How Much Property Can’t Be Taxed in Albany?

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?   

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).  

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

 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

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.