“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.”
“’Berrios issued a virtually identical press release in 2015, and it turned out to be completely false,’ said Berry, a longtime critic of Berrios’ assessment methods. ‘Why would anyone believe him this time? If they really have done what they claim, they should immediately release all their data and code for the public to see.’
Still, Berry said, dramatically higher assessments in booming areas of the city like Edgewater ‘could be an indication that the model could be getting more accurate. … It’s virtually impossible not to improve their model.’”
“’Everyone — even the assessor — now agrees that the system is regressive,’ Berry said. ‘But I wanted to know how much money is at stake. The answer is easily in the billions. These dollars are being taken from some of our citizens who can least afford it and used to pay the taxes of the wealthy. It’s unconscionable.’”
“The most valuable homes in Chicago were undertaxed by an estimated $800 million over a five-year period, with the bottom 70 percent of houses picking up the burden, according to a new report from the University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance.”
“It is the first attempt to quantify the impact of well-documented disparities in the county’s assessment process, a topic that has dominated the re-election campaign of besieged Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios. The report will provide more fodder for his two challengers, Fritz Kaegi and Andrea Ralia, who are trying to unseat Berrios in the March 20 Democratic primary.”