“Christopher Berry, academic director for the Center for Municipal Finance and one of the study’s authors, said it’s unfortunate that the reappraisal did not fix the overassessments.
‘After having studied a lot of jurisdictions around the country, Detroit is not the only place that has this problem. But it is one of the worst that I’ve seen,’ Berry said.”
“A researcher cited in the lawsuit found that a quarter of Detroit’s lowest valued homes would now have gone into tax foreclosure had they been accurately assessed.”
“An across the board cut of assessments for all properties value $30,000 and under (University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry says he’s found the city continues to assess its lowest-value homes at inflated rates, even after the recent re-assessment)”
“And those inflated assessments contributed directly to Wayne County’s flood of tax foreclosures, according to new research by professors Bernadette Atuahene and Christopher Berry, published last week in the UC-Irvine Law.”
“In 2015, if you’d asked property tax expert Christopher Berry about the work he did for the Cook County Assessor’s Office, he would have said it was “a textbook example of how to do policy reform.”