required in New York State — the property tax exemption is state law — but they can be negotiated, particularly when an institution is seeking zoning approvals, permits, or other city action. The Arnot Health system alone represents ~$54.4M in exempt assessed value and a theoretical combined tax liability of nearly $2.9M per year that the city and school district never see. See the full PILOT analysis →

Who Wins and Who Pays More

If Elmira reassessed every residential property to 85% of its market value — bringing the city roughly in line with neighboring Horseheads — the total levy collected stays the same and the combined rate barely moves. What changes is who pays it.

The 85% target matches Horseheads, Elmira's closest comparable. Market values below are estimated from actual Chemung County sales ratios by price tier — which show Elmira homes already sell near their assessed values, so the base grows only modestly and the combined rate moves from about $53.50 to roughly $51 per $1,000. The real change is the redistribution shown in the table.

Household	Current Assessed Value	Est. Market Value	Reassessed Value (85%)	Current Bill	New Bill	Change / Year
Distressed home Over-assessed relative to market — vacant-adjacent or severely deteriorated	$40,000	~$35,400	$30,100	$2,140	$1,543	−$597
Median Elmira home City median assessed value of $47K	$47,000	~$56,600	$48,100	$2,515	$2,466	−$49
Working-class home Under-assessed relative to market; owner has equity	$70,000	~$98,600	$83,800	$3,745	$4,297	+$552
Upper-middle home Significantly under-assessed; likely long-time owner	$100,000	~$172,400	$146,500	$5,350	$7,511	+$2,161
High-end home Heavily under-assessed; longest-frozen assessments	$150,000	~$326,100	$277,200	$8,025	$14,212	+$6,187

Market values estimated using actual Chemung County sales ratios by price tier. Bills use the combined rate (city + school + county ≈ $53.50/$1,000 now; ≈ $51/$1,000 after a sales-based reassessment, the same $29.84M levy spread over a modestly larger ~$582M base). The large increases on the $100K–$150K rows are real but apply to very few homes — 95% of Elmira homes are assessed under ~$76K — which is why the citywide rate barely moves even as individual under-assessed homes see big jumps. NY law allows phase-in over 3–5 years to soften abrupt changes.

Estimate Your Own Bill

Enter your current assessed value to see what your bill might look like under the 85% reassessment scenario. City of Elmira properties only.

Your current assessed value ($)

Market value override (optional, $)

If your home is assessed at $40,000 or below, you should file a grievance. At that level, Elmira's own sales data suggests the typical home is worth less than its assessed value — meaning you are already over-assessed. A house assessed at $40,000 has an estimated market value of around $35,000. You are paying taxes on $5,000 that doesn't exist.

Grievance Day in Elmira is the third Tuesday of July, 4:00–8:00 PM. Filing is free. Forms are available from the City Assessor's Office at City Hall, 317 E. Church St (607-737-5670). Full reassessment analysis and how to file →

Putting It Together

The City of Elmira's 0.4% assessment growth over five years isn't a fluke or a data error. It's the predictable result of three compounding problems:

A frozen assessment roll — the city assesses homes at 56% of their market value, a ratio that hasn't changed while markets have moved. The tax base doesn't grow as home values rise because no reassessment is capturing those gains.
A heavy institutional burden — nearly 39% of assessed value is permanently off the tax rolls, concentrated in a state prison, a hospital system, and multiple educational institutions. These large properties use city roads, sewers, water, and fire services but contribute nothing directly to the city's general fund.
Concentrated low-value properties — vacant and blighted parcels produce almost no revenue while still requiring code enforcement, demolition, and maintenance of surrounding infrastructure. Each demolition without replacement removes assessed value from the roll permanently.

Data: NYS ORPTS assessment rolls via data.ny.gov, dataset 7vem-aaz7. 2025 roll year. See Data & Methods for full methodology.

City of Elmira — Fiscal Health