To examine how much of the Suncoast’s recent housing growth occurred in special-purpose government districts, we analyzed hundreds of thousands of tax collector assessments and property appraiser records from Sarasota and Manatee counties. Below, we outline the methodology behind our findings.
For Manatee County, we looked at active properties in the 2024 adjusted certified tax rolls and tagged those within a special-purpose government district based on fields indicating community development districts (CDDs) or stewardship districts.
For Sarasota County, unlike Manatee, the property rolls do not contain fields for special-purpose government districts. To obtain this information, we requested assessment records for the county’s 16 special districts from the Sarasota County Tax Collector. These records showed every property that was charged a fee within CDD, stewardship district or independent district. We combined the assessment records and joined them to the county property data by matching account numbers.
We wanted to determine how much choice homebuyers had if they wanted to avoid CDDs or similar developments. After identifying which parcels fell within such districts, we filtered the data to include only single-family homes and condos – determined by each county’s land use codes. Using the year-built fields, we counted how many homes were built in each year inside and outside special districts. We then calculated the percentages for each county, both counties combined and for individual ZIP codes. The results showed a dramatic shift in construction patterns over the past three decades.
In any data analysis, it’s common to encounter anomalies or unresolved questions. In this work, we found that 13 properties in the special assessment records did not have a matching account number in the property data. We excluded those from the analysis; however, we also ran an additional check in which we treated them as single-family homes built in 2023. Because it was a small number of properties, including or excluding them did not change any of the numbers in our analysis.
As part of our fact checking process, a data journalism professor at the University of Maryland reviewed the conceptual framework and line-by-line code that produced our data findings.
Kara Newhouse is an investigative data reporter for Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
This story was originally published by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom delivering investigative journalism to Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Learn more at suncoastsearchlight.org.
