Assessing the City: Special Assessments, Property Values and Infrastructure Development in 19th-Century New York City

Rachel Eu, Princeton University

For much of the nineteenth century, New York City financed local infrastructure projects–such as paving and grading streets–through a process of special assessment, in which abutting property owners paid for infrastructure under the assumption that their property would benefit from the rising land values due to the improvements. One of the principal arguments municipal authorities made in favor of special assessments was that property owners would ultimately recoup the cost of local improvements as things like street paving or installing water mains would raise property values. This project extracts and maps conveyance data from the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide to investigate if local improvements led to measurable increases in adjacent property values. By investigating whether real estate values rose enough to offset the costs of assessment-based financing, this project seeks to understand how property owners evaluated the economic benefits of connecting their land to the city’s growing infrastructure networks.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 190. New York City: Mapping Social History