Tax break use too narrow
Two massive events rocked my West Central neighborhood this week. First, on Monday the Spokane City Council approved a nearly $4 million tax break for prospective Kendall Yards homeowners. Second, Tuesday evening, Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and County Commissioner Mark Richard described a nearly $1.5 billion new jail, with a preferred location in our neighborhood. When built to capacity, both projects will forever change the character of West Central and the north riverbank.
Only local residents, my family included, should have any strong feelings about the Spokane City Council granting Greenstone Corp., its Kendall Yards development and its future residential owners special property tax exemption for a dozen years. After all, we all want reinvestment and a revitalized West Central neighborhood. What is peculiar, however, is the fact that without any means test or affordability requirement, the investment of one group of people gets treated very differently from another.
For instance, we purchased a home immediately across the street on Bridge Avenue in May 1994 for slightly less than $100,000 (relatively expensive at the time). Like many homeowners we reinvested over the years and attempted to improve upon our home and residence. Not only did we not benefit from any form of tax relief, we of course saw our property valuation skyrocket when the Summit and later the Kendall Yards developments were approved – even though not a single home was built or business started. It was purely speculative, but the assessor chose to inflate prices and refused to grant tax appeals.
In an attempt to simultaneously provide affordable housing and continue neighborhood revitalization, we along with family and friends purchased another three homes along our West Bridge Avenue block and collectively reinvested nearly $400,000 between 2001 and 2004 in home purchases and improvements. Once again, we saw property taxes rise sharply, but no tax relief was in sight. (Finally, we helped organize and form a neighborhood housing community development corporation to continue this mission on an even larger scale – meaning more individual homes revitalized, but no multifamily developments – and still never saw any tax relief.)
In total, between 1994 and 2007 our family has helped secure and invest well over $750,000 in improved residential structures for predominantly low- and lower-middle-income (50 to 80 percent of median household income) residents and tenants – and still no tax relief.
With the price point for Kendall Yards proposed housing starting at 120 percent of median household income (or roughly $45,000) and unit sales prices starting around $160,000, it’s highly unlikely that the 2,275 or so annual graduates from our neighborhood’s jail will be able to afford a new condo or townhouse overlooking the river. So even though, as a community, we are subsidizing new housing development in West Central to the tune of nearly $4 million, it may not be West Central residents who can afford to buy and move in.
Our example is just one small story of how many well-meaning homeowners and landlords are doing their part in neighborhood revitalization without any form of assistance. With this multifamily property tax exemption and the combined tax increment finance district, it would be great if area landlords and low-income homeowners, who provide the bulk of affordable housing (80 percent of median household income) in the West Central neighborhood, were either granted some small share of tax relief and/or access to a low-interest loan fund for future improvements (and, for our renters and incarcerated graduates, some additional affordable housing projects).
In the future, let’s be more creative in how we share revenues and incentivize reinvestment for all property owners.