The city’s overall assessed value was up slightly, about 0.21 percent, or more than $3 million, from 2018 to 2019.

It’s the first time since 2016  that net valuation was up, after two years of declines, down 1.57 percent in 2018 and 0.45 percent in 2017.

Residential inched up to 67.89 percent of overall assessed value, from 67.83 percent in 2018 as the Industrial share dipped from 17.49 percent to 17.45 percent. Those 2019 percentages are both extremes, at the high end of Residential and the low end for Industrial, for the data I’ve compiled going back to 2005.

Here’s a breakdown of the year-over-year change in 2018 and 2019 assessments by class, with vacant and residential properties the only categories seeing an increase year-over-year:

• Class 1 Vacant, $13.44 million to $12.72 million, -5.3 percent;
• Class 2 Residential, $968.76 million to $971.63 million, +0.3 percent;
• Class 4A Commercial, $128.462 million to $129.481 million, +0.78 percent;
• Class 4B Industrial, $249.791 million to $249.712 million, -0.03 percent; and,
• Class 4C Apartment, $67.738 million to $67.738 million, 0.00 percent.

Brown = Residential; Blue = Industrial; Red = Commercial; Green = Apartment

It’s rare see many drastic changes in the class valuations year-over-year because in most cases, the class types are such large numbers (in the hundreds of millions). It’s more likely to see larger swings over time, say a decade or more, or maybe because of some unusual circumstances (like the historic number of tax appeals in the early part of the decade). You can have a look at the data going back to 2005 to see some of the longer-term trends, such as the drop-off in industrial class and the growth within apartment and residential.

Over the long-term, the changes still look subtle, per the graph below, but are much more acute than the year-to-year trends.

Here’s a graph of assessed value for Class 4C, Apartment, since 2005, with a trendline through it. You can see when new developments have been add to the tax rolls. In spite of the Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) for most downtown redevelopment projects that pay a percentage of annual revenue to the city, the new developments still have an overall tax assessed value.

The assessed value for the entire city in 2018 totaled $1,431,290,451, up from $1,428,223,565 in 2017. The complete 2019 Union County Abstract of Ratables is available here. It would be interesting to see multi-year trends across the county’s 21 municipalities in Union County to see how Rahway stacks up in context. That’s an ambitious project, maybe for another time.