Lansing abates or diverts about $18 million a year in property tax.
A record of Lansing's property and personal-property tax breaks and tax-increment diversions, drawn from the assessment roll, council packets, and the city's audited financial report. The citywide totals are the city's own audited or budgeted figures. The deal-by-deal list highlights individual breaks that can be traced to a primary record; it is not the city's full roster. Figures are what was promised or abated, not what was delivered.
What this is. This page keeps two things separate. The data is a neutral record: every figure, deal, and parcel comes from a public source, shown as the record shows it, for you to read and judge. The analysis is ours, and it is labeled as such. Where you see a verdict chip, a cost-per-job chart, or the "needed or extraction" scorecard, Rhinoceros is applying a published standard, chiefly the incentive-evaluation work of Timothy Bartik at the W.E. Upjohn Institute in Kalamazoo, to ask whether a break was likely needed and what the public got for it. Two cautions the research stresses, and we pass on. A tax break only costs the public money if the project would not have happened without it, a question the city rarely tests in public. A break can also be the price of keeping a project from locating in a neighboring community instead, a trade-off this record does not try to settle.
Where the money goes, by mechanism
The audited GASB 77 disclosure covers three programs ($7.65M, FY2025). Housing PILOTs and the downtown tax-increment capture are real diversions that sit outside that note, so the true annual figure is roughly double the audited note.
Does it deliver, or capture? Public dollars per permanent job
The standard test (Bartik, W.E. Upjohn Institute) is cost per permanent job (not construction) and whether the jobs would have happened anyway. Bartik's review of the research puts the share of incentives that actually change a decision at 2 to 25 percent. The brownfield deals cluster at the costly end. The OPRA and NEZ abatements instead return derelict buildings to use, delivering market-rate housing. Whether that housing is affordable is a separate test, scored deal by deal on the Whole ledger.
The dashed line marks about one year's full-time pay at these wages (~$40,000), a rough yardstick: a subsidy well beyond one year's pay per permanent job is hard to justify on jobs alone. The research sets no single dollar threshold, because the first question is not how much per job but whether the jobs are new at all. A low cost per job can still be a giveaway if the project would have gone ahead without the break.
What the city taxes, owes, forgives, diverts, and pays out
Lansing's charter-mandated Tax & Debt Dashboard discloses what residents are taxed and what the city owes. It leaves out the discretionary half: what the city forgives, what it diverts through tax-increment capture, and what it pays out in settlements. Every figure below traces to a primary record. Each carries its own measure and vintage, and quantities on different measures are never added together.
Per parcel: assessed value and estimated tax, beside the amount forgiven or captured
The city's Millage Library is parcel-less. Joining each subsidized parcel to the assessment roll lets a resident see one block's assessed value and the tax it would carry at the non-homestead rate (62.6 mills) beside the amount forgiven or captured there. The tax figure is an upper-bound estimate (assessed value × 62.6 mills), not an exact bill.
Needed, or extraction? Testing each break against the standard it is supposed to meet
A tax break is meant to be a last resort: the public pays only when a project cannot happen without it, and the break is no bigger than the gap it fills. Economists who study these deals (the W.E. Upjohn Institute in Kalamazoo and the watchdog Good Jobs First) find most incentives go to projects that would have happened anyway. Below, each deal is scored on six plain tests. A cell is shown only when we can point to a public record for it. The rest are still being checked.
A plain-language guide to the terms
Local tax policy runs on acronyms. Tap any underlined termⓘ anywhere on this page for a definition, or read them all here.
What this ledger does not yet count
This section lists what the ledger leaves out, and why. These are the quantities it does not yet count, each with the reason.
Vacant commercial buildings and subsidized sites
All 287 assessor-flagged vacant commercial buildings. 233 are held by an owner we found holding nothing else (blue). The other 54 belong to owners who hold two or more (violet). The largest single cluster is eight buildings held by one developer through separately named LLCs. Orange points are brownfield sites the city has subsidized. Click any point for the owner and the assessor's note.
Ownership is resolved two ways, because grouping by owner name alone undercounts it: an owner who puts each building in its own LLC looks like several separate single owners. We resolved all 204 corporate owners to their Michigan LARA resident agent, so a violet cluster is either the same owner name on 2+ buildings or separately named LLCs that share one principal. That tracing found nine owners hiding two or more buildings behind different LLC names, among them a second developer (on E. Michigan Ave) and two other multi-building developers. Each cluster is corroborated by a shared registered office.
Markers sit at the parcel centroid (Lansing GIS); click any marker for the address, owner, and the assessor's vacancy note. Use the Citywide / Downtown buttons or the zoom control to move around. Basemap © OpenStreetMap, © CARTO. Source: Ingham County assessor field-canvass notes + City tax-parcel geometry, 2025.
The individual tax breaks
Filter by program, search by name or address, sort by any column. The recipient, program, amount, and location in each row are the public record. The verdict chip is Rhinoceros's assessment, not the city's, and is defined below.
| Recipient | Program | Location | Public $ | Cost / benefit | Verdict |
|---|
PILOT = annual forgone tax (SK from roll-taxable × 62.6 mills; complexes upper-bound est.). Brownfield = total developer reimbursement over the term. OPRA/NEZ show rehab investment, not the abatement. Promised figures; delivery not yet measurable for 2026 approvals.