The IDA & the City of Elmira

22 of the IDA's 49 active deals sit wholly inside the City of Elmira, and they account for 58.4% of the entire county's net subsidy ($1.89M of $3.23M). Count Anchor Glass, whose five parcels straddle the city line, and the figure reaches 65.1%. A minority of the county's population, and a small fraction of its land, hosts roughly two-thirds of the cost.

And the school district is the one that pays most. Every one of the 28 city parcels sits in the Elmira City School District, which forgoes $1.01M of the city deals' exemptions, the largest single share of them, and a district with no vote on any of it. The county's own agency writes the abatement; the city's schools eat the largest slice of the bill.

Count the two mixed-use deals that put market-rate apartments over ground-floor commercial space, and the city hosts seven residential deals costing $1.19M in net subsidy in FY2024, more than manufacturing and warehousing combined, against 27 promised jobs. Two run to mid-century: Libertad at 624 Baldwin St to 2051, Gerard Block on Lake St to 2049. Those are 34-year and 31-year terms from an agency whose own Uniform Tax Exemption Policy sets the standard commercial abatement at 50% for ten years. And the reason they can run that long is that the policy has no schedule for apartments at all. It covers manufacturing, warehouse and distribution, commercial offices, tourist destinations, retail and solar. The words "housing," "residential" and "apartment" appear nowhere in it. So there is no standard term for a housing deal to exceed, and no benchmark for one to be measured against. The clearest case is 100 W Water St: 51 luxury market-rate apartments over 16,500 sq ft of commercial space, on a 20-year PILOT that pays nothing at all in years 1 through 4 and tops out at 60% of normal taxes in year 20. Its own application worksheet totals the public support at 60.5% of the $14.1 million project cost.

That is not an argument that the buildings shouldn't exist. Elmira needs housing and needs downtown investment, and several of these projects put real buildings back into use: the Mark Twain block, the Gerard Block, 100 W Water St, and three derelict historic rowhouses on the Water St riverfront. It is an argument that nobody has shown the work: there is no cost-benefit analysis anywhere in the IDA's 749 public documents. And the "but for" question is the one nobody has to answer. Would this have been built anyway, without a 31-year abatement? No PARIS field asks, and no board member is obliged to say.

▸ Click any category to see the individual projects inside it.

Anchor Glass is excluded from this table because only part of it is in the city: 1901 Grand Central Ave is City of Elmira, 151 E McCanns Blvd is Town of Elmira. Its $216K of net subsidy is the difference between the 58.4% and 65.1% figures above. Anchor Glass's record →

A note on how we drew the city line: municipality comes from each parcel's SWIS code on the 2025 assessment roll (70400 = City of Elmira), not from the address the applicant filed with the state. Several projects file a mailing address of "Elmira, NY" while their actual property sits in the Town of Elmira or the Town of Horseheads. Postler & Jaeckle at 2000 Lake Rd and D&G Commercial Realty at 1836 Grand Central Ave are both outside the city, and are counted as such here.

Main St, Water St, Baldwin St, Lake St, Clemens Square. The city's IDA deals are not spread across Elmira, they are stacked on the downtown core, several of them on adjoining blocks. The Mark Twain block at 154–184 N Main St, 110–120 Main St next door, One Clemens Square, the Clemens Center itself, 100 W Water St, 389–395 Water St, 465 Water St, 110–116 Baldwin St, 200 Baldwin St, 624 Baldwin St, 650 Baldwin St. This is the densest, most valuable land in Chemung County, and a large share of it is not paying full freight.

We have not built a map layer for IDA parcels. The addresses above are the evidence, and you can find each one on the 3D city map ↗ if you want to see the block it sits on.