The Arnot Mall sits on 83 acres and produces $72,000 in assessed value per acre.
A single apartment building on Main Street in Elmira produces $7.9 million per acre.
Land is finite. How we use it is a fiscal choice.
The Minicozzi Question
Urban planner Joe Minicozzi developed a framework comparing properties not by their
total assessed value, but by their value per acre of land consumed — the "miles per
gallon" of fiscal productivity.
The question isn't how much a property is worth. It's how much it produces
per acre of finite land — and per foot of road, water main, and sewer line required
to serve it. A mall may carry a $6 million assessment, but it occupies 83
acres. A four-story downtown apartment block may carry a $5 million assessment and
fit on two-thirds of an acre. The tax math is not close.
The per-acre lens matters because land is the one resource a municipality cannot
expand. Infrastructure cost — roads, water, sewer, storm drains, emergency response
travel time — scales with area served, not just assessment total. A development
pattern that spreads the same tax base across ten times as much land produces
structurally higher infrastructure costs per dollar of revenue collected.
This is not an argument against suburban development. It is an argument for
pricing it honestly — and for not systematically undervaluing the fiscal
productivity of the denser, older urban fabric that already exists.
What the Numbers Show
Chemung County's 2025 assessment roll, joined to the county parcel shapefile
for acreage data (parcel file as of May 2025). 41,509 taxable parcels with valid acreage.
The Arnot Mall at $6 million assessed value looks like a significant taxpayer in
absolute terms. But it occupies 83 acres — enough land to hold roughly 450 typical
Elmira single-family lots. Those 450 lots would, at the city's median single-family
assessment of $55,000 per property, produce over $24 million in assessed value. The mall
produces $6 million. The land is doing far less fiscal work than an equivalent
footprint of urban fabric would.
Big Flats and Horseheads — the county's primary commercial growth zones —
produce $288K and $254K per acre across their
commercial base, respectively. Elmira's commercial parcels produce
$310K per acre. The city's commercial strip is actually
more fiscally productive per acre than the Route 17 corridor —
even with stagnant assessments and decades without reassessment.
The Lot Size Inverse Relationship
As residential lot size grows, assessed value per acre falls sharply —
and the decline is remarkably consistent across different municipalities.
A single-family home on a city lot under 0.1 acres in Elmira produces a median of
$474,000 in assessed value per acre. The same type of property on
a 2–5 acre rural lot produces only $40,000 per acre — a 12:1 ratio.
The pattern holds across municipalities: Horseheads single-family homes on small lots
produce $776K/acre; on large lots the same town's homes drop below $72K/acre.
This is structural, not a quirk of individual properties. A home worth $100,000
on a quarter-acre lot produces $400,000/acre. The same home on a two-acre lot
produces $50,000/acre. The house hasn't changed. The land consumption has — and
so has the infrastructure burden.
Infrastructure cost doesn't scale with assessment total — it scales with the area
served. A water main running past a two-acre lot costs roughly the same per foot
as one running past a quarter-acre lot. Roads don't know whether the house they
front is assessed at $50,000 or $200,000. The larger the lot, the worse the ratio
of infrastructure cost to tax revenue generated.
The lot-size curve is the fiscal cost of sprawl made visible.
Every step rightward on the chart — toward larger lots, longer cul-de-sacs,
bigger setbacks — represents less revenue extracted per unit of infrastructure
committed.
Charts
Three views of per-acre productivity: landmark comparisons, the lot-size curve,
and municipal totals. All data from the 2025 Chemung County assessment roll
joined to county parcel shapefile acreage.
Tax Productivity per Acre — Landmark Comparisons
Specific parcels (colored by type) alongside property-class medians.
The Arnot Mall (83 acres, $72K/acre) sits at the bottom; downtown Elmira
apartment buildings ($4M–$8M/acre) at the top. The gap is over 100:1.
The Lot-Size Inverse Curve — Single-Family Residential
As residential lot size increases, assessed value per acre falls consistently
across all four municipalities. Only bins with at least 10 parcels plotted.
Erin (rural) starts lower and declines faster; city parcels stay productive
to larger sizes because higher home values partially offset the larger lots.
Assessed Value per Acre by Municipality
Median assessed value per acre for single-family residential and commercial parcels.
Urban Elmira and inner suburbs (Horseheads) lead on residential productivity.
Rural towns (Chemung, Erin) trail dramatically — not because homes are
cheap, but because lots are large.
Source: 2025 Chemung County assessment roll (data.ny.gov 7vem-aaz7) joined to
parcel acreage, compiled into per-acre.json
by scripts/visualize_per_acre.py. Full method on the
Data & Sources page.
Zoom In: What a Big-Box Parcel Is Actually Made Of
The same lens, applied to the region's major retailers. Two questions: how much
taxable value does each square foot of their land produce, and how much of their
assessed value is the building — versus just the dirt and parking under it?
Assessed Value per Square Foot of Lot
Every square foot of a parcel is land the public street-and-pipe grid has to
reach. Downtown row buildings produce the most value per square foot ($28);
Target produces under $7. Whisker lines span the middle half of parcels in each
group; the navy “(est.)” bars are single big-box parcels whose lot sizes are
estimated from their land assessments (their deeds record no dimensions).
How Much of the Value Is Just the Land?
Each bar is the share of a retailer's total assessment that is land rather than
building. The typical county parcel is ~20% land. The Arnot Mall is 96% land:
an 83-acre, $6M property whose buildings add almost nothing taxable — it is,
fiscally, a parking lot. A building that adds little value still gets full
roads, water, and emergency coverage to every corner of its lot.
Source: 2025 Chemung County assessment roll, compiled into
land-productivity.json by
scripts/visualize.py. Big-box lot sizes are estimates (land assessment
÷ $3.34/sqft, the median measured commercial land rate in the Route 17 corridor);
Wegmans, in the City of Elmira, is the least reliable of these estimates.
The Map
Every parcel in the county, colored by assessed value per acre — the same
"miles per gallon" measure as the charts above. Dense, productive land glows
deep red; sprawl and large rural lots fade to pale yellow. Toggle a single
productivity band in the layer control to isolate, say, only the $600K+/acre
parcels and watch them concentrate downtown.
Tips:
Color = assessed value per acre (see the legend, bottom right)
Toggle the ★ Landmark anchors layer to find Arnot Mall
($72K/acre) and 154 Main St ($7.9M/acre) as reference points
Turn off the lower bands to see where the county's most fiscally
productive land actually sits
The county's growth pattern — commercial and residential expansion in Big Flats,
Horseheads, and Southport — is expanding the tax base while simultaneously
lowering the fiscal productivity per acre of that base.
Between 2021 and 2025, Chemung County's total taxable assessed value grew by
approximately $782 million. Nearly all of that growth happened in the suburban
ring — in municipalities where lot sizes are larger, commercial footprints are
bigger, and value per acre is structurally lower. The county is, in fiscal terms, getting
more expensive to service at the same time it is growing.
The City of Elmira, by contrast, has a higher commercial value per acre than its
suburban competitors — but its total assessed value has been essentially flat for
years, held down by frozen assessments, a large exempt sector, and disinvestment
from properties that could be producing more. The city's per-acre productivity
advantage is not reflected in revenue because the underlying assessments are
themselves depressed.
A citywide reassessment wouldn't change the per-acre fundamentals —
downtown Elmira would still beat Big Flats strip retail on productivity per acre.
But it would close the gap between what properties are worth and what they're
assessed at, allowing the city to capture the revenue its land use pattern
is actually capable of generating.
The per-acre data makes the case for density on fiscal grounds,
not just aesthetic ones. The urban fabric that already exists in
Elmira is the county's most fiscally productive land use, acre for acre.
Maintaining and investing in that fabric — rather than continuing to extend
infrastructure to lower-productivity suburban and rural development —
is what fiscal sustainability looks like.
For the broader context on where the county's assessment growth has happened —
and hasn't — see the Trends page. For the argument
that reassessment is both possible and necessary to capture the city's
productivity advantage, see Elmira: The
Frozen Roll.