Amount of Shelby County Taxes Waived
The following are the yearly amounts of Shelby County taxes waived by EDGE (and before EDGE, the Memphis and Shelby County Industrial Board, Downtown Memphis Commission, the Memphis Health and Educational Facilities Board, the Shelby County Health Educational Facilities Board and the Industrial Boards of Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, and Millington.
These waived revenues include significant percentages that would otherwise go to schools.
The total amount of taxes waived over a 10-year period is $474 million.
2015 – $ 48,706,519
2014 – $ 48,703,213
2013 – $ 49,907,698
2012 – $ 46,428,979
2011 – $ 50,031,726
2010 – $ 48,270,278
2009 – $ 49,393,717
2008 – $ 40,452,509
2007 – $ 43,105,435
2006 – $ 49,269,457
Social Mobility
The probability that a child who was in the lowest 20% of income earners in 1996 would reach the highest 20% by 2010. In other words, a child grew up in Salt Lake City is 4.4 times more likely to make the change than a child in Memphis.
11.5% – Salt Lake City
11.2% – San Francisco
10.4% – Seattle
10.4% – San Diego
10.3% – Pittsburgh
9.8% – Boston
9.7% – New York
9.6% – Los Angeles
9.5% – Washington, DC
9.0% – Minneapolis
8.9% – Portland
8.8% – Oklahoma City
8.4% – Houston
8.3% – Denver
7.8% – Phoenix
7.7% – Philadelphia
7.5% – U.S. Average
7.4% – Miami
6.9% – Kansas City
6.9% – Austin
6.6% – San Antonio
6.5% – Baltimore
6.4% – Dallas
6.2% – Nashville
6.1% – Chicago
5.6% – St. Louis
5.6% – Milwaukee
5.5% – Cincinnati
5.2% – Cleveland
5.1% – Detroit
5.1% – Columbus
4.8% – Indianapolis
4.3% – Charlotte
4.0% – Atlanta
2.6% – Memphis
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More evidence of how life in Memphis sucks, especially for kids who have little hope for the future.
Once again Memphis is at the bottom of the barrel.
So what solutions do you propose, zippy?
So the EDGE board decides what we need is yet another PILOT program. Can’t see the writing on the wall.
What are we supposed to take from this data dump? There’s nothing here that links these two categories. Also, the social mobility figure is subjective by itself. There are loads of factors that go into those figures that are independent of tax levels.
We may as well compare the number of pizza places to social mobility or the number of off-kilter bricks in Main Street to social mobility.
I’m not sure what George is saying except that social mobility is not directly related to the amount of tax freezes, which is true.
Your social mobility is measured by income change, but the reason for change in income is not stated except to suggest that more money for schools is the answer. This doesn’t account for social services to families, housing improvements and neighborhood uplift. I know that Smart City knows this and regularly opines such. My concern is how school decisions can be made in concert with social services, housing and neighborhood uplift decisions.
You list the dollar amount of property tax frozen each year for past 10 years. Does data exist to give annual totals of property tax that is unfrozen, which I assume was a major aim of the original freeze?
I think what we can take from this and other data rankings is that Memphis ranks among the very worst places in the entire US in most categories of economic activity and quality of life.
This ranking of upward mobility is particularly bad. We are far worse than even Detroit. More than depressing, simply dismal.
The mobility figure is subjective and mostly meaningless. Is it based on local incomes, state incomes, regional incomes, national incomes? Why pick 1996 as the baseline year? Are all children alive in 1996 factored in, or just those of a certain age? If we consider children to be those < 18 yrs old, children in 1996 could range in age from 20 to 38 today. I would expect that 38-yr-old would have a higher income than a 20-yr-old. So, that figure could be skewed by higher populations of younger children. Also, how are in-migration and ex-migration accounted for? This doesn't even begin to delve into the factors that drive personal income.
Whether the rankings are flawed or subjective is really not the point here. The fact is Memphis always seems to rank among the worst, or at the bottom in every survey or poll. Perception is reality in the minds of most people and these survey results cause damage to the already tattered image of Memphis as a hell hole city.
Here’s the link: As long as taxes are being waived that would otherwise be spent to educate students or train workers, we struggle to compete. As we’ve written before, in cities, all things are related. This is yet another example of that.
If the mobility figure is meaningless, it sure begs the question of why it’s been reported by every major media in the U.S., particularly New York Times. And please go back and read what the social mobility numbers show – you mangled it. And then put it into the context of the other cities. As we said, there’s one-fourth of the opportunity to move from the bottom 20% to the top 20% in the cities had the top of ranking.
Gene:
Our big concern has been for some time that with the loose PILOT rules that we now have, employers have an opening to never pay taxes.
How in the world is this measure of social monility “subjective.”
Smart City, I’m sure you would like to make the link that local tax breaks have been the main culprit for Memphis’ lower incomes in relation to other metro areas. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But, you didn’t show that here. All large metro areas do something similar to what Memphis and Shelby County have done. You didn’t talk about the size of tax breaks for those other metros and how that is related to the mobility figure. For example, would each city in your mobility list be in the same order if tax breaks were lined up from top to bottom? Is the magnitude between them all the same? If SLC has 4x greater mobility, does it have 4x less tax breaks?
You’ve not proved a mathematical correlation here — you’re relying on two totally separate things to make this jump. And, you’re trying to assign causation to your mythical correlation.
Perhaps your conclusion is valid and perhaps it’s not. But, you didn’t prove either one here. May as well have linked the number of pizza places to mobility for all the good it did.
If you’ve noticed, most of the time when we post Data Points, we don’t necessarily point out what they mean. We just provide the data and people can interpret it within their own experience or context. We’ve explained ours. If a major metric for economic development programs isn’t increases in opportunity, we’ll continue with our policies that equate real estate development with economic development and continue for all of our economic metrics to languish.
And all large metros do not do something like our PILOT program. In fact, in a 20 year period, just in Tennessee, Memphis//Shelby County approved more tax freezes than all the metro areas combined – times seven. We’ve written about this repeatedly over the past decade.
George, you are correct, but I think Smart City only wanted to say that fewer freezes would have freed money for education, but as you suggest we do not know the reason for higher social mobility in other cities.
Smart City, are you saying that tax freezes never end and we never receive the benefit of the freeze except for the dubious employment/wage pledges, which may actually accrue to counties outside of Shelby?
Gene:
What we’re saying is that with the policy (which did not exist when PILOTs were authorized by City Council and County Board of Commissioners) that allows distribution centers to extend their tax freezes when tenants change and with the new policies that allow companies like FedEx and IP to double the length of their tax freezes, the original program has been fundamentally altered and not to the benefit of residential taxpayers as more of the tax burden is shifted to them.
George, you are the only one here making a causation argument for these two data points. Still wanting to know how the mobility measure is subjective. I am beginning to think you don’t know what the word means.
The Commercial Appeal reports 3 more violent deaths in Memphis over the weekend including downtown and Cooper Young area.
Memphis is the American crime capital snd not much more.
Very sad.