Romantics among us would say the city is priceless. But apparently romanticism is not a requisite for the job of assessor-recorder, because the city agency is in the midst of its annual tabulation of the city’s value in cold, hard cash. The early projection: $208 billion.
That’s a record high, of course, and probably not a surprise given that 2015’s estimate put us at $191 billion. The property tax roll is the estimated value "all real property and all personal property owned in San Francisco."
City Assessor Carmen Chu's office uses these assessments to calculate property taxes. For the rest of us, though, it’s ideal fodder for trivia and/or bragging rights. Although breaking the mind-boggling $200 billion mark is also yet another indicator of how high the city’s profile has grown, financially-speaking.
Back in 2011, the office assessed the city at just over $163 billion. By 2013, it had crept up to $177 billion. Oddly enough, the roll has gone up consistently every year of the last decade, even during the recession times of 2009 and 2010. In non-inflation adjusted terms, the city as a whole has appreciated 73 percent since 2006.
If you’re curious, $208 billion is a slightly larger sum than the estimated net worth of the world’s three wealthiest people. And it’s just a little bit less than the combined fortunes of the Bay Area’s nine richest tech billionaires, from Mark Zuckerberg ($44.6 billion) down to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar ($7.2 billion).
(Though Omidyar technically lives in Nevada, rather than San Jose, where his company is based.)
- Total Property Assessment Over $200 Billion [City Assessor]
- 2015 Annual Report
- 2013
- 2011
- 2010
- 2009
- 2007 (includes 2006 figures)
- The World’s Billionaires [Forbes]
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