Orange County taking another look at revaluation after group exposes racial disparity
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Groups reveal higher tax valuation increases in some Black neighborhoods versus white
- County to hire outside expert and form task force to review property tax equity
- Longtime homeowners face rising tax burdens, fueling displacement and gentrification
Beverly Walton saw the value of the house that her father-in-law built in northern Hillsborough rise by more than 80% after this year’s revaluation in Orange County.
The three-bedroom home with one bathroom was built in 1956 and valued at $141,700 last year. But this year, Walton opened her mail to find that the home, despite not being improved, now had a value of $255,500.
“I feel like this is so unfair,” Walton said. “My children owned land (in the same neighborhood), and my son and my grandson actually sold, because they couldn’t afford the repairs to [their] home and pay the tax. … But what they got for their land was nowhere where the value of what it should have been.”
County records show only one of six homes in Walton’s historically Black neighborhood sold for over $250,000 in the last four years. The county tax office valued that home at $284,500 this year, just a 10% increase over its 2021 sales price.
Walton, a member of Orange County Justice United, began working with the new Property Tax Justice Collective to bring attention to the tax burden on longtime homeowners.
The group found a problem in how the tax office assesses home values, especially when the group compared historically Black neighborhoods to nearby, wealthier and mostly white neighborhoods.
Rising property values are a threat to some of the most affordable and culturally diverse neighborhoods remaining in Orange County, said George Barrett, executive director of the Marian Cheek Jackson Center in Chapel Hill. It’s also making it impossible for residents living on low or fixed incomes to stay in their homes, he said.
“And so we, as a coalition, have formed to fight back against this and really preserve the future of our neighborhoods in the midst of these current revaluations,” he said.
Regressive tax values hit most vulnerable
The Jackson Center first raised the alarm about home values after the 2021 revaluation, when residents in the historically Black Northside neighborhood near downtown Chapel Hill saw astronomical increases, compared with nearby, wealthier neighborhoods.
Working with the Jackson Center, they found that their family homes were being compared to investor-owned student rentals that in many cases were larger with more bedrooms, increasing their market value beyond what someone might pay for the family homes.
The wealthier neighborhoods did not have the same problem.
Their work prompted the county to create the Longtime Homeowners Assistance Program, which pays a portion of the property tax for residents who meet income and property value limits.
The program has grown, to $250,000 last year for residents countywide and another $75,000 from Chapel Hill to help town residents. The money helped 592 homeowners pay their property tax bill last year, with an average grant of just under $500.
But the underlying inequities weren’t addressed, said Hudson Vaughan, former Jackson Center leader and now director of the N.C. Housing Coalition’s Community Justice Collaborative.
“One of the things that I’ve been studying is that the [tax] assessors make a lot of choices that influence what we call objectivity,” Vaughan said. These include neighborhood boundaries, and undeveloped land and home sales that are used to determine new values.
The most common method of assessing property value in North Carolina is market value, which compares homes and land to what buyers are willing to pay for housing in a particular market.
But that can lead to inconsistency in how land is valued, Vaughan said, and to “vertical regressivity,” in which lower-cost housing is assessed at a higher percentage of the area’s market value, which overvalues it for tax bill purposes and for what a buyer might pay.
Higher-priced housing is undervalued by the tax office — sometimes resulting in a lower tax assessment than its market value — because it’s already closer to the price that someone might be willing to pay.
The collective found the same problem across the county, regardless of the property’s development potential or whether it was in a rural or urban area. New apartment complexes in Chapel Hill were also valued at less than their recent sales prices, the group found.
It’s leading to further gentrification in neighborhoods that have provided affordable homes to Black families for generations, they said.
Vaughan’s 2022 study, done in collaboration with UNC School of Government professor Chris McLaughlin, an expert in public law and government, found the problem is affecting homeowners in over 80% of North Carolina counties.
“I just feel like that I live in a time where there should be more equality, where there should be more accountability, and that we should not be still so far apart in land value, and in taxes, just because we’re Black and we own land that we have owned for generations,” Walton said. “I feel like it’s gentrification, and I think it’s unfair.”
Orange County seeking a solution
Orange County’s property values grew by 50% or more this year, on the heels of a housing boom that has priced many people out of homeownership and is making even the rental market unaffordable for low-income workers.
The median sales price for a home in Orange County now ranges from $385,500 in Mebane to $660,000 in Chapel Hill, county tax officials have said. The average sale price is $512,200.
Other counties have seen similar increases, The News & Observer reported.
The Orange County commissioners have acknowledged the strain on homeowners in its budget discussions this year, asking staff to look at how tax assessments are determined and whether there might be some solution.
On Tuesday, County Manager Travis Myren said the county will hire an outside expert this summer to identify where problems with vertical equity exist, and the tax office will take that information to the Board of Equalization and Review for changes.
The county also will bring together a group of tax office staff, community members and experts later this year to address the problem, he said.
The work may not help right away, but it could change how the next revaluation is conducted in 2029, Commissioners Chair Jamezetta Bedford said. Commissioner Amy Fowler urged more residents to file a formal appeal if their property assessments are too high.
“I very much appreciate and respect my colleagues that have proposed amendments to lower our tax burden, but I believe that getting the tax valuations correct is very important — the most appropriate means of ensuring vertical equity in tax burden,” Fowler said.
This story was originally published June 6, 2025 at 8:40 AM.
