Taxpayer (building)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In US real estate, urban planning, and especially firefighting, a taxpayer refers to a small one or two story building built to cover the owner's annual property tax assessed for owning a parcel of land.[1] Taxpayers are most commonly mixed use structures with commercial occupancies on the first floor and residential use above. Such a building is usually constructed with the hope that it can soon be redeveloped into a larger building capable of generating more revenue, or simply to hold a parcel of land along a new road or especially a streetcar line while waiting for value to appreciate. The building style was generally replaced with strip malls as the automobile became dominant in the mid 20th Century.[2]
In the wake of the Great Depression, taxpayers proliferated across New York City, ending the period of high-rise buildings; while just 7 percent of building plans filed in 1929 for the busy 3rd, Lexington, and Madison Avenues were for one- to three-story buildings, every plan was for such a building by 1933. Despite being intended as temporary buildings, many survived for a half-century or more.[3]