Sold Properties Research Articles

MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS APPLIED TO RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES

ABSTRACTAn interesting and promising innovation in the assessment of property for tax purposes is the application of multiple regression analysis. Sales prices are regressed on various housing characteristics, and models developed from sold properties are used to generate value estimates for unsold properties. Two important issues relating to the development of such models are (1) the extent to which real estate markets are stable in terms of structural relationships over time, and (2) the extent to which sales prices reflect actual market values. The first issue is important because it affects how current sales must be before they can be used in model development, as well as the amount of information the assessor must collect and maintain on properties. The second issue is important because it concerns the amount of measurement error in the models and the extent to which the assessor/analyst can unambiguously interpret residual variance. These issues are investigated by comparing regression models developed from a sample of properties in Eugene, Oregon, which sold in each of two well separated time periods.

Twelve Ways to Sell Property Tax Reform*

So MANY competent economists are pretty well agreed that improvement values should be taxed much less and location values should be taxed much more that property tax reform is hardly an economic issue today (1). Of course many land speculators are still trying to make the voters think it is a question that remains in the realm of debate. But the economic need for property tax reform is so overwhelming that it is winning fair consideration. Property tax reform today has become mostly a political question and a political problem-a political problem of how to get enough voters to understand which side their bread is buttered on; a political problem of how to get more politicians to believe they could win more votes at the next election if they would come out for property tax reform instead of against it; a political problem with the multi-billion dollar vested interest in land speculation fighting hard and dirty to block any change. So property tax reform won't get very far unless and until property tax reformers begin paying a lot more attention to its political aspects and give a lot more thought to what they could learn from smart politicians at City Hall and to what they might learn from their few past political successes and their many past political failures. In all the 95 years since Henry George's Progress and Poverty caused a world-wide sensation neither he nor his followers have been able to persuade even one United States city or state to apply his teaching as he taught it-not even Hawaii and not even Pittsburgh, in both of which land is still so under-assessed as compared with improvements as to more than offset (in Hawaii) or almost offset (in Pittsburgh) the partial application of the graded tax plan there. This 95-year record of almost complete failure to sell a good and muchneeded product should make it more than obvious that it is high time to try a better approach. Nobody needs a Gallup poll to prove that the property tax has surfaced as a central political issue of the 1970s, writes the director of the joint Harvard-MIT housing study. The 1972 presidential campaign

The Law and Race Relations

T HE potentialities of the law in helping to break down racial bigotry and its chief objective manifestation, discrimination, have been sorely neglected. This neglect arises from an ignorance of the role the law plays in creating and reinforcing racial attitudes,' a failure to distinguish between prejudice and discrimination, and our unhappy experience with unenforced, poorly drafted statutes. This neglect unfortunately is not shared by our southern legislators. The entire apparatus of Jim Crow is employed by them to prevent the white from ever encountering the Negro except in a role which symbolizes inferior status. Southern segregation laws are designed to emphasize this inferior status and to drive home at every opportunity the lesson that the white race is a superior one. The South has always believed that law does affect folkways. Even in the North, the law is far from neutral in the field of race relations. Negroes are penned into black ghettos in northern cities because landlords band together to prevent one of their number from selling or leasing property to nonwhites, and then include in their contracts or deeds a covenant which forbids Negro occupancy. But these restrictive covenants could not be enforced without the aid of our equity courts, and so our courts do what the legislators constitutionally could not 2-they create ghettos.

Taxation: Right of State to Sell Property of Municipality for Taxes

Taxation: Right of State to Sell Property of Municipality for Taxes

The Power to Declare a Forfeiture and Sell Property Used in Violation of a Statute

The Power to Declare a Forfeiture and Sell Property Used in Violation of a Statute