Habitat Homes Generate over $850,000 in Property Taxes for Local Governments

by Nolan McKenna

Last updated on 12/2/2021

for Data Visualization for All
with Prof. Jack Dougherty
Trinity College, Hartford CT, USA

Story

For my data build, I was tasked with finding out how much property tax revenue Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity homes generated for local governments in 2020.

Since 1989, Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity has been providing affordable and safe housing to local families through the construction of new homes or the renovation of old ones. To date, they have completed about 250 of these projects.

Finding information on how much property tax their builds have generated is important because it shows how along with helping out families by providing reliable housing, the organization also aids local governments by providing them with thousands of dollars in additional property taxes.

These property taxes often go back into the community by providing public education, improving infrastructure, and funding public safety, so any increase in them will help the community develop.

Most recently in 2020, I found that the organization’s 249 homes generated a total of $864,739 in total tax revenue for 11 different communities.

Hartford led the way with over $500,000 in property taxes generated by 178 homes, as can be seen in the chart here:

Figure 1: A chart showing how much property tax Hartford Habitat homes generated for each town they were built in. If the chart is not displayed, click here.

New Britain followed with over $100,000 generated by 24 homes. Additionally, Bloomfield and East Hartford both also generated almost $50,000 each, with 11 and 9 homes respectively.

Along with the $850,000 in property taxes, it is also impressive how many towns Hartford Area Habitat has built in, which is shown by the map below.

Figure 2: A map showing the locations of Hartford Habitat's homes and how much property tax they generated in 2020. If the map is not displayed, click here.

With this map, it’s easy to see the wide outreach that Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity has. In just 2020 alone, Hartford Habitat helped generate over $850,000 in property taxes for 11 different local governments.

This number will only continue to rise as Hartford Habitat continues to aid local communities with their builds.

Town Name Total Habitat Homes Tax Revenue Generated by Habitat Homes (2020)
Hartford 178 $541,224
New Britain 24 $116,170
Bloomfield 11 $49,276
East Hartford 9 $47,892
Manchester 6 $27,939
Vernon 7 $21,722
Bristol 6 $20,223
Glastonbury 2 $15,876
Granby 2 $12,139
Windsor 2 $7,258
Farmington 2 $5,020

Figure 3: A table summarizing the data that was found.

This simple table nicely sums up all of the data that I found.

Overall, this data shows that Habitat homes help communities by generating thousands of dollars in property tax revenue. This provides a strong argument in favor of building Habitat homes in communities, and could be helpful in Hartford Habitat's efforts to expand to more towns surrounding Hartford.

Data

In order to gather property tax data and reveal these findings, Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity, Jack Dougherty, Nassar, Myri, Emma, and myself all collaborated heavily. Along with Habitat's own property records, we utilized various government tax databases (see photo) to find the 2020 property tax generated by each Habitat home.

Figure 4: An example of a government's property tax database.

In order to turn the data we found and organized into a visualization, I needed to tidy it up and think about what types of visualizations I wanted.

To start, I removed several columns from Habitat's data set that weren’t relevant to the topic of 2020 property taxes, including “Year Sold By Habitat,” “Parcel ID,” and “Code.”

Following this, I realized I wanted to use a bar chart and a choropleth map to communicate the data. I wanted to utilize these two types of visualizations because I thought the bar chart would do a good job at displaying the total revenue generated for each town, and the map would be effective at displaying the wide variety of locations where Hartford Habitat has built.

In order to create the bar chart and choropleth map, I used a website called Datawrapper. However, a key step in making the map was the use of Mapshaper and GimmeGeoData to create my own map template of Hartford and its surrounding areas that I could upload to Datawrapper. After some trial and error and a lot of rearranging data in Google Sheets, I created a functioning chart and map that both effectively communicate my findings on 2020 property taxes.

Credits

As mentioned, myself, Jack Dougherty, Nassar, Myri, Emma, and Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity all collaborated on this project. Jack, Nassar, Myri, and Emma helped find property tax records and organize the data, while Hartford Habitat provided all of the addresses for their builds.

Government property tax databases can be found below:

Hartford

Bloomfield

Bristol

East Hartford

Farmington

Glastonbury

Granby

Manchester

New Britain

Vernon

Windsor

Other Sources

Berry-Johnson, Janet. “Property Tax.” Investopedia, www.investopedia.com/terms/p/propertytax.asp.

“West Hartford Resident Opens Habitat for Humanity ReStore.” We-Ha | West Hartford News, We-Ha.com, 29 Oct. 2014, we-ha.com/west-hartford-resident-opens-habitat-humanity-restore/.