Can urban universities be better neighbors?

In 2020, with a new push by activists, a group of staff and faculty launched a petition called Penn for PILOTs. The organization calculated that if the university were to pay 40% of the property tax rate on the land it owns, the annual total would be $40 million, or about 0.35% of the university's annual revenues. (If passed through directly to the school system, the sum would represent a 2.5% increase in funding from the local government, which covers about half of the system's annual operating expenses.)