New Orleans Senior Property Tax Overcharges Black Owners

New Orleans Overcharged Seniors on Property Taxes

A Black Source Media accountability report.

Here’s a New Orleans senior property tax overcharge story with a deadline attached: the next window to act opens August 25. If you’re 65 or older, disabled, and own your home in Orleans Parish, you may be paying more in property taxes than the law intended. Thousands of homeowners are in the same position. The neighborhoods hit hardest look a lot like Gentilly, New Orleans East, and the Lower Ninth Ward.

The problem sits inside a policy meant to help you. Orleans Parish offers a “special assessment level” — commonly called an age or disability freeze. It’s supposed to stop your property’s taxable value from climbing. More than 17,000 households in the city currently have one. But the freeze in Orleans Parish only works in one direction. If your home’s actual market value goes up, the freeze protects you. If your home’s value goes down, you still pay taxes on the old, frozen — and now higher — number, unless you take the extra step of waiving and reapplying for the freeze yourself. Black Source Media has covered this kind of property tax friction before — see our earlier report, Fake Uproar Over Property Tax Increases.

Every other parish researchers checked does this differently. Assessor’s offices in East Baton Rouge, Lafayette, St. Charles, and St. Tammany all treat the freeze as a ceiling. If your value drops below the frozen number, they simply tax you on the lower amount, automatically. New Orleans is the outlier. Tulane real estate professor Casius Pealer, who studies the issue, put it plainly: “No other parish that I’ve come across in the state does it” this way.

The New Orleans East and Gentilly Numbers Are Worse Than the Citywide Average

Pealer and his students didn’t just find a citywide problem. They found a neighborhood pattern.

In East Carrollton, a more affluent area near Tulane’s campus, students reviewed 40 frozen properties. They found the assessor had overcharged 5 of them — 12.5%. Pealer then spot-checked three more neighborhoods: Old Aurora in Algiers, Edgewood Park in Gentilly, and Village de L’Est in New Orleans East. Across those 87 properties, the assessor overcharged nearly one in five homeowners, by an average of 12% above what they should have paid. That’s a meaningfully higher overcharge rate than the uptown-area sample showed.

No one has published a Lower Ninth Ward-specific breakdown yet. The ward wasn’t part of Pealer’s spot-check, and the assessor’s office has declined to release citywide data broken out by neighborhood. Gentilly and New Orleans East are both majority-Black neighborhoods with large populations of longtime senior homeowners. Given the pattern found there, the Lower Ninth deserves the same scrutiny. If you’re a senior homeowner there and think the assessor overcharged you, Black Source Media wants to hear from you.

The Assessor Promised a Fix. Then Asked the Attorney General Instead.

In May, when Pealer’s research became public, the Orleans Parish Assessor’s Office told him it was aware of the issue. It promised to send revised notices and credit overcharged homeowners the difference toward their 2027 taxes. That was the promise.

It didn’t happen. By August, homeowners going through this year’s public tax rolls found no such credits. Instead of issuing them, Assessor Erroll Williams sent a letter to Attorney General Liz Murrill’s office on June 4. In it, he asked whether his office even has the legal authority to lower a frozen assessment when a home’s value drops. The Attorney General’s office has not given a timeline for an answer. When Verite News asked the assessor’s office directly about the unfulfilled reimbursement promise, it declined to comment until it receives that opinion.

That leaves real people caught in the middle. Joy Willig, a 70-year-old Orleans Parish homeowner, has overpaid roughly $900 in property taxes over the past two years because her home’s actual value dropped while her frozen assessment didn’t. She hasn’t waived her freeze to fix it. Her household income sits close enough to the $102,700 eligibility limit that reapplying could cost her the freeze entirely. “I could end up not having a freeze and being in a worse position,” she said.

That’s the trap. The fix requires paperwork the assessor’s office never told most seniors to expect, and getting it wrong can cost more than doing nothing.

The Appeal Window Already Closed. Here’s What’s Still Open.

This year’s appeal window is gone. Tax rolls closed for public inspection on August 17. Online appeals closed August 20 — before most homeowners had any reason to know their frozen assessment might be wrong. If you missed it, that’s not on you. Nobody at the assessor’s office sent a notice flagging which of the 17,000-plus frozen accounts might be overcharged. That’s even after the office promised in May to fix the problem.

One thing is still open. The assessor’s office begins taking freeze-application appointments on August 25 for anyone who needs to waive and reapply for their special assessment level. If your home’s value has dropped since the assessor set your freeze, that appointment is how you start the fix for next year’s bill. But waiving your freeze means requalifying under the income limit, as Joy Willig’s case shows — so weigh that before you act.

Pull your assessment notice now and compare your frozen value against your home’s current market value. You can estimate current value using recent sales of comparable homes nearby. If the numbers don’t match, that’s your evidence heading into the August 25 appointment window. It’s also grounds to ask directly why the office didn’t catch this year’s overcharges before the appeal deadline passed. As BSM has reported before, most Orleans Parish property owners who disagree with their assessment never actually file the paperwork to fix it. Don’t be one of them this time.

Black Source Media will continue following this story. That includes efforts to get neighborhood-level data for the Lower Ninth Ward, and to hear directly from homeowners in New Orleans East and Gentilly who believe the assessor overcharged them.

Verite News reporting and a Verite News commentary by Casius Pealer contributed reporting and data to this story: a news story and a commentary by Casius Pealer.

Jeff Thomas

Publisher — Black Source Media Jeff Thomas Publisher • Opinion Columnist •  New Orleans Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades. His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands. He is also the principal of EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had. Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know. They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead. Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans? The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It. The Failure of Mitch Landrieu

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