Duggan Announces Reduction In Residential Property Assessments

DETROIT (WWJ/AP) — Mayor Mike Duggan announced a drop in residential property assessments for about 95 percent of Detroit residents after years of cost complaints from angry homeowners.

Assessment values — which help determine tax rates — will fall from 5 to 15 percent for most of Detroit's 220,000 residential properties, though 5 percent will face a 5- to 15-percent increase.

The property assessment overhaul follows a 2014 effort to make Detroit more appealing for homeowners.

Buying a home in the city will lock new homeowners into a taxable value based on the lower assessment, Duggan said Monday at a news conference.

"This should raise property values in Detroit, which is going to make the need for mortgages that much more critical," he said. "If you're thinking about buying a house, I would say this is the year to do it because it's very unlikely we're going to see assessment reductions like this next year."

Duggan said two-thirds of homeowners will enjoy a 15 percent decline.

He lauded the new reductions and implored those interested to purchase a home in Detroit. Duggan said it's "very unlikely" that assessment reductions of this scale will happen next year, though he announced last year that residential property assessment rates would drop by 5 percent to 20 percent in 2015.

The reductions follow years of complaints from homeowners that assessments didn't match the market value of those homes.

"People said to me, 'this is going to be terrible, isn't it going to hurt the city of Detroit's finances?'" Duggan said. "In fact, it's had exactly the opposite result."

Duggan said that even though declining assessment values means a decline in tax revenue for the city, that loss is being made up by homeowners now paying their property taxes on time. He said 78 percent of homeowners are paying their taxes on time.

"We've brought the assessments down to fairer levels," Duggan said. "More people are staying in their homes, more people are avoiding foreclosure, more people are paying their taxes. So this is a case where doing the right thing for individual homeowners has turned out to be the right thing for the finances of the city of Detroit."

Chief Assessor Gary Evanko and his staff reviewed assessments for two years before the current mayoral reduction announcement.

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