Port Chester IDA School Multipliers

In 2014 and 2019, Urbanomics worked with the Port Chester Industrial Development Agency to develop and maintain a tool to assist the IDA in assessing the school child generation potential of developments coming before the Board for PILOT approval given countervailing enrollment trends and facilities already beyond capacity. As part of this study, Urbanomics analyzed past trends and projected future enrollment for the Port Chester Rye Union Free School District, worked with the District to determine soft and hard education costs, developed customized public school child multipliers, and combined these elements to develop and maintain a Mitigation Formula spreadsheet tool.

The key component of the formula were the public school child multipliers. The child generation rate standard for developers prepared by the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research in 2006 were not reflecting activity in Port Chester, which differs economically, demographically, and in terms of recent development patterns from the rest of Westchester County and New York State. To create better and more up-to-date multipliers, Urbanomics ran several iterations of cross-tabulations of school child generation using the Census Bureau's Public Use Microdata Sample of the American Community Survey for households among various affordability levels, tenure, building structure and unit types. The results have been compared to a sample of known school child generation in recently constructed developments in order to determine the best fit between estimates and reality.

During the 2019 study update, past school child multipliers were found to be highly accurate over the long-term with a 1% differential. While capacity constraints were forecasted in the near-term, declining districtwide enrollment in later years would present an opportunity for increasing housing development in Village while providing sizeable fiscal benefits to the school district and the Village.