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> what jobs? Are we talking software engineers or warehouse workers?

Workers with an average salary of $150,000, I think it's disingenuous to act like you don't know that but you're also an expert in property tax reform.

Pay one person a salary of $1m and you can pay 9 people $55k to average $150k. The average means nothing. Will there some site lead earning $20m/year bringing up the average?

The Virginia agreement actually has a clause to prevent that loophole from being abused to the $20 million/year extent. Jobs that pay more than $850k/year (adjusted upward by 1.5% per year) can only be calculated into the average as being a $850k/year job.

Quoted from page 2 of the Virginia agreement [0]: "If any of the persons holding New Jobs are paid “wages” in any calendar year in excess of $850,000, as escalated 1.5% per year, as shown on Exhibit D, the amount of wages in excess of $850,000, or the higher escalated amount, shall not be included in clause (A)."

[0]: https://d39w7f4ix9f5s9.cloudfront.net/a1/f2/85b7a8db41379e15...

25,000 x $150,000 = $3.75 Billion dollars of new taxable income, regardless of how it is distributed.

Those billions aren’t uniformly taxed: that’s what they were pointing out.

Actually, those billions wouldn't have been taxed at all. That was part of the deal: Amazon gets all of the income taxes that are paid by their employees in the first ten years.

To be more specific, this part of the deal is called the Excelsior Jobs program. It rebates to Amazon 6.85% [0] of the wages earned by the company's employees, which effectively does mean that income taxes get paid out to Amazon (in reality, the income taxes paid plus a little more due to the NYS tax brackets [1]).

That being said, there's no city-level income tax rebate. Assuming the tax brackets currently in effect hold steady until the full 25k jobs promise was fulfilled, the city of New York would get ~3.8% of $150k * 25k jobs = ~$142.5 million/year once the 25k job mark is reached [2].

[0]: https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program

[1]: Note how the 6.85% bracket only applies to income above $215.4k; income above $1.08 million gets taxed at 8.82%; consequently Amazon will get more rebated than employees paid in income tax the vast majority of the time. See the second table of page 57: https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/it201i.pdf#page=...

[2]: The ~3.8% is approximated based off of page 69 of https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/it201i.pdf#page=...

From a taxation perspective, that would be even better for the state, because on average a person making $1m/yr + 9 making $55k has a higher marginal tax rate than 10 people making $150k

Best comment on the thread so far.

Property tax reform could work for single family homes if we decoupled property tax from land tax. NYS should only raise taxes on the value of land given the surrounding population density, natural properties and accessibility to public infrastructure. Check out some Henry George, if you're interested in learning more.

I didn't read Henry George, whoever that is, I'm reading you right now. Are you suggesting to tax a single family home the same as a six, if they take up the same amount of space?

What happens if someone has owned the home for 60 years, they're older and retired, and suddenly it so happens their neighborhood got popular a decade ago and their property values doubled, and some rezoning happened at a nearby avenue. That's one example. How about we try the academic flirtations with tax experiments at a smaller scale elsewhere, first?

NYS grossly favours SFHs for property taxes. For example, a $3m brownstone in Park Slope I saw had ~$700/month in property taxes. A similarly priced apartment would have more like $1500-2000/month taxes. A $100m apartment would be taxed at ~$15k/month.

The Park Slope home you had was probably newly renovated. That matters - the sale price doesn't. 700 is even a lot, relatively speaking. In any case, houses from the 19th century cost money to maintain, and sometimes, shockingly, they're populated by people who can't afford 1k a month in property tax. The property values went up high and fast - are we going to punish homeowners for that? This isn't a suburb where taxes must come primarily from property tax - there's a NYC-specific income tax, as you're probably well aware.

Then, here's something else, tax those 2,3,4-families more, rents will go up as a result; they're free-market rate apartments, not rent stabilized.

I don't know what any of this has to do with Amazon, though.

NYC has on several occasions tried to introduce congestion pricing on people driving in or into Manhattan (something I 100% support) but the efforts have failed as this is the jurisdiction of NYS and NYS has no interest in this (so far).

They introduced it - it just impacts taxis and for-hire vehicles.

  "For example, a $3m brownstone in Park Slope I saw had ~$700/month in property taxes"

Surely that's a typo. At a tax rate of $10 per $1000, that would to be $2500/month.

Examples:

- Park Slope brownstone, $548/month: https://streeteasy.com/sale/1375411

- Park Slope condo, $1740/month: https://streeteasy.com/building/105-8-avenue-brooklyn/3

Note: if you look into this a lot of condos have deceptively low monthly taxes due to a tax scheme (now defunct) called J-51 (IIRC) where property taxes started at 0 and would go to normal levels over 20-30 years.

That's absolutely insane. So we get oligarchs and tyrants buying up property in NYC to launder their ill gotten gains and paying little to no property tax on it!

Oligarchs and tyrants buy condos in the sky more than brownstones someplace. And 3M isn't a huge amount for a three family home near public transportation, especially a home from the late 1800's that's attached to other homes and with thousands of dollars a year in upkeep. There's an even more important reason for taxes targeting condos more than the older buildings: rental buildings (like a 3 or 4 family brownstone) have renters, and higher taxes would mean higher rents.

All that said, if you build a brand new single or multi-family home someplace, anyplace, the taxes will be pretty high. It's all about the grandfathering of older asessments and a state cap on tax rate increases (20% a year I believe), which is allowed an adjustment if renovation is done (or a fresh assessment if it's new).