Tag Archives: Cornell University

Rising Property Tax Assessments

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Canton, NY (CC BY-NC 2.0 Decaseconds)

I was interviewed by North Country Public Radio in Canton’s  Reassessment Doubled Many Home Values. How Does That Affect Taxes? The story reads,

Last month, Canton residents started receiving letters in the mail notifying them of their new property value assessments. Some people said their home values more than doubled, causing concern about unaffordable tax increases.

Canton’s last property tax assessment was almost two decades ago, in 2008. Since then, the values of people’s properties have changed. They’ve mostly gone up.

The town says properties were assessed at only 60% of their market value, and that the new revaluation brings these property values back up to 100% of their assessed value.

Reassessments have also happened recently in Potsdam, Ogdensburg, and other towns in the North Country. According to the Department of Taxation and Finance, these revaluations are happening to equalize property values so that people are taxed fairly.

But these changes have shocked some Canton residents. At a town board meeting in March, Phillip Burnett said his assessment seemed way too high.

“It’s so far out of whack…we’re talking about a double wide that tripled in 13 years,” said Burnett. “The discrepancy is so large that I don’t have confidence in anybody inside of these four walls, because this is what you voted for. I mean, my hair’s blown back that you guys got it so wrong.”

Town Supervisor Jim Smith says that just because a property value increases, that doesn’t mean your taxes will.

“That does not mean your taxes are going to double. No way, does it mean your taxes are going to double,” said Smith. “They would only double if county, town, and school left their tax rates at the very same rates as what they are, but all those tax rates are going to come down.”

Smith says he’s expecting there to be a reduction in tax rates by next year. That’s because, due to this reassessment, Canton’s tax base is expected to grow from $417 million to $730 million.

David Reiss, a Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell University, says property assessments need to keep up with how neighborhoods change.

“And so if you don’t reassess, you don’t really capture the introduction of the park. You don’t capture the introduction of the highway exit,” says Reiss. “And so you have relative unfairness where maybe both houses were valued at $200,000 15 years ago, but one is now worth $250,000, and then the other’s worth $400,000. And the reassessment is supposed to capture how that has diverged over time.”

Reiss says there are many variables, but it’s important for property owners to understand not just the assessed value of their property, but also their neighbours and the town as a whole.

“You need to understand the tax rate. You need to understand the budget. And then you have a better sense of how this is playing out across the board and also how it’s playing out for each individual property owner.”

Canton residents have the opportunity to contest their new property values at Grievance Days, which start on May 26. Town Supervisor Jim Smith encourages people who have concerns with their assessment to get in touch with the assessor’s office.

Smith says that in the future, he’s hoping to make these assessments happen more often, so that people aren’t surprised by what their property’s assessed value is.

Incorporating AI Tools Into Your Legal Practice

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Image Generated by ChatGPT

I published Advice for Incorporating AI Tools Into Your Legal Practice along with Celia Bigoness and Robert MacKenzie in the National Law Review. It reads,

We have been speaking with many lawyers and law students about using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their legal practice. We are struck by the fact that many of them have not been experimenting much, if at all, with the tools that are available to them – although many acknowledge that their clients are increasingly integrating generative AI into their businesses. We have been integrating a lot of these tools into our own professional lives, and here are some tips to help lawyers and law students get comfortable with AI tools that can help them, in big ways and small, with their job.

Put it on Your Home Screen

Put your preferred AI app (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) onto your phone’s home screen and be sure to allow it to access your phone’s microphone. You will be surprised by how often you get the urge to ask the app slightly complex questions that a basic web search would not answer. (Hat tip to one of our kids for this idea.)

Start with the Familiar

Trusting the output of an AI tool without having the ability to verify its accuracy is okay if you are choosing a movie to stream tonight. It is not okay if you are using it to provide legal advice to a client. To get comfortable with AI tools, start using it for tasks that you have experience executing and reviewing. One simple way to start: explain a familiar task to the AI tool and ask it for guidance on how you can use it to complete the task.

As you use AI tools in newer areas, you want to review the cited sources in the AI output to confirm that you agree with the AI model’s interpretation of them. Sometimes they are plain wrong, sometimes the AI model misinterprets the cited documents, and sometimes those documents are out-of-date.

When the stakes are greater than your personal entertainment, you need to do a lot of due diligence before you adopt an AI tool’s findings.

Use Multiple Tools

Different AI models are built on different training documents and have different algorithms that they apply to those documents. There is nothing more edifying than running the same queries through a few general AI models and a few specialized ones (like those geared to lawyers, in particular). You will see a range of answers, from non-answers to highly specialized and accurate ones. You will start to become a more sophisticated consumer of the different models, understanding each of their strengths and limitations.

Tell It Your Needs

Most AI tools will tailor their responses to your preferences. In some cases, we created a prompt to instruct the AI tool that responses should be of the type that a lawyer would like to receive—providing sources, explaining its analytical steps, and what it did and did not consider. The AI tool responded that it would be precise, answer “above a lay level,” and “be candid about uncertainty.” This has improved its answers and had the side effect of reducing sycophantic language (“That is a very good question!”).

Use it for Your Pain Points

We all have some routine tasks that we find irritating. They are usually the ones we procrastinate on. For some, it is preparing slide decks. For others, it is drafting certain kinds of emails (unpaid bills, anyone?). Just getting a first draft from the AI tool often helps you to finish the work up. But for some tasks, like preparing presentation slide decks, you can save hours and hours of your time.

We have experimented with both general AI tools and those that specialize in slide deck preparation. They have pros and cons, but are generally very helpful. In all these cases, the AI tool’s time savings are in large part due to the fact that the AI tool is optimizing a task that you are capable of doing yourself. You are able to quickly verify and edit the output.

However, if you were asking the tool to analyze a topic with which you are unfamiliar, or perform a task that you’ve never done before—if you’re learning from scratch—you will still need to go through the painstaking process of checking sources and confirming output.

Play in Vaults

One game-changing use of AI tools is to upload documents to a secure location in the cloud (sometimes referred to as a “vault”) and hone the tool’s focus on only those documents. A transactional lawyer can upload hundreds of documents and quickly identify commonly appearing terms for comparison or inconsistencies among them. A litigator can upload thousands of pages of litigation documents and create a draft chronology of events. Again, the output cannot be taken at face value due to the functional limitations of these tools, but it can provide an extraordinary first draft that can then be verified and edited to the form you prefer. This can be a game-changing use of AI for lawyers, as long as you have verified the vault’s security in advance.

Use it as a Second Set of Eyes

This is a great and scalable tip for those who are skeptical of AI tools. After you have completed a written task, ask an AI tool to critique for clarity, coherence, and accuracy. Even an experienced attorney will get at least a couple of suggestions that will ring true. And of course, you can reject all of the suggestions that you disagree with. This is a great way to see if an AI tool can provide you with real value with very little investment of your time.

Along the same lines, for more advanced experimentation, you can use the AI tool to issue spot and offer counterarguments to your work to complement your own analysis. Again, this is very low stakes because you can reject anything you find wrong-headed or irrelevant. Of course, you need to be careful about sharing privileged information (see vault security above).

Preserve Confidentiality

We have spent more time than many of you would like looking at the Terms of Use of the AI tools we have used. Except for certain tools that are developed for legal work in particular, we believe that the attorney-client privilege can be compromised when using many AI tools because of how the tools use your input information.

We have had students and clients who wanted to use AI transcription tools to compile meeting notes. We have advised them that confidential information can be compromised by such tools and that we do not use them in our practice, at least at this time.

If you begin to use a tool with client-identifying information, be sure to confirm that you are complying with your professional responsibilities to preserve client confidences.

Don’t get Lazy!

We all read the headlines about lawyers who use AI to draft legal documents and do not check to confirm that the work product is correct. Those lawyers rightfully face professional discipline and reputational consequences. We can all say that we would never do that, but a new term has arisen to describe an unthinking reliance on AI: “cognitive offloading.” This offloading occurs when we reduce our own deep research and thinking because of an unhealthy reliance on AI tools.

Every time we complete a substantive task with AI, we need to ask if we have thought through the task as fully as we would have if we did it without the tool. If the answer is no, we need to dig into it again. Cognitive offloading is a particular concern for law students and younger generations of lawyers, who have grown up with technology and tend to be more comfortable using AI tools – and therefore more susceptible to this unthinking reliance.

Conclusion

From our discussions with lawyers in private practice, it is clear that AI tools are being used in the ways we have mentioned above. No doubt, more specialized tools are in development. It’s clear that AI will transform the practice of law in the coming years. Those who are new to AI can use these pointers to begin exploring how AI works. We think they can amplify their effectiveness to the benefit of their clients and themselves, so long as the risks that AI tools pose are thoughtfully addressed.

 

Why Was Housing So Much Cheaper in the 1950s?

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inequaltiMarketplace quoted me in Why Do Cars, Housing and Clothing Cost Much More Than They Did in the 1950s? It reads, in part,

Question: Why did a pair of jeans, a box of rice, cars, houses and other items that still exist today cost one price in the 1950s but now are so much more? They’re still the same products with very little change. In fact, due to automation, many of these things are actually cheaper to produce.

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Aren’t products today higher quality?

There has been an increase in the quality of some products over time, which means looking at costs from the 1950s vs. today can seem like an apples-to-oranges comparison.

One can make the argument that cars are equipped with better features than ones from the ‘50s. “We have all kinds of things like seat belts and anti-lock brakes and computerized systems in your dashboard,” Stapleford said.

But if you’re trying to determine affordability, you have to look at the options that are available to you at the time.

“If someone wanted a 1950 car, they couldn’t get it. You couldn’t go out and buy a car that’s exactly the same as it was in the 1950s. You don’t have that kind of discretion as a consumer. You’re sort of stuck with what’s available on the market. So you’re then forced, in a way, to buy this higher-quality thing, which you may or may not want,” Stapleford said.

If you’re comparing housing prices, you also have to look at changes in the types of homes people are buying.

A typical home in the 1950s could cost around $7,000 a year vs. about $400,000 now, said David Reiss, a law professor at Cornell University who studies housing policy.

But while today’s price is 57 times more the cost of a house in the 1950s, you have to adjust for inflation and look at the size of these homes. The average house is now much bigger, Reiss pointed out. So based on square footage, a home today is actually probably four or five times more expensive than one in the 1950s, Reiss said. They also have more amenities, he pointed out.

“The quality of the housing has gone up dramatically, and that’s probably reflected in the price to some extent,” Reiss said.

But there are still other factors explaining the increase in price, which include construction productivity and supply and demand. There are people who will pay $1 million for an apartment with a leaky roof because of the area it’s in, Reiss said.

In a lot of areas with job opportunities, the regulations that govern new construction are very strict, which contributes to these high prices, Reiss said.

Many Americans feel like homeownership has become increasingly out of reach.

There was less income inequality in the mid-20th century compared to now, Reiss said. In 1950, the household median income was $2,990, with the median home value about 2.5 times that. In 2024, the median sales price was almost five times the median household income.

There is one big caveat: Reiss noted that the housing market was “incredibly discriminatory” against different groups like Black Americans. But for those who didn’t face unjust policies, homeownership was more affordable.

“Now you have extreme wealth at the one end, and some very low incomes at the bottom end,” Reiss said.

The FHFA’s @Pulte Acts on X Alone

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Business Insider quoted me in Mortgage Regulator Bill Pulte Has Posted at Least 13 Agency Orders on His Personal X Account (behind a paywall). The story reads, in part,

Until he became the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and a warrior in President Trump’s fight with the Federal Reserve, Bill Pulte was mostly known for posting on X. Under the handle @pulte, the businessman frequently sent groceries and gas money to people in need.

In his governmental role, which he assumed in March, Pulte has continued to use X as a megaphone. Over the last six months, he has posted at least 13 official orders on his personal account — and they don’t appear to be posted publicly anywhere else.

The practice is unusual for the head of an agency that regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two housing-finance companies under federal conservatorship central to the $21 trillion residential mortgage market.

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“This is very abnormal,” said David Reiss, a law professor at Cornell University who focuses on housing policy and real-estate finance. “I don’t know what a court would do if someone sued based on an order that he only posted on X.” He added by email that impacted parties might argue that carrying out official acts by an X post doesn’t comply with the Administrative Procedure Act.

The FHFA did not respond to questions about Pulte’s posts. Pulte didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Cornell Law School Is Hiring a Transactional Clinician

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File:Cornell University Law School, Jane Foster Library addition entrance.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Cornell is hiring a transactional clinician to be based in Ithaca in the Entrepreneurship Law Clinic and the Blassberg-Rice Center for Entrepreneurship Law.

The appointment will be to the long-term, presumptively renewable, contract track for permanent clinical faculty at Cornell Law School, with voting rights and academic leave rights consistent with the other permanent clinicians.

The full job posting is linked here.

The application deadline is September 30, but candidates are encouraged to apply early.

Mamdani and Affordable Housing Development

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CNN quoted me in Zohran Mamdani Has Big Housing Plans. Here’s What Stands in The Way. It reads, in part,

Mamdani’s rent freeze plan could undermine his goal of building 200,000 publicly subsidized, rent-stabilized, permanently affordable homes over the next decade for low-income households and seniors.

That’s because the private sector may be dissuaded from participating if these buildings don’t include market-rate housing. The private sector has a “very important role” to play in building housing, Mamdani has said.

“A rent freeze will change how a conversion might pay off for the developer,” said David Reiss, a law professor at Cornell University who served on the Rent Guidelines Board under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

And to be permanently affordable for extremely low-income renters, it will require deeper government subsidies than Mamdani has pledged, experts say. Previous New York City mayors have attempted to produce housing for a wide range of incomes to help offset higher subsidies for deeply-affordable units.

“It’s in the right direction to focus on people with the greatest affordability challenges,” said Alex Schwartz, an urban policy professor at The New School and a current member of the Rent Guidelines Board. “It’s important to recognize that the capital dollars won’t go as far in terms of total numbers of units if they only go toward people with extremely low incomes.”

Mamdani wants the city to borrow $70 billion to build affordable housing over the next decade, on top of the roughly $25 billion it already plans to invest.

That’s no easy task – he will need state approval since the plan would exceed the city’s debt limit by around $30 billion, as well as the New York City Council’s approval of zoning reforms that would make it easier to build.

“This would be a significant increase in city capital to produce deeply affordable housing,” said Rachel Fee, the executive director of the New York City Housing Conference, a non-profit affordable housing policy and advocacy organization. “It’s not something he can just implement on his own. It will take a political coalition to make this happen.”