How Much Property Can’t Be Taxed in Albany?

If you listen closely to Albany functionaries enough you might hear a statistic - “60% of Albany’s land is exempt from Property tax.” We want to drill into this number and find out a) if it’s true, b) if it is true what makes up that number and c) how consistent (or out of whack) is the number with our peers, is it meaningful? Our overall goal is to understand how realistic it is for our property tax base to support the functions of the City of Albany.

Taxable and Wholly exempt property by the numbers

We did a study using the 2023 City of Albany assessment data. We may repeat this study using 2024 data, however we don’t believe that the outcomes or insight meaningfully changes with new data. We drew the data from the NYS GIS Clearinghouse for a number of reasons, primarily the NYS data includes coding for Roll type and Ownership categorization. There are two values that we can use for our analysis - Assessed Value and Market Value. We chose Assessed Value for all of our studies as a standard.

The first study is very easy - looking at the aggregate Assessed Value for all properties in the City of Albany, what is the amount and percentage of property that is taxable and wholly exempt? There are four main Property Tax categories - Taxable and Exempt make up the lion’s share, and Utility and Railroad property types comprise half of a percent of land value. This quick study immediately confirms that over 60% of the total Assessed Value is indeed Wholly Exempt.

The immediate reaction for some might be that the State of NY owns a lot of property. Is this true? Who owns the $7.9 billion of Wholly exempt property in Albany?

All Property and its value by ownership category

We can drill into the ownership to understand the types of ownership, using a categorization variable found in the source data. We can start by looking at the distribution of Total Assessed Value by Property Owner category. We will do this study looking at all property and owners, setting aside whether the property is taxable or wholly exempt.

In this study we see that NY State owns $4.8 billion of Assessed Value property within the City of Albany. Other government entities (Federal, County, Town and School) own over $600 million of property (all of which is tax exempt).

Private (non-Government) Wholly exempt property owners

Government entities (Federal + State + County + City + School) collectively own $5.6 billion of Wholly exempt property. However per the first table there is $7.971 billion of Wholly Exempt property. Who owns the $2.4 billion of Wholly Exempt property that is not owned by a government entity? We can look at the sum of Total assessed value for Wholly exempt property by property owner. Let's highlight the non-government entities that own property. These 13 owners (above) collectively own $1.165 billion of the $2.4 billion of non-government owned Wholly Exempt property

* Note that we have added a description when the relationshp between owner and property is not obvious

Smaller Private Wholly exempt property owners

Owners of Wholly exempt properties come in all sizes. Let's look at those owners that own between $1.0 to $1.2 million in property. There are 20 owners in this bin that collectively own $22 million in property. On this list over half of the owners have a religious affiliation, there are housing-focused entities (e.g. Madison Properties of Albany), non-profits that deliver services (e.g. Legal Aid Society of Northeast) and some others that would require digging to find out what they are (e.g. The Frank Chapman Memorial)

In 2023 there were over 500 unique property owners with Wholly Exempt Property including the owners above down to 50 entities that owned property with an assessed value under $10,000

Comparing the City of Albany vs neighbors

These statistics demonstrate how much of Albany is not taxable and puts some color on the owners and who they are (state, city, private, non-profits and more). How out of whack is this, though? Let’s look at three comparisons - 1) Albany County property ownership outside of the City of Albany, 2) all of Rensselaer County and 3) all of Onondaga County (the Syracuse area).

Using the same 2023 Assessment data we see that the City of Albany has over 4x the percentage of Wholly Exempt property versus the remainder of Albany County (62% to 14%), nearly 3x the percentage of Wholly Exempt property versus Rensselaer County (62% to 23%) and over 3x the percentage of Wholly Exempt property versus Onondaga County.

Summary & Additional Explorations

A few conclusions:

Over 60% of the Assessed Value of the City of Albany is Wholly Exempt ($8 billion out of $12.9 billion of property within the City of Albany).
Over 60% of the Wholly Exempt property is owned by NY State ($4.9 billion out of $8 billion).
$2.4 billion of Wholly Exempt property is owned by Private entities, ⅓ of that value comes from 5 property-owning entities associated with hospitals (Albany Med entities, St Peters, and Albany Memorial)
A limited examination of a couple of peer areas suggests that it is unlikely that there are any cities or counties that carry anywhere close to the same Wholly Exempt property tax load.

We can envision some additional questions that we may want to answer in the future. We also ask any of our readers to ask follow-up questions as well:

Albany has significant undeveloped property - how much of this undeveloped property is Wholly Exempt and who owns it?
Numerous properties were developed with an agreement to treat the property as Wholly Exempt for some amount of time. We want to understand the owners, properties, value and time period of each of these scenarios.
What do other cities with the same amount of exempt property do? Is there anything to be learned?
For private entities, what is the mix of owner types that are wholly exempt, e.g. what percentage are non-profits, religious, healthcare, etc.
What PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) payments are made by Wholly exempt property owners? Who and how much?
The 2025 City of Albany budget narrative includes some interesting comments on exempt property (below in bullet points). We would want to understand specifically which properties have been reviewed and what the City has been able to reclassify and reclaim.
- 2024 Accomplishments “Reviewed and identified a multitude of exemptions for properties that were potentially invalid due to reassessment or classification. To date, such reviews have resulted in several million dollars of taxable value added back to the Assessment Roll”
- 2025 Goals “Continue exemption review to ensure that properties are receiving only those which they are entitled.”

Questions or comments? email us at AlbanyDataStories@gmail.com

Albany Data Stories