Congregation V’yoel Moshe on Maple Avenue in Monsey (Photo: John Meore/The Journal News
Exponential growth: Ramapo
“Nowhere is the expansion of religious exemptions as pronounced as in Ramapo, a Rockland County town that is home to a rapidly growing Orthodox Jewish population.
“You could feasibly have a situation where there are no properties on the tax rolls,” West said of Ramapo. “If you do the math and extrapolate it out, there’s only so much land.”
To illustrate the point, in 2015, in Ramapo:
The number of religious exempt parcels more than tripled from 150 in 1999 to 523 in 2015.
The total value of those properties increased 165 percent in the same 16 years.
Ramapo ranked second in New York state in the number of parcels with nonprofit educational exemptions. Those 349 (up from 232) properties were worth $537 million (up from $164 million), a 226 percent value increase since 1999.
Ramapo had the highest number of tax-exempt clergy residences of any town or city in the state aside from New York City in 2015. The 250 parcels were worth $123 million, or nearly $500,000 per property. That makes one in every 120 pieces of land in Ramapo a clergy residence.
Those figures reveal remarkable growth — an increase of 54 percent from 162 in 1999. And those parcels’ value tripled from $42 million to $123 million over 16 years. This counters state trends: clergy residences dropped 7 percent around the state in the last 16 years, to 3,910 properties worth $2 billion.”
Read the complete Journal News story here.