McNamara appears on Fox Business to talk about Rockford’s real estate turnaround

By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — Mayor Tom McNamara appeared on a Fox Business show on Wednesday to discuss how the Rockford region made its turnaround from underwater mortgage capital to the top real estate market in the country.

The interview on The Claman Countdown comes about a month after The Wall Street Journal and Realtor.com released a ranking that placed Rockford on top of a list of the 200 most populous metropolitan areas. Its rankings factor in multiple components of the real-estate market as well as quality of life and economic health.

“We invested really in hard work, we invested in partnerships throughout our community,” McNamara told host Liz Claman during the five-minute segment. “We invested in physical infrastructure as well as human capital to get us where we’re at today.”

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The city was named America’s underwater mortgage capital by Wall Street Journal and Realtor.com a decade ago. Now the same outlets rank Rockford as the country’s top real estate market.

In the Fox Business segment, titled “Rags to Riches: WSJ crowns Rockford, IL as U.S. real estate darling,” Claman said the city cut its property taxes by 37% and gave credit to that move for the turnaround.

“They say that if you want to stimulate something, cut taxes on it,” Claman said. “You cut property taxes by 37%. Weren’t you worried that the city’s coffers would suffer because of that?”

That point requires clarity. The city didn’t cut its property taxes. Rather, it went without an increase for 11 straight years. That includes two small reductions to the levy in two of the last seven years.

By collecting the same amount or slightly less in property taxes — often described as leaving the levy flat — the city’s property tax rate started to fall once property values began increasing.

That rate now stands at 2.1972% for the city’s portion of your bill, one of 11 entities that make up your overall property tax bill.

The city’s rate  — which fell by 36% from its peak in 2015 of 3.3595% — isn’t set by the city directly but is rather a byproduct of two factors: increasing property values and the city’s decision to forgo collecting any increases in property taxes.

But even when rates fall you can pay a bigger bill, as many taxpayers have seen the past few years.

The city’s decision to keep its property tax levy flat has left millions of dollars in the hands of home and business owners. Since 2017, the city has left $53.8 million in property taxes in the hands of taxpayers that it legally could have collected under tax cap laws.

McNamara told Claman that it was able to hold the line on property taxes by operating a lean workforce, which he said is about one-third the size of communities with comparable populations.

“We invest heavily into our employees, but we also have a very lean workforce,” McNamara said on the show. “We also allowed our employees to tell us what they thought we should cut, where can we increase revenue and cut expenses?”

McNamara said the city also sought advice from experts in municipal finance and experts in the business community.

“We’re here through a lot of hard work, a lot of help from a lot of community members,” McNamara said.

He put a spotlight on the city’s effort to spur homebuilding through a program that provides a three-year property tax rebate and the waiver of building permit fees for new home construction. He also highlighted a critical home repair program in partnership with Rockford Area Habitat for Humanity and the work of the Rockford Community Investment Fund to provide short term loans to help repair dilapidated houses.

Claman gave credit to McNamara at the conclusion of the interview.

“Thank you for being the kind of leader of a community of your size and fixing a problem that almost seems insurmountable,” she said.

This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on X at @KevinMHaas or Instagram @thekevinhaas and Threads @thekevinhaas