Community, Service, and the Case for Fair Property Taxes with Will Jarvis

About this Episode

This episode flips the usual Assessment Matters format on its head. Jay, a young professional newly entered into the assessment world, caught Will Jarvis at a conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, and turned the microphone around for an impromptu interview. What emerges is less a technical deep dive and more a philosophical conversation about why property taxes matter, who bears the burden when the system fails, and what draws people — especially younger people — into a field where the median practitioner has decades of experience.

The exchange is notable precisely because Jay represents something rare in assessment: a 44-year-old who looks 30, comes from a music background, and stumbled into appraisal work with genuine curiosity rather than institutional inertia. His outsider questions surface truths that insiders sometimes forget to articulate.

Property Taxes Are Community Infrastructure, Not Just a Bill

The most compelling thread in this conversation is also the simplest. Will frames property taxes through the lens of a community well — an analogy borrowed from researcher Ped Davis in Northern Ireland. If everyone in a village needs water, everyone pools resources to build a well. Property taxes are the mechanism that ensures everyone contributes to the shared infrastructure they consume: trash pickup, fire response, ambulances, schools, clean streets.

Jay's reaction is telling. He admits that before entering the assessment profession, he had no idea that 65 to 75 percent of a city's revenue comes from property taxes. That's not ignorance — that's the norm. Most property owners see a bill, not a community investment. Assessors understand this intuitively, but the profession rarely articulates it this plainly. The well analogy works because it strips away the bureaucratic abstraction and replaces it with something visceral: we all need water, and none of us can afford the well alone.

The Regressivity Problem Hasn't Gone Away

Will doesn't shy away from the systemic equity problem baked into mass appraisal. The core issue is mean reversion in valuation models: fewer sales at the high end pull expensive properties down, while more sales at the low end push modest homes up. The result is a property tax system that systematically overburdens people with less and undercharges people with more.

This isn't a new insight for assessment professionals, but it remains an uncomfortable one. The profession has known about regressivity for decades, and progress has been incremental at best. Will frames Valuebase's mission around this problem — building better automated valuation models that reduce this bias. But the honest truth is that better models are only part of the solution. Legislative frameworks, exemption policies, and appeal processes all contribute to the regressivity gap. Assessors can build the most accurate models in the world, and the system can still produce unfair outcomes if policymakers don't understand what they're looking at.

Tax Abatements Shift the Burden to Those Who Can Least Afford It

The Madison Square Garden example is a gut punch. During the NBA Finals alone, the arena generated roughly $100 million in ticket sales — and pays zero property taxes. This pattern repeats across the country: stadiums, corporate campuses, and large commercial properties secure abatements or aggressively appeal assessments, and the foregone revenue gets shifted onto homeowners and small businesses.

Will calls out the dynamic plainly: the guy running the Chinese restaurant down the road ends up shouldering a disproportionate share of the tax burden because Walmart has better lobbyists. Mom-and-pop shops get cooked. This is the structural reality that assessors operate within every day, often without the authority to change it. Policymakers grant the abatements. Legislators write the exemptions. And assessors are left to administer a system that was tilted before they ever opened a spreadsheet.

The profession needs to be louder about this. Not partisan, not political — just factual. When a jurisdiction grants a tax abatement to attract a stadium, someone else pays. Assessors are uniquely positioned to quantify exactly who that someone is.

The Talent Pipeline Is a Real Crisis

Jay and Will both acknowledge the elephant in the room: the median age at assessment conferences skews 20 years older than Jay. The profession is aging out, and not enough younger professionals are entering to replace the institutional knowledge that's about to walk out the door.

Jay's path into assessment — stumbling in from a music background, drawn by curiosity — is exactly the kind of nontraditional entry the field needs more of. But the profession doesn't make it easy. Assessment work is perceived as boring, bureaucratic, and invisible. Will argues this is actually an opportunity — boring problems with thin talent pools are where impact happens. But opportunity only matters if people can find the door.

The profession needs to actively recruit, not just hope that curious people wander in. Jay wandered in. The next Jay might not.

Key Takeaway

Property taxes are the most direct way citizens fund the communities they live in, and yet the system routinely overcharges those with the least and undercharges those with the most. Assessors sit at the center of this tension — they can't fix legislative failures alone, but they can refuse to be silent about them. The case for fair property taxes starts with assessors who are willing to say, plainly, who is paying and who is not.