Chicago

Discrimination in property assessment: human or computer bias?

CLAIMS of governmental discrimination against blacks are nothing new, and many such claims are valid, but solid proof of bias is usually hard to come by.

That is why a report on Cook County property taxes, issued in April by the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus, received such wide attention. Rarely has it been so well documented that the white community is getting a break at the expense of blacks.

A group of five graduate students in the School of Urban Sciences, under the supervision of Prof. Arthur Lyons, produced the report, which showed that the county assessor had underestimated the value of almost all homes in six predominantly white neighborhoods of Chicago and the suburbs and had overestimated the value of a major portion of the homes in six black neighborhoods.

The result, of course, was higher taxes in black areas -- sometimes three times higher than on comparable property in white neighborhoods. The reaction was strong among blacks. Protest meetings were called, investigations were demanded, lawsuits were threatened. And Assessor Thomas C. Hynes and his staff became very defensive, convinced that Lyons was a rabble-rouser who was out to get them.

Lyons, in fact, is no ogre. He is a soft-spoken, 34-year-old New Jerseyite with a Ph.D. in economics, an extensive knowledge of how to use computers, and an interest in improving the property tax system.

Lyons began analyzing tax issues in 1972, when the Citizens Action Program, a community group, asked him to conduct a study of two black neighborhoods in Chicago, Beverly and South Shore. The study found that those communities were assessed at much higher rates than the city as a whole, and numerous valuation cuts were obtained by black homeowners as a result.

In 1976 the city of Evanston hired Lyons to study assessments there, and he issued a report in April 1977 which declared that, among other things, the value of commercial and industrial real estate in Evanston was underestimated significantly.

The following summer, tax bills of homeowners throughout the North Shore and Northwest suburbs increased dramatically, triggering a noisy protest movement. Much of the protest centered on the alleged inaccuracy of assessments, and as a result of the heightened interest in this issue, Lyons was able to obtain a grant from the Wieboldt Foundation to study assessments throughout Cook County.

Expecting a hint
That study found that most small homes in the county were being assessed at a much higher rate than large, expensive homes, and that computerization in the assessor's office seemed to have made the problems in assessing worse. A report of the study, issued in August 1978, made big headlines.

One of Lyons' students who worked on that study, Toni Mahan, suspected that the disparity was not just between low-priced and high-priced homes; she speculated that race might have something to do with it, and she persuaded the professor to launch a project zeroing in to examine that question. Mahan and four other students spent an estimated 1,250 hours combing through records at the assessor's office and analyzing a computer tape report of assessments and home sale prices prepared for the state government by the assessor's office itself.

"We really didn't expect to find what we found, but we thought it might be worth looking," Mahan said. "We expected a hint of it, but this is a lot more than a hint."

Experiencing the heat
A week after the black-white report was issued, another Lyons study demonstrating serious flaws in the assessor's computer was made public. This study was conducted for the Cook County Real Estate Tax Study Commission, whose members -- especially one, Joanne Andrews -- have worked closely with Lyons since the commission was established in September 1977.

Hynes found himself backed up against a wall again. He claimed that Lyons' research techniques were faulty, but he did not come up with much evidence to support the claim. Subsequently, he announced that he would delay this year's assessments until the process could be examined and, if necessary, corrected.

Lyons, meanwhile, hasn't been very comfortable with all the publicity. (Even the national media have been interviewing him.) He is an academic, not a spear-carrier, and his chief desire, he says, is to cooperate with the assessor in an effort to improve the system. He has stressed that he has no reason to believe that the racial bias in assessments is deliberate; rather, he is convinced that the computer program used by Hynes and his predecessor, Thomas M. Tully, has been written improperly.

Clearly, the heat is on Hynes to convince a very skeptical public that the assessor's office is doing the best job it can do. Hynes is fortunate that this crisis occurred so early in his four-year term. If he has not shaped up his assessing procedures by the next election in November 1982, a Jane Byrne-type candidate conceivably could wrest the coveted assessor's office from the Democratic machine.

August 1979 / Illinois Issues / 33

Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library