I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks talking about assessments. What the system does. What it does not. That’s important, because a lot of the frustration out there is rooted in misunderstandings. But explanation only gets you so far.
If people feel like the system is stacked against them, then it’s worth asking a harder question: What would it look like if we actually fixed it?
Not by blowing it up. Not by pretending market value doesn’t matter. But by addressing the parts that are clearly broken while keeping the core intact.
Because here’s the thing — New York’s assessment system, at its core, isn’t the villain people want it to be. Using market value as the basis for assessments is the only way to keep things even remotely fair across a community. If you abandon that, you end up with something far worse — neighbors in identical homes paying wildly different taxes based on when they bought or how long they’ve lived there.
That’s not a solution. That’s just a different kind of inequity.
But just because the foundation works doesn’t mean the system does.
The first — and probably most obvious — problem is how infrequently reassessments happen in a lot of places. Values drift for years, and then everything gets corrected at once. That’s where the shock comes from. Especially during an era when market value has swung aggressively upward in a matter of 3-4 years. It’s not the math. It’s the timing. If values were updated every year you wouldn’t get those six-figure jumps that send people into a panic. You’d get smaller, more predictable changes that people can actually process.
The second issue is transparency. Or more accurately, the lack of it. Most homeowners have no idea how their number was calculated unless they go out of their way to ask. That’s backwards. If the government is going to assign a value to your largest asset, it should have to show its work upfront. What sales were used, what adjustments were made, how your property compares, etc. Not after you file paperwork. Immediately.
Third, the process for challenging an assessment is technically there — but practically out of reach for a lot of people. On paper, anyone can grieve their assessment. In reality, it favors people who have time, resources, or a professional willing to take it on. That’s a problem. If you want people to trust the system, they need a real, accessible way to challenge it without feeling like they’re stepping into a legal process they don’t understand.
Then there’s the issue that nobody really talks about: Timing and presentation. The way reassessment notices are structured — especially with those tax estimates — creates an incredible amount of confusion. People see a higher value, apply last year’s rate to it, and assume their bill is about to explode. Even though that’s not how it works.
But even if you fix all of that — make reassessments more frequent, make the system more transparent, make the appeal process easier — you’re still left with the bigger issue sitting underneath everything.
Housing.
Because the pressure people are feeling right now isn’t coming from the assessment office. It’s coming from a market that’s been constrained for decades.
We didn’t build enough. Not in the 90s. Not in the 2000s. Not after the financial crisis. And now we’re dealing with the consequences.
When supply is tight, every home carries more weight. Older homes get valued like newer ones. Modest homes get pushed into price ranges that feel disconnected from reality. And when assessors update values to reflect that market, it feels like something artificial is happening — when really, it’s just the system catching up to years of underbuilding.
That’s why any serious conversation about fixing the assessment system has to include housing policy.
If you want to take pressure off assessments, you have to take pressure off the market. And the only way to do that is by adding supply. More homes. Different types of homes. Housing that actually reflects how people live today — not just what zoning codes allowed 40 years ago.
That doesn’t mean overbuilding or throwing out local control. It means recognizing that if a community refuses to grow, it’s going to feel that decision somewhere else—usually in prices, and eventually in assessments.
There are other ideas worth exploring, too. Smoothing out large increases for longtime homeowners so they don’t get hit all at once. Regionalizing assessment services so smaller towns aren’t trying to manage complex valuations with limited resources. Even experimenting with different tax structures in places where demand is consistently high.
But those are all secondary to the main issue.
If we keep treating assessments as the problem, we’re going to keep having the same conversation every few years. The numbers will change. The frustration will stay the same.
Because the system isn’t creating the pressure. It’s revealing it.
And until we deal with the supply side of housing, no amount of tweaking the assessment process is going to fix what people are actually feeling.
Thanks for reading In Focus! New columns drop every Sunday here on Substack.
