In Brookside, longtime residents are feeling the squeeze of Jackson County assessments

During Kansas City’s warmer months, unless it is raining or unbearably hot outside, several residents of the 600 block of 70th Street meet on Wednesday evenings at 5 o’clock out on the grass island that separates the north and south sides of their Brookside street.

They plop down on folding chairs carried over from garages, secure their adult beverages in netted cup holders, and chew over the neighborhood news for an hour or two. It is an older crowd — longtime residents of the block. How long?

“37 years,” said Sarah Hancock.

“50 years,” said Rodd Staker.

“We moved here in 1968,” said Phil Chaney. “So that’ll be 55 years in October.”

Lately, talk on the island has turned to property values. Assessment season, which occurs in Jackson County during odd-numbered years, is upon us. The county has been sending out notices informing homeowners what it believes their property is now worth. Jackson County Assessment Office director Gail McCann Beatty warned in May that the average increase would be around 30 percent.

But over in this subdivision of Brookside known as Armour Fields, the average seems to far exceed that.

“We’re up 78%,” said Staker.

“86%,” said Chaney.

“Nearly 93%,” said Jane Fowler.

Their soon-to-skyrocket tax bills, they believe, are the outcome of an appraisal process that’s heavy on guesswork and light on nuance — one that fails to distinguish between homes that have undergone extensive recent remodels and those where the kitchens, bathrooms and electrical systems look and function much the same as they did when they were built back in the 1930s.

“We all know the value of houses in this neighborhood have gone up since the pandemic,” said Ron Fuhrken, who’s been in his Brookside house for 46 years. “We expected an increase. But we haven’t done anything to our home in the last 30 years other than painting and general upkeep. For us to go up 71 percent in two years — that just seems ridiculous.”

As county officials have stated — and as many homeowners will quietly acknowledge — the county for decades undervalued residential properties. Starting in 2019, assessment officials began the process of bringing some of those valuations up to market value. Outrage ensued.

Both Legal Aid of Western Missouri and the American Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuits against the county on behalf of low-income residents in neighborhoods like Ivanhoe and the Westside, whose assessments doubled or nearly tripled from the previous year. Those higher valuations targeted predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, the lawsuit argued.

There are approximately 300,000 parcels in Jackson County, and state law mandates that each one be reassessed every two years. But to individually appraise each property every other year is, for all intents and purposes, financially impossible.

“We would have to hire thousands of new employees, and it would take several years,” McCann Beatty told The Star. “Even small counties don’t do that.”

Instead, Jackson County relies on a mass appraisal process that inputs facts about each property — square footage, lot size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and which of the county’s 1,388 “market areas” it is located in — into a computerized system that spits out a valuation. To enhance the accuracy of that information, the county this year added what McCann Beatty called a “parcel by parcel review,” something it had not done in recent assessment cycles.

“Most work done on homes isn’t done with a permit, so we have no way of knowing if someone has added a bedroom or removed a wall to make two bedrooms into one,” McCann Beatty said. “So, this time around we sent representatives out to each property in the county and asked them to fill out and send back to us a blue card with information about bedrooms, square footage, things like that.”

The county also outsourced the 2023 assessments, paying $18 million to a third party, Tyler Technologies, to update the process and carry it out. Anticipating that somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 homeowners would appeal their property valuations, the county opened a downtown office at 1300 Washington St. for “informal reviews” where homeowners who wish to contest their valuations can speak to assessors and real estate brokers, start the appeal process and potentially come to a binding agreement that lowers their assessments.

Sharp increases

There were reasons for the residents of Armour Fields to expect a hefty hike this time around.

For one thing, the county didn’t do much in the way of re-assessing in 2021 due to COVID. It is also generally accepted that homes in Brookside, now a desirable area in a still-scorching real estate market, have been undervalued by the county over the last few decades.

In Armour Fields, young families, some of them fleeing coastal cities and armed with coastal salaries, have been pouring in since the pandemic, driving prices up. Contractor signs dot the lawns of the neighborhood, a sign of dated kitchens, bathrooms and back patios being updated with modern amenities.

But not everybody in the neighborhood is a software engineer relocating from Seattle. Some are what you might call house-rich and cash-poor. They purchased their homes decades ago when they were affordable for buyers on a middle-class salary. Now those homeowners are retired. Some of them are on fixed incomes.

“There are 780 homes in our neighborhood, and about half of them are owned by people over the age of 60,” said Mike Jantsch, president of the Armour Fields Homes Association. “And I’ve been contacted by a lot of people in the last month who are over 65, retired, and worried about these increases.”

Acute assessment increases on primary residences aren’t lawful in several other states. Michigan and Arkansas cap annual assessment increases at 5%. New Mexico’s is 3%. Texas’ is 10%. South Carolina law prohibits taxable value on a home from increasing more than 15 percent over a five-year period. Kansas offers a 75% property tax refund to certain homeowners 65 years or older.

But Missouri has no such laws.

Asked to comment on the idea that, although home prices may have been undervalued in years past, it’s unfair to jack up assessments on homeowners by 70 or 80 percent over two years, McCann Beatty said, “Statutorily, we are required to determine market value on all county properties. We’re not allowed by law to do it gradually in pieces. It simply says to get these properties to market value.”

She also said that caps don’t always work the way they’re intended because neighborhoods appreciate at different rates. “If there’s a 10% cap, and Neighborhood A appreciates at 5% and Neighborhood B appreciates at 20%, you have a situation where Neighborhood A is paying its fair share but Neighborhood B isn’t.”

The Missouri General Assembly did recently send a homestead exemption bill to Gov. Mike Parson’s desk that would freeze property tax rates on the primary residences of homeowners 65 years and older, though Parson hasn’t yet signed it. Supporters see it as a way to protect seniors from being displaced; opponents say it’s yet another gratuitous transfer of wealth to the Baby Boomer generation.

McCann Beatty said that although she is supportive of the bill, it is “very much flawed.”

“I think most assessors in this state would say a homestead exemption is something we need,” she said. “But we have to make it fair not just for property owners but also school districts that rely on that tax revenue. The way this bill is written, the language is so incredibly vague that I don’t believe it could be implemented even if the governor signs it.”

She went on: “It doesn’t give counties across the state any direction. We don’t have data in this county for who is 65 or older and where they live. Also, you have to qualify for Social Security to get it. But what about Missouri teachers that don’t get Social Security? Can they participate? So, we’d need time and resources to put a program and process in place to verify all this information.”

Fighting it

Unlike many of her neighbors on her Armour Fields block, Jane Fowler is not retired. She is a Realtor and a relative newcomer, having moved to the block with her husband six years ago.

“In Johnson County, where we were before this, we got a letter with our assessments that listed 4-6 other addresses in the neighborhood that had roughly the same square footage and same bedrooms and bathrooms so we could compare and contrast what our home was worth compared to those homes,” Fowler said. “In Jackson County, it’s just, ‘Here’s your previous value, this is the new one, this is the percentage going up.’ There’s no information about how they came to that conclusion. So my question is, what are all these numbers based on?”

McCann Beatty said part of the goal in overhauling the assessment process this year was to put in place a system where homeowners receive more “comps” — comparisons of other homes in the area similar to theirs — and information explaining why they were assessed what they were. “But we are are still getting those components up and running,” she said. “I would add, though, that if you do come in (to contest your assessment) you can see those comps then.”

Fowler said that when she went to the assessment office a few weeks ago to contest her 93% jump, she arrived armed with comps as well as a Realtor’s fluency with the topic that the average citizen doesn’t possess. But she says she still faced heavy resistance.

“I had to talk to three different people, and after all that I was given just one comp as evidence, and it was one of the highest-selling homes in the neighborhood in the last few years,” she said. “It sold at $304 per square foot while the average home in this neighborhood sells for $227 per square foot. So why are they cherry-picking and comparing my home to the most expensive possible home?”

She continued: “It needs to be an apples-to-apples comparison. The county should be using averages, not extremes, for comps. When Realtors sell a house, we don’t use extremes when we price it.”

Fowler left the assessment office without a reduction in her valuation. But she’s headed back soon, and several of her neighbors on 70th Street may join her. She’s been educating them on how to read comps, and suggesting questions they might ask when they go. Some have hired their own appraisers.

“You know, if we didn’t sit out here every week, I think most of us would have probably just not done anything about it,” Martha Staker said. “I barely knew what a comp was. But you start to hear all these numbers, and it seems like a bigger deal. And I think together we all feel a little stronger.”

McCann Beatty shared some advice for those who do come down looking to get their assessments lowered. Ask a real estate broker to give you comparable sales to your home. If they try to charge you for it, call another one. Don’t use Zillow (it’s not as accurate). If your home is a recent purchase, bring your appraisal or closing statement. If your home hasn’t been updated, bring photos that prove it. She discouraged hiring an appraiser, saying that, in most cases, a simple conversation with one of the county’s real estate brokers is all that’s needed.

“We want people to tell us if we didn’t get it right,” McCann Beatty said. “This is a new system we’re using. Maybe we need to tweak the boundaries for a market area on the next round of assessments. Schedule an appointment. We’re open 8 to 5 every day. Our brokers will review the information and try to come to a conclusion.

“We see this as a partnership,” she said. “Come correct us.”