This week, Mayor Eric Johnson used his annual state of the city address to drum up support for parks in next year’s bond election. He also vowed to start promoting a cut to the city’s property tax rate way before budget season; timing appears to be his takeaway from his failed effort earlier this year.

The whole tax cut thing got me thinking. It feels short-sighted. The mayor wanted a rate that would result in real savings for homeowners, which is an intent I understand. 

But cutting the rate by as much as the mayor will likely want requires cutting money from the city’s budget, which means some sort of services get cut. Set the “yeah but the bloated city budget” argument aside for just a second—why are we living the municipal version of paycheck to paycheck? Isn't Dallas booming? 

On Thursday, I sat in a room with a bunch of Realtors in Irving and heard about how little money big box stores and traditional single-family housing generates for our city’s tax base. The presenter was a guy named Joe Minicozzi, an urban planner out of Asheville, North Carolina, who was hired by the MetroTex Association of Realtors to use data to paint a very clear picture of how Dallas County is performing financially. (This 4 minute video is worth your time.)

His company, Urban3, was provided anonymized sales data from the Realtors to study the assessed value of properties across the county and how much they’re contributing to the tax base. Minicozzi’s argument is basic: the land a city has within its borders is a finite resource, and how said city chooses to use that land determines its financial health.

He breaks it down by acre. A big-box store is worth an average of about $600,000 per acre to a city’s bottom line. A single-family house is about $1 million per acre. A duplex is $1.9 million. Multifamily averages $3.2 million, townhomes average $3.6 million, and condos contribute an average of $5.6 million per acre in Dallas County. Simple math. 

Minicozzi isn’t advocating for downtowning Preston Hollow. He’s making the argument that, where it makes sense, our land can be doing a lot more for our bottom line than it presently is. It's up to us to figure out where that makes sense.

His funniest anecdote was in Deep Ellum, where an acre of the Hattie B’s hot chicken concept would generate $18.9 million a year in taxable value. Put more new things in more old buildings, and make it legal to do so, and we'll bring in more money, and make larger tax cuts more palatable. 

“The lasting value your great grandparents left is building generational wealth for the future,” Minicozzi said.

Our tax base—$154 billion total!—is how we pay for our infrastructure. We have enough miles of road in the city of Dallas to get us to Alaska and back—and then down to Galveston. All that asphalt has to be maintained, and it’s only getting more expensive. (That was another fun anecdote he presented. It’s 19,645 total miles, by the way.)

On Wednesday, the City Council will be briefed on loosening the zoning code to allow for duplexes and quad-plexes in neighborhoods zoned for single-family, which is how most of the city is zoned. 

This is the hard work, finding ways to grow the tax base even further so that a cut like the mayor prefers doesn’t result in hurting the services provided by City Hall. That's the way to secure our future: building more things that make more money so that the City Council has the tools to pass down deeper savings to the taxpayers. Plus, you'll create more housing in the process. Win/win, right?

I'm looking forward to watching on Wednesday.