Owning property in NYC is a privilege- albeit one that comes with a hefty tax bill each year. Property taxes are essential to NYC’s bottom line - in 2015, for example, they made up 27% of the city’s $70 billion in revenue. And yet data on the specific sources of these property taxes is fairly hard to come by. That’s because New York City has done limited work to create access to property tax information on the open data platform. However, you can freely access each individual bill one-at-a-time online. When John Krauss reached out to the Department of Finance with a FOIL request for this very data, he was told it would cost “approximately 1,000 hours at a cost to you of $50.36 per hour” to get it. That’s right, 6 months of employee time and $50,000 for some lines in a table that were already online. Oy.

Not being one to take no for an answer, John wrote a PDF scraper and downloaded the PDF tax bill for each and every lot in NYC in 2015, and I can assure you, he did not spend 6 months on it! Then he worked with Chris Whong to convert these PDFs into tables and the results are at taxbills.nyc. And there you have it, a new dataset was born. As long as government keeps putting out PDFs without access to underlying data, we will have to go to the trouble to create datasets in this roundabout way.

Whong’s first look at the data showed that the sum of exemptions and abatements totaling $12.9 billion, a staggering number considering the total tax due is about $21.6 billion. But many of these tax abatements go to public agencies. Properties like parks ($1.2 billion in exemptions), and those run by the Department of Education ($926 million in exemptions), as well as the Port Authority ($913 million in exemptions) top the list. But sitting at number 6 on the list of the 156 different abatements and exemptions are Houses of Worship, totalling $476 Million. A closer look shows that religious exemptions add up to over $650 Million a year - about 1% of the City’s budget. To put that in perspective, it’s more than the exemptions that NYCHA received in 2015 ($427 million), which suggests that religious institutions have more valuable real property than our public housing stock.

With underlying data, we can take a look at these religious property tax exemptions with far more granularity. Here’s what I found:

The Types of Religious Property Tax Exemptions Available

Looking through the list of exemptions, I identified eight categories that seemed to be religious in nature: “House of Worship,” “Religious Dormitory,” “Clergy,” “Parsonage,” “Religious Mission,” “Bible,” and “Salvation Army.” Of those, House of Worship and Religious School make up the vast majority of exemptions.

Where Are These Exemptions Given?



In short, everywhere. Mapping each of these lots looks like a view up towards the heavens, but with a lot more money involved. Check out the religious tax exemptions in your neighborhood:

Clicking on any building will give you the exemption type, amount and the name of the religious institution.

There is a “Bible” exemption taken by just two properties in NYC…including one owned by Jews for Jesus



Though I see no “Torah” exemption, there is in fact a Bible Exemption! Plus, one of the two properties in NYC that is taking it could apply to either. It’s “Jews for Jesus” and the tax bill shows that they save $133,249 in taxes a year with the Bible Exemption. The other is held by the Faith Bible Seminary in Flushing.

Where does this bible exemption come from you may ask? Well State law offers the exemption if the property is used for “bible.” What does it mean to be used for “bible” with no verb? We’ll have to ask these two property owners, since all other religious institutions used other exemptions.

The Salvation Army has it’s very own Exemption!

In what seems to be a unique situation, the Department of Finance issues an exemption called the “Salvation Army” exemption to- wait you guessed it – The Salvation Army. You can see it right there on the tax bill. 44 Properties in NYC take that exemption, totaling 2.3 million dollars a year.

South Jamaica Has the Most Houses of Worship per Capita



Tax bills can also teach us about the composition of our communities and neighborhood land uses. South Jamaica, the neighborhood with the most Houses of Worship per thousand residents, has five times more per resident than NYC as a whole. They have one house of worship for every 271 residents, compared to one for every 1400 or so residents in NYC as a whole. Darker areas on the map below have more houses of worship for capita.

The top 20 neighborhoods are below:

Clergy May be Priced out of Manhattan, but there are Plenty Living in Ocean Parkway South

Though there are no shortage of Houses of Worship in Manhattan, there does seem to be a shortage of home-owning clergy members. A map exploring clergy exemptions per 1,000 residents of each neighborhood shows this acutely:

Astoundingly, only 5 clergy exemptions are taken in all of Manhattan, compared with 667 in Brooklyn and 404 in Queens. Ocean Parkway South has 2.5 Clergy Exemptions per thousand residents, a rate 20 times higher than the city average.

Religious Exemptions add up to $76 dollars per NYC resident

$650 million dollars in exemptions is nothing to sneeze at, but it adds up to about $76 dollars per resident of NYC. That means a family of four on average might pay $300 more a year in taxes to make up for the lost income. So while many religious institutions don’t charge membership fees, the cost is being passed on indirectly to everyone.

The neighborhoods receiving the largest amount of exemptions per resident are some of our wealthiest.

Wealthy neighborhoods have high land values. High land values equals high property taxes. So it might come as no surprise that the wealthiest neighborhood in NYC, the Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill, has the third largest amount of exemptions, at $610 per resident. Midtown has a higher rate per resident, but that is largely because that neighborhood has relatively few people who live there, and in addition, the property values are high. More religious areas, like Williamsburg and Borough Park also appear high on the list, due to the large number of exemptions.

Communities with Large Jewish Populations Have the Most Religious Schools per Capita

NYC has one religious school for every 14,000 residents or so, but Williamsburg has one for every 1200 (note this is the Neighborhood Tabulation Area (NTA) for Williamsburg, which has a high concentration of observant Jews).

So we’ve used these tax bills to explore both some issues about our city’s revenue, and the religious fabric of our city. Call me crazy, but I dream of a world where we can explore the fabric of our own city without having to write PDF scrapers. A world where it does not cost $50,000 for the City to write some data to a file. But until then, we’ll just have to rely on our passionate citizens to keep pushing the ball forward, making “public” data actually public because its the right thing to do. That sounds almost religious… wait a minute, I’ll be right back.

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Raw data from taxbills.nyc

Neighborhood Tabulation Area data found here.

Lot outlines for churches and BBLS were found in PLUTO data here.