Young stars and racing stripes

Ah! ALC! One of the beach associations whose fabulous beaches the rest of us subsidize but are not welcome to visit!

Check the city's assessment records, and you'll find a bunch of them:
ALC has one
Sea Beach Association has two!
Ocean View Drive (St. David's Bluff) has one
The Foxes (the old Haywood Hale Broun property in North Stamford has one

These properties are fully the size of building lots, but the Assessor very kindly values them at a tiny fraction of their value as a building lot, AND does not assess the owners of the deeded beach rights any more than similar lots nearby which lack such rights.

And the value of those rights is high. ALC is taxed -- are you ready?--$268.45 per year on its 0.54 acre beach, which the assessor has generously valued at a mere $15,960. My notes say that it was previously valued at $158,520, which suggests that they had the chutzpah to appeal an already ridiculously low valuation!

A neighboring waterfront lot at 2 Ocean Drive North, 25% smaller at 0.40 acres, is valued at $1,137,190. So the ALC beach folks are getting a 98.6% discount on their property tax for that lovely shared -- and private -- beach. The rest of Stamford's residents are not welcome there.(Check their website.)

On Sea Beach Drive, they have not one but TWO! private and subsidized beaches. The first in the listings is 0.46 acres, valued at $57,510, and the second is 0.62 acres, assessed at $53,280. They pay a combined property tax on these two fine properties of $1,949.(I'm sure their lawyer will appeal their assessment on the basis of ALC's lowered assessment. Sorry about that, for the other 99.9% of Stamford taxpayers.)

Nearby, 60 Sea Beach Drive's lot of 0.60 acre, is assessed at $1,816,480. This means that the property owners' association is getting a 97% discount on their property taxes on TWO shared properties. That's over $30,000 per property, enough to pay for several children in Stamford's schools.

Ocean View Drive -- St. David's Bluff -- has a similar deal. Their beach is 0.70 acres, and is valued at $54,220; The neighboring waterfront property at 1 Ocean View Drive has a land assessment of $1,664,980 which means that the shared beach is getting a 97% discount on its property taxes.

Hycliff Association must have appealed its assessments; my records show their 2007 assessment on 1.0 acre at $556,750, and it is now down to $74,420; and on their other property, of 0.9 acre, their assessment went from a fair $730,530 (this one's on sewers) to $40,340.(They also got a reduction on their "outbuilding").
But some of Stamford's private parks are paying their fair share.

Dolphin Cove Club Corp. has a valuation of $4,056,440 on its 4.5 acres -- less per acre than some of the other smaller properties on that road, but still significantly higher than ALC, Sea Beach and Ocean View.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Those of us not welcome on these private beaches and in these private parks are nonetheless asked to subsidize them, permitting them to pay property taxes of less than 5% what nearby properties pay.

Maybe most of us could afford to be that generous a few years ago.

But can we afford it now?

When I questioned the assessor about this practice a few years ago (at a public meeting prior to one of the revals), I was told that the properties with deeded beach rights were valued higher than those without, to account for this. I can find no evidence that this was then -- or is now -- true.(I have a spreadsheet which contains the last few revals for some of these streets.)

And the owners on one side of one of the streets in ALC lack deeded beach rights, and they are clearly not given a lower lot valuation than those whose properties have the deeded beach rights.

And can you imagine a real estate ad neglecting to mention the existence of deeded beach rights? I can't.

Stamford's non-beach-owning taxpayers deserve better.

Don't we?

Or would we be told we'd be throwing poor widows out on the street, making their homes unaffordable?