AVI and the Formation of the Philadelphia Crosstown Coalition BY JEFF HORNSTEIN In its nearly 50-year history, QVNA has on occasion formed or joined coalitions with other civic associations to exert influence on issues of importance beyond our neighborhood. Examples include: the epic battle to prevent the construction of the Crosstown Expressway down South Street; the fight to prevent a casino from being sited along the Delaware River in Pennsport; and the successful effort to demand formal neighborhood participation in the drafting of Philadelphia’s reformed Zoning Code. Typically coalitions form around a single issue, a campaign is waged, and when the issue is resolved, the coalition dissipates. This was the case with the Crosstown Expressway and “Casino Free.” However, perhaps because Zoning Code Reform (ZCR) was truly a citywide effort, impacting every single neighborhood. And perhaps because it was a campaign for something rather than simply against something, the group of civic organizations that initially demanded a seat at the ZCR table formed a durable organization that has long outlived the initial issue. That organization is the Philadelphia Crosstown Coalition, and I am honored to serve as its chair. The nucleus of “The Crosstown,” as it is commonly called by many, included QVNA, Logan Square Neighbors Association, Society Hill Civic Association, and Center City Residents Association. It soon grew to comprise about 10 organizations. Its representatives sat at the ZCR table for nearly four years and hashed out some very technical details about how to classify the many land uses that shape the very fabric of our city and its very diverse neighborhoods. When the code was signed into law by then-Mayor Michael Nutter in 2012, the civic leaders who participated felt like they had achieved something pretty big and important - true citizen input into a very complex policymaking process. Soon thereafter, a group of us were sitting around a conference table in a law office in center city that had become the de facto war-room of the coalition, and someone said “Well that was gratifying, what’s next?” And as I recall, I said something about a then-obscure proposal by the Nutter administration to overhaul the city’s property tax system, the so-called “Actual Value Initiative” or AVI. Though no one had really heard this three-letter term before, I assured everyone it would be as impactful, if not more so, than Zoning Code Reform. We quickly rebranded ourselves as the Crosstown Coalition of Taxpayers (CCT) and began to solicit information about AVI. We knew that Nutter had taken aim at the Bureau of Revision of Taxes (BRT), an opaque agency responsible for not only assessing property values, but also for hearing appeals of its valuations. Regardless of one’s views on the BRT’s efficacy, 20 January 2018
one thing was clear: there hadn’t been a true citywide property reassessment in many years. Despite profound changes to the real estate landscape in the city, homes in neighborhoods like Queen Village were assessed for purposes of taxation at values wildly at odds with market values. For example, my home on the 300 block of Queen Street was valued by the BRT at $75,000, though I paid roughly four times that; the valuation hadn’t changed for at least a decade. The CCT began to analyze the data and realized that the assessments were an absolute mess, totally inconsistent across neighborhoods, across comparable properties, in pretty much every way possible. Since a city’s creditworthiness is, in part, based on the aggregate value of its real property ratables, it makes sense to get it right. So at first many of us were in favor of AVI – let’s just make sure our assessments are done professionally and accurately. Nutter sensibly split the assessment and appeal functions, placing the former in the newly created Office of Property Assessment (OPA). He hired Richie McKeithen, a smart and experienced guy from D.C. with a good reputation, to be his chief assessment officer. So far, so good. The CCT met with McKeithen in August 2012 and asked lots of questions about the process of reassessing the nearly 600,000 properties across the 135 square miles of Philadelphia, from the Great Northeast to South Philly, from the Delaware waterfront to Cobbs Creek – that is, a massive, highly variegated set of neighborhoods, some of which were growing, others declining, others virtually stagnant – at least from the point of view of real estate markets. My notes from that meeting state: McKeithen and his team graciously fielded nearly 1.5 hours of questions from the civic leaders, on both the technical aspects of the assessment process, as well as policy issues. McKeithen pledged that his office would do its best to educate taxpayers about the entire process of assessment, emphasizing that his office’s function was to implement policies, not make them. McKeithen was also quick to state that his office is responsible for determining property values in the City of Philadelphia, but is not responsible for determining the property tax rate or tax policy. He urged the members of the coalition to educate the citizenry that the two are separate matters, and not to fuse discontent about tax rates to the work of his department. We were fortunate to have a veteran retired mass appraisal consultant among our ranks, so we knew exactly what questions to ask. We learned that McKeithen was under tremendous pressure to assess all 579,000 properties in less than two years, and that Nutter intended to implement the new tax regime all at
