NYC | de Blasio's Cities of Opportunity Task Force

I wrote this in 1988.

June 22, 2008–At the 82nd annual U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting yesterday, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson–who heads up the USCM–announced a new Task Force.

It will be called the "Cities of Opportunity" Task Force and it will be chaired by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The Task Force will address issues of inequality, through a higher minimum wage, expansion of affordable housing and ensuring every child has access to pre-K.

Mayor de Blasio said: 

Mayors are starting to respond to this crisis, and this task force is going to organize and focus the progressive ideas coming out of cities across the U.S., and put city issues back on the national agenda. Cities are the problem solvers and the centers of innovation. As Mayors, we are on the front lines. It is our responsibility to create more opportunities for our citizens and more equitable cities.

John Tepper Marlin (L) with new
Chair of "Cities of Opportunity"
Task Force.

The task force's Vice Chair will be Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh. New York City and Boston are two cities with very high (among top 13 cities) Gini Coefficients, i.e., very high inequality of income.

Mayor Walsh:

This is a national problem, but we feel the impact of income inequality particularly in Boston's neighborhoods. Some areas have seen a development boom, significant drops in crime statistics, strong advances in our education system; and yet, we struggle with concentrations of real poverty and unemployment in other neighborhoods. This inequality makes it difficult to sustain the strong workforce, active consumer base, and vibrant civic life that every city needs for lasting growth. We need solutions to bridge this growing divide, and I applaud Mayors Johnson and de Blasio for their work. I'm proud to participate in this Task Force.

The task force will spend a year developing and sharing governing methodologies to empower cities to make equity a central governing principle.

The task force will develop an action plan for cities to take action in developing aggressive equity agendas and implement real change. This plan will include practical tools and best practices – both previously executed and newly developed by the task force – which cities can use to make the most equitable decisions that they can, with the powers that they have, to create more equitable cities.

The Cities of Opportunities Task Force will conduct its kickoff meeting in New York City on August 10-11, 2014 where mayors will develop the groundwork for the scope and direction of the task force's work.

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter

I am pleased to join Mayors de Blasio and Johnson and a host of other mayors from across the country to tackle inequality in America's cities. Cities are incubators of change and innovation, and mayors are at the forefront of it all – we get things done. Providing equitable opportunity directly correlates to the success of our cities, our regions and our country...

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

I look forward to partnering with Mayors Emmanuel and de Blasio on this transformative task force that will look to develop policies aimed at addressing the needs of our historically underserved and disenfranchised communities.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings

We as a nation will only succeed when our cities succeed together. The gap between those of means and those that are not as fortunate will only be closed with new, long-term, non-partisan and pragmatic solutions.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker

Even in cities with robust economies like Houston, too many are locked outside looking in on opportunity. We are pleased that the Conference of Mayors is focused on this issue to ensure that all residents of every city can have equal opportunities to thrive. This is our call to action.

LVT | Scott Stringer on Vacant Lots in Manhattan (Updated Sept. 25, 2016)

At a Manhattan breakfast meeting this morning sponsored by the Drum Major Institute. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino spoke about his survey of abandoned buildings in Boston. Based on this survey,  through a variety of creative initiatives (not without opposition), he reduced the number of abandoned units by 77 percent.

In 2006 the U.S. Conference of Mayors recognized the Mayor's strategy as "best practice." The event was recorded in a liveblog by Corinne Ramey. I posted a comment on the following two paragraphs of her report:

• Brad Lander, Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, returns to the idea of approaching vacant buildings in different markets. We've only in the past few days fixed certain tax laws, he says. He says that the J51 tax abatement rules need to be fixed here, but might be slightly different in different cities.
• Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President, jumps in. "Or we could sit down and figure out a different tax structure for abandoned buildings," he says. "Right now we tax buildings -- imagine if we created a system of incremental land value taxation. I don't know what the result would be, but we need to figure out the next bold move as it relates to tax policy. Let's research what's going on in other cities and other states. Land is our asset and commodity."

Clearly, the reason that Manhattan Borough President Stringer has been able to find so many vacant properties in Manhattan is that property-owners suffer no penalty for warehousing empty lots or buildings. The owners are waiting for prices to rise. Unimproved land is taxed at a much lower rate than improved land.

Some cities have attempted to solve this problem–the low taxation rate of unimproved land, encouraging speculative warehousing of land–by taxing vacant land at a multiple of the rate for improved land. Others have taxed improvements at a fraction (e.g., half) the rate of taxes on land value.

The ultimate fix is to tax just the underlying land (hence "land value taxation" or LVT) and not the improvements, so that property-owners pay the same tax regardless of improvements. The LVT concept isn't far from NYC's actual practice of encouraging developers/builders to put up new buildings with tax abatements or, more recently, fixed Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs).

But there is a problem with tax abatements and PILOTS. The bigger, and therefore the more effective/attractive, they are, the more they undermine the City's ability to pay for the service needs created by the development. These service needs include education, sanitation, police, and the annual debt service for the bond issues to pay for local infrastructure improvements.

Comment (September 25, 2016)

The use of PILOTs grew significantly during Mayor Bloomberg's administration. The impact of these PILOTs grows every year as new services are required for developments approved a few years ago.