Urban3 mapping taxable value and land use

2:17:45David, you ready to start? Yeah, I'm ready to start. I'm ready to start. I don't know where the other board members are.

2:17:54Well if they were on my list they can. If they want on the list, they can't.

2:18:07Okay. Time's of essence though.

2:18:12Good morning, uh, or or good afternoon, David Engel, Planning, Development, and Economic Growth Director. I am very happy today to introduce Joe Minnakozi. He is the principal of Urban 3. Urban 3 is a advanced urban planning consultancy. And what they do is they actually use our data and using a proprietary model, they three-dimensionally map the land use implications for financial health. So I'm gonna turn it over to Joe now and

2:18:42I think you'll find the presentation provocative and informative. Thank you.

2:18:46All right. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. Um I'm from Asheville, North Carolina. I don't know if y'all have been to Asheville. I don't know

2:18:55I got a daughter in um Flat rock. Oh below Ashville.

2:18:59Oh all right, did you go to Asheville when it looked like this? This is Asheville from the nineteen nineties. Asheville was the second largest city in North Carolina and it fell flat on its face in the nineteen twenties. And we essentially bored it up. Um this is a shot of Asheville from nineteen ninety-six. Um and our attitude was we weren't a city, we're rural mountain people, we don't care about what what our downtown is, this isn't who what we want is a community. I ended up working for this real estate developer. His name is uh Julian Price. Um, if you visited Asheville and uh um

2:19:30gone to some of our restaurants or or uh entertainment venues, we're responsible for a lot of those. So what we were doing was putting 25% of his wealth into starting businesses and 75% into starting business, uh build fixing buildings. And it was real simple stuff. This was the old Asheville Heart Hotel that we converted into apartments. Also started the Mellowprops bookstore in the basement of it. What we were doing was essentially understanding how cities are operating, but trying to explain these to folks. What does it matter

2:20:00for you? What does it matter for everybody behind me, what you do here in your community? What does it matter for you all when you make budget decisions? You just had a uh a great conversation about that. And a lot of things are linked to what we ask for as a community and what we have to pay for. Very similar for real estate development. And I raise that question to you because uh we're a twenty five billion dollar or twenty-five million dollar real estate development company in the city of Asheville. So what does that mean to the citizens? And if you look up the word incorporate in the Oxford American Dictionary, it says to constitute a company,

2:20:30a city or other organization is a legal corporation. So by law Um for the city attorney. The city's incorporated, Pasco County is incorporated, the state of Florida is incorporated. And in fact, when Joe Biden was vice president, he said this on the Stephen Colbert Show: the United States is the largest corporation in the world. This is the way the American system of government operates. It's essentially a corporate government, a social corporation, if you will. It has to have a cash flow. So my city at $14 billion, that's the taxable value of Asheville,

2:21:01is seven times the value of Ted Turner. Does Ted Turner just look at Facebook and make decisions? Does Ted Turner just listen to some random complaints and make a decision? Of course not. He's taking that feedback, but he's also looking at the data on what he can afford as a business, right? This is business and how you operate your community. So my city, the state, I don't know if you know this, the state made it illegal for my city to annex land. So those acres are all that we have. We're the only city in the state of North Carolina that can't annex land, by the way. Uh thank you, State of North Carolina.

2:21:31Um but that's how our state operates. So those those widgets, those components of dirt are essentially all that we have. And we should look at it like a product. Uh when when you talk to farmers, farmers all talk in agricultural terms about economics of agriculture. So what's the crop yield per acre, the labor per acre, the water per acre, stuff like that. So this is a building that we rehabbed. Um thank you, City of Asheville, for the street tree uh the the the the street furniture. Um somebody actually accused us of being subsidized because the city did the streetscape project and we're like, all

2:22:01right. Fair enough. We didn't pay for that, right? The garbage can, the bike rack, two benches and the street tree. We put in retail at the ground floor, office at the second floor, and residential above that. So we took the taxable value from three hundred thousand to eleven million. So what the community got was three thousand five hundred What's that?

2:22:19Can we say that again?

2:22:23Which which one? W uh we to we put in retail, office, and residential and took the taxable value from three hundred thousand to eleven million. That represents 3,500% more taxes on that property. That entity was there, that crop was there. We just fixed it, right? And in fixing it, we pay more taxes. So go out and buy three thousand five hundred percent more garbage cans. We don't care. And again, this bias that people have about what revenue generation is and where it comes from, people would say to me, Well, Joe, that's $11 million. We

2:22:54have got this Walmart that is $20 million. Fair enough, that's double the value, right? If you just look at that number, that's double the value. But we didn't realize that it took thirty-four acres of our farm to make that crop happen versus point two acres of our building. So it's really apples and oranges if you're taking the gross value, right? So per acre, apples to apples, we're producing a hundred times more property taxes. Double the sales taxes. A lot more residents obviously and more jobs. Well what I found in

2:23:24doing this math is that a lot of people take biases toward the math. And they look at gross numbers without doing a comparative analytic to see apples to apples. Do you all get that? This is just if you stack them up side by side, which would you rather do? So you're getting more jobs, more residents, more revenue and less land. I want you to realize this isn't scary math here. This is basic th uh middle school uh mathematics. So think of it this way. If if I was to say we've got these cars

2:23:54here and and I own this Ford pickup truck that gets 650 miles per tank. What would be your reaction if I said to get 650 miles per tank? You know that sounds weird, right? We just say, oh Joe, all tanks are different sizes. We don't do tanks. We do gallons. And you say miles per gallon, the numbers just changed. And we should all be driving BMW asetas. Sorry to the Prius people, but BMWs are more ex uh. It is also a little bit more dangerous. If you have a head-on on that thing, you're pretty much dead. But um, you know, it's the numbers show it's 70 miles per gallon, it's

2:24:24more efficient. So we do this for a $3 commodity, we should do this for a million dollar commodity, right? Understand what you've got. And by the way, Pasco County can't annex the next county over. That land is all you've got. So we've done this all across the country, forty-one different states, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. And when you stack up the numbers, this is what you see. For every dollar of single family tax somebody out in the county is paying to the county, their brother or sister in the prime city is paying about five times that to the same county. Here's the Walmart, there's the mall. This is a two-story

2:24:55building, a three-story building, and a six-story building. So I'm not showing anything that's in the high-rise code here. This is all below high-rise. But it shows you as you stack your stories and as you mix your uses, you build potency in your community. Or another lesson here is our great-grandparents used to build this stuff because it made economic sense. We've sort of gotten away from that without understanding the economic consequences. And when I first started doing this stuff about ten years ago, people used to say to me, they're like, dude, what's your problem? Why do you hate Walmart? And that was the takeaway that like because I have Walmart

2:25:25on there, everybody's got one, right? Um is the assessor here? In the room? I

2:25:30hope so. He's supposed to be here.

2:25:32Okay. Um Stepper

2:25:34Two

2:25:34is here, but I presented at the International Association of Assessing Officers Conference. I don't know if you all hang out with assessors on your daily basis, but it was probably the squarest conference I've ever been to. No offense. Just a bunch of math nerds. They're super awesome. It makes a planning conference feel like Burning Man. Um but This guy got up at eight thirty in the morning and did this amazing presentation on how cheap Walmarts are. Let that wash over you for a second. I mean, I'm thinking this is incredibly brilliant. You've got 3,000 assessors in the room, and

2:26:04you prove you have a cheap building. Assessors are agnostic. If it's low value, it's low value. It's not their fault. This is how the system operates, right? So I thought that was smart. Now, As a former staff from a government when I was a zoning administrator in West Pull and Beach, I was sort of having a coronary because I was like, how is this guy getting away with it? Like he's basically saying, I'm gonna pay the lowest taxes in your community and you're gonna be okay with it, right? So I went up to the microphone and I asked them, I said, Mr. Terrell, what's the useful life of one of your buildings? And he goes, fifteen,

2:26:35twenty years, we designed the building to depreciate it as fast as possible. We'll pay as little taxes as possible on the way out. We'll build another building to depreciate again. We start that cycle over. Again, don't hate the player, hate the game. But you better understand the game if you're gonna play it, right? So is that good for you? For your corporation, is a 20 year commitment good for you? Make sure you're balancing that out. And if it is, great. But a twenty year commitment is the life cycle of a cat. We at least mourn the passing of a cat. This is a joke, it's okay to laugh. I

2:27:06I'm I'm making this point because you have to think of the longevity of your corporation. So if you can't see what's going on in your corporation, if you can't see the money that's leaking out of your bucket, you don't know what to fix it, how or how to fix it. Um You know, as I was talking with your planning department, there's uh A presentation I did last year where I I talk about can you see finance? And I made a joke about how to see things. Um and I don't know if you know this about puffins, but they how did y you ever ask how do puffins

2:27:37find sardines? Um puffins find sardines because they they can smell farts. Um And what puffins do is they're going after the sardines and what the sardines are doing is they're eating krill. The krill are eating phytoplankton and when krill eat phytoplankton they off gas or fart. Um and so a a scientist figured out, well, I can ma I can map this, right? So this is the map of the ocean on the left, and on the right is when the phytoplankton are off-gassing. You can see with the map. What's

2:28:08going on, right? That's what the puffins see, right? They can visualize that off-gassing and that's when they show up and go after the sardines. So our attitude as a company is if I can do that in science, can we scientifically map and model your community to see what's going on? The reason why I did this is back in my community, I've got two voters out in the county for every one voter in the city. And back in 2010, when our when our state stepped in and attacked our city, they actually took our water system away. They took our airport away. They

2:28:38threatened to liquidate our charter. Um but probably the most insulting thing was when our state representative called my city a cesspool of sin. And You know, I'm on the Downtown Association Board and we're like, really, you know, play your politics, but are you really gonna do that with our community? So this is my county, 450 square miles. I've got non-taxable out here. This is Mount Mitchell. This is Mount Pisgas. They don't pay me taxes, I don't care about it, right? Just to be crude. I have got green is low value, purple is high value. So up here in in

2:29:08uh Big IV you can see it is green, it is low value, but you look at this big purple splotch right there, that is the Biltmore estate. The Biltmore estate that one house is worth one hundred million dollars. You all have a hundred million dollar house in this town? No. Of course not. And when the Cecils show up at our community, we all genuflect,

2:29:29But a hundred million dollar house is really an unfair way of looking at it because it is an eight thousand acre parcel with a hundred and eighty thousand square foot house on it, right? A hundred and eighty thousand square foot house, that's like the biggest gas tank ever. And I know that because it's the biggest house. So rather than total value, let's look at value per acre, the map just changes. And I'll show it to you in 3D. Can you all tell me where downtown Asheville is? It's that big purple mountain shooting off the map. So we showed this at our state of

2:29:59the downtown address to our County. friends and and cousins to our city. peers and we asked them, we said, Well that's fine that we're producing wealth for your community. How about a thank you card? How about a box of chocolates? We're more than happy to produce that wealth for our community. Just don't hate on us. Let's have better politics in our community. So on on the right you can also see our little cousin of Black Mountain. That's a little village of thirteen thousand people. Y'all can see where its downtown is right there, popping up off the map. So my f for my friends that live out there

2:30:29in Fairview. Who think they pay a lot of taxes, they have no idea what we pay in county taxes in the downtown. So it's sort of on us. To communicate that and share that with everybody so that we're all in this together. This community needs to survive together. Remember, I'm a shareholder of my county. So our attitude is to show this and not just talk about it. Visualize what's going on economically in your community. And I would also argue that most people don't understand or they misunderstand municipal economics. You all know this when

2:30:59you when you deal with conversations. I sat here through this meeting with folks asking for They ought to pay for their roads. So here's the question, does their community and their neighborhood actually cover the cost of the road that they're sitting on? That's a really simple question. Do the math on it and see. Um this is by the way, when I was working in Florida, this is a book that I found in a garage sale. This is an elementary school Florida textbook from nineteen fifty nine. It's called the City, the Town, and the Country. So you've got the city on the right, here's

2:31:29the town, and there's the country. You can see on the spine it says T, this is the teacher's guide. This is the third grade textbook. So, kindergarten, you learn about your house, first grade the school, second grade the neighborhood, third grade you learn about regional planning. Did y'all do that?

2:31:45Nineteen fifty nine. This was a class textbook here in Florida. Um in the book, this is for the teacher section. So, for y'all are teachers, to talk to the citizens, the child the children in the class, learning about all this stuff, you have to explain what's going on in the budget and how it operates. I love this. While patterns vary from state to state, counties are usually responsible for education, library, health, welfare, agriculture, conservation, et cetera. In studying the functions performed by your county, you will no doubt find there's a duplication of services,

2:32:15an overlapping of jurisdictions, and a lack of coordination between the county and the local communities within it. Do you all have that problem?

2:32:28Mm-hmm. To be part of this. You are coordinating, but in most places you don't do that. I remember when I was working in West Palm Beach and the county told me as we were working on downtown that they're doing work for the county, not the city. And as somebody that's a a county taxpayer, I was kind of floored that they would say they would have that attitude. in Palm Beach County. against the city of West Palm Beach. But here's the lesson plant. It's one of those Dick and Jane kind of books. You can see the coloring what's going on. It's painfully white, I'll say that. It's also a little bit misogynistic. The girls

2:32:58are shoved out in the hallway for some reason, but you see what's going on. There's a new school gets built, there's even more kids that go to school. So in blue right here, this is what you ask your third graders. Give four good reasons for building a new school. And your kids talk about what? infrastructure. We should have another desk. You know, equity. Everybody should have a desk and a space in the room. Maybe get another teacher. This is about how you build things, right? On the right-hand side, you read about Mr. Canfield. He lived next door to the Allens. He didn't want a new school. He said our taxes are too high now. If we

2:33:28build a new school, we will need more teachers and everything else. We will pay still higher taxes. That is indeed true. When you buy stuff, it costs money, right? Can't just have everything we want here, folks. So in in blue, this is what you ask your third graders, why would some people be against paying higher taxes? Third graders used to have this conversation. We've gone to a place now where we've lost this ability to have a civic understanding of how things operate. We turn things into fights without understanding and let's kinda have a rational

2:33:58discussion about this to understand what's happening. And and and I think the main point in this book that was my takeaway is is this point here. Remember too that many children, whether urban and rural, and regardless of region, are tragically limited their knowledge of their world, and their world is largely the space in which they live and operate.

2:34:20Uh paying for roads. uh that are outside uh the city attorney made uh the county attorney made this made this point that you Even though you're in a private road situation, there is a public road system that gets you to your neighborhood. There isn't some catapult that shoots you there, right? You have to pay for that whole system. But people will only fret about their neighborhood, which is fine, but y'all have to think about this larger area and how it's all tied together. This is how the system works. So our work

2:34:50in Florida is experienced about um I want to say it's like Seventeen or eighteen counties. The nearest one is Hillsboro that we worked on. I'll go through some of these things and some of our lessons. Uh one of the lessons is the basics of city economics. Your state is different. Uh A little bit. From most places. So in when I say local property taxes or local revenue, I'm saying City and county combined. So for Zephyrhills or Dade City and Pasco, the majority of your taxes come from property

2:35:20taxes. You have a little bit of sales taxes, and this blue stuff is state transfer or things like that. If you're on the right-hand side of this chart, like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama, you generally don't want to be there. So think your blessings in Florida. Property tax is more of a control system that you can actually see the land use relationship between revenue and expense. When you have sales tax, what happens in a recession? Nobody's buying a boat, a TV, and I think that's a good thing. a car, so all of a sudden you can't afford your city. It's

2:35:50really tragic to see what happens in in Arkansas and Alabama. Um so for Florida Um you also have a couple of other weird quirks. Um you have a a property cap through the Save Our Home and also the Save Our Homes amendment. Um So commercial can grow up to ten percent and then it hits its ceiling. Residential goes to three percent or CPI, which is ever lower of the two. Quick little confessional. This happened in 1992. I was living in Miami at the time. I

2:36:21actually voted for this. Um I was stupid. I shouldn't have done that. I was a renter. It didn't do anything to benefit me, right? Because the renter is going to be paying still at that commercial rate and not I'm not a homeowner. But there's a quirk to this. Um So commercial is growing at three times that of residential. But this is a great chart from Brevard County. In blue, this is the during the run-up to the recession. That's what's going on with the market value. So if you're a taxpayer, you're following the red down there. That's

2:36:51your assessed value. And it's kinda awesome that you're not paying what the market would bear on your house. That feels good as a property owner. That makes kind of a logical sense as a homeowner to be a little bit not taking the heat of a marketplace. That sounds good, but what happens in the recession, everything craters and then the market takes back off again. But notice what happens with the recess w with the assessed value. It can't climb as fast is the cost of things in the marketplace. So when you all have to pay pay for or ask

2:37:21your county manager to pay for asphalt or concrete or a police car, is it following the blue line or the red line? It's following the blue line. But your revenues are restricted back to the red line. There's this weird perverse incentive in Florida that you actually have to add more people to be able to afford yourselves because when you cap things, you put a lid on your pot for your revenue. That's the financial calculus that y'all are stuck with. Every state, every county in the state. So the CPI in two thousand and twenty and twenty twenty two was

2:37:51was uh was um seven percent. Y'all remember we're talking about inflation? But your revenues were capped down to three percent because there's this lid that was placed there that it couldn't follow inflation. So there's good and bad that comes with policy decisions. Just understand the ramifications of those choices. So here's what's going on with with uh with your with your cap rate. It wasn't seven percent, it was three. And meanwhile, this is the cost of asphalt from F DOT. It's averaging five percent growth over a ten year window.

2:38:21If you look at just the Federal Reserve rate on on asphalt from 2021 to 2022, asphalt went up thirty percent. So just talk to your engineering department and ask them, what does it cost for us to to buy this stuff? And make sure that when your citizens ask for new roads and new pavement, they're under they're aware of Your costs are going through the roof. You can't put a control on this. There's no Save Our Homes amendment for the asphalt industry, right? Um you also have pretty crazy stuff. You have this uh agricultural

2:38:52tax loophole. I could rent a cow and put it on my property and get a tax break on it. Um this is Ocala, Florida. We went ahead and mapped their community. This is all their agriculture. And so we thought, well, okay, if you're if you're renting cows and doing this in out in in Ocala, you're essentially taking away the revenues that come in. Meanwhile, the the city has to pay for the roads and the pipes and everything else that go by it. Um but you know we thought that those three parcels right there in the middle of their city Probably not farms. You know, so it's just you have to understand the financial

2:39:22calculus of what the state policies do. To take away you have uh you called talk y'all talked about unfunded mandates. There's also what your state does to take wealth away from you by its state policies, and this is one of them. Uh but one of the interesting things about this map If you look at the footprint of single family physically Versus multifamily? versus their revenues. So single family takes up nineteen percent of the footprint of the place. It produces thirty three percent of the revenue. So that's

2:39:52like a one In a let's call it a one and a half. gain in value. When you look at multifamily, it takes up three percent yet produces eleven percent of the revenue. So what you find with multifamilies is is it's three times the potency of its footprint, right? That's the economics of that land use and its production uh from a tax standpoint. Uh this is just spatial analysis that we're doing here to show that land that you have is limited. This is another joke. This doesn't work for people under the age of forty. I I know

2:40:23that. But um I'm a nerd. Um the other thing that we find is I don't y'all know about New Urbanism. Um we did a a project in Walton County. Walton County has the um sort of the the archetypes of neurbanism in Rosemary Beach, Alles Beach, and Seaside. Um they were all designed by by Dwani Plater Zeiberg. And you could see how they pop off like mountains here. Now remember this coast all has the same frontage. It all touches the Gulf. It's all got the same water access, but you see that the land use changes

2:40:53the economic. returns on that. So In Florida you have this kind of edge condition. It's not just in Wallon County, it's all across the whole state. That's the value of of of of the of the water, basically. But here you can see Gulftown Place peaking out at 69 million an acre. This is what you'd expect to find on a Florida coast, a big condo tower with uh With all the amenities at eighty five million. And then this little three story building In in uh in Al speech.

2:41:24is a hundred and fifty eight million an acre. Now I wouldn't pay that f for that property, but that's what somebody did pay and the value set on that property because of the context and environment that it's built in. That walkability adds value. To show you three properties side by side, just up between Alice Beach and Rosemary Beach, there's this kind of Uh halfway done place called uh called Seacrest Beach. So there it is, all the same stuff, all the same strip on 30A, all the same

2:41:54opportunity for wealth creation. This is averaging 8.4 million an acre. To show you the value of design, this is Alice Beach. It now bumps up to 12.7 million an acre. It's got a peak value of 158 versus 50. And then this is Seaside at 84 and Rosemary. Rosemary's a hundred acres. And it's a and it's a two billion dollar real estate development asset sitting there on a hundred acres, which is a phenomenal production at eighteen point two million

2:42:24an acre. So we just understanding the land use effect of design and placemaking. Um and I would argue that the reason why these three do better is because they're designed better, they have a commercial core that's walkable, they have a different form that produces value. Um So just to compare Rosemary Beach with its sister, which is literally the next parcel over, so 100 acres versus 100 acres, uh Inlet Beach It pulls an average of seven million an acre versus rosemary at eighteen.

2:42:55Um in new urbanism, everybody jokes that this is okay, Joe, this doesn't make sense because this is just wealthy, phenomenal rich people on the on the on the coast. Um Uh But looking at at Seaside versus Sandestin, again this is a conventional condo resort community versus Seaside, which is a walkable Resort community, again both resorts. Um and just stacking them up side by side. The total value is more for the Sandustin, but the value per acre, because it took 220 versus 70,

2:43:25um is one point six versus I'm sorry, you can do um Yeah. I'm missing the slide here. Sorry about that. Let me skip ahead. Um you can do five seasides in Sandestin from a land area standpoint. So this isn't about being rich and famous to do this. I'll go away from the coast for a second to go to Nassau County. This is uh Amelia Island. Off the coast, there's the thing called Amelia Park that's in the middle of that strip

2:43:56there. Um so here's Amelia Park, it's a new urbanist development, $2.6 million an acre, and just going literally a quarter mile away uh to the Will Hardy neighborhood, again 87 acres, only pulling 1.5 million. How you lay the land out has a direct effect on the value of the land. and consequences to it. Here they are in three D. Um Also in Nassau County, we grabbed some stuff in toward ninety five. Uh a development out in Callahan. Callahan is uh would be like

2:44:26Dade City for y'all. It's like out pretty far away. Um and then on Amelia Park, the the New Urbanist Project. Here's the the Nassau Nassauville stuff. There's the roads. It's got about 0.6 miles of roads to it. This is the road area is a footprint. So the value per acre here is about 1.5 million. The average f house value is about $500,000. So this is a more wealthy neighborhood, $500,000 houses. Um this is a less wealthy neighborhood. Um it's

2:44:56got about a quarter mile of street. And the houses here are about half that, about two sixty. In value. And then this is uh some housing in Amelia Park and the roads that it has. And again, all these places have roads and have value. This one's five forty in value. Um and about th 33,000 square feet of of roads. Here they are stacked up with each other. So $460,000 houses, $260,000, and $540,000

2:45:27houses. This is the average value per acre, $4.7 million, $1.7 million, and $1.5. So the low wealth neighborhood is actually more productive than the high wealth neighborhood. Does all make sense? Y'all follow me there? It's just look at some basic stats on your properties to see what is the economic reality of what is happening there. Um So for each square foot of road in each community, the the average home has about $6 in property value, $5 in property value, or

2:45:57$16 in property value. As you lay infrastructure, you should be asking the questions about the return on investment, or if you are going to be subsidizing something, make sure that you can afford that subsidy and write that down. Finally, outside of Florida, this is something that I thought would be very similar for what you all have to deal with with Tampa Bay. This is a community, a county outside of Atlanta, down it's called Fayette County, it's southwest of Atlanta. Um Uh Dan

2:46:27Kathy, the owner of Chick-fil-A, uh basically built a town. Um so this is the 2019 model that we did. Here's the start of his town that he's building. It's in the city of Fayetteville, and Fayetteville has encouraged that growth and worked with Dan to build this plan here. So that was 2019. We went back out in 2024, and here's the layout of the plan. It's got a little main street here. It's got some higher density houses, some townhouses mix, and a lot of mix of uses of single-family over here. Some

2:46:58multifamily main street. Across the street here is uh Marvel Studios where they do all of the Avenger movies. And they're doing this next phase over here. This is on the right is some example of the housing stock. That they're doing, averaging this these little guys are averaging nine million an acre, which is kind of crazy. Um 13, 14 million for these duplexes, um, townhomes. So just a a kind of a windshield survey of of those communities. And here's the the Main Street stuff. What's what's

2:47:28important here is it's all integrated. So the rising tide raises all boats when it's all connected. Um so here it was in twenty nineteen. Here it is in twenty twenty four. It's shooting off the map. Now remember The county is yielding revenue off this too. It's not just the city that's getting this, but the city is getting well if the rising tide raises all boats, if you will. Um here's Peachtree Village. Uh one of the What was perceived as a as a valuable property is only about nine hundred thousand. versus these townhouses at four

2:47:58point three million. Twisted tacos killin' it at seven. Um and then Dan's projects peaking out at twenty one million an acre. So just to compare and contrast them. Uh Fayette County's total value was fifteen billion. Back then it's now twenty three billion and a great majority of that is the wealth that Dan's generating um and that new mountain that he's building there. As y'all grow, Think of opportunities for growing new places that add wealth like this. So you're not just doing this kind of like

2:48:28rash of development that they have over here by the highway. Where you're getting a lot of growth, but not a lot of value density. Does that make sense? It's a lot of horizontal infrastructure there. Um so Dan's project's gone from $48 million of total value to $362 million. And so he's far outpaced all of Fayette County in growth over that period by a factor of six, let's say, or five, and every other typology of sub-development inside the county as well, even including Fayetteville, the city. Um

2:49:00So this is the growth. As they've gone from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty-four and is projected once he adds this other phase, he's gonna be close to a billion dollars of of growth there.

2:49:11Another stat to give yourselves is what's the footprint to financial potency? This is something we do with every community. So the footprint of Trilith. Um barely showed up as if it wasn't less than one percent of the county's area, but it produced point three thought three tenths of a percent of value. That's a one-to-one ratio of physical footprint to financial footprint. They've grown that to one to six. A typical downtown, you want it to be a one to six ratio of physical footprint to financial footprint for the city. Um and

2:49:41then this is where they're headed. Now this is for the entire village, it's going to be a 1 to 14. This is phenomenally productive for the community. And the county is going to benefit too, because the county is not in there building the streets or paving the sidewalks for Trilleth. That's all being handled by the city of Fayetteville and and Dan's development. So just to compare it, we're just like, let's grab Peachtree City since everybody thinks it's awesome. It's $8.2 billion in total value. You can do this many peach uh trillis, um about twenty-six

2:50:12trillis in there. on that same footprint. And if they did I know this is kind of just sort of a joke cartoon, but we just want to stretch people's minds. These are choices that you have and you develop your community. They could have had $12.8 billion on that same land use. And this isn't to say that everybody should go live in that village or everybody should live in a townhouse, but you have to provide that opportunity in your community, and the market is there to do that. Um Oh, by the way, in when in even with this. Um

2:50:43We included the three thousand six hundred acres Of parks that Trilleth has, the 7,000 acres of studio space, think of the employment numbers there. Now you can't have seven thousand acres of of Marvel Studios, but just again as an exercise, he's got jobs there too. That's this low green pad right there.

2:51:06So the story here is to build more towns. Dan loved this joke by the way. Um

2:51:14Let me kind of skip ahead here. Um

2:51:19Back to f back to Florida examples. I I did a a presentation about this. This is Gainesville. And one of the things that Gainesville has done as a diagram, or should say Alachua County, is you can start to see where they are shifting the control of land, where they are trying to keep agricultural preserve areas as well as open space preserves. On the east side of Gainesville is heavily restricted because of the wetlands. And on the west side, they're trying to keep control of Of having an agricultural belt around the city. Now the city has spilled

2:51:50out a little bit over here into some sprawl, but they're they have this kind of like satellites of villages around the main star of Gainesville. This is maybe something to think about as you look at your county writ large. What are the towns and villages and what are their shapes? If you look at uh McCanopy, McKenopy, McCanopee, I can never pronounce McNopey or Hawthorne, you can see their little main streets popping up. So inside of those communities, they should have their own shape. The shape of Gainesville is probably a

2:52:20good example. You have downtown, and they've basically grown their downtown to the university. Here's Florida here's the University of Florida. That's the only fraternity that was kicked off campus right there. They should perhaps do more of them. But i it's a joke. This is their economic generator and they're growing to it. And also using that opportunity to grow their own wealth, which actually subsidizes the right-of-way. their neighborhoods on the north that are low wealth generation. And that's just the reality of how they operate. Um South Florida. We all know what that

2:52:50looks like. Um I went to school at University of Miami. It's changed a lot since I've lived there, but you can see pretty much what you'd expect, a lot of value on the water, and then it just flattens out like a shag carpet and just spreads out and wastes all that land. Broward County could have learned from Dade County, and they put their faces flat in the sand when I was going to school in the 80s. And look what they got. Same damn model. all coastal value, nothing going on back there past ninety five. What's

2:53:21phenomenal to me is there are twenty-four cities west of I-95. Can you see where any of them start or end? No. This is the paradigm of Florida development, which is let's just draw a line and we got green stuff on one side and people on yards on the other. This does not work when you add it all up if from a long-term model standpoint. It may work from a like a sugar high where you're it's an immediate return, but this is how you build sprawl and stuff that basically just doesn't work from a transportation standpoint.

2:53:52It also doesn't work from an open space and a nature standpoint. Um on the left is uh Dade County and on the right is um uh Broward County. Just as a comparison, here's Coral Gables. Um and Coral Gables is fifty thousand people. It's got a density of four thousand people per square mile. So that's just some stats on coral gables. This is Davey, uh, Florida, which is in Broward County. Did y'all know Davey is

2:54:23Bigger than Coral Gables by two? It's a hundred and ten thousand people. And it's almost as dense or actually yeah, it's almost as dense as as coral gables. Just looking at those stats was mind blowing to me. I would have never thought Davy was bigger and denser And and as dense as Coral Gables, but look at the economic model. Where's downtown Davy in that model? Where's the purple spikes? Where's the red stuff? It's got it's built no economic potency. So they

2:54:53have done all that development. They have got no revenue to pay for that long-term effect. Um even worse, just across 395 or 595, this is plantation. Plantation is ninety-two thousand people and it is actually way more dense than Coral Gables at four thousand people. per square mile. And again, ask yourself the question, look at those models, where's downtown plantation in that model? So the shape of the city financially, you can see it in the models. You can tell where downtown Coral Gables is compared to what's

2:55:23going on in this kind of conventional sprawl here. So this is how Coral Gables laid itself out back when they were Orange Groves in the 1920s. You can see the grid, you can see the pattern, you can also tell where they're starting to build their downtown over here. And this is what plantation looks like. If you're not asking questions of development patterns, the developers will build what they think is is right for the community. They're not going to build what you need for long-term effects. So another example, this is this is my downtown of Asheville. Side by side with uh Pompano Beaches

2:55:53downtown. Y'all don't have to have a master's degree in urban design to tell the difference in the architecture of these two places. Look what we've built in the 1920s versus what we have to do. Pompano Beach built post-World War II, and they're actually bigger than us at 112,000 people, versus Asheville at 95,000, and they're double our density. Would you have thought Pompano Beach, Florida, is double the density of Asheville? It is. Or one and a half times, let's say. So this is a lesson that I have for all floor

2:56:24Florida communities. Learn from South Florida. I wouldn't say you know South Florida is full of a lot of bad examples of what not to do in your community, but if you don't set up policy to avoid that stuff, what makes you any different? Um and the reason why I bring this lesson forward to you is um let me kind of jump jump ahead here. We did Hillsborough. And it's kind of comical that on the West Coast they're like, well, we're just not them. I w I did a project in Collier County. And I said to them, I'm like,

2:56:54y'all look like Broward County in nineteen eighty, and they were offended. And I was like, no, you are. Like get in a bus, don't listen to me. Just get in a bus, go drive over to Broward County and talk to their county commissioners. But how is this any different? This is this is Collier County. Look at all that development out there. This is this this whole rash out here is called Golden Gate Estates. That stuff will never pay for the amount of infrastructure that's out there. You know, and it's this stuff is just barely more productive

2:57:24than farms. Now, a an ear of corn or a strawberry doesn't call the police. a neighborhood does. So once you build th those div subdivisions You're going to get all of the services that are commensurate with that development. There's an expectation from a community that you will provide services. But can they afford it? Uh this is Hillsborough County. So this is Tampa. We're doing a project down in Waimama, which is down here, and working with the county about what to do with the exurbs. Um the most potent building is the Bank of America building.

2:57:55The most potent building in Plant City is Crazy Cup. Killing it at 24 million an acre. I I thought that was hilarious. A two-story building is crushing it. And it is, or it is popping up. Um and then my mom is trying to build its downtown. So looking from the west eastward To Wymama, Brandon, and Plant City. These are just the economic productivities of these places. Now again, Waimama is mostly agriculture. They're trying to thicken up in here. Um Plant City is a more of a traditional city. You can tell where its downtown is versus its suburbs.

2:58:25Look at what happened in Brandon. Brandon developed. eighty eight thousand people out there as a census tract. and is still not a town. It's not a city. It's not a place. It's eighty-eight thousand people. This is almost as big as Asheville. Uh Plant City is half the size of 40,000. You can tell where its downtown is. So this is a lesson that Hillsboro County didn't do. They didn't work with Brandon to build up its places. The most potent building in Brandon is the extra space storage place at six million. And a

2:58:55townhouse in Waimama is the most potent. But Waimalma is trying to change their their trajectory. If we think of the profile that you see a horizontal part of a city and you see a mountain that pops up that you should have in any community as your downtown or core. Um what if Brandon had a core? What would it need to get to uh versus Wai Mama? And just there's what Wai Mama needs to get, here's what Brandon should have um from a from a core standpoint. So they way underperformed um in their development pattern. From

2:59:26somebody that worked in real estate development, if you don't ask me to do something or if you don't provide a financial incentive for me to do something, I'm going to find the financial incentives that take advantage of my wealth. and may take advantage of take away from your wealth. Does that make sense? I'll underdevelop and then leave you with the bill for all the roads and streets. And it's y again, don't hate the player hate the game. This is the game that I have to perform as a real estate developer. So finally one last example is Ocala. Um You have all of this development going on. It was kind of wild

2:59:57to just drive around Marion County and just see all these horse farms flip to subdivisions. And it was like they're trying to do work in Ocala, but they're basically competing against Ocala with all these subdivisions. So you have all this new stuff rashing around. This is part of the villages down here. Um But what was crazy to me is they kept on saying they're the land area of Rhode Island. And they only have one, two, three, four, five towns inside their area. Here's Marion County, here's Rhode

3:00:27Island at the same scale. Could you imagine going through about half the population of Rhode Island? Um and they only have five cities and towns. Rhode Island has four like forty cities and towns. Uh we we tend to allow growth in Florida without ever thinking about what we're building. You you have you have census tracks that are bigger than your biggest city in your in your county. So does that census tract um Atlanta Lakes, thirty two thousand people. Um Zephyrhills

3:00:58is only seventeen thousand. Does Lando Lakes have the ingredients to make place? Does it have its own community centers and commercial areas where people can walk? Does it have neighborhood restaurants? Are you doing this stuff and learning from Zephyrhills or NPR that you can translate those same ingredients into those places? And that's a conversation to have that they should be having there as well. So what's going on now is there's all of this rash going on out here, and this is the best that it's ever gonna do is when it's new, and then it's gonna get calcified

3:01:29into that long-term reduction once the Save Our Homes and everything else starts to kick in, once people's portability starts coming over to Ocala, they're gonna start to suffer. Um That is the revenue side. I'm going to close with some um cost side. We did a work in Springfield, Missouri. This is one of their local billionaires. His name is Jack Stack. He wrote a great book called The Great Game of Business. He's super awesome. And I love this quote. This is what he says about private business. A business should be run like an aquarium where everybody can see what's going on, what's going in, what's moving around, and what's

3:02:00coming out. Governments should be the same way. Transparently, we need to see what's going on. So this is the revenue in Missouri. This is again a high sales tax place. So the community has run mostly off sales tax, a little bit of property tax. So we stack the property tax on top of the sales tax. This is the Bass Pro Shop's world headquarters right there. Killing it from a sales tax standpoint. and there's its property tax. But check out their downtown. Doing way better. They actually have a second downtown. So both our downtowns are crushing the Bass Pro Shops. Let the

3:02:30data tell you what's going on in your community. So here's the revenue stack.

3:02:36This is the revenue side. We did their costing model. Um just a l is the finance officer in here? One of the little quirks in finance.

3:02:44They they may be watching online

3:02:45if

3:02:46they're

3:02:46not sitting

3:02:46in here because he kn he knows.

3:02:48Okay. Um finance officers by their municipal standards list roads as and pipes as assets. When I talk with finance officers, I show them my computer, I've got a van at my office or my office itself. Those are assets to my business, the building, the van and the computer. I can sell you the building, the van, and the computer. Can Pasco County pick up its roads and sell them to Hillsborough? No. That's a liability, it's not an asset, right? You should look at it financially differently. So when we look at people's

3:03:18roads, what we're doing is we're looking at when they went down. So these are all the roads in um uh Springfield, Missouri. And look at all the roads they built in the 1970s. Well, guess what? Those have a useful life. They have a life of about 50 years. Every 10 years or so, you're going to be doing a remilling, any kind of resurfacing. There's new technologies that come in, but generally, you're going to have to fix that road in a big scale 50 years out. So that's when the the first rebuild comes due. So this is what you have to look forward

3:03:48to in the future. Um this is the this is the second wave and this is the third wave and they're sitting right here right now. We're not adding any more roads to their system where like this is what you're dealing with. This this future wave is gonna be a problem. Roads last forever. You know, their their liability is forever. They don't last forever. So this is their road liability and pipes, uh government expenses, basically their general physical plant shoved into the ground and their revenue sitting on top of it. If you turn it sideways like it's a boat floating

3:04:18in the lake, This is the revenue coming out of the ground and this is the cost for that neighborhood or that area. So if you net in any business you're going to do this. So they've got $446 million of revenue against $497 million of cost right there. That's telling you they're upside down financially, that's a deficit. So this is their net position with their net deficit. So you're going to have some winners, some stuff that's producing, and they have a thin layer of subsidy across the bottom of the model. This is the top view of the model. So again, when you have

3:04:49um in their case, a model that's built off of sales tax, it's going to be the sales tax stuff that's going to float the whole city. So 20 percent of the of the land use is covering eighty percent of the subsidy. This is the bottom view of the model. And again, this we have these same models for property tax-based places. We did one for for Wai Mama. It's just as you stretch people out, it becomes more expensive. Um and this is I call it the Brady Bunch slide, but basically residential Low density, medium density, high density, mixed

3:05:19use, or commercial and mixed use, low density, medium density, high density, and and these are the the net sticker prices of each of those. So because residential is so low taxed in their community it's subsidized the most because it's just not selling anything. Um on the flip side, it gets cheaper with the density that goes up because you just get less infrastructure. When you do this for property tax places, it's the same thing. We always see that top row as a negative. Um I want you to realize this isn't rocket science

3:05:49that we're doing here. This is just academic or not even academic, it's just basic math principles. But we're up against politics. We're up against people that say, well, Joe, that's great. I want low density. Most of us have grown up in single family houses, most of us live in single family houses. We were we were sold something that we thought works and no one did the math on it. And it's tantamount to me saying I I wanna be six foot tall and have a full head of hair. I think you all should pay for it. You know, it's like you can't afford it. Not

3:06:20when you do it at scale. So there's old math actually that goes back to Did y'all know the Nixon administration published on all this stuff? So this was discovered in the nineteen sixties. And the Nixon administration, true conservative, said, you know what, we're just going to give people the damn math. And they produced this document called The Cost of Sprawl in 1973. It's a six-volume series on all the economics of this. We're just doing it with new technology. So let me just jump ahead. I know we're at time.

3:06:50Are we?

3:06:51We're at forty seven minutes. Do you want me to keep going?

3:06:53Um David, are we at time? Did we go to one thirty orty

3:06:57five minute presentation with fifteen minutes QA?

3:07:00Well you still have you still have another ten minutes and then we'll

3:07:03let me just show you something. Um we find weird stuff in the system. This is uh This is Cheyenne, Wyoming. This is just land value per acre. There is no buildings in this picture. So just land value per acre, how it's valued. If you look up here in the upper left, this is how you'd expect the world to operate. Everybody's dirt is the same value. Um but we do these because we want to see what's going on over here. This is telling us Either the assessor made a mistake, there's bad math in the camera model, somebody had a bad day, I don't know. But

3:07:34that that shouldn't be that discolored. But when I was presenting I said what's going on here where this is fifteen thousand dollars an acre under the dirt under them all. And when you cross the street in the same zoning district, it doubles to 40,000. And I'm standing in the room, it is like eight o'clock in the morning, we're in the library, and the assessor raises her hand. and just yells out, she goes, You don't understand. And I'm like, what am I what am I missing here? And she goes, well they have more land. The more land you have, the less the less people that can afford a large tract of land. So

3:08:04we have to give it a discount because there's less people in the market that can afford that. That was the mayor's that was the mayor's reaction. The mayor starts laughing. And I'm like, Wait, hold on a second. If it's bigger, I get it it's cheaper for me. Like does that work that way with other limited commodities? If I get a bigger diamond, is it cheaper? And she goes, Well no, that's our standard. I'm like, where did this standard come from? She goes, I don't know. I'm like, well what about this fellow's got three miles of streets around the property versus this fellow's only got two hundred feet? She goes, We don't count the infrastructure as part of the valuation.

3:08:34That's not our standard. And it just kind of dawned on me: like, why would you build an economic system without like when Apple sold me this phone, it I had to pay for the metal, the glass, I knew that I was paying for it. Why would we set up a government system? That had this kind of disconnect. It just seems kind of weird to me. So the reason why I was at the assessors conference was to ask them, by the way, their magazine is called Fair and Equitable. And I asked them, how is it fair and how is it equitable to have this system in place? To their credit, they are like

3:09:04And like where did this standard come from? Did did Moses deliver this to you? Like is this how it came to you? And they're they by the way, this joke killed them at the assessors conference. And I'm not making this up. They said you need to find Larry. Larry would know. So I I tracked down Larry. And and I'm walking him through all this stuff. And he goes, Well, you know, it's probably has something to do with agricultural purposes, but now that you point this out, it's pr doesn't make any sense. It's not fair and equitable. It's just gonna take a while to get through the system, but we probably need to change it.

3:09:32How many conversations have you all had without understanding this kind of conveyor belt that you're on that's making economic decisions for you? So we don't know how the sticker gun is working. We don't know how pricing is going. And I'm going to close with this example in Asheville. So okay. I'm gonna flip from a consultant to a taxpayer now. My city and my county adopted reparations. I knew they weren't going to do anything about it, so I volunteered my company and And they did a victory lap in newspapers about how awesome they were, which is cool. But

3:10:03I want to do the numbers to help my county understand this. We had a history of redlining. I don't know if you all know what redlining is, but redlining was a standard that was put in place by the FDR administration, the American Housing Act, changing mortgages from seven years, seven-year mortgages to thirty-year mortgages. The Federal Government made us all single family house householders because they were trying to change the Depression. That's how it all happened. But they made us all adopt. Maps that were based on four colors. Green is good, blue is okay, yellow is declining, red is hazardous.

3:10:33You were deemed hazardous by a Uh Mostly ethnic ethnicity. Um your infiltration of immigrants. And in the nineteen thirties those were Italians, so watch out, I could take your real estate down. Watch out for me. Or Uh if they you also had to measure your Negro population. Now as an Italian I can change my name. I can also pass as a white person. A black person can't change their skin. So you find black neighborhoods calcified from nineteen thirty-four to nineteen sixty-eight when this

3:11:03was finally deemed unconstitutional, and that affects communities.

3:11:07Is that a that's a loan?

3:11:10A

3:11:10loan risk map?

3:11:11It was a it was a the Homeowners Loan Corporation and was basically a risk map. Um and what it did is you were you had protected loans if you were in the green neighborhoods, but you didn't have protected loans if so folks in black neighborhoods could still get loans, but it was usually through a predatory system. Um oftentimes you would find that if they missed a payment The creditor would take the bank their their their house away. This is why you see a lot of um uh um vacancy in in black neighborhoods and communities. Um y'all didn't have

3:11:41a map here because you didn't have enough people Uh but Tampa had one. Um there's you know they're they're they were used in other methods. So our query was: Is this also baked into our tax assessment system? So here's a map of race. in my county. Um If you zoom into my city, there's this big old hole right here. That's the Biltmore estate. Um and what a lot of people don't realize about the Vanderbilts is they built a big subdivision called Biltmore Forest. It's still ninety-nine percent white. and across the street is the

3:12:11city of Asheville and that's a neighborhood called Shiloh. Uh my friend Reggie uh lives in Shiloh and at the time we did the analysis, I mean sometimes you can't make this stuff up. Sydney Powell lived in Biltmore Forest, so thank you Sydney. We grabbed her house. Um here's Reggie's house and here's Sydney's house. So looking at the land value per acre, this seems reasonable. Her dirt is worth more than his dirt, right? When you look at the building, however His house is worth more than hers. And I sat down with my assessor and I said, Look Walk me through this. I'm trained as an architect.

3:12:42How the hell is this house worth more? Just look at the pictures. And he had all of his biases come out. He's like, Well she's got more square footage. I'm like, oh houses are like toilet paper, the bigger the house, the cheaper you get. Come on now. Um that means he's paying more county taxes per acre. But here's the kicker. We do reassessments every four years. So from one assessment to the next, his house has doubled in value. past hers and on her property card she's renovated and he hasn't. So what's happening here? Just just talk with me through that talk me through this. Um

3:13:12at the time we were doing the analysis, the New York Times published uh this op-ed piece covering a University of Chicago report where Chris Berry was seeing the same trend across cities all across the country. And basically I call this a J-curve. The lower the value, the higher your assessment. The higher the value, the lower your assessment. Um your state law says you should be uniform in taxation, right? So everybody's charged the same millage rate. But if you bend the assessment, it's going to change how we're paying taxes, right? So

3:13:43Here's how that works. This is a house, the computer camera model assessed this house at $190,000, $191. It sold in the marketplace for $150,000. So that was overvalued by a factor of 27%. That's called an overassessment in the sales ratio. So the computer can't get it all right. Um that's what that one did. Here's one where the computer got it pretty pr pretty close. So that's a one ratio. And then here's one where the computer was off.

3:14:12Wow.

3:14:13Okay. So you've got what you see here is over Accurate and underassessed. So let's take the whole housing stock of my county, stretch it from end to end, break it into 10% buckets, and this is called a longitudinal analysis, which is you're looking at it all together in buckets and saying what's the average screw-up in each bucket? It should be average. It should be the same across the model. What's going on in my county is this. So because they adopted reparations, what we said to my county is like,

3:14:44look, you're overtaxing the bottom 40 percent to the tune of a million dollars in overcharge, and undercharging the top 60 percent, which is which I am part of, six million. So that means the average set the average reparations fund should be about seven million bucks. Let's move forward on that. Our law says that the true value of a property should be what someone was pay for it and what somebody would buy it for, right? So here's a house in uh one of those black neighborhoods on the south side. This is what it

3:15:14was assessed at, here's what it sold for. So be it not for this transaction, this individual is paying 16% more for their government, right? They corrected it with a general parcel review down to a hundred. That's fair. Here's another one. Now the general parcel review is the human goes in and corrects things. Okay? These seem to check out with the state law. To go to a higher wealth neighborhood, we have to change scales. Here's what it's sold for, here's what the computer assessed it at. So I sat down with my assessor and I said, Mr. Miller. If my child brings home a

3:15:44test score of fifty on a test, I kinda want to know what went wrong. So could you show me how your computer model is this far off? Now as a taxpayer, this is why I don't necessarily trust the process, because with the test score, we all see it right there. This is what they reassessed it at. And if you think this is uh just cherry picking, here's another one. My l the my this last one's my favorite. The the moral courage to bring it up one whole percentage point, boy, that's awesome. Um So

3:16:15there's five people on the left. supporting the subsidy of one house on the side of a mountain. On the right. Again, let's just be aware of that subsidy. Let's talk about that. Is that what we intend in our community? Is this what we want to happen? And we said to him, we said, look, use use Esri software. We use it. This is it. We asked the computer, show me land change in one year. and this one property pops up, that person is being absolutely screwed. Fix it. You know, let the model show you where your math is wrong. You know, don't leave it up to the

3:16:45property owner to figure this out. Zooming into my neighborhood, Notice what's going on in my neighborhood. And we asked the assessor, we're like, What's going on right here? And he goes, Well, that's a different tax neighborhood code. I said, So inside my neighborhood, there's different neighborhoods. And he's like yeah and I said, Who drew that map? He's like, I don't know. This is something that's just been in the machine, going. So I'll show you the difference here. Um two properties side by side, the dirt under that house went up three three hundred and sixteen percent. Cross the property line, it only went up two one

3:17:15hundred percent. How's that happening? And again it's I'll tell you as a city planner Uh Monford Avenue is where the streetcar ran in the 1920s. That's where all the rich white people lived on the streetcar. Their help lived a couple blocks away. So that legacy effect of how we treat folks From the redlining standpoint, rhymes with how our assessment process works. So back to Reggie's neighborhood, notice how everything's level. That's called gentrification. It's not my fault. You know, it's your fault. You moved in

3:17:45that neighborhood and you set the new value, so therefore everything is that value, right? That's that's what that's what I was told about that neighborhood. Gentrification happens there. Cool. When you cross the street and go to the richest neighborhood in my state, why was there two transactions and it didn't affect the rest of it?

3:18:02I don't know. Uh this this house right here is 22 acres on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It's a 16,500 square foot house designed by Addison Meisner. Uh twenty twenty one twenty eleven. The house value was four million bucks. Ten years later, The house has lost a quarter of its value.

3:18:25How is the wealthiest neighborhood in my state losing value? Um I joked that we should start an urban renewal program for the Chads and Cassidys of the world. They really need our help. This is the definition of blight, right? It's losing value. That's a joke. Um It is also way undervalued. This is about a $25 million property. So just testing Biltmore Forest. Uh about 55% of the houses are losing value for a net loss of forty million bucks. So there is a transference that is happening, right? If the value is dropping, that means we are losing tax dollars.

3:18:55We are losing $4.4 million from that one neighborhood, which could pay for 111 school teachers. So don't come back to me and ask me for a tax millage rate raise to pay for teachers when we're losing the money. Um So they're losing four million bucks and we're overcharging Shiloh 1.5 million. I just want to put that out there because there's matters of equity and questions we're not asking, that we're playing this kind of kabuki act on how we talk about communities, but not understanding the full financial effects. And I pulled the

3:19:25uh the report on on y'all. By the way, I call this reverse Robin Hood. Um basically taking from the the poor to subsidize the wealthy. And for Pasco County, this is your report report from now again this is 2022 data. Um but this should be a straight line. And basically your bottom decile, your bottom your poorest ten percent are overpaying about 230 bucks, while your wealthiest 10 percent are underpaying about 11,000. according

3:19:56to that report. Now this is maybe I I wouldn't say this is confirmation of a bias, but this is just maybe a place to start and ask the questions to see what's happening in your system, to become more literate about your about your assessment process. Um

3:20:14So

3:20:16There's new technology. There's ways to look at this stuff. But we tend to practice government like a like an old rotary dial cell phone or rot why I said cell. Uh ro a rotary phone. Some people some people don't know what these look like, right? But this is how the world operates now. You know, so there's there's technologies at play to do this. Um there's ways that you can you can we can do this math um going forward. So thanks for letting me Do

3:20:46some math with you.

3:20:50That's it.

3:20:51Thank you so much. I think I need another class.

3:20:55Or a drink. Or a drink, right.

3:20:59So now's the time that we can ask him questions, I believe, right? Um

3:21:07Go ahead.

3:21:08Well, you know, we we're ninety what, ninety five percent unincorporated. So I really wanted all our cities to be here. I see Port Ritchie is here. I don't know what other city is representing. Port Richey. Well the Debbie's not here, but she sent her economic

3:21:27Yeah. And what about Zephyrhills and Dade City? Over there. So to me it just one shows the importance of Helping our s cities to grow. That adds value to all of us. And and how do we I've always said where's downtown Land O' Lakes, you know, and And I'm I'm always talking about walkability and And density and I just think the number You know, the numbers here show how important the

3:21:57your development patterns are. And I think we have a lot of work to do.

3:22:02There is um one of the it's and it's you're you're not the only place struggling with this challenge. Um And I think what happens is Once you change the window of time. And cities do this because they've been around. They they've kind of have suffered through good and bad cycles. So they're a little bit more literate. I wouldn't say they're the still the best. It at understanding the that pipes do break, roads need to be replaced because of the legacy of what was left to them in the 1920s or whatever. So it's a it's that fifty-year window that you

3:22:33have to get past. And unfortunately for a lot of American cities we have only been growing on fire post World War Two. So we've laid down a pattern without understanding the long-term consequences. And if you read any literature from the 1950s, nobody was thinking of this long-term. It was just like we're gonna do something different. And we did it. We did a great job. But we didn't think through what's now being left to us. And our kids and our grandkids. Um so we're the we're the the children or gr or grandchildren of that wave of development without

3:23:03understanding the long term consequences. But cities because they've been and if you go to the northeast, they've been along even more. So they're making more advanced calls. If you looked on that map, we've we have we do very little work in the Northeast because a lot of times people are like, Yeah, we we get it. We're already working with our financial system. And it's think of us like adults. When we were twenty Did we ever look at the fat content on a pizza? No. Like I was eating pizza every day. Now if I eat pizza every day I'll have a heart attack. You know, I wouldn't make it out of this room.

3:23:33I never check the fat content. Yeah

3:23:35I've never checked that either. I

3:23:37I have

3:23:38But I don't eat pizza every day, you know.

3:23:39I I have to because my family's got a history of heart disease. But I know that more as I get older. You know, than than is a twenty year old. So it's it's just a matter of thinking of your place and time.

3:23:50Mr. Chairman Mariano. Yeah. So y you had a map up there, I think it was Peachtree City. Is that the one outside of Georgia? Peachtree City is yeah, it's southwest of the land like

3:24:00Lilith?

3:24:02What's that?

3:24:03Comparing it to Lulith.

3:24:05Trellith.

3:24:05Trellith.

3:24:06I'm sorry. So I've I've been in Petrie City and that community was it looks rural all the way around. But they've got a golf cart community that connects like every cul de sac's got a golf cart path running through it. You can actually take it from any one of those places and go to the downtown area to go through. Um So to say it's not well developed. It's high end residential development. tremendous demographics. Um No crime, great place to live. My daughter Lauren said years

3:24:36ago she says I'm gonna live here Dad 'cause I wanna be able to take my golf cart and go to Dairy Queen. Uh what we did. So, you know, I I I I I hear what you're saying as far as the property values, maybe some generation, but when you look at the demographics that change from going that high density with some of the apartments that we may have around, you drop down the value as far as what people can spend as far as demographics and that that creates what you're gonna bring in. If you don't have the high end residential as well where executives

3:25:06wanna live, it's gonna be tough to get uh straight in. So I appreciate your concentrations and the and the densities to it, but

3:25:16All the thinking we need to put into our our calculations.

3:25:19Sure. But if if you go to Peachtree City and then go to Trilleth. And it's not that Trilith doesn't have any high end folks, you know, it's just they they do. And they've got like back to Rosemary Beach. Rosemary Beach is ridiculously high end.

3:25:37weight dense environment, like European level density. So people will make different choices based off the environment, but it's just okay, Peachtree City right now is a wealthy community. They have the demographics you mentioned. It's fun to go drive around a golf court golf golf cart. I'm a numbers guy. I'm looking at that map going, there's not a lot of revenue that's coming out of that rash. It's just all yellow to me. Right. hit the same level of value, but it's got this tremendous amount of infrastructure under it. that it hasn't hit that first useful life yet. Let's

3:26:07go back to Peachtree City in twenty forty and see how it is. You know, when I s when I go to places I grew up in the Rust Belt, so I Uh pr people in the sun belt are like we have let me just let me show you an example.

3:26:27Mm-hmm. Present town.

3:26:30Gilbert, Arizona is two hundred and seventy-three thousand people. And it's called the Town of Gilbert. Psychologically, what does that put your mind in? When you're doing Mm-hmm. They're thinking about town problems. They're not thinking about they're a city. They've got city problems. They haven't built up their downtown. Um I showed them this. This is South Bend. We did their work in 2016 and 2017, and one of the things that blew my mind was their pipes. So their

3:27:00population grew until nineteen sixty and then they just stopped. They lost Studebager, Packard, to Detroit. And their population dropped, and you can see they kind of flatlined. This is where they're at. No growth. This is their pipes going in the ground from the eighteen hundreds. They're building a community, they're building their pipes out, everything's cool. And I'll drop a boundary when their population stops.

3:27:33I showed this to my mother. My mom's got a high school education. She never went to college. It's not that she's not stupid. She just never had the access to education that I've got. And I showed this to my mom and her first response was, well that looks stupid. I'm like yeah Mom. So this is their pipe growth in blue indexed against their population growth in orange. This is what they had in nineteen sixty. three lift stations and two blocks of force main. For the engineers in the room, force mains are super expensive, so are lift stations. Lift stations cost

3:28:03a million dollars a pop, fifty thousand dollars a year to fix them each year and maintain them. So this is what they had and now they have grown to this. This is their new boundary. So just to wrap it up, in 1960 they had 133,000 people, three lift stations, and about a third of a mile of force main. Now they have twenty two percent less population. This much force main or lift stations and this much force main.

3:28:32Who's

3:28:33paying for that?

3:28:33They dropped their population and they increased their costs by a thousand and six thousand. This is gonna happen. To Peachtree City. Until they can regenerate, they haven't built a density to be able to pay for what they've got. So it feels good to drive around all that

3:28:50Let's go back to your map you just showed.

3:28:56This

3:28:56one? That's fine. So when they started in the core, they kept it tight. their big mistake was all these long spaces where they haven't built. If they just built and continue to grow out. And kept it tighter, they'd have been but much better off.

3:29:12Correct. Or also don't go build off in a wetland. You know, because then you're fighting Mother Nature. The developer is going to drop that lift station in and turn around and divide it by everybody's house built house lots. They're all going to pick up a little piece of it in their mortgage, but then you're going to get stuck fixing it. So that's that's kind of the the same thing. actually when we did this presentation the engineer she was like waving a hanky she was so excited And she's like, I've been trying to get the the council to understand that I can't afford this stuff. And we're like, Why haven't you shown

3:29:42a map? You know, just help people understand this stuff.

3:29:46So let me ask you another question. So have have you been up and down this Nineteen corridor all have you just have you seen much what's what's up and down there?

3:29:55So we've got a lot of uh infrastructure put in place, but we haven't trouble Let's say with the rebuild. Coming through. That's where probably I think one of our biggest struggles in the county. What do we do there? What should we do there? You've got single family homes on the ground, on the coast, you've got some other things have been elevated up, but you've still got that struggle of even along nineteen, how do you elevate up? How do you get going better?

3:30:18Yeah, like uh let's go back to Hillsborough. Um

3:30:24Or actually let's let's just stay let's just stay with Trillif. In uh

3:30:30If if I were to adjust

3:30:31a suburb. It's a s it's a c it's a r county like ours, find.

3:30:37Yeah, they're

3:30:38outside of Atlanta.

3:30:40Um What what they what they did that was smart and I think this is more to dan um Um to to Dan's point, he p he brought in the studios. Studios are are very low generator because they're just big dumb boxes. But they brought in a lot of high wage employment with all the people doing CGI effects and actors and actresses show up. So there's this kind of cash flow of folks that he's importing wealth, which is super smart. The trade off is you're not getting a lot of revenue

3:31:10out of that because it's just cheap. But if you had that high if you got those high end

3:31:15producers, they can then go fund what's right beside it.

3:31:18Correct. They're buying the housing nearby. Um and it's, you know, f folks with high salaries because they're doing computer generated stuff. You're getting a lot more of that than you're getting in Peachtree City. Peachtree City is all strip malls and I mean they're jobs, but they're not they're just retail sector jobs. Um and they are what they are. So I think I think the long term effect there is going to be a problem. Now what you find here is This is this weird kind of dog leg that comes out of the city of Fayetteville. So Fayetteville is learning that they've sort

3:31:48of missed an opportunity in their own downtown to grow it up. Now it's not really their fault because the state blasted two state roads through the middle of their downtown that's kind of choked off any walkability. So they ha that's a different problem. Think of this as silver buckshot, not silver bullets. It's gonna be different solutions in different areas. So they the county needs to back the city of Fayetteville on those state road rebuilds in the in the downtown. Now it's not gonna be the county's project, that's the city's project, right? But the county's gonna benefit if the

3:32:18city grows up. Right. And so it's it's it's they're working together to do that. But you also have to look at the South County. and say we need to have a plan here. Because this will eventually change too. or around Peachtree City that this stuff is gonna fill in. This is Fulton County, so at Atlanta's just like right here. So this is gonna eventually get hit with something once once Atlanta changes. But you can learn from Trulet in this case.

3:32:45And they built a compact walkable community with vertical mixed use.

3:32:50Thank you for uh All that you've given us today is a lot to think about.

3:32:55There's there's more. David, what what are your plans for

3:32:57Well, thank you very much. Uh time is up for the luncheon session. Joe will be speaking to some stakeholders up in Mike's conference room for a breakout and uh brief presentation. And I want you to know that this is all context driven. We are a unique county and we don't have a one-size-fit-all solution here. But this really establishes uh a baseline for consideration of our future land use and emphasizing redevelopment of the west side where the core infrastructure is there, and we need housing and development and tax revenues.

3:33:27So thank you very much. Great job.

3:33:30Thank you very much. Appreciate it.