"Maybe they'll build one for me," said Caskey, a Swarthmore College professor who teaches urban economics.
With its new, "actual value" numbers, the city will ask thousands of Philadelphia homeowners, including some on St. James, to pay sharp increases in property taxes.
The proposed assessments are, in fact, generally much closer to the homes' real value than the current ones. The 22 homes on St. James, where recent sales have ranged from $710,000 to $1.2 million, have been underassessed for years.
But an Inquirer examination of the BRT's records for the block reveals a number of mistakes in the descriptions of properties - errors likely to throw off the new numbers as well.
At least eight of the 22 homes have some serious inaccuracies that include garages attached to the wrong houses and extra floors.
One single-family home, a redbrick 4,700-square-foot townhouse at 2201, is designated in the records as "store/office + apartments."
Similar errors apparently exist in neighborhoods throughout the city, an Inquirer review shows, part of a legacy of poor recordkeeping and incompetence at the BRT.
Although the new computer-driven values are an improvement, experts say there's no way that the formulas - without a huge number of inspections by appraisers - can find all the errors in the BRT's property records.
This could be a massive headache for the BRT and the city's elected officials. Fixing the assessments is already a tough sell. It will be immeasurably harder if the public decides the BRT's numbers can't be trusted.
The Nutter administration has its own doubts about the quality of the BRT's new numbers, and plans to spend the summer reviewing them "to figure out what flaws there are and why they exist," Finance Director Rob Dubow said.
That could include hiring an outside expert to review the new data, he said.
