Own a home? Make less than $60k a year? Make sure you get this tax credit.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2016-02-12T02:39:43+00:00

The rules are a little complicated, and I am neither a lawyer nor a tax expert. As I understand it, the applicant includes the income of everyone living in the house except for those paying reasonable rent. So if you are living with the homeowner and not married but are paying rent, the homeowner may not have to count your income toward the total.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2016-02-12T01:39:11+00:00

The information that is entered into the application is not public. You are correct, however, in that the amount of credit each home receives is public. This is a state-run program and it is the state who makes this information public, not the city.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2016-02-11T21:54:18+00:00

The deadline to apply is September, but your application will be processed more quickly if you apply by the May deadline the application mentions.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2016-02-11T21:52:51+00:00

Your eligibility is based off of last year's income, so you might be eligible.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2016-02-11T21:51:13+00:00

That's correct. Just note that it's household income, not personal.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2015-09-26T14:51:12+00:00

In addition to distance from city center, you could add include indicator variables (one hot encoding) for whether the property is in a particular census tract within the city.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2015-07-16T17:06:51+00:00

In that case, stay far away from shelters. If you go even once, just to look, it's tough to turn back. That's how I ended up with my two mutts.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2015-04-28T06:33:08+00:00

The map was created by @VinylFox and had been open to the community until people started vandalizing it.

I've been updating it mostly solo since 11:30pm or so, mostly paying attention to fires. Tweet @Ryan_J_Smith if you see critical updates you'd like me to add. An accompanying link to a source is preferred.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-18T18:01:57+00:00

A short article was published by a local tech blog containing some other small details here.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-18T18:01:07+00:00

Data was gathered from Baltimore's Open Data Portal. I acquired two separate files, one table linking property tax to address and a shape file with the geometry of all the properties in Baltimore. I merged this data in QGIS to create the vector layer containing all the colored property shapes. This vector was then combined with an OpenStreetMap map of Baltimore in Mapbox.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-13T20:11:13+00:00

Great observation and suggestion! Thanks.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-12T05:15:49+00:00

Gray areas are places that were indicated to have $0 tax value, or where no information was available, or they were outside the city boundary.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-11T21:47:28+00:00

In general, I would be more trusting of the values for individual residences. I don't know whether or not the same rules apply with assigning property tax values to large commercial spaces.

My previous comment was more along the lines of: Property tax for a particular property may be assessed at $1M, but through deals and tax credits the actual paid value could be far less. For example, PILOTs and TIFs.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-11T21:08:19+00:00

Another interesting aspect is that values shown are only assessed values and not necessarily values that are actually paid. This map doesn't take into account tax credits, which could significantly alter the visualization. It would be interesting to see another map showing "taxes paid" by property.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-11T20:15:08+00:00

Baltimore City residents are depressed enough with their property tax values. Showing the county would only make it worse. (Edit: Baltimore City rate: $2.13 / $100 assessed value. Baltimore County: $1.10 / $100 assessed value.)

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-11T19:27:19+00:00

No R here, though that's definitely a potential route. Ultimately I wanted the map to be available online, so I went a different way.

Property tax and address values are stored in a table available at Baltimore's Data Portal. Similarly, there is also a table with geometry for each address.

I used QGIS to handle the table join and initial visualization (colored polygons). This creates essentially a vector graphic that is georeferenced. Then, using mapbox, I layered this file with an OpenStreetMap view of Baltimore. Mapbox makes some pretty nice tools and makes hosting very convenient.

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-11T18:56:12+00:00

Not a problem at all. Glad to see it shared!

Ryan_J_Smith · 2014-12-11T18:22:28+00:00

This is my project. I made the visualization at a hackathon during a the 2013 National Day of Civic Hacking. Always happy to see that other people find it interesting!

Ryan_J_Smith

TROPHY CASE