A property tax trap for senior and disabled homeowners will soon be fixed

By Casius Pealer

Source: Verite News

May 25, 2026

Housing affordability is a serious and persistent issue across neighborhoods, incomes, and age groups in Orleans Parish and across the state. Even for longtime homeowners with fixed rate mortgages, rising insurance and property taxes are reducing affordability. Fortunately, one longstanding statewide policy gives vulnerable homeowners an opportunity to freeze their property taxes. Currently, more than 18,000 Orleans Parish households have age or disability freezes specifically designed to keep assessments from going up.

Unfortunately, in Orleans Parish these freezes also keep property assessments from going down. If a property value decreases, the age freeze application notes that an elderly, low-income property owner “must submit a waiver and new application…to receive benefit (sic) of lower assessment in the subsequent tax year.” While it may seem unlikely that home values will go down, it happens enough to warrant a specific call-out in the Assessor’s Special Assessment Level (SAL) form. The result is that a policy to reduce taxes for our most vulnerable homeowners paradoxically also has the potential to keep taxes high.

Take the real life example of two identical units in a Warehouse District condominium. Both were valued at $370,000 and had identical tax payments in 2023, when one owner applied for the added benefit of an age freeze. However, in that year’s quadrennial reassessment, units in this building saw a 13% decrease leading to a lower valuation for both units in 2024. The not-frozen owner’s assessment consequently went down, but the senior’s assessed value stayed frozen. As a result, she paid $700 more than her neighbor did in both 2024 and 2025 solely because of the age freeze. Both property values dropped again in 2026, but the age freeze again kept the senior homeowner’s taxes more than $900 higher this year than if she had never qualified for the freeze in the first place. 

Of five condo units with age freezes in the building, three of them (60%) paid more in 2026 than they would have without the freeze. While this particular building may be an extreme case, citywide data from the assessor’s office is difficult to get. Students in my real estate class this semester at Tulane University compiled individual property data for more than 500 properties in the East Carrollton neighborhood near Tulane, and of 40 properties with age freezes, five of those senior homeowners (12.5%) paid more in property taxes than they would have without the freeze. I spot-checked locations in three other neighborhoods (Old Aurora in Algiers, Edgewood Park in Gentilly, and Village de L’Est in New Orleans East), and of 87 total properties with frozen assessments, nearly one in five homeowners were charged more in taxes than they would have paid without the freeze — by an average of 12%. 

Overall, these data suggest that more than 3,500 low income seniors in Orleans Parish are paying at least $500,000 more in property taxes, every year, solely because of the illogical administration of a policy meant to charge them less. In theory, each of these homeowners could have closely reviewed their assessment notice in July, requested a waiver to cancel the freeze, and then re-applied for the freeze in August. But in reality, vulnerable homeowners expect the freeze to be a relief rather than a continued burden. 

Indeed, despite our common use of the word “freeze” to describe this policy, laws establishing and implementing the age freeze never use this word. In a subsection titled “Special Assessment Levels,” the state constitution says only that future assessments “shall not be increased above” the amount in the first year. That is exactly what assessors in other parishes already do. Calls to assessor offices in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, St. Tammany, and St. Charles confirmed that those parish officials logically treat the age and disability freeze as a ceiling rather than a lock.

In Orleans Parish, aggregated data that could be used for citywide research and analysis is prohibitively expensive to get. In 2010, the Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR) went so far as to sue the assessors’ office when they “refused to turn over the city’s 2010 tax roll at a reasonable price,” according to a Times Picayune article at the time. BGR ultimately settled out of court, so the problem was not solved. Currently, an Excel file of property data for all 164,839 parcels in Orleans Parish costs more than $4,500. For comparison, this same data in Jefferson Parish (+167,000 parcels) costs just $900. In Chicago, data on all 1.86 million parcels are available to download online for free, 24 hours a day.

The lack of public access to aggregate Orleans Parish data creates numerous blind spots that are holding our city back. The age freeze trap is just one, discovered mostly by accident and with the benefit of a team of students. Fortunately, this particular oversight is now being fixed. When given a chance to respond to this commentary, the Assessor’s Office acknowledged that “we have been aware of this issue” and said they would be “sending revised notices … so the difference should be automatically counted towards the 2027 taxes.” That means vulnerable homeowners who were overcharged in past years will now get reimbursed or any credit toward future taxes owed — by my rough estimation reducing 2027 taxes by more than $2 million for more than 3,500 New Orleans homeowners.

This is objectively good news, even if those reductions are reimbursements rather than additional relief. But greater transparency and access to public data collected by the Assessor’s Office could have enabled this issue to be identified and resolved much sooner. What else could researchers, community groups, and City staff better understand about affordability, equity, land use, and economic development solutions in New Orleans? This episode should encourage the Assessor’s Office to make their existing data more widely available in order to help find out. 

Fair Use Notice

This site occasionally reprints copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We make such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of issues and to highlight the accomplishments of our affiliates. We believe this constitutes a “fair use” of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is available without profit. For more information go to: US CODE: Title 17,107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond “fair use,” you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.