My county appraises my home for much more than I could sell it for, and my property tax is based on that county appraisal. I have tried to get the appraisal down to realistic number -- I file annual appraisal protests.
I'm in favor of paying for public schools but would prefer the county appraise properties realistically and then raise the tax rate to compensate, rather than inflate the appraisal so they can claim a lower tax rate.
In the last three years, a number of states have substantially reformed their property tax systems, providing huge tax benefits to owner-occupied homes and shifting the burden of paying for services like schools and police to commercial property owners (including rental apartment buildings)
That sounds like shifting the property tax burden from homeowners to renters - homeowners are generally wealthier than renters, so it's placing more of the property tax burden on those less able to afford it.
The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.
That has some not-fun generational aspects.
(1) If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced. That in turn leads to lower home values since the school quality factor is reduced.
(2) If munis are unable to collect a sufficient tax base, they must reduce services. There will be hemming and hawing about things like cutting the pensions promised decades ago to attract competent service workers, but those are harder to reduce rather than not fixing the fire trucks, the water pipes, and other hidden taxes citizens pay for by reduced services. So your property values will also be reduced in the long term. Small towns are prime examples of this happening, when towns fail.
Trying to build a community out of one socioeconomic class works about as well as trying to redline. It leads to a less vibrant community, less adaptable community, and people are poorer in life and in their finances for it.
Imagine a town with a number of wealthy homeowners, most of them old enough that their kids have grown up. Their municipality is already flush with cash. They already only need few schools for their kids and grandkids. They just want to pressure the less wealthy undesirables away, and use tax (dis)incentives to do that.
> If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced.
"Good schools" are mostly about avoiding bad kids and bad parents. Expensive homes (without Section 8 or equivalent in the neighbourhood) is a feature, as it keeps most of them away. It's not a good way of doing it -- it excludes lots of perfectly good kids and parents and it is really expensive. It's just the best way available to most people in the West.
While it may be common, it certainly isn't universal. I've worked in schools in poor communities that have pushed for good educators. In one of those schools, the push for better teachers was by the students themselves. There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities.
I'm not sure the opposite is true either, i.e. that expensive homes are a proxy for good schools. I've also worked in schools where the families were affluent, but the environment was toxic due to the behaviour of students and parents.
No, good schools are also a function of $ spend per pupil, which is correlated with school quality and opportunities for students. A really interesting place to study this is San Antonio v Rodriguez (1973) where in my opinion they laid the groundwork for such inequality in the US. The argument being made in that case (which the Supreme Court ruled against 5 4) is that funding schools via property taxes leads to this prolonged entrenched inequality.
The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).
In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
Spend per pupil is a factor, but I have to agree with the parent poster, if you remove bad, disruptive, or underperforming kids from a school, and replaced them with disciplined, over-achieving students, the rest of the student body benefits. This is independent of school funding.
Private schools, even ones that receive less tuition per student than public schools of the same district prove this point because they can set a higher bar and more readily kick out disruptive students.
California spends more money on low-income school districts than the average, and I think that's generally true most other places, especially since No Child Left behind (which for all it's problems by-and-large forced states to invest in poorer schools.)
Nationally, per student cost at Catholic parochial schools is roughly 1/2 of public schools. (Couldn't find California specific numbers, but it tracks what I've seen.) That's cost/spending; tuition is even less. Special education programs eat up 1/4-1/3 of public school budgets, so there's still a gap after accounting for that.
1973 was over 50 years ago. Even the poorest, most "backward" states have long ago largely remediated spending inequities. What you hear today to support claims of inequity are cherry-picked esoteric cases to drive outrage, just like every other topic today. In reality there's clearly much more going on than what advocates for this or that would ever admit.
That's true to an extent, but much less true of Catholic parochial schools. In fact, such schools will sometimes have a population with average income less than the local public schools. Of course most parochial schools won't have special education programs, so that's a huge filter, but as I pointed out doesn't account for the budget gap.
In any event, "picking your customers" is exactly the point of the previous poster(s). Money doesn't really explain what we're seeing. Once upon a time there was a very strong correlation, and people presumed causation, but now it's quite clear that the causation wasn't there. Certainly not directly, which is why throwing more money attheschools isn't helping.
Money can be extremely strongly correlated but if I get to kick out the bottom 20% of shitheads I can still outperform you on half the budget. Not talking income wise, talking behavior wise.
It's doubtful that a catholic parochial school has ever turned away a catholic student. Certainly if that happens, it must be rare. If catholic students are superior to non-catholics, through some self-selection process, how does that invalidate his point? They're not being picky intentionally. A great many admit non-catholic students, often on scholarship, those students also tend to do well.
Public schools have to take children that do not want to be there and make it everyone's problem, and their classmates suffer for it. Maybe this public school policy is the issue that should concern you.
That is entirely my point. Catholic schools aren’t doing anything special they are just not keeping the problem kids. Why do you assume this doesn’t concern me?
I think the effect is twofold - spend/pupil tends to benefit poorer students more (diminishing returns), so a good school in a poor neighborhood needs more $$ to achieve equivalent outcomes. And then the lower property tax revenue in the poorer neighborhood makes it harder to sustain that higher spend
Even "bad" schools use this strategy to move some of the "good" kids into special programs, etc. to raise their average scores. Which makes the remaining classes even worse. It's an eternal struggle between raising the floor vs raising the ceiling
It's also a feedback loop, once you're known for "good schools" then the homes become more expensive. If you don't care about moving then it's often cheaper to buy a home to send your kid to a good public school vs. sending them to private school.
Are pensions still an effective way to attract workers? I feel like there’ve been enough cases where workers get screwed out of them, that this isn’t much of an incentive. Similar to offering engineers equity in a startup.
In California, most cities are behind on funding pensions. There is a de facto assumption/delusion that there will be some large scale bailout at some point.
>The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.
This is likely very intentional in some of these places.
Growing up in suburban TX decades ago, people FREAKED out at talk of potential apartment building development nearby. The duplexes a mile away were 'bad enough.'
Why did they freak out? What was their threat model, so to say? (I can imagine several lines of reasoning, but as a hardcore urbanite, can miss the mark entirely.)
Also grew up in suburban Texas, saw similar freak outs, and can tell you it's thinly veiled racism and distaste towards being forced to be around people who are part of perceived lower socioeconomic classes.
The threat model is "been indoctrinated by years of propaganda to be fearful of a vague nebulous threat of being around people who don't look and act like me"
The town near where my parents lived just had a subdivision kill a multi family apartment complex because it was too close to their subdivision. There was no thinly veiled racism. It was just racism. Poor and black people apparently bring your property values down. The protests were, quite literally, we don't want those people here, without defining what 'those' meant.
It was not great to watch, but it was great to let my parents know who exactly they should stop associating with.
Falling home prices, increased crime, decreased social status, long term political shift resulting in suboptimal and even counter-interest local policy.
That really depends on the state. Some states have different public school district funding mechanisms that don't depend as much on local property tax collections.
Fire trucks are far more expensive to acquire and maintain than necessary due to monopolistic actions by manufacturers, plus local governments buying fancier apparatus than they really need. There's a lot of room to trim those particular expenses.
> Fire trucks are far more expensive to acquire and maintain than necessary due to monopolistic actions by manufacturers, plus local governments buying fancier apparatus than they really need. There's a lot of room to trim those particular expenses.
The real problem with fire equipment is that it will sit there in an emergency unless you have the staff on hand to operate it. Small, remote, or cheap towns get to burn while they wait for volunteer #2 to make it to the station.
I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible. In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people. It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income.
Someone I know is trying to plan such a thing right now. She has a decent paying job and a degenerative, disability-inflicting illness. She'd like to see the possibility of a secure future in the city where she's lived for the past 10 years, but property taxes and HOA fees alone in her city can be multiple thousands of dollars per month in neighborhoods that from the outside you wouldn't think seem particularly new or posh or luxurious. It seems that if she's forced into early retirement by disability, she'll have no choice but to relocate. So instead she feels trapped in a job she hates because she got it before she became disabled because she's reasonably afraid that employment discrimination, which is terrible at her job that nominally espouses inclusive values, will be even worse most other places. And while she's already disabled, her disability will only continue to get more profound for the rest of her life. And property taxes for sole and lived-in-by-the-owner homes is one of the reason that owning a condo or apartment is so much more expensive than renting one for her.
I feel like HOA fees have to be doing most of the damage there. AFAIK the highest property taxes in the US still top out around 2%, so for a "multiple thousands per month" property tax bill it has to be a house worth more than $1.2 million. I'm not sure what the line is for what level of housing expense is reasonable for society to subsidize housing security for, but I'm pretty sure $1.2 million is well past it.
True but imagine you're in the same home for 30 years. That home with somewhat affordable property taxes could double in value and now you owe double the tax. With no real increase in useable income unless you sell
That's just property taxes in a nutshell, though. We periodically see discussions about land value taxes and it's a feature of those as well; proponents shrug and point out that you didn't do anything to earn that extra value so it doesn't belong to you anyway.
I'm not taking a position here other than to say I don't believe there is a universally acceptable tax. Every tax I've ever read about or experienced personally, someone has made a valid argument for why it leads to a bad outcome or is otherwise unfair. You have to decide what gets priority, pick the system that matches that, and then be honest about where you're making tradeoffs and why.
The property was purchased with "after tax" money. So at purchase date the value was already taxed.
If one sells, and make a profit, we tax that profit. Why ask for a tax on the value of the property, each year.
There should be local taxes, and there are. To fund services and whatnot of course. But taxing a percent of the current value of a property is unfair as the owner may live in there with no intention to sell and potentially no revenue whatsoever.
I haven't researched national stats, but from the experience of having lived in two states, one blue and one red in case that's important to a counter-argument, both limited property tax to 3% annual growth, even if the valuation is higher, preventing that exact scenario. It only jumped to tax on the correct valuation when the property exchanges owners.
Sure this doesn't prevent issues if someone is stuck on savings/Social Security, etc., but it prevent surprises, such as a boom in your area causing sudden explosion of equity and taxes due.
The cap required it be your residency, i.e. you aren't renting it out and you are a citizen.
Again I can't speak for every principality across the board, but for the places I have lived, it seemed very fair. Regarding your concern, I might have been unclear, but when I said "limited property tax to 3% annual growth", I meant it can be lower, but doesn't exceed 3%. It adjusts with inflation unless inflation is over 3%, so no matter what, the owner is winning if it is their primary residence, with the caveats I previously mentioned.
The typical way property taxes are done in the US is that the local government first sets a revenue amount, then a tax rate is determined which produces that much revenue. You don’t have a situation where property values double and the local government automatically ends up with double the tax revenue.
The government should need to accept its 2% in kind. I guess by the time people cannot pay these taxes any more they are much closer than 50 years to their eventual death. Thus it only reduces eventual inheritance. Problem solved
Most of the problem solved, but does mean that generational wealth transfer stops being a way to climb out of instability. Just another chip in American class mobility.
Being stressed about finding the money to make your payments is probably not a much improved quality of life. And they probably picked the place cause they liked it as it was, so don't be so sure about appreciation of those new developments anyway...
Why should I get to have that sort of externality on others just because I have more money than them?
>I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible.
You can also do this with combinations of renter protections + owner-occupier protections.
Currently the latter (whether the recent trend of red states lower property taxes, or Prop 13 in CA) is much more broadly-popular in the US than the former.
Property owners generally show pretty little empathy for anyone else wanting that security.
I go the other way: nobody should be forced out of their home because other people who have more money than them decide to increase the paper-value of their home. Something has to give between "I have a lot of money, I want this place" and "I was already here, I want to stay" and I think incumbency and stability is a better tiebreaker than "money wins."
How do you expect to borrow against that property for the rest of your life?
And why is being a Google Programmer "earning" that money, but a construction worker who spent 30 years paying off their house is an "unearned" windfall?
I'm not sure where your friend lives, but my county (perhaps state level, but county for sure) exempts property tax for those with a permanent disability. I read the requirements and it was really reasonable to prove eligobility.
I understand that this doesn't fully solve the issue in that your friend, if to take advantage of this has to move, but it might be worth seeing if there are similar options around where she lives.
What if I'm not disabled. And healthy in part because I bought a property with hard earned already taxed money, and retired early?
The taxman says not enough. I should borrow money I don't have or sell for a cheaper place just to cover for the state's inability to do with sales tax
Should we expect that people who become disabled continue to live by the same means they had before?
If yes, then that means replacing their entire income once they’re no longer able to work.
If no, then something must diminish. That may include needing to relocate to a less expensive living situation. If we accept that disability means reduced means, then I don’t see why housing should be exempt from that as long as they’re not on the streets.
> In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people.
Nah, the market is supply constrained, if taxes go down the price of the real estate just goes up to fill the gap. People make purchase decisions based on income & total expenses, not on anything else, "can I afford this house?". The price stops rising when the answer switches from "yes" to "no". If your friend can't afford a house right now they don't have enough buying power to compete in the market with other house buyers. Reducing taxes won't give them any advantage in the market that other buyers don't get.
> I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible. In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people. It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income.
It seems to be equally straightforward an answer to just not expect homes to function as an investment.
I do not now nor have I ever understood why people expect homes to rise in value. If you live in an area for 20 years, and you enjoy that area, and it serves you well, and educates your kids, and the crime is low, and all that good stuff: why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation? Like I could see it if you made the house bigger, or otherwise improved it? Maybe you put in a new shed, or a nice brick backyard area with a kitchen, sure. House being worth more makes complete sense. But if you just buy a house, and live in it, and maintain it over the years, and then go to sell it: why is it reasonable for you to expect money back out of that?
You've already received what you paid for: a place to live.
Like I just don't see how people go like "My house needs to sell for more than I bought it for years from now" and then complain about the housing market being out of control and houses being expensive. Of course they are. Each time a house changes hands by this logic, it must necessarily be worth more than it was before. So every subsequent buyer of that home is effectively required to tithe to the previous owner for... some fucking reason, that nobody has ever adequately explained to me.
Not only do they want the value of the house to go up, but they don't want anything around them to change. No new 5-story condo complex on that one corner. My neighbor shouldn't add a second floor and block my view.
I think it’s worth pointing out that you and your neighbors actually do have a voice in local government. You don’t just have to sit there and take it. NIMBYs have realized this and actually show up to be counted. You can too.
> Why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation?
Because getting the mortgage to buy the house involves parting with a large sum of money, after which some part of the mortgage payment goes towards something called principal. If it just goes towards interest, it may as well be rent.
Not to mention that when you try to sell the thing, there's some expectation by one or more third parties of some percentage of it.
But at the same time most people do the bare minimum to maintain their house, so the quality of the property continually decreases. I don't drive a car for 20 years and then expect to make a profit on selling it.
ChatGPT suggests the land might have appreciated, the neighborhood may be more desirable, inflation, or development potential. We don't need programmers anymore because LLMs can do it. It must be an expert on home values too.
I’d expect property values to go up (or have gone up) as population rises; less space per person. I bet we could also put together some geometric argument about proximity to things like cities. But it’s the weekend, so let’s just halfheartedly gesture at the potential for rigor.
Anyway, nowadays population is barely increasing so I guess property values… maybe they’ll keep pace with inflation (for whatever reason)?
Another possibility is that property values tend to go up and down as some areas become more fashionable. Maybe, for whatever reason, there’s a selection bias where we tend to associate ourselves the trajectory of people who lived in those fashionable areas instead of the unfashionable ones?
My theory is that the "house" consists of two things: the land and the building.
The land goes up in value when other people spend money. More retail is constructed nearby, transportation is improved, schools improve, jobs are created, etc. My land captures some of that value even though I paid nothing. That to me explains some of the fairness of property tax: the owner should contribute to the government services, such as schools and police, that help make the land appreciate in the first place.
Then there's the building. It's a wood box that sits out in the rain and rots. Water soaks in from the outside and pipes burst on the inside. Termites eat it and insects and vermin invade. Carpet and walls slowly degrade. HVAC systems wear out. Appliances break. Concrete breaks apart. Even on the land portion, plants die and need maintenance. (Trees are the only thing on a property that get better with time.) This building needs constant maintenance and I'm always spending money and time on it.
So I figure the land might go up slowly in value over time. I figure I'm lucky if the building appreciates at all after I consider the money I sink into it.
On paper my house is worth a lot more than when I bought it. But I don't know how much of that is nominal price change due to inflation.
You can restate all mentions of "value" in the parent post to "real value", and there entire point still holds: why should people expect the real value of a home to increase over time?
It's an answer to why the number is bigger but not to why the house is worth more. It is common to say "I want my house to appreciate in value" and inflation doesn't mean it's appreciating in value, it just means the number is bigger than it was before. That's not the same thing.
PP literally says “I just don't see how people go like "My house needs to sell for more than I bought it for years from now"” That is basically not understanding why people expect the number to be bigger.
> that nobody has ever adequately explained to me.
Jesus it’s not rocket surgery. People want to live in a nice area, as more people show up and want to live in a nice area prices rise with rising demand accordingly. For the counter example, there are very large houses basically for free in Detroit. No one wants them.
>>It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income.
One idea here is deferral - if it's your primary residence the taxes are deferred until the property is sold to someone else.
This way you won't get evicted but the locality/state can get the payment at some point. This is better than just charging a tax on sale as many countries do because it doesn't discourage transactions.
The little town I live in is growing about 22,000 people per year. That's 64-67 people per day or about 16 new households populated with new residents every single day. The rental population is growing dramatically faster than the owner population.
That growth trend has very little to do with wealth and is almost exclusively a factor of availability. Most single family households in this growth area are rental properties, because the most urgent buyers are rental corporations who buy many of these houses the earliest moment they hit the market. Sometimes they are buying the houses before they hit the market by working directly with the home builders. Home renters tend to pay more to access the property than home owners even before taxes are considered.
So, its not just about houses versus apartments.
Also, the school systems and local municipalities attempt to sell their multi-billion bond proposals by taxing future residents at the benefit of current residents. That also disproportionately hurts renters compared to owners. The moment I see a bond proposal that will be paid for almost exclusively by residents who aren't living here yet I vote for it... because why not. We need a lot of shit to accommodate this growth and somebody has to pay for it. We need new high schools every couple of years. We need new roads. We need more plumbing, sewage, and electricity before the data centers eat it all up. Somebody has to pay for all this.
Landlords charge what the market will bear and generally have little if any price elasticity of supply, so they bear nearly 100% of the economic incidence of the tax. This is especially true where housing supply is constrained by zoning policy rather than the price of expanding supply.
It'll make it so new construction tends to be condos rather than apartments, since the first is heavily preferred by tax policy. This reduction in supply will mean higher rents.
New construction is like 1-2% of total housing stock annually. It'll take a relatively long period of time for these sorts of changes to hit prices because again, low price elasticity of supply.
edit: on slightly further thought, you'd also need this effect to either increase overall vacancy or reduce total construction, since any supply shift from occupied rental units to owner-occupied condos also implies a demand shift from renting to owning.
> That sounds like shifting the property tax burden from homeowners to renters...
This is all obviously very specific to the locality where you live, but at least where I live, property values were recently reassessed to account for the large post-pandemic increases. Individual homeowners were generally stuck with these reassessments, while commercial properties, especially those managed by large property management groups, were organized and successfully petitioned to reduce those assessments in disproportionate numbers. So the balance of power was not equal to start with.
And, commercial activity tends see revenue follow inflation. And, a business offset expenses.
An individual, could go bankrupt just because the property tax follows its' property value which itself changes nothing with regards to that owner's income.
Around here, many renters are pretty well-off. It's really difficult to own a home in the city.
Brooklyn, for example, has seen an explosion of high-rent apartment buildings, occupied by nerds like us.
If you are lucky enough to own a home/apartment in the city, you are either crazy rich, or, more likely, brought the home before it exploded in value, making you "paper rich."
Many of the apartment-dwellers in the city make a lot more than homeowners.
All that to say you agree with the GP: homeowners, as a class, are wealthier than renters. How owner occupiers choose to spend their wealth has nothing to do with the fact they have it.
They could choose a different lifestyle, but they value the one they have. That's fine, but that doesn't mean I'm obligated to subsidize their preferences.
Owner-occupiers can and do refinance to turn their wealth into cash. It's routine.
They can sell at their convenience and have their wealth liquid. Then they are in the exact same situation as renters, except that they have a big pile of money to boot.
Usually what they have is rent stabilization rather than control. It is tricky business to really estimate what is reasonable or not under that. For example, rents in my city are allegedly "decreasing," yet if you live in a rent stabilized unit, your landlord is probably incentivized to increase your rent to the limits of the ordinance, it could be 4 or 5% so not unsubstantial especially it being compounded by the year.
And what is more, when a tenant leaves and the landlord puts the unit up for rent again, there is no price limit for what they can ask for new rent. They are free to ask above market rent if they want.
So really I would not say the burden is shifted entirely on the owner of the building when they still possess two levers for ameliorating overhead increases: increasing to the limit of the RSO even when the market doesn't support any increase, and increasing rent on the next tenant. In high demand cities the market rate is not so much a wall, and landlord generally enjoys good success pricing above market rate and still leasing the unit out in a reasonable timeframe for them.
Wealth is easily converted to income. People can sell their properties and move to cheaper ones. If we’re gonna run our entire society on the whims of retirees who are taking up houses big enough to raise families, while also preventing all new construction, while also opposing paying their taxes, while also opposing moving to smaller houses, we are just fucked.
For multi-unit housing a cash-poor leveraged property owner sounds like a likely slumlord, so I'd be happy to discourage that situation. More, less-leveraged, property owners instead sounds good.
For owner-occupied, it sounds like someone who made a risky financial decision because of perverse incentives. Which also seems good to revisit.
Also in these cases cash-poor is not low-income. It's likely to be high-income+high-obligations the way you describe it. Hard to get all that leverage otherwise.
Rental yields are so low in the UK compared to the cost of finance, tax and maintenance that being a landlord has become completely unprofitable, which means the rental sector is falling apart.
Pretty much no landlords in the south east of England are cashflow positive on a monthly basis, and if they are they are yielding less than government bonds
What’s happening is income inequality manifesting on the market. The middle and upper middle of the market is seeing accelerated appreciation as incomes rise for the upper quartile. Some places see >10% annualized appreciation over the last 20 years.
The lower part of the market is very different, and are basically depreciating away. Property taxes are the most fair tax for the most part — you basically pay a prorated share of the levy based on the market value of your home. So if the poorer property is getting less valuable proportionally, your share of the tax pie increases. Some states share Medicaid expenses at the county level so there’s demand pressure for more tax levy.
The problem is old people generally cannot afford their homes, and are usually profoundly ignorant about everything except tax avoidance, even when tax avoidance hurts them. The tax knob is one that can be turned, which makes the problems worse. Senior exemptions, veterans exemptions, all increase the overall share for everyone else.
The new Republican platform is accelerating that — pushing property taxes to non-homestead property and driving up sales tax. In other words, it just a consumption tax, which pushes the tax burden to families and inflates retail costs, so grandma can sit in her big house and her kids get to inherit the place at the stepped up cost basis.
There's all sorts of factors at play. Uncle is a financial planner and advised grandma to sell her house to Grandma's House LLC for $1 and pass ownership of that LLC to the offspring, avoiding prop 13/prop 19 reassessment in california.
Part of it is honestly just people wanting a safe harbor preserving generational wealth. I think people who are generational wealthy understand what a damn advantage that is and obviously push hard to guarantee that for their family as much as they can. The alternatives are a bit terrifying given the direction of the economy, world, and climate. The only social safety net afterall in this country really beyond an abject poverty level of subsistence is reliance on well off family.
Maybe you can call it a sort of restart of feudalism, but there are no serfs in the mix really. Its not a productive estate in most cases (in some cases sure e.g. family business), but really often just a little lot with a house on it. People don't like the idea of the state coming in and carving that up and carting it off.
And really I think there are far more real things to set the tax burden upon. I mean grandmas home once again produces nothing, it is a box to sleep in; it's value is based on pure speculation. It is now worth 'more' because people say it is worth more and believe in that, not because it now actually does anything it didn't do thirty years ago. It is in far poorer shape than 30 years ago, even. Like, this is not where you find money flowing in this country. Tax where the flows actually are not the stagnant ponds, slowly being filled by the leaks off those profoundly vast flows of money and the speculative abilities those flows grant the flow controllers.
> Uncle is a financial planner and advised grandma to sell her house to Grandma's House LLC for $1 and pass ownership of that LLC to the offspring, avoiding prop 13/prop 19 reassessment in california.
Pretty unbelievable, really. They get a free house and tax bills from decades ago. The whole thing is made to screw over future generations, and act like it’s all hunky dory.
Lower demand for the product globally. If their asset has a higher vacancy rate, raising rent all the time can't solve the problem.
However, tax rates give perverse incentives. What you'll probably get is a lot of commercial slumlords as repairs are seen to increase the value, thus the tax.
If they could raise rents by the amount they would've been taxed, they would have. I'm happy to see more incentives against buying up houses for literal rent seeking.
>If they could raise rents by the amount they would've been taxed, they would have
They can’t raise rents higher because they are in competition with other rental properties. In equilibrium, if all commercial properties have taxes raised on them, (a) the majority of the market will raise rents to cover the cost of the tax and (b) those rental units that are no longer financially sustainable at the higher rate will exit the market (e.g. sell the homes to an owner occupant or redevelop the property if allowed to by zoning). Some fraction of property owners might take a haircut on their capital returns in the short run (the housing market is fairly illiquid) but the market will return to equilibrium in time.
No. The suppliers (landlords) as a whole have always been charging the maximum that the market is able to bear. Just because rents are raised everywhere doesn't mean the market can bear it. It would push every renter to cheaper smaller worse units and push the poorest renters to homelessness.
Is the implication the only path is to design the economy around keeping landlords as happy as possible? Its similar to the fear of a wealth tax driving the rich to move, you can just say out loud who our true masters are.
A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house. An owner occupied house is not primarily a financial investment in most cases. Any increase in housing value (and thus property taxes) is mostly an increase in the cost of living. Any gain in value cannot easily be realized since it’s not a liquid asset. This leads to a fear of being driven out just because the value of the surrounding neighborhood rises doesn’t mean that the owner’s income rises in lockstep.
One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
A major problem with decoupling property taxes on owner-occupied housing from market prices is that it removes the biggest incentive for a homeowner to vote for policies that keep the local real estate market in check. An owner occupied house in a desirable area where there is no disincentive to politically engineering a supply shortage becomes a financial investment. Any increase in housing value becomes profit for the owner (or their descendants). This leads to supply restrictions and escalating prices and an increasingly unhealthy society as the young and the poorer are pushed out of the city, county, or even state.
This is essentially what has happened in coastal California over the last 60 years.
The land should be expensive, the housing doesn’t need to be.
With different policy, there could be more housing built on the same land. The most scarce land there is shouldn’t be predominantly zoned for only low density single family homes.
We could easily build apartments on the coast in CA and then non multi millionaires might be able to live there. We have decided that only multimillionaires deserve to own a coastal house by restricting zoning in the coast so heavily
The uber wealthy have their gated communities in the hills.
The very wealthy have their lock on places like Carmel.
The upper-middle class in Santa Cruz or Half Moon Bay try to prevent new condos (or student housing) from being built, because it "destroys the community character."
This conveniently ignores all the gains in property value which they can benefit from by refinancing, selling or renting. If they don’t want to pay property taxes on higher values, and don’t care about the value, then we have a simple solution:
Freeze the property taxes and let the government take the entire value gain in the house when its sold.
> value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house
Value is always relative - even if the experience hasn't changed, the rising house price does mean that same experience is being value more highly relative to other opportunities. (In most cases this is because the experience actually has changed: if your neighborhood gets nicer, you are indeed benefitting!)
The bigger fallacy in rising property taxes is that civic services don't necessarily get better or more expensive just because property rates rise. And the bigger unfairness is that homeowners with rising values but not rising income don't always have efficient access to the equity of their homes.
A fair property tax regime would avoid presuming budget increases just due to rising value of housing stock, and might subsidize HELOCs or similar structures for folks who need to access property value to pay taxes.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home, which would offset some of the costs we currently pay in ad valorem property taxes.
The local real estate community had a meltdown and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into defeating it, which my neighbors obliged and did.
I think many people would have a hard time believing that a new tax in one area would be offset by lowering taxes in another. Even if they did reduce property taxes shortly after passage, many people would assume they will raise them again later on.
If it wasn’t combined in the same bill, the people will just have two taxes going forward. Effectively every “temporary” tax becomes a permanent tax. During the last local election, our city council was asking people to vote to replace an expiring tax with one at a lower rate and trying to sell it as voting for this reduces your tax.
>> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
>My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home,
First comment suggests taxing the gain (income tax), while second comment suggests a tax on sale price (gross receipts tax). Two very different things.
While I grant you that they are two different things, two-thirds of the average sale price in my area is from gains in value accrued over the time the home was occupied prior to sale, almost all of which is currently untaxed.
I own a home in Berkeley which loves transfer taxes. They’re creative about it though they tax at different rates based on the home sales price. Starting 1/1/27 the transfer tax goes from 2.5% to 3.5% based on the selling price of the home.
It’s been attractive to voters since most homes sell in the first tier.
You can reclaim some of the transfer tax by performing seismic upgrades which is actually something I support in a town with some houses that can be 100 years old.
That is true, but on the other hand if you had to pay a hefty yearly property or wealth tax you might not be able to afford it in the sense that your wealth is bound up in the house.
The counter is of course that when you buy a house you should make sure you have enough income and/or liquid wealth so that you can pay the taxes. And if not, move to a smaller house. Of course, opponents of such taxation will then roll out all kinds of grannies living in mansions on meager pensions. Then again, is it fair that this prices out younger people from the property market?
As difficult as they are, I do think we'll need some form of wealth taxation in order to put a brake on spiraling inequality. Yes, call me a fan of Piketty if you want.
A wealth tax is just a warning shot to your wealthy neighbors, if they can afford to flee, they'll flee.
If you're planning a peasant revolt you should really consider going all-in, bloody revolution, you give the kulaks less time & space to plan for contingencies.
The issue with that is the disincentive to sell (or buy), which leads a lot of people to stay put in their oversized home during retirement, for example.
In the UK, 'stamp duty' is something that buyers pay (as opposed to sellers), but sellers also have to buy, so everyone pays to move and everyone stays put to avoid paying.
(And of course no one builds, which is the biggest issue).
I'd say it's OK to defer your property taxes until you sell (or die), but it shouldn't be the default, only something you apply for if you're in a vulnerable position.
I think it's a great idea to let land taxes create the incentives to build efficiently.
In Austria it is even worse. The stamp duty is only for literally buying the house in your name. Thus all sufficiently expensive real estate is wrapped in shell companies where the transfer is untaxed.
The result - stamp duty is exclusively paid by middle class people actually buying homes, never by the rentier class. They already used the money up front to buy the votes for this law apparently
> A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house
Your better believe it is when it comes time to sell.
Or would owners not mind having 0% property taxes in return for the state taking all gains at sale time
"the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house"
An owner can derive value from the house in one of three ways:
A) Occupy the whole place.
B) Receive rent from a tenant.
C) Something in between (e.g. airbnb one room).
When property prices double, it's likely that rents roughly double. This may not increase the value the owner can derive from (A) but it will sure change the value they can derive from (B).
So they might decide to switch from living in the place to renting it out. If they don't decide to switch, then it indicates the value they derive from living in the property has either gone up, or it was always way higher than the market rent.
It seems like market rent is a reasonable benchmark to use to calculate property taxes, and property value is a reasonable proxy for market rent.
What they mean is the day-to-day "value" of having a roof over your head, in contrast to your ability to make money by selling.
If the area around you is improving substantially, then yes that day-to-day value could be improved by better local shops, maybe a closer office building, nicer parks, etc. Generally stuff like that does not happen quickly though, and really big changes like magically teleporting from boring middle of nowhere to a vibrant cultural downtown don't happen at all.
And arguably, they already extracted the value of that house by having a place to live without having paid for it up front. They didn’t even put up the capital in most cases. In the US they will have been granted a loan that is backstopped, and therefore subsidized by the government. Don’t forget the mortgage interest deduction, that’s a massive homeowner subsidy.
So someone else put up the capital, the government made that capital cheap, and societal demand with artificial scarcity (in most places) pushed up the asset value.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but let’s not pretend that making capital gains on a house in the US is anything like any other available investment.
They maintained the home and paid taxes on it. Have you ever had a failed septic system? A major water leak? A new roof? There's this whole anger around home ownership you get these days, oftentimes by people who have no experience in the matter.
Yes, mortgages are subsidized by our interest tax deduction system. That part is true. It doesn't turn home ownership into something with no risk, and it certainly doesn't turn it into this subsidized investment. It's a liability, not an investment.
Exactly. Surely the finance industry can come up with a product that automates this so you automatically sell them a tiny slice of your home to make up the property taxes without it affecting your cash flows.
The private finance industry need not be involved.
Just have government allow taxes to be deferred until time of sale with interest pinned to the cost of borrowing for government. That already exists where I live for people over the age of 65. The government can still get the revenue for free via borrowing and the payback is more or less guaranteed.
This really seems like the most fair situation, if we don't want to a) let retired people stop contributing their fair share, b) kick old people out of their lifetime homes during their most vulnerable years.
I believe you can get a reverse mortgage line of credit that allows you to take out money as needed. That is, a reverse mortgage doesn't have to be a predetermined lump sum or monthly payout.
This doesn't totally automate it, but it takes away the need to manage the proceeds from a reverse mortgage between the time you receive a payout and the time you pay your taxes.
It’s really hard to loosen supply side restrictions on “this somehow became a hip neighborhood.” You can in general make more housing available, but not prevent rising prices in specific neighborhoods.
You absolutely can prevent a "hip neighborhood" from becoming the equivalent of a short squeeze. Prices are not only signals of current scarcity, but also future scarcity. Once you've established that any increase in property value will lead to an influx of capital, followed by a swift increase of supply, every increase will partially suffocate itself.
Not everyone needs to live in a hip neighbourhood?
My intuition agrees with the supply side argument. Also higher interest rates to reduce demand? Isn't this how we got here, to these very high house prices worldwide, by a combination of the two? Taxes seem a second order effect here at best.
Of course, the people who already own land in the now-hip neighborhood either don't want it to change and grow at all, or they want the price to go up as much as possible so they can cash out. The existing owner class never have an incentive for ownership to be affordable...
Only in the most literal sense. In a far more accurate sense what we are talking about is land where people want to live and that does grow, more or less, with population growth. It's only a handful of cities with geography that makes desirable land fixed.
That's basic Econ101: households optimize for (subjective) utility, not for profit on some balance sheet. Taxing households for non-realized gains doesn't take into account liquidity nor the (subjective) negative utility and opportunity cost of selling your home and moving away.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale
Stamp duty in the UK, horrendous tax. It's better than nothing at offsetting the unearned increase in house (land) value, but far worse than a regular tax.
If you live somewhere for 10 years, then move, then repeat for 40 years, you pay far more than if you never move. This encourages people to live in less suitable houses for longer.
As to your worry about land values increasing -- the owner is deriving benefit. The higher the land value is, the more benefit the owner gets from the land.
Oh, so GP was just incorrect in calling this a tax on gains. That explains why repeat buying and selling incurs more tax.
Large sales tax on home purchases is probably a generally bad idea. Looks like Bay Area pricing would incur a 10-12% tax under the UK scheme which seems pretty crazy.
The increased land value is because the land is more desirable. If I buy some land next to a rubbish dump, it's cheap because living there is terrible. If the dump is then closed my land improves in value, and I derive value from that.
Likewise if I buy somewhere cheap in a backwater town, and the town becomes more desirable because there are better employment opportunities, better shops, better amenities, all of which serve to mean people will pay more for the land, then I benefit from that immediately.
The value is subjective, if you lived in a quaint town and now it’s become a bustling place it may be a nightmare for you , despite the price increases. That is actually a win win situation, though, since you can now move to another quaint town elsewhere while taking a pile of cash with you, with the perhaps important caveat that you do lose your proximity to places and people you may consider more important than the money.
These imaginary scenarios do not align with typical real world experiences. Very few people live near a dump that closes or see their small town unexpectedly boom (and as brabel notes, that’s not necessarily a benefit).
Most people’s home values go up because of 1) increasing housing demand and 2) the collective delusion that home prices can continue to far outpace wage growth indefinitely. Neither of these things necessarily result in an increase in amenities or improved quality of life.
My own home value has gone up something like 70% in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, the amenities near me are essentially unchanged. Same schools. Same number and quality of restaurants and grocery stores. My net worth has jumped a fair bit but my immediate benefit seems pretty much flat.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
Forcing renters and buyers to pay for the local services instead of property owners seems extremely unfair.
> Any increase in housing value (and thus property taxes) is mostly an increase in the cost of living.
So? If the property values go up then cost of living is going up for renters too. Why should property owners be shielded from this by imposing local service costs on renters who generally have even lower incomes than owners.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale
This is how it works for sales in Sweden, via the so called "reavinstskatt", or profit realisation tax. Funnily enough, it is mostly applied to individuals in practice. To avoid the taxation, companies package properties in subsidiaries, which can then be sold and traded like any other stock. The tax is then postponed until the de jure sale of the property, which never occurs. Individuals are not eligible because the loophole is closed if the legal owner also occupies the property they own.
I don't like taxes but I also like having roads, sewage treatment, 100+ psi water pressure, multi-gigabit internet access, and a reasonably constant flow of electricity. The cost of public education and the management of that system is the only serious concern I have with my local taxes.
I actually don't mind the cost of living in my neighborhood going up. The $2500/yr HOA fee is a feature for me. I picked this location precisely because of it. I've lived in many places with virtually no maintenance overhead or economic friction. You may eventually learn that there are two sides to this coin. Neighbors who can afford and are willing to participate in ridiculously scaled housing markets also tend to take better care of their properties and local communities.
> Neighbors who can afford and are willing to participate in ridiculously scaled housing markets also tend to take better care of their properties and local communities.
Whereas you take great care of your local community by even refusing to live around anyone not as well off as you ?
Imagine the horror of having to live within 10 miles of a low class smelly poor plebeian, you might have to lay your eyes on their 3 days overgrown lawn from time to time.
I wish poorer areas of US suburban localities had overgrown lawns. In many cases, those neighborhoods are blighted concrete jungles with no foliage save the occasional pavement weed.
This works in other areas of life. A courtesy charge creates a better environment by giving participants skin in the game and filtering out actors who wouldn’t mind abusing you but wont pay to do so.
In this country of oh-so-much freedom and journalism how can a layperson like myself check whether in the final degree my tax dollars are really paying for someone’s collection of vintage Ferraris, hidden behind an inconspicuous budget item?
Wait until you get a tyrannical HOA board and realize you have to make a choice between dealing with them or moving. Dealing with them typically involves lawsuits which come out of your HOA fees, which will go up along with all your neighbors who are now angry that their fees have gone up as well. (Ask me about open records my HOA hasn’t delivered for over 350 days.
I pay my city for sewer, water, and trash. I pay an ISP for fiber to the home, a power company for electricity. If you get all those things for $2500/year from your HOA, congratulations.
My friends lost a battle to paint their garage door a slightly different shade of white than the approved Pantone shade. No private entity should ever have that degree of power over one’s private life. Petty tyrants, I tell ya.
Sure, I meant this more in the sense that my friends' experience trying to very gently and largely unmeaningfully deviate from the petty tyrants' decrees taught me I never want to live anywhere near this type of governance structure. (unfortunately HOA-less developments are becoming more and more difficult to find and so whether you read the contract or not is slowly ceasing to matter - do you want a house or don't you? John Oliver did a great video about this stuff if you're so inclined)
all of those services are ones that should be realized by the city, from taxes paid to the city. If they are not, the problem is that people vote for wrong people
The problem with having the city pick things like your trash pickup is that you end up bound to whatever choices they make.
In Canada for instance, I’ve seen towns where they have pick up once every two weeks and the canister is not even a full size one. It’s a “gentle” push to get people to recycle and compost.
HOAs in general are nothing but classic American privatization of that which would otherwise be public, because counties and cities here either lack the tax base (rural), budgeting skills (urban), or both, to provide the services some subdevelopments are built with.
It’s dumb. Here in Washington it’s rather common, I’m finding, for rural land plots to be part of a “Road Maintenance Association”. Exact same legal construct as an HOA, but scoped only to road maintenance on roads the county didn’t want to deal with. It would make so much more sense for the county to socialize those roads and reuse the same maintenance crews and vehicles for these stretches of road! But instead, a private entity pays through the nose to duplicate all that maintenance infrastructure (or pay contractors).
What I don't understand is (because I honestly haven't been afforded the time to sit down and think about it, also it's frustrating), why do taxes generally trend upwards for the average person? Doing napkin math it seems to have gone from ~10% to ~28% for average family. These are %-based, why does it need to change? Why can't cities/towns/counties work with the money their citizens can give?
Happening in Austin, Texas recently. City cites:
- Rising cost of core services
- Weak sales tax revenue. This is the city’s second-largest revenue source, and it has slowed or dipped.
- A shrinking property tax base. Officials point to falling property values, appraisal protests, more business tax exemptions, and little new construction adding value to the tax rolls.
- Disappearing one-time money. Pandemic relief funds have run out, and federal funding cuts were anticipated.
- Rising service costs. The new budget’s highlights include $6 million more for permanent supportive housing services, $6 million more for fire overtime to keep four-person staffing, and extra EMS overtime. Employee raises and social services were also major line items.
It is frustrating... if core services are costing more, cut extracurricular services? Why would you lean so much on sales tax, seems obvious this would revert to a mean? If your budget is reliant on infinite new construction it seems a bad budget? Why is pandemic relief cuts a shock to anyone? More housing services? I'm empathetic but there's more homeless than ever before. I know it's simplifying the problem but it just feels like people are punished with permanent tax increases for governments spending more than they should... we start with a new "floor" tax rate and repeat forever? Is it going to get to the point where we work 50% of our time just to pay taxes?
> why do taxes generally trend upwards for the average person?
One-time money from development runs out, but services like sewers, roads, power, emergency services, snow removal, and so on, need to be paid or saved for every year. Most US cities are sprawling, low-density affairs, meaning they're developed (and paid for) once, but all those roads still need money to maintain. Quoting from [0] to draw attention to what I'm talking about:
> What the tax productivity data shows is that "rich-people housing" with big lots and plenty of room for cars, which were subsidized when the neighbourhood was developed, continue to be subsidized throughout their long existence. Suburban single-family houses on big lots simply do not cover the municipal expense of things like repairing all that asphalt and clearing all that snow
People have asked previously how, if this were true, we would see more cities declaring bankruptcy - and some do [1], while others do what you've noticed, and raised taxes. The car-centric, driving-as-the-only-transportation-method way of life is financially unsustainable.
I'm not going to yell death to the automobile, but to make it the default, and in many cases only way to get around, is not a good long-term plan for cities beyond a certain size.
People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.
So not only is the cost of service to be thought of, but the quantity of services.
The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.
> People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.
Makes sense, totally agree... however I don't think generally citizens want to pay _more_ taxes... or at least eventually there's a point where they say enough is enough.
> The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.
This should be stopped. Creates exactly the sort of ratcheting effect you described. Mind boggling to me. I've been in-charge of small budgets and buying more stuff after making more money is a big decision, not taken lightly because we can't assume present returns will match future returns.
> we can't assume present returns will match future returns.
Funnily enough, after spending some time in public service albeit in another country, genereally budgeting for public agencies works almost inverse to this.
If you get allocated X budget but only spend 0.8 * X, then next time you will almost always get <X. This is in itself reasonable, you don't get more allocation than you need. In practice though this means you are incentivised to not save money from your allocation iff you expect to need more in the next period or do not want to lose your allocation (maybe a renovation or smth similiar has been pushed back due to external factors).
Its a very difficult problem. The exact same dynamic happened in the USSR (my Dad has stories that are basically word for word what is described). I have also seen it in large corporations and US state and federal governments. I would not be surprised if we had papyrii from ancient Egypt about the need to spend the pyramid budget this year or the pharaoh may not allocate enough next year.
Oh for sure, just ask the residents of Austin if they feel services have improved over the last 10, 20 years! I imagine there will be quite a bit of bias and "rose-tinted glasses" but generally speaking I don't think they feel the price tag is reflective of the services they're getting. On that note, not sure why people seem to think of governments as some sort of subscription they pay for and get services in return... but perhaps that is a discussion for another day :)
Percentage increases are the result of your money being worth less. That’s why every good government fights inflation. Stable values of money make it easier to plan budgets, estimate costs, lure investors, and collect taxes.
It’s when the value of money decreases that government has to choose among reducing spending (often by reducing services), increasing tax rates, and electoral losses. Most choose incremental tax rate increases because it’s easiest and the people likely to complain are unwilling to run for office to replace the people who raised the taxes.
Not arguing that sequence of thought doesn't occur, but it bothers me because the reasoning is faulty. If money's worth less, then the appraised value of my home measured in dollars should correspondingly increase. If the biggest taxes are assessed as rates on things that tend to scale with inflation, then it ought to be relatively indifferent to inflation. The only changes you should have to make to your tax system in response to inflation should be raising flat rate taxes.
I don't know about Austin, but where I am the single biggest source of rising costs for the city seems to be its pension fund. Which seems to have severely underperformed the market thanks to the efforts of hedge fund managers who were all hype about dotcoms in 1999, mortgage-backed securities in 2006, cryptocurrencies in 2018, and are probably pretty excited about AI right now.
In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund. This excludes the seperate schools tax which is property based. Health care costs drive up many costs in the US including all libality insurances. The second part of this tax mess comes from the excessive military budgets since the late 1970s most of our national debt as of the mid 1990s was from that waste of resources. I understand we shouldn't just cut abruptly but our spend on weapons needs to slowly decline while we fund the transfer of workers out of the military industrial complex. And there are a lot of structural accounting problems like how personal credit card and automobile financing isn't tax deductbable but leveraged buyout interest is. The tax exemption for share buybacks is another budget drain. My instinct is we need a universal national income tax along with a land tax that in some ways exempts housing up to some middle or upper middleclass level.
> In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund.
That is an insane statistic. Surely the state can throw some weight around to say enough is enough?
I just had my own insane encounter with healthcare. They "accidentally" billed us insurance rate which was about 4-5x more than self-pay. Why is there 4-5x overhead when dealing with insurance? (I know there's the negotiation stuff) but also seems to be quite a mess. I'm actually more mad at hospitals and clinics lately than insurance. Seems they have agreements with companies to "dispense" things at 4-5x the actual price, expecting insurance or taxpayers to pick up the tab. Seems like blatant fraud.
Sorry for the rant, I agree with everything else you mention :)
I seem to recall that NY state medicaid expenditures are completely out of line even when comparing other liberal states with Medicaid expansion, when you compare how much every resident pays.
The answer is almost certainly large scale fraud by organized criminal groups, but investigating and publicizing this is, currently, extremely politically inconvenient.
Not NY resident but recently had an experience that I think is basically fraud but also "legal."
Went to clinic for fractured arm. Was given a sling, told it was included with the visit, verbally by the staff.
Later get a bill for nearly $500 for the sling that costs $50 if you get it outside of the clinic. Was told they think they accidentally billed me the insurance price. I can understand "convenience" being baked into the price but not at a 10x markup. The more I talked with the clinic trying to get them to fix it, the more it sounded like they had a partnership with the stupid sling company where they put slings on people and bill the insurance 10x the cost of the sling.
>Surely the state can throw some weight around to say enough is enough?
How do you know that it's enough? Baby boomers are old now, which means demand for healthcare has skyrocketed. There's an odd thing I've noticed in political commentary where nobody really thinks that healthcare is expensive, but it absolutely costs a ton to keep people alive. America might have problems with too much overhead, but even here in Ontario, healthcare is by far the province's biggest expense.
Because that is 17% above the US average, at an average of $13k per year per patient. This is _after_ medicare handles the bulk of the cost. I'm not disagreeing that healthcare is expensive, just the costs are excessive.
Taxpayers are getting milked by providers and insurance. I was given an arm sling that cost almost $500. If I got it outside of the clinic it would have been $50.
> In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund.
Chicago..hold my beer. 80% of taxes here go to funding pensions for 2% of city population. Our parking meter money goes to gulf countries because we sold them to pay for city services back in 08.
This doesn't explain it all, but worth considering.
As the cost of living increases, so does the cost of providing public safety workers and their union-guaranteed pensions and benefits. In most cities, public safety eats up a large chunk of the operating/general fund budget (in Austin it's 71.2%)[1, pg. 30], and reducing public safety budgets kills your representative's clout. You yourself can advocate for lower hiring rates or pay and pensions if that's a concern. Any new hire comes with long-term costs for your local government, even after they've left service.
Extracurricular services are highly visible and therefore highly defended by the advocates that claim they reduce crime (by providing structure to youth with nothing else to do, for example). Representatives are typically replaced with those that defend those highly-visible services. They will instead reduce less-visible support services (like IT) that make public safety more efficient/effective.
Since you can't outlaw homelessness, citizens that complain about homeless activity motivate local governments to provide more services that make homelessness less visible/likely. Without those services, public safety budgets need to increase to address more desperation on the streets.
As the population ages and needs more medical care they can't afford, demand for EMS and senior services increases. I've seen arguments to freeze or eliminate property taxes for seniors, but balanced budgets mean non-seniors have to pay more to cover their service costs unless the local government finds additional revenue (fees, fines, more local sales tax that increases living costs, etc.)
You can outlaw abortion for unfit parents, but that also likely creates more welfare service demand over time.
To me, private businesses not increasing wages to meet a standard cost of living means an increase for demand of welfare and public safety services. Local governments can attempt to hold private businesses to a higher tax burden, but are usually preempted by state law in Republican-led states. Your local government has no control over that and has to respond somehow.
To me, the frustration is best placed with private businesses that can afford to provide for their workforce, but instead rely on welfare services to give their workers what they need to survive, so that executive officers can earn more and deliver more to their investors. ~55% of households in the U.S. earn less than $100,000 per year (before taxes). [2]
I think land-value taxation, with a cap on properties based on income (and wealth) for your first home, is the way.
I do think there is something special about the idea of home, and that home ownership should be encouraged. It brings people stability. People shouldn't be pushed out just because others have more income than them.
At the same time, we do need property taxes. In California, rate increases are capped, so older owners often pay pennies compared to new homeowners. Harmonize the taxes, while capping it.
Consider my neighborhood in Chicago. It has gentrified rapidly over the past couple decades. But it wasn't always so wealthy. My retireee neighbor probably bought her house for no more than about $100,000, but now the market rate for a house like hers is more like $500,000. With that comes about $20,000 per year in property taxes.
That might be reasonable for the wealthier families who are moving into the neighborhood and driving up the land values. But it's pushing her into poverty.
No, its pushing her into a cash flow problem. Its not poverty; she has substantial wealth, but its all in the house.
There are mechanisms, of course, to access that wealth without moving, including ones specifically geared toward income-limited house-rich retirees.
Now, those end up creating a debt that must be resolved before transferring the house, including via estate, so living on the value of the home reduces its utility as a vehicle for generational wealth, but...unless you want to reproduce California’s system which makes it much harder for people to become homeowners while rewarding those who already have, eapecially the wealthiest, making the rich richer and what would be the comfirtable middle class anywhere else in the country poor, that’s the way it works (and your exact scenario was the major sales pitch that was used to sell the California system; its maybe understadable how people without 50 years of California’s example fell for it then, but...)
There are ways other than California's for addressing this. Washington's system works quite well: a disposable income based property tax exemption for people over 61.
It exempts you from "excess levies" (basically levies that are voted on) and some statewide levies and freezes your taxable assessed value. If your disposable income is low enough it also starts excluding part of your assessed value from taxation.
So your solution is to take the house away via a second mortgage?
Why are we trying to take houses away from homeowners? Many who have lived in their homes for twenty years or more. What services that the city has could be so important to push residents out of the homes they've lived in all their lives? Most of it is inefficient pork on admin and roles the people living there didn't choose to hire for.
Build more. Encourage building multifamily. Pay to buy these homeowners out of their single family and convert the land to multifamily. If you can't pay, don't try to make it up with tax increases. That forces people out.
Deregulate and build.
Maybe a city failing to stretch services will send new residents seeking other cities, which would be healthier anyway.
Or maybe property taxes should be based on the services rendered. If they increased from $1,000/year to $20,000/year and you subtract away the inflation here is the city government delivering more value or less?
In my city and others our city council delivers large grants to non-profits and other entities under various auspices. “Defending gay rights” is one, or maybe helping the homeless or something. Of course I support both causes in general, but if the city gives a million dollars away maybe we just have to have some people kicked out of their homes to pay for these programs?
You can say well we will just raise taxes on the wealthy. Sure yea, whatever but that isn’t a viable long term strategy for places outside of California or New York which have an ability to capture wealth better due to intrisinic location value. There are only so many “rich” people. Could I afford another $10,000 in city taxes? Yea. I won’t be able to go out to eat or shop at local business as much though. So then what happens? Do those businesses go under? Raise prices? What about their property tax? Maybe instead I sell and take a loss on the house and the market value goes down so now that home pays less in taxes (depending on how this stuff is measured in a given jurisdiction).
> Maybe a city failing to stretch services will send new residents seeking other cities, which would be healthier anyway.
Yea. Tell Google and Meta and whoever to stop putting more jobs in the “cool” cities and come to Ohio where I live instead of these data centers.
This stuff is rather complicated, unfortunately. Even the case of a city let’s say “building affordable housing” is arguably a benefit to the local homeowners, but if you do that yea sorry Granny McPension has to pay for it too - she has a house, she’s wealthy!
> Pay to buy these homeowners out of their single family and convert the land to multifamily.
But that's what the market is already doing? In your example from above, you can take a $400,000 windfall and move somewhere else, or take out a mortgage against that $400,000 of new equity to pay your taxes and still come out waaaaay ahead. I don't understand your characterization of a second mortgage as "taking the house away" at all.
What poverty--she owns a house worth $500k.
I think deferral schemes where certain individuals can pay taxes upon sale of the home (with fair interest) should be fine to avoid forcing anyone into a reverse mortgage.
Well she doesn't have the 500k. This is akin to saying we should force people out if market conditions make their house more expensive. That seems like a really strange consequence to all this, idk
Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
Especially not when you're getting older, have limited ability to manage a move for yourself, built a life and raised your kids in the building, and would have to consider unloading a lifetime's worth of objects and/or moving infeasibly far away from your friends and community to get into a living situation that's more financially tenable.
> Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
> Especially not when you're getting older
Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Why are we replaying the dishonest “think of the retirees” now? It was bullshit in California in 1978 to sell Prop 13, and its even bigger (and more transparent) bullshit now when, especially when it is used to sell the same basic idea.
How can someone be so out of touch? A person buys a house, spend a whole life there, and through no action of her own happens to live in an area that drastically appreciates in value over the decades, all she wants is to spend her last few years in the same house that she loves and would never consider selling, and now we ask them to kindly pay all their income or more in property taxes, otherwise fuck off??
And where would she move to? All decent areas probably also increased in price, her property went up 10x in value but so did all other properties she would contemplate to buy. That’s the fallacy of thinking property is wealth when talking about your only residence.
The suggestion is that this person can get a mortgage to pay their property taxes over the next 20 or 30 years as part of their retirement - or they can sell their property and live well in a cheaper location.
Claiming that the retiree has a right to both the home value and the ability to live there is the friction point. It reads as hollow in the face of rising homelessness and the inability for young people and families to access housing.
The comment you are responding to is saying the opposite. They are saying that the person can access the wealth of the house (eg via a reverse mortgage) in order to pay the taxes while staying in the house. That's what this meant:
> Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Simple example. I bought the house at $100k. It's now worth $500k. That means I owe $20k/yr in taxes, but it also means I have $400k of additional wealth. A bank will lend me money with that wealth as collateral. If you imagine that the interest on the loan is roughly equivalent to the rate of appreciation of the property going forward, that's 20 years of taxes paid for by the increase in home value. Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone!
All else equal, I can see why the ability to live in the same house until you die would be given a high moral value. But in practice, IMO, this culture causes a number of problems. For instance, where I live, there was a lot of growth in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of young families, so they built a bunch of schools. It's an attractive place to live, so a lot of those people who lived in those houses when they were new and raised those families and attended those schools have kept living in those houses. But those kids that they raised there can't live in those same neighborhoods as adults, because there's no turnover, so they can't raise their own kids there. So now the schools are all half (or less) full, because the neighborhoods they were built to serve no longer have a lot of families living in them. So then they have to close and consolidate schools and everybody hates that. I don't really have a strong view on the moral question of whether houses "should" be owned by older people who have lived there a long time or by young people families, but from a pragmatic standpoint, this situation seems quite bad to me.
I think if we had a totally different culture, with multigenerational families living in the same house, then this might work better. But this model where we build new family friendly neighborhoods with parks and schools, and then nearly everyone ages in place and all the family amenities become empty over time, and the families all end up in the next new neighborhood and then it repeats, this doesn't seem ideal to me.
Schools aren't forever. They're just buildings that get built, expanded, replaced, upgraded, mothballed, abandoned, sold and/or destroyed all the time as the needs of the community using them changes. Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long.
It's OK that they don't last forever; they're schools, not irreplaceable shrines.
And speaking of things that also don't last forever: Homeowners. Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts, and then some new family buys it at market price and is free to breed a whole new fleet of kids to raise there.
There's still eventually churn in the marketplace, and in the neighborhood. The churn didn't disappear just because Grandma Sally was able to choose to keep living in the same place until she died quietly of an agonizingly painful heart attack as she stood in the kitchen making tomato sauce after church on a Sunday morning before the family dinner that afternoon.
People die all the time. It's often tragic, but it's natural and ultimately unavoidable.
People also get forced out their forever-homes all the time, too. That's also often tragic, but it happens for artificial reasons that could be avoided if we bothered with trying to do so.
Anyway, Grandma is as dead as that Sunday dinner. She won't care that the new occupants are being complete heathens about smoking dope and makin' babies on the sofa.
GP is not forcing the retiree to move. GP is instead advocating retaining the use of property while reducing the cash flow burden. Asking someone to get a cash out refinance is not morally bankrupt; it is a pragmatic and fair solution. Some states also have deferred property tax schemes; these are even better. It is only fair for someone who, by luck, paid $100k to get a house that is now worth $500k and lives in a neighborhood that is now far better than when she bought the house.
Defered property tax for elderly can be (and usually is) implemented as a lien on the estate, to be settled upon the owners death. Do you heve any problem with that? Or should we now also think of (inheritance of) the children?
"And where would she move to?" -- Either the graveyard or the incinerator? She's dead... the bill doesn't come due until after her death and is settled from the value of the house.
It's classic neoliberalism think which for some reason the tech crowd is unreasonably susceptible to. "Oh you're poor? Can't afford your bills? Must be your fault." It's utterly disgusting.
You're not wrong, but that's an entirely different discussion from whether or not someone should be forced out of their house simply because gentrification and inflation causes their taxes to go up year after year likely long after they're done working. Oftentimes people buy homes in low-cost areas because that's what they can afford. It's not their fault when the area gentrifies and their taxes skyrocket past their means through no fault of their own. We can advocate both for homes to be more affordable for people that need one and for people to not lose their homes due to constantly rising taxes.
So your solution is to force her to sell her home and move? Move where? I've seen this in so many areas of the country where property taxes on your property are tied to market value rather than purchase price. It drives retired and lower income people out of neighborhoods that they have lived in for decades, forcing them to move down the scale of home ownership.
Perhaps the retired person is living on a fixed income of $40k/year. Over time their proterty taxes on the home that they have lived in for decades can now be more than half of their total income? How is this fair at any level?
How is it fair that working people have to pay 10x for housing than she did when she was young? How is it fair that the money goes to her inheritance while she made her working neighbors pay her share of taxes?
Of course, let's let yet another corporate land grab take even more residential property off the market for profit-based motives. This can't possibly do any more harm than locking property taxes at the time of sale.
Where I live, we are looking at locking property taxes once you hit a specified age (65) and have under a specified income ($40k+/-). The current debates revolve around exactly what those numbers are and at what level the taxes get locked. The goal is to protect the elderly who have already contributed to the economy and society for 40+ years and not force them into a financial situation forcing them to sell their home just to pay even more property taxes that they have paid for the entire ownership.
A number of states have this. Basically if you are low income, where that may be calculcaed differently depending on cost of living of the county you live in, you can defer or freeze property taxes.
"All Washington counties offer senior citizens and disabled households property tax exemptions. Eligibility is based on your age or disability status, home ownership, residency in Washington, and income level. Seniors who are at least age 61, or retired from regular gainful employment by reason of a disability, with an income of $64,000 or less are eligible."
The idea is to help people stay in their houses. This is really really important. And if you can afford it, you should be paying property taxes. I'm lucky I can afford mine, but I highly support this strategy.
In my state I occasionally see people in online discussions saying they can't afford their property taxes - I think a lot of people aren't aware of these programs, people are amazed when I post a few pointers and tell them about it.
Meeting the basic needs of the population, by having enough housing and preventing hoarding of housing by wealthy individuals, is not a "coporare land grab."
We are clearly talking about different things. I'm talking about protecting single home homeowners on a fixed income from being forced out of their homes. Staying in the only home she owns is not hoarding.
Telling people that the solution is to sell their home to an insurance company as a solution is most certainly a corporate land grab.
You seem to be arguing about people/corporations that own multiple homes or even entire portfolios of property. These are not the same argument.
The solution is not necessarily to sell, they should only do that if they want.
If their asset is gaining in price so much that the tax burden is getting high, then tax deferement until a liquidity event both keeps them in their home, but also keeps them honest about how much they are taking away from the rest of society by taking that piece of land.
Why should this person take up a family home in a desirable area? It is inefficient. The pressure she is feeling to leave is the system working as intended.
We shouldn’t prioritize efficiency when it comes to moral matters. That’s a bad idea for the government.
People’s primary residences are more than just an economic asset. If you don’t understand that, it’s difficult to have a conversation as we have very different starting points about morality.
$20k on $500k is 4% annually, which is really high. I'm not seeing any Chicago neighborhoods that are this high (looks like a max of maybe 2%) but perhaps I'm missing something about how Chicago works?
Why can’t she pay from her retirement accounts? 20K/yr isn’t all that much considering today’s cost of living. The stock market has skyrocketed in the last decade and change.
I also don’t buy 20K of property tax on a 500K home, that’s a 4% tax which seems unlikely in Chicago.
You don’t need to be rich to own. Some people are lucky to buy a home where/when it’s cheap. Imagine the value (and taxes) outpacing your income. Like an elderly person with fixed income.
Either it's really valuable, and they can borrow money to pay taxes, or it's not and taxes are low. But people shouldn't be allowed to freeload on the work others do to make the property valuable.
Borrow money needs to be paid back. It's entirely possible and it wouldn't be a surprise someone retired lives for 30 or 40 years, accruing all that back taxes have to be paid up until eventually the taxes are worth more than the house.
The boatman doesn't charge money, so what's the problem with that? They got to live somewhere other people invested to make nice without extra money out of their pocket.
If you're lucky. There are a lot of scams out there that are variations on the idea of well we'll pay various fees at your house or pay you this or that. Reverse mortgages...
Sometimes it works out and it's fine. It's not all the scam. But there are no scams out there that I would not have any confidence in working out. And as a government (which as a voter I'm part of), I certainly would refuse because there are too many ways that I can lose.
Well you might need to if the property taxes can spike like crazy, which is the point some people may be making. You could budget a mortgage but with taxes as a substantial wild card, it can blow up your budget.
Because a cap or exclusion or credit for your primary home lets people who can just barely afford it to purchase their own home. And that's a good thing.
I'm not sure it is. If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession.
Now, apartments can suck too. Especially in places like the USA where we have a landlord cartel actively pushing up prices, and a professional landlord president who shut down an antitrust investigation into said cartel shortly after entering office.
I certainly can't say I have all the answers here; right now housing sucks every way you look at it. But I do believe quite firmly that this idea that going very deeply into debt and securing it with the actual roof over your head is somehow good for a person's financial security is an idea that mostly serves the interests of people who earn a commission on convincing people to get into that situation.
Even assuming things just increase at the rate of inflation, a house you can just barely afford today is a good investment because in 20 or 30 years that house is going to be worth far more while your payments have stayed the same and your income has increased.
Note that I'm very against cash out refinancing, which a lot of people are doing to get the cash that the house is worth. In my opinion the best reason to have a house is in 30 years it's paid off and now you can live there rent free for the rest of your life.
I just don't believe that that math works out so easily if you run real numbers.
I am a fairly recent homeowner. Before that I lived in an apartment in the same neighborhood. I like owning the house and having control over the space. I like having a bit more space. But, after I add up home loan interest, taxes, homeowner's insurance, higher utility bills, maintenance, etc., the amount of money that I will definitely never see again adds up to quite a bit more than I was paying to live in an apartment that, square footage aside, was aesthetically much nicer and better situated than the house.
And then, yeah, some additional amount goes to equity in an "investment" that is less liquid and historically earns a lower rate than a decent index fund.
When a person buys a home with a mortgage (congrats, by the way!), they gain the possibility of getting some return on the money they spend to have a place to live. It might work out long-term or it might not, but there's a chance (and it's often a pretty favorable one) that it works out well-enough as the years tick by that the light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting actually-closer.
Every day, thousands of folks do emerge from that tunnel and gain the ability to make profound statements like "Well, at least the house is paid for."
This is in stark contrast to renting, wherein: There is absolute certainty that none of the money spent towards having a place to live will ever be returned. It doesn't matter how much is spent: Whether a little, a lot, or a lot more, that money is always just unilaterally gone. There's no chance at all of anything else happening. The odds of winning are nonexistent. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and there never can be -- it's just inescapable darkness in there.
In general, buying binds capital, more than renting.
If you include opportunity cost into the decision, then your contrast can and often will disappear (i.e. renting is financially superior or "winning" in your terminology).
Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.
> Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.
When I find these kinds of phrases to be directed my way, it is my most charitable interpretation that it is impossible for anything to be gained from the conversation.
> But, after I add up home loan interest, taxes, homeowner's insurance, higher utility bills, maintenance, etc., the amount of money that I will definitely never see again adds up
So your landlord was renting your apartment to you at a loss?
The landlord may have been. Sometimes investments lose money.
But it's also probable that the loan is fixed at a lower rate than you can get now, the maintenance costs less if you put a few people on salary vs hiring them for one off repairs, and the utility bills are lower because it's a smaller space.
You need to report back again in 30 years. As a recent homeowner, you are absolutely correct. I don't even need to ask for details. However, things will change over the next 30 years. Your tax and insurance will go up with inflation and so it will actually be free to live there. However, in 30 years your loan is paid off and you get to live there for the rest of your life with no house payment ever again.
As a general rule of thumb, the break-even comes out to be about seven years. It can be as bad as 15 years if you get unlucky and when you buy it what the economy does, but by 30 years it is almost guaranteed you are overall money head buying a house.
Although I do have to point out that I did not consider other investment options. If you take an apartment for cheap rent and then invest the difference between what a house payment would be including all that insurance and taxes versus your apartment and apartment insurance (less buy important) - and invest the difference in stocks, that is going to change your financial situation. All those equal that expect to be equal over in the long run. Since by investing, you are investing less money. However, just to make things tricky, in the U.S., we can invest up to a certain maximum in a 401k or IRA, both of which are going to be much better because of taxes, but it doesn't matter if you have an apartment or you have a house, you're at the same maximum. And so someone with a house can get that advantage of that and their future rent is paid for while someone with an apartment is still going to be pay for that apartment all their life.
There's a few other assumptions above. I'm assuming you're relatively young and you're going to live a relatively long life in the same area. Moving houses that's going to change things, apartments are much easier to move. Be the umlucky person who dies young: you won't get to take advantage of either investment.
Overall apartments and houses can both be good things and you need to examine the situation for your own life. Life includes your future, which is of course unknown. Good luck.
Anyone who claims there is a universal answer for everyone is categorically, utterly wrong.
You're just arguing what "barely afford a home" is. Ok, it has to include a maintenance budget. And maybe a financial buffer. But those are true regardless of taxes. That doesn't mean that there are lots of people who can afford the home and the maintenance and some taxes but not the full tax amount.
> I'm not sure it is. If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession.
'Tis better than to have owned and lost, than to have never owned at all.
> Now, apartments can suck too. Especially in places like the USA where we have a landlord cartel actively pushing up prices, and a professional landlord president who shut down an antitrust investigation into said cartel shortly after entering office.
So rather than ever own a home, just rent. It's about the same as taking a pile of money out into the middle of the street every month and setting it on fire, but what else can a person do?
That's looking at the ability to buy ONLY as a numbers game, but it says nothing of the emotional effect it has on actual buyers. I bought a house. I can ask for a raise I'm worth it. I am doing well now... I'll get a better job next. Now I have a wife and kid and they want me to do better. etc...
While not all stories are like that, many are (in fact most are).
>"If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession."
Except you have to live somewhere, it's not like buying a boat. All of these dangers apply equally to owners and renters. Yet the protection you get from owning in that situation is massively advantaged over renting. Lose your job and can't afford your mortgage? Oh no, guess I'll have to take out a HELOC, or apply for forbearance, then wait years to be foreclosed on and declare bankruptcy. Lose your job and can't afford your rent? Sheriff's knocking on the door in 90 days to throw you on the street.
Likely because of legacy homeowners who bought their $2m home 50 years ago for $25k and are now retired. They don’t have the income to pay those taxes even though their non-liquid net worth is way high
Maybe you’re referring to someone who owns multiple properties… But I think if someone owns the house they live in, there should be a cap once they reach a certain age. My Mom is retired and owns her home, but she still effectively pays rent on the property. She has a fixed income and the property tax comes in around 16% of her monthly income.
That doesn’t seem too bad, until you see all of her other costs have gone up dramatically because inflation has been high post pandemic. She only has so much money to spend every month, and if her property taxes kept going up too, she’d eventually be unable to afford to live in her house. She only owns her home because she was worried about being secure later in life and prioritized it above things like vacations or cars.
For a lot of folks as they age, even if they’re frugal, it’s not easy to survive. If you live for 20-30 years after retirement you’re likely to have your buying power cut by half if not more.
With that said, if someone’s home is worth more than say 10x the average price in your area, or your assets are $10+ million[1], I think there’s room for increased taxation. My primary point was simply being a property isn’t necessarily the right measure to determine a reasonable tax rate.
[1] The number obviously depends on where someone lives. Living in New York or SF, $10 million dollars of assets would be an extremely comfortable life but most likely not a lavish lifestyle. But… $10 million dollars in rural Mississippi is going to have you living an extremely lavish lifestyle.
Raise capital gains taxes then on those who inherit the property. It’s not extremely unfair to reward folks with a home to live the rest of their life in… I’m also not sure at all how it’s excess wealth to own a home. Most people in retirement now bought their homes at reasonable prices, that well exceed what they paid for or perhaps even made in life. If they sell they can’t buy something else.
By your logic anyone who is retired and has an asset appreciate should immediately sell it, and be forced to move somewhere else.
I cannot afford a home in Portland where I live. I could probably make the mortgage but it’s too risky in my opinion to have a 30 year debt obligation. None of my friends own their own home, not a single one. We’ve all just entered our 40s. The lack of somewhere to live won’t be fixed by a lien, nor will liens on an individuals actual home due at death fix it. It will absolutely incentivize investors who can exploit that, who will pay the liens and add to their portfolio.
If we want more housing at better prices we need to encourage development of more housing. That means making cities more dense and removing NIMBY policies which prevent it. Sure some of these homeowners may be voting for those policies, but they are the minority in larger cities.
Get rid of the fixed mortgage rate. Owners will sell when they can't afford the mortgage rate; the new owner will pay property taxes at the current rate.
Apart from the US, there aren't may other countries that allow fixed rate mortgages, and not a 30-year fixed.
Land value taxation is the worst idea ever. I already don’t like the idea of property taxes, where you have to pay for a piece of land you own. The ideal should be that unless you’re making use of public services you can live a free life. You should not have to pay just to exist. I’d much rather that income is taxed for the higher tax brackets more.
In most jurisdictions (not califoria) property tax increases are somewhat unlinked from your actual property value
1) the tax entity sets their budget (usually an increase)
2) the valuation group values all properties
3) the tax entity sets a tax rate to raise their budgeted amount. budgeted amount = tax rate * total value
Most people think if their value doubles, their tax doubles. This mostly isnt the case. If everyone's value doubles, the rate decreases so they raise the budgeted amount. Mostly property tax increases are due to ever increasing budgets not rising values.
1) If everyone's value stayed the same, and the budget increased, your tax would increase by the amount of the budget increase
2) if everyone's value doubled, but the budget stayed the same, your tax would not increase
3) if your value doubled, everyone else's stayed the same, and the budget stayed the same, your tax would double.
Let’s say you wee solid middle class and bought your forever home, in what was at the time, the near suburbs. Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable. The city might set a percentage of the home value as their target but now your well placed forever home is beyond your what your pension can afford. This happened a lot in Canada.
The worst part is that for all these taxes, the level of service has dropped since that home was bought.
Isn't it better for society if retirees downsize to a retirement community and allow young families to move in to the neighborhood with schools and amenities?
People make the best decisions for them and they have the freedom to do so. Who am I to decide that their 2 bedroom bungalo needs to be torn-down for a massive 5 bedroom infill for example.
While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off, and quite well may have built up to support your own aging in place. Some people want a “forever home”, and that’s okay.
In some countries and cultures the good of the many comes before the good of the individual, no matter the sacrifices required to get there. The US (and to a slightly lesser degree, Canada) generally does not subscribe to such a cultural mantra.
Edit to add: for the cases where the societal good really does outweigh the personal good, we have a tool for that: eminent domain, which is how we build train lines and so forth.
>While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off
This line of logic doesn't follow. There's plenty of old people who need to move out for non-financial reasons (e.g. can't live independently anymore), and it doesn't really make sense to me that having to move out because you can't afford your mortgage is okay while not being able to afford your taxes isn't. In any case, we can have our cake and eat it too by building more housing. Homes become affordable for young people if supply increases and the tax base broadens enough that taxes go down for established homeowners.
At least in the US, mortgages are typically fixed cost (I know this is not the case in many other countries, like the UK). You know when you sign the contract what your monthly cost will be, for the life of the loan. ARM loans are an exception to this, but ARM loans are nearly universally considered a terrible idea unless interest rates are egregiously high at signing time, or some other edge case applies to you.
Thus, you can budget around the mortgage payment in a predictable way, and if you have to move out because you can no longer afford it, that's a very different thing than if your property taxes magically change because a theoretical buyer may theoretically be willing to pay some astronomically higher cost for your house than you paid for it.
So, respectfully, I disagree with the framing that we have to take both or neither. They are separate budgeting concerns, and separate policy concerns.
A point against: if someone was an early adopter in a community that urbanized over 30 years, in effect the increased value means their future ownership at present rates requires the collective subsidy of their neighbors. Young families subsidizing the elderly in this way is a huge issue in tax burden disparity where I live.
How so? e.g. anywhere I've looked, schools are a huge part of the budget. Special education alone is over 10% of the county budget where I live. Schools in total are over half of city+county. The elderly wouldn't be contributing to service demand there. They're likely also not going on tons of crime sprees necessitating police, generally another large budget item.
Like another poster said, things like pensions and medicare might overall drain the entire economy, so the end result is the same, but that seems more diffuse than local tax bases, and wouldn't properly appear in local government budgets.
If we're going for a "better for society" angle, I have so many other things that are far more impactful for society and less damaging to the individuals that we will never get around to messing with evicting pensioners so younger families can use their spot to get to school.
Because boomers voted to defer fully funding pensions until later. Now it's later. We're paying for past work and current work.
In Washington State, Puget Sound Energy is a for-profit utility owned by mostly pension plans! Their guaranteed ROI is sucked out of the productive economy. Everywhere you look rent is being extracted either by the 0.01% or the elderly, and the working class must slave to get 1/10 what they gave themselves.
At the level of an economy, I don't see how funding model can make a difference. Ultimately, there are now old people that want/vote for some level of service, and young people that provide it to them. The young people can and perhaps will at some point decide to revolt, or the old people will die.
Not an economist but I don't see how money can be anything other than an accounting tool at that level. If they had "paid for it" back in the day, young people would still be screwed.
The two big ways to increase prosperity that I see are for people to take care of their health so they need fewer medical services, and for fewer people to be devoted to administration (e.g. the medical billing quagmire, SaaS companies focused on how to better extract rent) or convincing people to buy stupid crap (c.f. the giant advertising industry that swallows up bright workers to build a surveillance and propaganda apparatus instead of e.g. industrial automation), fewer pointless wars, and more people devoted to actually doing things people need or building infrastructure (e.g. solar).
> there are now old people that want/vote for some level of service
The problem isn't that there are old people, is that there's currently a glut of old people, which puts real strain on the system. Being old is expensive for governments. Not only do older people not typically pay nearly as much in taxes, they also require more resources to support.
So many of today's problems come down to the simple demographic fact: there's a lot of baby boomers, and they're getting old.
This is but one of the ways well-meaning people get displaced. And, frankly, th the is hypothetical family is the most fortunate of that class. They have equity and a pension. Playing my tiny Monoprice violin, from the 4th apartment I've lived in over the past 10 years (not including couch-surfing). And even I'm still on the "fortunate" side of the line, if just barely.
I don't think people really understand how bad it is out here. I imagine that if a dignified line on the base standard were held, there would be less of a need for this kind of middle-class pearl-clutching.
I live in a municipality that taxes like OP and you don't understand how OP described it. Lets try with easy numbers:
Y2K: buy an 1/8th of a million dollar house. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $1.25M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.
If your mental model is the city tax rate is 0.8%, that is ... numerically correct but its mere numerology.
2026: house is now worth 1/2 of a million dollars. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $5M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.
If your mental model is the city tax rate historically was 0.8%, then you'd have to pay $4K/yr, but it doesn't even remotely work that way, so it simply doesn't matter. Its just numerology. My fraction of total property ownership "value" times the annual village budget is what I'll be taxed, which in this case is the same old $1K.
In reality grandma gets kicked to the street because inflation raises the price of everything, including real estate, but real estate is not even remotely the problem or the solution. Grandma might have afforded a house and its taxes when a McDonalds Big Mac was 75 cents each but now that its $13.49 the village budget has gone up 10x, 20x what it was when she bought, so she better find a way to make 10x, 20x more money or not only is she not going to pay her fair share of the budget via taxes, she's not going to eat food either.
"Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable." Thats the real problem. No one can move in and pay the city budget, and the city budget explodes because now they have to pay the dog catcher at least $250K/yr to live there and nobody can afford to rob peter to pay paul quite that much...
Depends on the jurisdiction. I've lived in both, budget based rates like you describe (Minnesota), and fixed rates with market based assessments (D.C.). I wonder which is more common.
I don't know how economics escaped basic elementary/middle school curriculum. There is so much confusion in people's lives around money, and so much destruction that results from it, yet we still don't teach the basics of what is going on in school. It's totally perplexing to me.
Most people aren't capable of understanding numbers: https://politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math.... You can't educate them to do it, any more than you can educate your average person to be able to reliably hit three pointers. It's a physical limitation.
That's why socialization is so important. You can't get voters to understand the difference between billions and trillions or put anything in context when the numbers get that big. All you can do is socialize them from an early age to have directionally correct gut feelings like, "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "saving is good."
Hilarious. They were right to do the comparison, but got it oh so wrong.
I was recently trying to understand Elon Musk's wealth, and come up with similar comparison: For example, he could make millionaire's of every single person in Seattle, and still have hundreds billions of dollars of wealth left over. Truly mind boggling.
Elon doesn't have a pile of cash, and it wouldn't be possible to convert his assets into cash either (without an incredible discount). This is true for most billionaires. In fact this very fallacy is part of what I'm alluding to with "we need to educate better".
So while fun thought experiments are excellent selling points, they aren't actually grounded in reality.
Yeah, but you're not required to transfer cash in order to transfer wealth, are you? Stocks are plenty transferable. Sure, the value would likely drop, but what's 20% to 40%, when you have a trillion to start.
He could totally go into debt for e.g. 80% or his accumulated wealth, designate said wealth as collateral and get a really good deal in terms of interest.
Economics class is usually in high school and it's optional.
Schools are really expensive to operate. Most districts and schools make it easy to graduate to maximize their graduation rates. Standardized testing is suppose to catch local lowering of standards but state departments of education are also under pressure to maximize test pass rate. So resources flow into pulling the bottom quintile of students up to a minimum standard. This means teaching to the test on math and English, and de-prioritizing other subjects or dropping them entirely.
We could expand the breadth of educational basic standards. This would require a cultural shift in valuing formal education more, increasing teacher training/recruiting resources, making schools year round, more centralization of education budgets at the state or even Federal level.
Generally speaking public schools tend to be better in states like Massachusetts than Kansas.
In the majority of states in the USA, districts in the state are not allowed to graduate students without taking both an econ class and a personal finance class. Kansas is one of the stricter states. I can only think of three off the top of my head that do not mandate econ/finance classes, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington. Pretty hilarious to claim MA has better education requirements than KS LOL when its the other way around. Also hilarious when the average SAT score in Kansas is 1256 vs a mere 1128 in Massachusetts, LOL. I can't immediately think of any way that the schools in MA are better than KS, which is pretty funny. Is there even one stat or requirement where MA beats KS? Maybe college sports scores...
That said, public schools are mandatory pass, and the kids know it.
I think the problem with education is the prepack solutions sold by politicians intentionally don't reflect reality, sometimes intentionally reflect the opposite, and are designed to be ineffective or even actively counterproductive.
Looking around, it looks like MA beats KS on most metrics. For example, 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test. There is a reason that MA always ends up at the top of lists that rank public education while KS is much lower. To be fair, KS has been improving in rankings quite a bit, which I agree MA has been unable to do.
MA did pass a personal finance requirement for schools earlier this year. Like many other states it doesn’t have to be, but can be a stand alone course. While it may seem like MA is lagging behind, the majority of those requirements have been put into place within the last 5 or 6 years, so this is pretty new in most places. And a lot of states have done things that seem counter productive, like allowing a personal finance course to replace core math requirements. MA typically lets schools figure out how to implement requirements, so as in most cases the wealthier areas will figure out a high quality way to do this, and the poor areas will do their best to meet the state requirements for the lowest cost, providing less benefits to the students than it should. (Yet another reason that relying so heavily on local resources for public education is a poor choice).
Likely it just means that college-bound students (which should be ~1/3 of young adults based off educational attainment levels in the US), strongly lean to taking the ACT.
I know cynics would run to say this, but on the whole the lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be. And they even know this, but somehow it's still expected for people to just innately understand what's going on, but they don't. And everyone else who does have the insight just ends up perpetually frustrated.
The "lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be".
I think it's far more ambiguous and less measured of a net negative, than it is a clear, measured net positive for the "powers that be" if we define them as the wealthy.
You can take a very clear, measured look at wealth distribution over the past 50 years.
I have never worked with anyone in business who wished their customers had less economic/financial literacy. Just endless frustration.
On the other hand, you have a massive contingent of people who are constantly scoring own goals because their economic insight is purely an emotional surface level intuition.
It depends. Predatory salesmen are happy to oblige a customer's desire for a $299 monthly payment, while glossing over the 84 month schedule and 12% interest. They have a very short term view. Uninformed customers are like shooting fish in a barrel.
A mainstream bank takes a longer term view. They offer financial literacy info for customers who are interested. If a customer overdrafts less frequently and is able to leave significant amounts of money deposited the interest spread is more profitable than collecting overdraft fees.
The predatory loan market is a fringe market though, and it's not even that lucrative because delayed payments and default rates are so high (and bankruptcy rinses the lender).
Don't confuse the existence of people who profit on inefficiencies as being a sign that the system works best with those inefficiencies, or that those inefficieces are even particularly profitable.
If calculators had never been invented then perhaps arithmetic and economic literacy would be required of citizens. A big problem is that we invented a tool for something that's most powerful when you can do it easily and constantly in your head. People are not pulling out the tool to use it constantly because there's friction to that.
It seems like we should tax non economic wealth hoarding more not less. We have a glut of elderly people occupying houses that are far too large for their current needs while young families can’t afford larger homes. People forget that part of what property tax exist is to encourage dormant assets to trade hands from Low economic use to higher economic use. If some isn’t using a property to its highest and best use because there are no carrying costs then they will just hoard it and have no incentive to sell it to someone that could use it more productively.
It would make a lot more sense to increase the carrying costs of homes so that people are inclined to sell them when they no longer need a particular configuration.
I have a 4500 sqft home with 6 bedrooms because I have kids a home office a recording studio and workshop. My Nextdoor neighbors are retired and have adult kids that moved out. Their house is the same size. They could downsize and make that inventory available for other next generation families. Instead they hoard it with a mortgage that is long since paid off and thousands of sqft that serve no purpose. They don’t even heat or cool the whole thing. Now extrapolate that across the whole economy. The obvious supply and demand distortion explains part of the reason homes are as expensive as they are.
It's not necessarily that people forgot that reason for property taxes existing. Many voters fundamentally disagree with that as a valid reason. This is a matter of ideology and values as much as economics, and not everyone shares your priorities. You can label them as greedy hoarders or whatever but that won't change how they vote.
I feel like people don't realize that this is how aristocracy happens.
Like, yea, property taxes suck... but the point is you're wealthy even if you want to pretend you're not. Passing the tax burden onto others, just because you can, is exactly how we end up in a world where wealthy landowners live like literally nobility while the people renting their land pay the taxes for their infrastructure.
> I would like the price of my home to rise, because it increases my wealth, but I would also like the prices of all other homes to fall, so that I could sell my house and buy an even nicer house.
There’s a way to do this. Buy in a VHCOL area like San Francisco, wait for 3-10 years, then move to Texas, Florida, South Carolina, etc. Real estate is highly localized so you do not need to stay in the same area all the time.
The homelab guy at CloudFlare did this because the prices of real estate in Austin are actually falling.
I wouldn’t count somewhere I don’t want to live being cheaper as the prices of all other homes falling… ;) Nor as lack of need to stay either - if real estate prices were the only thing keeping people around, cities might not exist.
I mean yes it’s a bet, but real estate in SF has historically done very well. The progressives/NIMBYs have a strong presence to thwart new housing so that existing properties increase in value.
No property tax where I live, which is true for about half of the Swiss Kantons. There used to be a system where they would calculate how much you would be paid if you rented out your property and then charged you tax on that value. So basically a property tax.
But they got rid of that tax while at the same time removing the ability to deduct mortgage interest. So now it makes most sense to pay off your loans.
Mortgages are different here - they are interest-only loans for usually 1 to 5 years. And when the loan expires you have the opportunity to pay off as much as possible and then renew the loan for the remainder.
I think the surge in people wanting to reduce taxes is because it rose at an unexpected rate that no one was or could prepare for. So I almost blame the speed of increase for the recent conversations, rather than the idea of people wanting their house to rise and others to fall; yes that is part, but I don’t think it is the majority.
> the property tax ... has the standard problems of a wealth tax: specifically, you can have more wealth–say, the value of your home, your business, or your retirement account went up–without having immediate income to pay a higher level of taxes. Thus, older voters who tend to have higher accumulated wealth, partly in the form of home equity, but also lower current income, are a politically powerful and sympathetic group in the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes.
We should expect this phenomenon to grow stronger as more high-earners hit retirement age, right? I'd guess we have another 20-30 years at least before this incentive starts to "level out", and that's only if we somehow see wealth distribution become less extremely correlated with age.
There’s no reason the local government budget should increase at the same rate as the property values in the taxed area. Property taxes should generally increase at the rate of inflation not because property values increase.
However, where I live local government is wildly inefficient. So in that case property taxes should go down while property taxes go up via the expedient of competent governance. Alas.
If the value of a house doesn't increase, then the property taxes, upkeep, mortgage interest, and selling fees would make home ownership untenable and worse than renting. And then if you rent the problem gets pushed up to the landlords anyway.
Besides the fact that your hostility is unnecessary, rent prices very rarely decrease. There’s been a good deal of journalism investigating this in recent years, especially in my metro area of Seattle. Landlords would rather leave something sitting empty, potentially even off market, waiting for market rents to increase back to their target, than ever let the rent prices fall. This is especially true for landlords who own multiple units: they’ll often trickle those units out one or two at a time to avoid flooding the market, to artificially keep prices high.
This is so much of a thing that there was even a federal investigation into it (particularly the SaaS service used to help feed the data driving this trend).
It's nice that you would like the world to be this way but it's time to put this tired old canard to bed. It's not individuals but the financial system that treats houses as assets. They do so by extending mortgages. Try getting one for your car.
It’s a consumer good most people want and will pay for and it retains its use for a very long time. So naturally there are fairly liquid markets and loans for it.
Yeah, I view my house as a consumer good and I don't want the value of my home to increase relative to inflation - ignoring taxes if I have to sell it I'd just have to buy another house at an increased price which will take up any realized gains from the transaction. Plus the fees involved in the cost of buying/selling are higher now b/c they are usually a percentage of the transaction.
I can see how, conceptually, shifting tax burden to companies rather than individuals puts public services at risk. Companies don’t really have a lot of incentive to want things like quality schools, parks, and other non-profit public services.
On the other hand, property taxes seem to be a pretty flawed system that still result in inequalities. Individual homeowners hate them and will do anything to lower their burden. More wealthy and mobile people will move to different jurisdictions specifically to save on tax burden. There are extreme examples like The Villages in Florida where the heavy demographics skew toward older residents means that minimal funding reaches services that benefit younger families who work there as service industry workers. My understanding is that this is a particularly extreme arrangement in the villages: if you lose your employment within the jurisdiction you have to pull your kids out of the local schools immediately.
Then you have issues where you get poor jurisdictions and wealthy ones based on property values. Some states help mitigate this by pooling property taxes across the state for school funding.
I’ve heard that many condo buildings in my area have a standing arrangement with a law firm to submit appraisal appeals every single year and the law firm is paid on a percentage based on the savings they achieve.
This system can’t be efficient for anyone involved. When you really think about it this is like a siphon of money that could be going into public services into a private law firm.
The thing about property taxes especially those that have owner-occupier exceptions is that they sort of work okay because they’re a good approximation for wealth. They’re still regressive but you can pretty safely assume that someone who owns a second home is wealthy enough to pay a high tax rate.
On the other hand, that arrangement passes more costs on to the lower income renter. Their property owner landlord has higher property taxes than owner-occupiers and theoretically passes those costs on to the renter.
I think someone could devise a better system and do away with property taxes as they function today entirely. We need a system that makes all the stakeholders in our society feel like every dollar they invest is a positive investment with returns.
Interestingly enough, it’s the opposite in NH. Our taxes just increase 1,000 each year to pay for horrible public schools while also giving state school budget funds to everyone that wants to homeschool or sent their kids to one of the many alternative schools we have. I would love to know how much of the US this actually reads as true for, because my friends in various other states also feel very similarly about their taxes going up and the housing prices not so much.
School system and taxation for schools in NH is very specific to NH « low/no taxes » mantra.
I am a resident of a neighbor state with several co-workers living in NH and I recall 15 years ago that there were massive school funding differences between towns. So there was an attempt at redistributing taxes to help pay for other schools from other towns, which was extended to all schools (freedom!) - so home schooling etc.
Is NH state funding local schools in some form ?
Typically it’s a mix of local, state and federal funds…
I was encouraged by a story I heard from NPR about a Hasidic community turning out the vote and using official powers to take private a school building that had been underfunded under municipal control. It was genuinely impressive how much they changed their local community.
I understand how this would be infuriating to other locals. But it shows the power of community organization. They don’t win because America is systemically pro Hasidic, they simply turned out the vote (after years of non-participation.). This is an encouragement to be active in your own community. If you don’t, someone else may do it for you.
The cult leaders tell them how to vote and then bus them to the polling station. They also largely are unemployed or work for others in the cult, so there is no obstacle there.
It's a scientology level cult, not a "community", and while certainly impressive knowledge and coordination to hijack tax payer money, it's still nakedly fraudulent.
I swear so many societal problems have their roots in the attitude of "I've got mine, screw everybody else"
I've seen people completely change their attitudes about things once they own a home. I know a self-proclaimed liberal who claims to care about people suddenly go all NIMBY because they are buying a $2M house and now they don't want duplexes in their neighborhood and don't like the idea of more housing being built ("we're full"). They feel entitled to a high (and increasing) property value in a desirable area.
But isn't it understandable? You work your whole life to buy a piece of property. But not just a piece of property anywhere. It's a specific one, in a specific neighborhood, in a specific zone. All of these things tie into the $ that you paid for that property. Regardless of the change in value, a change there impacts how you perceive living there.
If all of the sudden the neighborhood behind you gets rezoned to industrial and you get a datacenter nearby, everybody understands you're up in arms.
If at the same time the neighborhood behind you gets converted from 200 single-family homes to 200 8-plexes, complaining is NIMBY. Even though it has the same dramatic impact on the quality of life you bought into. Way more noise, way more street parking, cars racing late at night etc.
Why should society value stability of your quality of life (which is a pretty nebulous bundle of your preferences and environment—neither of which we can bet on being stable in any event) over the interests of all those people who want to live on land that can readily support them—and without putting any true undue burden on your ability to do the same on your land?
Because you would be upset if a developer bought every house on your block and converted them to eight-plexes and rented them out to Section 8 tenants, and we should provide some level of protection against that from happening.
I can be upset, but why should I expect the government to “protect” me from that feeling? It’s a free country.
We’re not talking about a sewage treatment plant or even a data center, we’re talking about fellow members of our community living in code-compliant housing.
You need extremely high levels of trust and community to incentive the kind of behavior you are asking for. That is not reinforced or taught at any of our schools or government institutions. It only exists in small family or religious communities.
So absent of that, I think your personal incentives also lead you to your current housing policy preferences. Don’t you?
My house has appreciated at a ridiculous rate. Personally I'd be fine if it hadn't. It's not in great shape. It's literally the cheapest house in town.
Fixing owner-occupied property taxes to the fair market value or sale price (whichever is higher) at the time of last change in ownership (by any means: purchase, inheritance, transfer, etc.), and then adjusting that amount annually or semiannually for inflation (to account for folks who bought their house 40 years ago and would otherwise get away with paying $5 in taxes) seems like the most reasonable compromise here if we want to retain property taxation (which is debatable - an income tax can achieve everything a property tax can, without punishing folks who own their house free and clear and no longer wish to work as hard as they did while paying said house off... or can't anymore). Modulo edge cases like inflation grossly outstripping investment returns (hi, 2020s!), this ensures retired folks can stay retired.
Taxation based on the theoretical monetary value you could extract if you sold your primary domicile is probably the dumbest possible policy, because it leads to people being pushed out of their homes (or our of retirement, or into higher-paying jobs they don't want, or whatever). Houses do not have to be viewed as investment vehicles, they can simply be residences.
As far as property taxation on non-owner-occupied units... up for debate, but I think fixing to most recent transfer time's FMV works reasonably well here, too.
> One might think that homeowners would be happy that their largest asset has appreciated substantially in value, as homes did,...
This is absurd. There's absolutely no benefit to you if the value of your house increases if you have no intention of selling it. That's exactly the point of treating owner-occupied homes differently from commercially owned property. The author should be embarrassed that he, as a an economist, doesn't know that in economic theory, households do not optimize for profit on some balance sheet, but for personal (subjective) utility. That's econ 101.
Yes there is. You own a more valuable asset, so now even if you want to keep it you could take out a loan against it for a greater amount than if it hadn't appreciated.
Your statement is based on assumptions that just don't hold for many people. First and foremost, you imply a subjective utility of receiving a loan. For many people, having loans - especially collateralized against your home - has negative utility, not positive. Case in point: someone who'd need to take our a loan to pay the property tax.
But even if you were right for the majority of home owners: feel free to tax collateralized homes as commercial property based on the volume of the mortgage. Case solved.
You mean take out a loan to pay for the increased taxes? The banks win with that one. Some people, especially as they age, are seeking out simplicity with their finances amongst everything else.
You're making a valid point, but not in favor of taxing owner-occupied homes, but in favor of treating collateralized homes as commercial property. I'd be okay with that as long as the basis for taxation is the volume of the mortgage.
Millions of us: We would like to be housed please. We're still recovering from the 2021 rental markets that forced people with jobs and savings into homelessness.
Regime in charge: Enjoy these property tax reforms that will lead to higher housing costs and (further) transfer of wealth towards people who already own homes. Let us know what else we can do to keep people in lower classes trapped and vulnerable to exploitation.
They don’t evict you but put a lien on your home. When it’s sold the gov gets their taxes then. Also, a sheriff is an elected official and evicting an 80 year old because they can’t pay their taxes is not good for their career.
Surely one missed tax payment is not enough for the government to evict and assume ownership? I see these cases in SF occasionally and it takes years of non-payment.
Is there any country where I can walk into town with a bag of money, buy a house in cash, and never have to pay taxes on it again? EU countries either have a property tax or a wealth tax that includes people's first homes.
So does one ever actually get to retire and rest after a lifetime of "paying one's dues"?
Could someone go off the grid to some "commons" land and build a log cabin there or something?
What the heck are "property taxes" paying for?
The house is just sitting there, not consuming any finite resources (you already paid for the land) or requiring constant maintenance or upkeep from the government..
Said house may not be consuming any finite resources in a sense, but there are various services and amenities that are provided to it and to the other homes in a community. These services need to be paid for. There are roads that take you to your house, which need to be paid for. In addition, firefighters and police are funded via property taxes. So are schools, as are other amenities, including parks, libraries, and in some places, public transit.
You can look up a property tax bill and get an idea of what property taxes pay for. Mine is itemized and it breaks down exactly where my money is going.
And, sure, you could go off the grid and live in a shack in the boonies. That's always an option. If you feel like you don't need the services and amenities that property taxes pay for in a particular place, you can move, and many people do. In that case, yes, your property taxes on said shack-in-the-boonies will be low. But that's going to be in large part due to the lower value attached to this property and the land it sits on, in addition to fewer services and amenities available to it. That's a tradeoff that you can make. But at least in my case, I don't mind paying my property taxes because I can easily afford them, and I and others receive many benefits in return.
Fine, you win. We're all serfs. You've redefined "serfdom" to mean living in a modern civilization with public infrastructure, and the property tax tradeoff that comes with it. I'll choose this serfdom until a better viable option presents itself.
Apparently medieval people owned quite a bit of property, possibly more than the average person today (though not the same in technological value of course):
Probably depends on when you look. I think the point stands that are drawing a false comparison to serfdom. Tax obligations are not the same as serfdom
I think society should be structured in such a way as to incentivize contributing to society. Heal the sick, get rewarded, feed the hungry, get rewarded, teach the ignorant, get rewarded. Own a thing; no reward as far as I'm concerned. Owning stuff _is_ the reward, not something to be incentivized. It's its own incentive. Why should society give a gold star to someone for owning a toothbrush, or a house? They're a reward in themselves.
This is a potentially reductive take, but, property tax is theft.
In the guise of 'paying your fair share to be a part of society', property tax is essentially the institution of serfdom to the royalty of state bureaucracy.
Property tax is effectively the same as rent, but the one collecting rent also has martial and lawfare capabilities. Not to mention effectively unlimited funds with which to crush anyone who doesn't fall in line.
If what you have can be taken by another if you don't meet some set of conditions, you don't really own that thing, do you? It's more like a loaner than it is 'I own this thing'.
---
I'll offer a blanket alternative for state and federal taxation: no taxes on individuals, their income, or their property. Instead we tax exchange. States levy a 10% VAT on all transactions. Federal government levies taxes on interstate commerce, imports, and exports only.
All other forms of taxation are barred. New taxes may not be levied. If the state needs additional funds it may issue short or long term bonds accordingly.
Money printing is shifted away from being owned by an international banker's consortium, re-pinned to durable goods or precious metals.
Yes that is generally what you get down to: you can’t really own land free and clear in a populated area. You depend on the government in many ways to enforce property rights, as well provide services for that property and in return you have to pay for that.
It makes me uncomfortable too actually but I can’t see any alternative that does not get back to a similar spot or violence. In addition if we shifted to a land value tax, it would push taxes onto the very dense developed areas encouraging better use.
So many of our current problems can be traced back to ever-increasing house prices. Homeowners who are voters have been duped into creating a society that allows the hoarding of land and turning your home into an "investment". This hurts everybody in three ways:
1. No matter how high the value of your house, you still own one housing unit of wealth. If you sell it, you still need to live somewhere else. So the only way to "get ahead" is to buy "investment properties", which is hoarding housing;
2. Housing costs are an input into everything you do and buy. Food more expensive? Well, if housing is more expensive then the workers who produce your food need higher wages to survive. The place where your food is made or sold has a higher rent. So higher housing prices decrease real wages even if you own your own home; and
3. When land becomes the best investment, which it has been for years, then it destroys any productive use of capital. It's competing for the same dollars. Why invest in a factory that makes widgets? That might fail. But a housing estate? Banks give you good collaterization. Governments create policy to make sure you will never fail. Demand is inelastic.
Ever-increasing house prices is just stealing from the next generation. That's all it's doing. Yet so many government polices are designed to enshrine and protect increasing house prices as an explicit and implicit policy goal.
The problems with property taxes are:
1. They don't go up fast enough. So it acts as a tax break to market incumbents. If property taxes properly reflected market value, it would act as a brake on increasing house prices.
2. Property tax increases are often capped (eg Prop 13 in CA); and
3. On an investment property, higher rents should increase property values because you've increased the value of the housing and land. This too would act as a brake on ever-increasing rents.
It should be essentially impossible for non-residents to own housing somewhere they don't live. Owning more than one or two properties should be punitively taxed if not outright impossible.
> Thus, older voters who tend to have higher accumulated wealth, partly in the form of home equity, but also lower current income, are a politically powerful and sympathetic group in the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes.
Miss on two points: there are exemptions for retired that freeze prop tax and equity is wealth that’s rare to access before death
I think most normal people, including me, don't like it when housing costs are so out of step with everything else. The "value" in your primary residence isn't very useful, unless you sell and move to a more depressed area.
I'm a multi-homeowner and I'd love it if house prices fell, or at least stopped rising.
This has been a sticking point for me for the better part of my adult life (~20 years now), and it all started with wondering who that dude in the taxi in “Airplane!” was: Howard Jarvis, one of the major proponents of California’s Proposition 13. From Wikipedia:
> The proposition adjusted the property tax rate, pegging it at 1% of the purchase price of the property.
That sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand why property taxes go down while home values go up, and why raising property taxes is so damn hard in so many states (it’s largely because of caps etched into law by Boomers in the 70s and 80s). It’s also why I have the strong opinions on the issue I hold today.
Tax displacement is a very real issue, but one that theoretically should be solved by a liquid property market where you can sell your home at FMV and downsize to another one you can afford. Americans, special creatures that we are, instead demanded we get the McMansions without the property tax valuations, while also deciding what housing gets built regardless of demand, while also keeping the distorted value of the home should we sell it for a retirement nest egg.
In other words: homeowners keep all the money, while paying decreasing to no taxes on it. This has been a significant contributor to the housing crisis of today, with shitbox properties in major cities selling for upwards of a million dollars but families pulling in not even a tenth of that in yearly income. The typical soundbite responses of “we need more housing” and “we need to reform or loosen regulations”, while technically correct, ignore the root incentive structure crafted back in the 70s with these sorts of inverse taxation schemes, and therefore leave the problem intact. We’d have to build so much housing, so quickly, that property values halve nationally for there to be any long-term fix to this problem, and nobody seems inclined to do this given the ponzi scheme we’ve discovered suburbia to be (just look at new developments in CA with dirt roads as an example of homeowners having to foot the bill and realizing it ain’t worth it given the thin density of suburbs).
And thus we arrive back at the beginning: we need to raise taxes on homes to reflect their high assessment values, which would displace existing homeowners who couldn’t afford said bill, which is leading to the same demographics as before demanding the same solutions as they enacted in the 70s and 80s: caps, limits, or shifting costs onto less-advantaged demographics (like renters via commercial real estate). As perverse as it sounds to most Americans, the actual solution is to finally let property taxes “float” with valuations in their entirety, no caps or cuts, and let the market sort it out. Will that lead to some folks becoming homeless? Yeah, and that’s a whole other ball of wax we’ve ignored dealing with precisely because we catered to homeowners as a political group, but that’s infinitely more solvable than trying to build our way out of a housing crisis engineered by lower taxes and controls on builds.
We gotta eat the pain up front to find a better collective tomorrow for everyone.
In so many ways it helps to focus more deeply on the fundamentals.
For one thing, in the 1970's lots of true "baby boomers" were still too young to vote.
Maybe what you mean is old folks in general, they were the ones in California who were desperate enough to support the proposition which might be able to save their homes.
They should know, lots of them had been through The Great Depression, and were so much older than boomers they could be their grandparents, well they actually were if you do the math.
And they did the math, getting by just by the skin of their teeth while those just a little bit older who had been on a fixed income earlier had already been taxed out beyond recovery before the proposition.
They already ate the pain, I guess it's difficult to remember how up-front it was if you never spent that many years among Depression survivors.
Nobody ever wanted a depression again, and losing your home through no fault of your own was one of the most visible outcomes that ordinary people could do something about before it got out of hand.
This was supposed to be big, and it is bigger than ever, this is by design.
The problem comes from trying to work against it when the entire economic system surrounding "real estate" was supposed to evolve by now to where nobody pays more tax by now than the most proposition-protected properties.
The idea was for it not to end up making any difference as the years went by, nothing could be more fair than that.
The pearl-clutching comes from the failure of following generations to evolve away from taxing properties or wealth, with all levies eventually falling exclusively onto commerce instead so that only those who are actively making big transactions at the time are logically expected to be able to afford anything at all at the time.
Otherwise things are going to stay as medieval as they can, and the torture will continue until the attitude improves.
Well good news! Because taxes are there to pay for services, there's absolutely no reason why they should increase just because the value of your property... Oh that's not how local governments see it?
Well at least your property value will go up endlessly. No bubble there. Totally not based on speculation.
> Because taxes are there to pay for services, there's absolutely no reason why they should increase just because the value of your property... Oh that's not how local governments see it?
Actually that often is how local governments see it in many places.
Local bond issues, which are paid for by property taxes, are often not a fixed rate. They are often a fixed amount (e.g., $2 million/year for 5 years) or a fixed initial amount with some growth allowed (e.g., $2 million/year for 5 years with inflation adjustments, often capped at some maximum adjustment).
With these each year the rate changes to keep the amount collected on target. If aggregate property values go up the rate goes down and if aggregate property values go down the rate goes up. If everyone's property values went up or down by the same percentage the amount of tax each person paid would stay the same.
Your share of the tax is proportional to your share of the aggregate property value, so our individual taxes can change regardless of any changes in aggregate value. For example if aggregate value goes up 5%, but your assessed value us up 10% and mine is up 3% your tax for a fixed amount bond will go up and mine will go down.
If the price of housing the rises, the cost of living will rise, employees will demand raises, and the cost of providing services will increase. Even if housing prices remain flat, there will be inflation leading to the same result.
But I agree that pinning all hopes of class mobility or comfortable retirement on perpetually increasing housing costs cannot work for very much longer.
Most of local and state gov expenditure is salaries (subject to inflation, particularly local housing) and financial support for low income residents (also tied to inflation and housing).
Thurston county WA collects my property tax. Thurston county should not have attacked Iran and caused a surge in energy prices. The county should have hiked rates earlier and more aggressively. Thurston county is out of control!
Government is not a borg. We elected the dumbest motherfucker in the country, he consolidated power, and we got incredibly inflationary (among other things...) policies. Local government is just along for the ride.
Having sat on a county assessment appeal board, this is basically every hearing. People want the comps high when they sell and low when the notice arrives.
Of course. Everyone wants the money they have to increase, the amount of services they receive increase or stay the same, and the money they pay to decrease or stay the same.
in the case of many economic areas of life, you can increase your income and you can find better prices for things. What's special here is when those same people look at municipal governance and can't see that it's a zero sum game and they can't have both of what they want.
Another one of these. Lets see... they want the value of their house to go up but everyone elses down so they can trade up, the gain without the carrying cost any other investor pays, lower taxes because prices are high and the cut pushes prices higher so owners get the windfall and the next buyer eats it, schools and police but push the bill on commercial and rentals, renters pay it back in rent anyway
Fix is not complicated. Tax land not buildings, flat exemption under the primary residence off the local median so nobody proves income, defer the rest as a lien till sale for the cash poor
My county appraises my home for much more than I could sell it for, and my property tax is based on that county appraisal. I have tried to get the appraisal down to realistic number -- I file annual appraisal protests.
I'm in favor of paying for public schools but would prefer the county appraise properties realistically and then raise the tax rate to compensate, rather than inflate the appraisal so they can claim a lower tax rate.
In the last three years, a number of states have substantially reformed their property tax systems, providing huge tax benefits to owner-occupied homes and shifting the burden of paying for services like schools and police to commercial property owners (including rental apartment buildings)
That sounds like shifting the property tax burden from homeowners to renters - homeowners are generally wealthier than renters, so it's placing more of the property tax burden on those less able to afford it.
The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.
That has some not-fun generational aspects.
(1) If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced. That in turn leads to lower home values since the school quality factor is reduced.
(2) If munis are unable to collect a sufficient tax base, they must reduce services. There will be hemming and hawing about things like cutting the pensions promised decades ago to attract competent service workers, but those are harder to reduce rather than not fixing the fire trucks, the water pipes, and other hidden taxes citizens pay for by reduced services. So your property values will also be reduced in the long term. Small towns are prime examples of this happening, when towns fail.
Trying to build a community out of one socioeconomic class works about as well as trying to redline. It leads to a less vibrant community, less adaptable community, and people are poorer in life and in their finances for it.
Imagine a town with a number of wealthy homeowners, most of them old enough that their kids have grown up. Their municipality is already flush with cash. They already only need few schools for their kids and grandkids. They just want to pressure the less wealthy undesirables away, and use tax (dis)incentives to do that.
> If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced.
"Good schools" are mostly about avoiding bad kids and bad parents. Expensive homes (without Section 8 or equivalent in the neighbourhood) is a feature, as it keeps most of them away. It's not a good way of doing it -- it excludes lots of perfectly good kids and parents and it is really expensive. It's just the best way available to most people in the West.
While it may be common, it certainly isn't universal. I've worked in schools in poor communities that have pushed for good educators. In one of those schools, the push for better teachers was by the students themselves. There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities.
I'm not sure the opposite is true either, i.e. that expensive homes are a proxy for good schools. I've also worked in schools where the families were affluent, but the environment was toxic due to the behaviour of students and parents.
No, good schools are also a function of $ spend per pupil, which is correlated with school quality and opportunities for students. A really interesting place to study this is San Antonio v Rodriguez (1973) where in my opinion they laid the groundwork for such inequality in the US. The argument being made in that case (which the Supreme Court ruled against 5 4) is that funding schools via property taxes leads to this prolonged entrenched inequality.
The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).
In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
Spend per pupil is a factor, but I have to agree with the parent poster, if you remove bad, disruptive, or underperforming kids from a school, and replaced them with disciplined, over-achieving students, the rest of the student body benefits. This is independent of school funding.
Private schools, even ones that receive less tuition per student than public schools of the same district prove this point because they can set a higher bar and more readily kick out disruptive students.
California spends more money on low-income school districts than the average, and I think that's generally true most other places, especially since No Child Left behind (which for all it's problems by-and-large forced states to invest in poorer schools.)
Nationally, per student cost at Catholic parochial schools is roughly 1/2 of public schools. (Couldn't find California specific numbers, but it tracks what I've seen.) That's cost/spending; tuition is even less. Special education programs eat up 1/4-1/3 of public school budgets, so there's still a gap after accounting for that.
1973 was over 50 years ago. Even the poorest, most "backward" states have long ago largely remediated spending inequities. What you hear today to support claims of inequity are cherry-picked esoteric cases to drive outrage, just like every other topic today. In reality there's clearly much more going on than what advocates for this or that would ever admit.
Private schools get to pick their customers. Public schools have to take everyone.
That's true to an extent, but much less true of Catholic parochial schools. In fact, such schools will sometimes have a population with average income less than the local public schools. Of course most parochial schools won't have special education programs, so that's a huge filter, but as I pointed out doesn't account for the budget gap.
In any event, "picking your customers" is exactly the point of the previous poster(s). Money doesn't really explain what we're seeing. Once upon a time there was a very strong correlation, and people presumed causation, but now it's quite clear that the causation wasn't there. Certainly not directly, which is why throwing more money at the schools isn't helping.
Money can be extremely strongly correlated but if I get to kick out the bottom 20% of shitheads I can still outperform you on half the budget. Not talking income wise, talking behavior wise.
It's doubtful that a catholic parochial school has ever turned away a catholic student. Certainly if that happens, it must be rare. If catholic students are superior to non-catholics, through some self-selection process, how does that invalidate his point? They're not being picky intentionally. A great many admit non-catholic students, often on scholarship, those students also tend to do well.
Public schools have to take children that do not want to be there and make it everyone's problem, and their classmates suffer for it. Maybe this public school policy is the issue that should concern you.
That is entirely my point. Catholic schools aren’t doing anything special they are just not keeping the problem kids. Why do you assume this doesn’t concern me?
I think the effect is twofold - spend/pupil tends to benefit poorer students more (diminishing returns), so a good school in a poor neighborhood needs more $$ to achieve equivalent outcomes. And then the lower property tax revenue in the poorer neighborhood makes it harder to sustain that higher spend
Even "bad" schools use this strategy to move some of the "good" kids into special programs, etc. to raise their average scores. Which makes the remaining classes even worse. It's an eternal struggle between raising the floor vs raising the ceiling
It's also a feedback loop, once you're known for "good schools" then the homes become more expensive. If you don't care about moving then it's often cheaper to buy a home to send your kid to a good public school vs. sending them to private school.
Are pensions still an effective way to attract workers? I feel like there’ve been enough cases where workers get screwed out of them, that this isn’t much of an incentive. Similar to offering engineers equity in a startup.
Anything past the paycheck is a gamble.
They were for a substantial portion of time, such that today's pension obligations remain relevant.
In California, most cities are behind on funding pensions. There is a de facto assumption/delusion that there will be some large scale bailout at some point.
>The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.
This is likely very intentional in some of these places.
Growing up in suburban TX decades ago, people FREAKED out at talk of potential apartment building development nearby. The duplexes a mile away were 'bad enough.'
Why did they freak out? What was their threat model, so to say? (I can imagine several lines of reasoning, but as a hardcore urbanite, can miss the mark entirely.)
Also grew up in suburban Texas, saw similar freak outs, and can tell you it's thinly veiled racism and distaste towards being forced to be around people who are part of perceived lower socioeconomic classes.
The threat model is "been indoctrinated by years of propaganda to be fearful of a vague nebulous threat of being around people who don't look and act like me"
The town near where my parents lived just had a subdivision kill a multi family apartment complex because it was too close to their subdivision. There was no thinly veiled racism. It was just racism. Poor and black people apparently bring your property values down. The protests were, quite literally, we don't want those people here, without defining what 'those' meant.
It was not great to watch, but it was great to let my parents know who exactly they should stop associating with.
Falling home prices, increased crime, decreased social status, long term political shift resulting in suboptimal and even counter-interest local policy.
That really depends on the state. Some states have different public school district funding mechanisms that don't depend as much on local property tax collections.
Fire trucks are far more expensive to acquire and maintain than necessary due to monopolistic actions by manufacturers, plus local governments buying fancier apparatus than they really need. There's a lot of room to trim those particular expenses.
https://www.iaff.org/news/fire-apparatus-crisis-sparks-inves...
> Fire trucks are far more expensive to acquire and maintain than necessary due to monopolistic actions by manufacturers, plus local governments buying fancier apparatus than they really need. There's a lot of room to trim those particular expenses.
The real problem with fire equipment is that it will sit there in an emergency unless you have the staff on hand to operate it. Small, remote, or cheap towns get to burn while they wait for volunteer #2 to make it to the station.
I appreciate this knowledge tidbit. Firetrucks aren't the only relevant example, and perhaps it is less fit to purpose than I assessed originally.
theres also (3) those single family home neighborhoods require much more government maintained infrastructure for water and roads
I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible. In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people. It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income.
Someone I know is trying to plan such a thing right now. She has a decent paying job and a degenerative, disability-inflicting illness. She'd like to see the possibility of a secure future in the city where she's lived for the past 10 years, but property taxes and HOA fees alone in her city can be multiple thousands of dollars per month in neighborhoods that from the outside you wouldn't think seem particularly new or posh or luxurious. It seems that if she's forced into early retirement by disability, she'll have no choice but to relocate. So instead she feels trapped in a job she hates because she got it before she became disabled because she's reasonably afraid that employment discrimination, which is terrible at her job that nominally espouses inclusive values, will be even worse most other places. And while she's already disabled, her disability will only continue to get more profound for the rest of her life. And property taxes for sole and lived-in-by-the-owner homes is one of the reason that owning a condo or apartment is so much more expensive than renting one for her.
> property taxes and HOA fees alone
I feel like HOA fees have to be doing most of the damage there. AFAIK the highest property taxes in the US still top out around 2%, so for a "multiple thousands per month" property tax bill it has to be a house worth more than $1.2 million. I'm not sure what the line is for what level of housing expense is reasonable for society to subsidize housing security for, but I'm pretty sure $1.2 million is well past it.
True but imagine you're in the same home for 30 years. That home with somewhat affordable property taxes could double in value and now you owe double the tax. With no real increase in useable income unless you sell
That's just property taxes in a nutshell, though. We periodically see discussions about land value taxes and it's a feature of those as well; proponents shrug and point out that you didn't do anything to earn that extra value so it doesn't belong to you anyway.
I'm not taking a position here other than to say I don't believe there is a universally acceptable tax. Every tax I've ever read about or experienced personally, someone has made a valid argument for why it leads to a bad outcome or is otherwise unfair. You have to decide what gets priority, pick the system that matches that, and then be honest about where you're making tradeoffs and why.
But property tax is just absurd.
The property was purchased with "after tax" money. So at purchase date the value was already taxed.
If one sells, and make a profit, we tax that profit. Why ask for a tax on the value of the property, each year.
There should be local taxes, and there are. To fund services and whatnot of course. But taxing a percent of the current value of a property is unfair as the owner may live in there with no intention to sell and potentially no revenue whatsoever.
I haven't researched national stats, but from the experience of having lived in two states, one blue and one red in case that's important to a counter-argument, both limited property tax to 3% annual growth, even if the valuation is higher, preventing that exact scenario. It only jumped to tax on the correct valuation when the property exchanges owners.
Sure this doesn't prevent issues if someone is stuck on savings/Social Security, etc., but it prevent surprises, such as a boom in your area causing sudden explosion of equity and taxes due.
The cap required it be your residency, i.e. you aren't renting it out and you are a citizen.
3% yearly compounds to doubling the value in 24 years.
So even with the cap, it's more than likely the property tax costs a typical owner more than double what it did 30y ago.
Not a big deal if you bought at age 20 (unlikely) and still receive some work income. But if you are retired, it stings harder each year.
Again I can't speak for every principality across the board, but for the places I have lived, it seemed very fair. Regarding your concern, I might have been unclear, but when I said "limited property tax to 3% annual growth", I meant it can be lower, but doesn't exceed 3%. It adjusts with inflation unless inflation is over 3%, so no matter what, the owner is winning if it is their primary residence, with the caveats I previously mentioned.
Inflation adjusted though it is like a 10% increase.
Property taxes are not that simple, usually. E.g caps on growth of total property tax receipts or on increase per year, rebates, other schemes.
The typical way property taxes are done in the US is that the local government first sets a revenue amount, then a tax rate is determined which produces that much revenue. You don’t have a situation where property values double and the local government automatically ends up with double the tax revenue.
The government should need to accept its 2% in kind. I guess by the time people cannot pay these taxes any more they are much closer than 50 years to their eventual death. Thus it only reduces eventual inheritance. Problem solved
Most of the problem solved, but does mean that generational wealth transfer stops being a way to climb out of instability. Just another chip in American class mobility.
you could rent out a room though?
but you also have a much improved quality of life as a result of that property value going up, because theres more desirable stuff around
Being stressed about finding the money to make your payments is probably not a much improved quality of life. And they probably picked the place cause they liked it as it was, so don't be so sure about appreciation of those new developments anyway...
Why should I get to have that sort of externality on others just because I have more money than them?
People refinance all the time.
>I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible.
You can also do this with combinations of renter protections + owner-occupier protections.
Currently the latter (whether the recent trend of red states lower property taxes, or Prop 13 in CA) is much more broadly-popular in the US than the former.
Property owners generally show pretty little empathy for anyone else wanting that security.
I go the other way: nobody should be forced out of their home because other people who have more money than them decide to increase the paper-value of their home. Something has to give between "I have a lot of money, I want this place" and "I was already here, I want to stay" and I think incumbency and stability is a better tiebreaker than "money wins."
"Forced out" meaning they choose to sell rather than spend their unearned windfall.
They could always borrow against their massively appreciated property, after all.
How do you expect to borrow against that property for the rest of your life?
And why is being a Google Programmer "earning" that money, but a construction worker who spent 30 years paying off their house is an "unearned" windfall?
I'm not sure where your friend lives, but my county (perhaps state level, but county for sure) exempts property tax for those with a permanent disability. I read the requirements and it was really reasonable to prove eligobility.
I understand that this doesn't fully solve the issue in that your friend, if to take advantage of this has to move, but it might be worth seeing if there are similar options around where she lives.
What if I'm not disabled. And healthy in part because I bought a property with hard earned already taxed money, and retired early?
The taxman says not enough. I should borrow money I don't have or sell for a cheaper place just to cover for the state's inability to do with sales tax
Sounds like you retired too early and are learning the lesson the hard way. Some parts of tax code suck, but that specific problem is self induced.
Then tough shit. Should not have retired so early.
Should we expect that people who become disabled continue to live by the same means they had before?
If yes, then that means replacing their entire income once they’re no longer able to work.
If no, then something must diminish. That may include needing to relocate to a less expensive living situation. If we accept that disability means reduced means, then I don’t see why housing should be exempt from that as long as they’re not on the streets.
> In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people.
Nah, the market is supply constrained, if taxes go down the price of the real estate just goes up to fill the gap. People make purchase decisions based on income & total expenses, not on anything else, "can I afford this house?". The price stops rising when the answer switches from "yes" to "no". If your friend can't afford a house right now they don't have enough buying power to compete in the market with other house buyers. Reducing taxes won't give them any advantage in the market that other buyers don't get.
> I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible. In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people. It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income.
It seems to be equally straightforward an answer to just not expect homes to function as an investment.
I do not now nor have I ever understood why people expect homes to rise in value. If you live in an area for 20 years, and you enjoy that area, and it serves you well, and educates your kids, and the crime is low, and all that good stuff: why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation? Like I could see it if you made the house bigger, or otherwise improved it? Maybe you put in a new shed, or a nice brick backyard area with a kitchen, sure. House being worth more makes complete sense. But if you just buy a house, and live in it, and maintain it over the years, and then go to sell it: why is it reasonable for you to expect money back out of that?
You've already received what you paid for: a place to live.
Like I just don't see how people go like "My house needs to sell for more than I bought it for years from now" and then complain about the housing market being out of control and houses being expensive. Of course they are. Each time a house changes hands by this logic, it must necessarily be worth more than it was before. So every subsequent buyer of that home is effectively required to tithe to the previous owner for... some fucking reason, that nobody has ever adequately explained to me.
>why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation?
Essentially everybody in the US is continually trying to make their fortune by picking a winner instead of adding productivity and value.
Have your house appreciate.
Pick the right stocks.
Invest in the right company.
Become a landlord in the right neighborhoods.
Everyone wants to be a genius speculator instead of doing work.
Not only do they want the value of the house to go up, but they don't want anything around them to change. No new 5-story condo complex on that one corner. My neighbor shouldn't add a second floor and block my view.
I think it’s worth pointing out that you and your neighbors actually do have a voice in local government. You don’t just have to sit there and take it. NIMBYs have realized this and actually show up to be counted. You can too.
"No change" is usually the much stronger behavioral driver than "increased property value."
"Don't turn this into Manhattan" is such a common refrain yet turning it into Manhattan would wildly increase their land value.
> Why are you then owed money? Why is that a fair expectation?
Because getting the mortgage to buy the house involves parting with a large sum of money, after which some part of the mortgage payment goes towards something called principal. If it just goes towards interest, it may as well be rent.
Not to mention that when you try to sell the thing, there's some expectation by one or more third parties of some percentage of it.
But at the same time most people do the bare minimum to maintain their house, so the quality of the property continually decreases. I don't drive a car for 20 years and then expect to make a profit on selling it.
Your analogy might be applicable to the sale of an RV.
What makes a house that has set outside rotting for 30 years more valuable than the day it was originally purchased?
ChatGPT suggests the land might have appreciated, the neighborhood may be more desirable, inflation, or development potential. We don't need programmers anymore because LLMs can do it. It must be an expert on home values too.
I don't give a rats ass what ChatGPT said. Use your brain. Think for yourself.
Sorry, I don't understand. Can you explain again please?
I’d expect property values to go up (or have gone up) as population rises; less space per person. I bet we could also put together some geometric argument about proximity to things like cities. But it’s the weekend, so let’s just halfheartedly gesture at the potential for rigor.
Anyway, nowadays population is barely increasing so I guess property values… maybe they’ll keep pace with inflation (for whatever reason)?
Another possibility is that property values tend to go up and down as some areas become more fashionable. Maybe, for whatever reason, there’s a selection bias where we tend to associate ourselves the trajectory of people who lived in those fashionable areas instead of the unfashionable ones?
My theory is that the "house" consists of two things: the land and the building.
The land goes up in value when other people spend money. More retail is constructed nearby, transportation is improved, schools improve, jobs are created, etc. My land captures some of that value even though I paid nothing. That to me explains some of the fairness of property tax: the owner should contribute to the government services, such as schools and police, that help make the land appreciate in the first place.
Then there's the building. It's a wood box that sits out in the rain and rots. Water soaks in from the outside and pipes burst on the inside. Termites eat it and insects and vermin invade. Carpet and walls slowly degrade. HVAC systems wear out. Appliances break. Concrete breaks apart. Even on the land portion, plants die and need maintenance. (Trees are the only thing on a property that get better with time.) This building needs constant maintenance and I'm always spending money and time on it.
So I figure the land might go up slowly in value over time. I figure I'm lucky if the building appreciates at all after I consider the money I sink into it.
On paper my house is worth a lot more than when I bought it. But I don't know how much of that is nominal price change due to inflation.
Is “inflation” not a valid answer? Or at least component of an answer?
You can restate all mentions of "value" in the parent post to "real value", and there entire point still holds: why should people expect the real value of a home to increase over time?
It's an answer to why the number is bigger but not to why the house is worth more. It is common to say "I want my house to appreciate in value" and inflation doesn't mean it's appreciating in value, it just means the number is bigger than it was before. That's not the same thing.
PP literally says “I just don't see how people go like "My house needs to sell for more than I bought it for years from now"” That is basically not understanding why people expect the number to be bigger.
> that nobody has ever adequately explained to me.
Jesus it’s not rocket surgery. People want to live in a nice area, as more people show up and want to live in a nice area prices rise with rising demand accordingly. For the counter example, there are very large houses basically for free in Detroit. No one wants them.
> For the counter example, there are very large houses basically for free in Detroit. No one wants them.
Is that true, or do they actually come with large tax liabilities?
>>It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income.
One idea here is deferral - if it's your primary residence the taxes are deferred until the property is sold to someone else. This way you won't get evicted but the locality/state can get the payment at some point. This is better than just charging a tax on sale as many countries do because it doesn't discourage transactions.
I would certainly be discouraged from purchasing a property if the price was inflated by having to pay back taxes.
I read the idea as the seller would pay the tax. Not the buyer.
If you see that as inflated due to payback, then it's already inflated due to the yearly tax currently in place. Plus interest.
The the seller is locked in until equity is greater than the back taxes.
Not exactly.
The little town I live in is growing about 22,000 people per year. That's 64-67 people per day or about 16 new households populated with new residents every single day. The rental population is growing dramatically faster than the owner population.
That growth trend has very little to do with wealth and is almost exclusively a factor of availability. Most single family households in this growth area are rental properties, because the most urgent buyers are rental corporations who buy many of these houses the earliest moment they hit the market. Sometimes they are buying the houses before they hit the market by working directly with the home builders. Home renters tend to pay more to access the property than home owners even before taxes are considered.
So, its not just about houses versus apartments.
Also, the school systems and local municipalities attempt to sell their multi-billion bond proposals by taxing future residents at the benefit of current residents. That also disproportionately hurts renters compared to owners. The moment I see a bond proposal that will be paid for almost exclusively by residents who aren't living here yet I vote for it... because why not. We need a lot of shit to accommodate this growth and somebody has to pay for it. We need new high schools every couple of years. We need new roads. We need more plumbing, sewage, and electricity before the data centers eat it all up. Somebody has to pay for all this.
Landlords charge what the market will bear and generally have little if any price elasticity of supply, so they bear nearly 100% of the economic incidence of the tax. This is especially true where housing supply is constrained by zoning policy rather than the price of expanding supply.
It'll make it so new construction tends to be condos rather than apartments, since the first is heavily preferred by tax policy. This reduction in supply will mean higher rents.
New construction is like 1-2% of total housing stock annually. It'll take a relatively long period of time for these sorts of changes to hit prices because again, low price elasticity of supply.
edit: on slightly further thought, you'd also need this effect to either increase overall vacancy or reduce total construction, since any supply shift from occupied rental units to owner-occupied condos also implies a demand shift from renting to owning.
> That sounds like shifting the property tax burden from homeowners to renters...
This is all obviously very specific to the locality where you live, but at least where I live, property values were recently reassessed to account for the large post-pandemic increases. Individual homeowners were generally stuck with these reassessments, while commercial properties, especially those managed by large property management groups, were organized and successfully petitioned to reduce those assessments in disproportionate numbers. So the balance of power was not equal to start with.
And, commercial activity tends see revenue follow inflation. And, a business offset expenses.
An individual, could go bankrupt just because the property tax follows its' property value which itself changes nothing with regards to that owner's income.
Around here, many renters are pretty well-off. It's really difficult to own a home in the city.
Brooklyn, for example, has seen an explosion of high-rent apartment buildings, occupied by nerds like us.
If you are lucky enough to own a home/apartment in the city, you are either crazy rich, or, more likely, brought the home before it exploded in value, making you "paper rich."
Many of the apartment-dwellers in the city make a lot more than homeowners.
All that to say you agree with the GP: homeowners, as a class, are wealthier than renters. How owner occupiers choose to spend their wealth has nothing to do with the fact they have it.
Well, "paper rich" is dicey. It means that you may have the burdens of money, but few of the advantages (like actually being able to spend it).
Farmers, for example, are often multimillionaires "on paper," but don't have a pot to piss in.
They could choose a different lifestyle, but they value the one they have. That's fine, but that doesn't mean I'm obligated to subsidize their preferences.
Owner-occupiers can and do refinance to turn their wealth into cash. It's routine.
> they value the one they have
So do you. I assume that you like to eat? Farmers are how that happens.
> refinance
Are you familiar with the downsides of refinancing?
They can sell at their convenience and have their wealth liquid. Then they are in the exact same situation as renters, except that they have a big pile of money to boot.
Same thing for farmers.
A lot of states have rent control laws though which would entirely shift the burden on the owner of the building.
Usually what they have is rent stabilization rather than control. It is tricky business to really estimate what is reasonable or not under that. For example, rents in my city are allegedly "decreasing," yet if you live in a rent stabilized unit, your landlord is probably incentivized to increase your rent to the limits of the ordinance, it could be 4 or 5% so not unsubstantial especially it being compounded by the year.
And what is more, when a tenant leaves and the landlord puts the unit up for rent again, there is no price limit for what they can ask for new rent. They are free to ask above market rent if they want.
So really I would not say the burden is shifted entirely on the owner of the building when they still possess two levers for ameliorating overhead increases: increasing to the limit of the RSO even when the market doesn't support any increase, and increasing rent on the next tenant. In high demand cities the market rate is not so much a wall, and landlord generally enjoys good success pricing above market rate and still leasing the unit out in a reasonable timeframe for them.
Wealth is not income.
You can be wealthy and still have poor cashflow, especially as a leveraged property owner
Wealth is easily converted to income. People can sell their properties and move to cheaper ones. If we’re gonna run our entire society on the whims of retirees who are taking up houses big enough to raise families, while also preventing all new construction, while also opposing paying their taxes, while also opposing moving to smaller houses, we are just fucked.
For multi-unit housing a cash-poor leveraged property owner sounds like a likely slumlord, so I'd be happy to discourage that situation. More, less-leveraged, property owners instead sounds good.
For owner-occupied, it sounds like someone who made a risky financial decision because of perverse incentives. Which also seems good to revisit.
Also in these cases cash-poor is not low-income. It's likely to be high-income+high-obligations the way you describe it. Hard to get all that leverage otherwise.
It's not just slumlords though.
Rental yields are so low in the UK compared to the cost of finance, tax and maintenance that being a landlord has become completely unprofitable, which means the rental sector is falling apart.
Pretty much no landlords in the south east of England are cashflow positive on a monthly basis, and if they are they are yielding less than government bonds
That is what I think will happen at the end.
Yeah, it’s nasty politics.
What’s happening is income inequality manifesting on the market. The middle and upper middle of the market is seeing accelerated appreciation as incomes rise for the upper quartile. Some places see >10% annualized appreciation over the last 20 years.
The lower part of the market is very different, and are basically depreciating away. Property taxes are the most fair tax for the most part — you basically pay a prorated share of the levy based on the market value of your home. So if the poorer property is getting less valuable proportionally, your share of the tax pie increases. Some states share Medicaid expenses at the county level so there’s demand pressure for more tax levy.
The problem is old people generally cannot afford their homes, and are usually profoundly ignorant about everything except tax avoidance, even when tax avoidance hurts them. The tax knob is one that can be turned, which makes the problems worse. Senior exemptions, veterans exemptions, all increase the overall share for everyone else.
The new Republican platform is accelerating that — pushing property taxes to non-homestead property and driving up sales tax. In other words, it just a consumption tax, which pushes the tax burden to families and inflates retail costs, so grandma can sit in her big house and her kids get to inherit the place at the stepped up cost basis.
There's all sorts of factors at play. Uncle is a financial planner and advised grandma to sell her house to Grandma's House LLC for $1 and pass ownership of that LLC to the offspring, avoiding prop 13/prop 19 reassessment in california.
Part of it is honestly just people wanting a safe harbor preserving generational wealth. I think people who are generational wealthy understand what a damn advantage that is and obviously push hard to guarantee that for their family as much as they can. The alternatives are a bit terrifying given the direction of the economy, world, and climate. The only social safety net afterall in this country really beyond an abject poverty level of subsistence is reliance on well off family.
Maybe you can call it a sort of restart of feudalism, but there are no serfs in the mix really. Its not a productive estate in most cases (in some cases sure e.g. family business), but really often just a little lot with a house on it. People don't like the idea of the state coming in and carving that up and carting it off.
And really I think there are far more real things to set the tax burden upon. I mean grandmas home once again produces nothing, it is a box to sleep in; it's value is based on pure speculation. It is now worth 'more' because people say it is worth more and believe in that, not because it now actually does anything it didn't do thirty years ago. It is in far poorer shape than 30 years ago, even. Like, this is not where you find money flowing in this country. Tax where the flows actually are not the stagnant ponds, slowly being filled by the leaks off those profoundly vast flows of money and the speculative abilities those flows grant the flow controllers.
> Uncle is a financial planner and advised grandma to sell her house to Grandma's House LLC for $1 and pass ownership of that LLC to the offspring, avoiding prop 13/prop 19 reassessment in california.
Pretty unbelievable, really. They get a free house and tax bills from decades ago. The whole thing is made to screw over future generations, and act like it’s all hunky dory.
Wouldn't a European like VAT system help this ? Along with properly taxing the property of corporate and business owned properties.
How VAT could help? Unless you mean to dramatically increase sales tax to European VAT level? Like 23%
VAT requires invoicing, while the people railing against property taxes in the United States primarily want to avoid taxation for themselves.
The problem with this form of taxation is that it slows down consumption and impacts poor and middle class people more.
It would also place a higher burden on investment home owners so it's not all bad.
how would put burden if costs are simply passed down to renters
Lower demand for the product globally. If their asset has a higher vacancy rate, raising rent all the time can't solve the problem.
However, tax rates give perverse incentives. What you'll probably get is a lot of commercial slumlords as repairs are seen to increase the value, thus the tax.
> Lower demand for the product globall
oh shoot why didnt anyone think of this. genius.
If they could raise rents by the amount they would've been taxed, they would have. I'm happy to see more incentives against buying up houses for literal rent seeking.
>If they could raise rents by the amount they would've been taxed, they would have
They can’t raise rents higher because they are in competition with other rental properties. In equilibrium, if all commercial properties have taxes raised on them, (a) the majority of the market will raise rents to cover the cost of the tax and (b) those rental units that are no longer financially sustainable at the higher rate will exit the market (e.g. sell the homes to an owner occupant or redevelop the property if allowed to by zoning). Some fraction of property owners might take a haircut on their capital returns in the short run (the housing market is fairly illiquid) but the market will return to equilibrium in time.
No. The suppliers (landlords) as a whole have always been charging the maximum that the market is able to bear. Just because rents are raised everywhere doesn't mean the market can bear it. It would push every renter to cheaper smaller worse units and push the poorest renters to homelessness.
Is the implication the only path is to design the economy around keeping landlords as happy as possible? Its similar to the fear of a wealth tax driving the rich to move, you can just say out loud who our true masters are.
> keeping landlords as happy as possible?
In this case, landlord is neither happy nor sad since it the tax is irrelevant to them.
A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house. An owner occupied house is not primarily a financial investment in most cases. Any increase in housing value (and thus property taxes) is mostly an increase in the cost of living. Any gain in value cannot easily be realized since it’s not a liquid asset. This leads to a fear of being driven out just because the value of the surrounding neighborhood rises doesn’t mean that the owner’s income rises in lockstep.
One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
A major problem with decoupling property taxes on owner-occupied housing from market prices is that it removes the biggest incentive for a homeowner to vote for policies that keep the local real estate market in check. An owner occupied house in a desirable area where there is no disincentive to politically engineering a supply shortage becomes a financial investment. Any increase in housing value becomes profit for the owner (or their descendants). This leads to supply restrictions and escalating prices and an increasingly unhealthy society as the young and the poorer are pushed out of the city, county, or even state.
This is essentially what has happened in coastal California over the last 60 years.
Why shouldnt coastal property be crazy expensive? It's the most scarce land there is.
The land should be expensive, the housing doesn’t need to be.
With different policy, there could be more housing built on the same land. The most scarce land there is shouldn’t be predominantly zoned for only low density single family homes.
We could easily build apartments on the coast in CA and then non multi millionaires might be able to live there. We have decided that only multimillionaires deserve to own a coastal house by restricting zoning in the coast so heavily
It's funny because it happens at all levels.
The uber wealthy have their gated communities in the hills.
The very wealthy have their lock on places like Carmel.
The upper-middle class in Santa Cruz or Half Moon Bay try to prevent new condos (or student housing) from being built, because it "destroys the community character."
Everyone wants to pull the ladder up behind them.
This then means there is no real fix to anything since basic human greed always prevails. May explain why things move slowly if at all.
If those places became worse places to live as a result, wouldn't that drive property values down?
According to the massive drop of properly value near a certain Tenderloin quarter, yes.
This conveniently ignores all the gains in property value which they can benefit from by refinancing, selling or renting. If they don’t want to pay property taxes on higher values, and don’t care about the value, then we have a simple solution:
Freeze the property taxes and let the government take the entire value gain in the house when its sold.
> value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house
Value is always relative - even if the experience hasn't changed, the rising house price does mean that same experience is being value more highly relative to other opportunities. (In most cases this is because the experience actually has changed: if your neighborhood gets nicer, you are indeed benefitting!)
The bigger fallacy in rising property taxes is that civic services don't necessarily get better or more expensive just because property rates rise. And the bigger unfairness is that homeowners with rising values but not rising income don't always have efficient access to the equity of their homes.
A fair property tax regime would avoid presuming budget increases just due to rising value of housing stock, and might subsidize HELOCs or similar structures for folks who need to access property value to pay taxes.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home, which would offset some of the costs we currently pay in ad valorem property taxes.
The local real estate community had a meltdown and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into defeating it, which my neighbors obliged and did.
I think many people would have a hard time believing that a new tax in one area would be offset by lowering taxes in another. Even if they did reduce property taxes shortly after passage, many people would assume they will raise them again later on.
If it wasn’t combined in the same bill, the people will just have two taxes going forward. Effectively every “temporary” tax becomes a permanent tax. During the last local election, our city council was asking people to vote to replace an expiring tax with one at a lower rate and trying to sell it as voting for this reduces your tax.
>> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
>My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home,
First comment suggests taxing the gain (income tax), while second comment suggests a tax on sale price (gross receipts tax). Two very different things.
While I grant you that they are two different things, two-thirds of the average sale price in my area is from gains in value accrued over the time the home was occupied prior to sale, almost all of which is currently untaxed.
I own a home in Berkeley which loves transfer taxes. They’re creative about it though they tax at different rates based on the home sales price. Starting 1/1/27 the transfer tax goes from 2.5% to 3.5% based on the selling price of the home.
It’s been attractive to voters since most homes sell in the first tier.
You can reclaim some of the transfer tax by performing seismic upgrades which is actually something I support in a town with some houses that can be 100 years old.
The problem with transfer taxes is they bolt you to the place.
That is true, but on the other hand if you had to pay a hefty yearly property or wealth tax you might not be able to afford it in the sense that your wealth is bound up in the house.
The counter is of course that when you buy a house you should make sure you have enough income and/or liquid wealth so that you can pay the taxes. And if not, move to a smaller house. Of course, opponents of such taxation will then roll out all kinds of grannies living in mansions on meager pensions. Then again, is it fair that this prices out younger people from the property market?
As difficult as they are, I do think we'll need some form of wealth taxation in order to put a brake on spiraling inequality. Yes, call me a fan of Piketty if you want.
A wealth tax is just a warning shot to your wealthy neighbors, if they can afford to flee, they'll flee.
If you're planning a peasant revolt you should really consider going all-in, bloody revolution, you give the kulaks less time & space to plan for contingencies.
It just becomes part of the sale price
The issue with that is the disincentive to sell (or buy), which leads a lot of people to stay put in their oversized home during retirement, for example.
In the UK, 'stamp duty' is something that buyers pay (as opposed to sellers), but sellers also have to buy, so everyone pays to move and everyone stays put to avoid paying.
(And of course no one builds, which is the biggest issue).
I'd say it's OK to defer your property taxes until you sell (or die), but it shouldn't be the default, only something you apply for if you're in a vulnerable position.
I think it's a great idea to let land taxes create the incentives to build efficiently.
In Austria it is even worse. The stamp duty is only for literally buying the house in your name. Thus all sufficiently expensive real estate is wrapped in shell companies where the transfer is untaxed.
The result - stamp duty is exclusively paid by middle class people actually buying homes, never by the rentier class. They already used the money up front to buy the votes for this law apparently
Except they don't, taxing single house owner is just cost of living increase any time area gets gentrified or more desirable
It's basically excuse to get rid of poor that made a mistake of buying a house in area that turned more expensive 2 decades after.
Tax anything after first house, sure, but taxing house by value is terrible idea that never actually worked in a way proponents are saying it would
the incentive is if they sell they realize their gains and are left much richer
> A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house
Your better believe it is when it comes time to sell.
Or would owners not mind having 0% property taxes in return for the state taking all gains at sale time
"the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house"
An owner can derive value from the house in one of three ways:
A) Occupy the whole place.
B) Receive rent from a tenant.
C) Something in between (e.g. airbnb one room).
When property prices double, it's likely that rents roughly double. This may not increase the value the owner can derive from (A) but it will sure change the value they can derive from (B).
So they might decide to switch from living in the place to renting it out. If they don't decide to switch, then it indicates the value they derive from living in the property has either gone up, or it was always way higher than the market rent.
It seems like market rent is a reasonable benchmark to use to calculate property taxes, and property value is a reasonable proxy for market rent.
> the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house
It often is, instead. Eg the resale value of my flat increased because the area where I live became a better place.
What they mean is the day-to-day "value" of having a roof over your head, in contrast to your ability to make money by selling.
If the area around you is improving substantially, then yes that day-to-day value could be improved by better local shops, maybe a closer office building, nicer parks, etc. Generally stuff like that does not happen quickly though, and really big changes like magically teleporting from boring middle of nowhere to a vibrant cultural downtown don't happen at all.
> Any gain in value cannot easily be realized since it’s not a liquid asset.
Reverse mortgage
"Oh no, someone's given me an extra $500k for doing nothing which I'll get when I (or my kids) sell my house, how terrible"
But they didn’t do nothing. They put up capital for a resource. Generally more capital than anything else until late in career.
And arguably, they already extracted the value of that house by having a place to live without having paid for it up front. They didn’t even put up the capital in most cases. In the US they will have been granted a loan that is backstopped, and therefore subsidized by the government. Don’t forget the mortgage interest deduction, that’s a massive homeowner subsidy.
So someone else put up the capital, the government made that capital cheap, and societal demand with artificial scarcity (in most places) pushed up the asset value.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but let’s not pretend that making capital gains on a house in the US is anything like any other available investment.
They maintained the home and paid taxes on it. Have you ever had a failed septic system? A major water leak? A new roof? There's this whole anger around home ownership you get these days, oftentimes by people who have no experience in the matter.
Yes, mortgages are subsidized by our interest tax deduction system. That part is true. It doesn't turn home ownership into something with no risk, and it certainly doesn't turn it into this subsidized investment. It's a liability, not an investment.
They did not create the resource (the land), nor did the person they bought it from.
Exactly. Surely the finance industry can come up with a product that automates this so you automatically sell them a tiny slice of your home to make up the property taxes without it affecting your cash flows.
The private finance industry need not be involved.
Just have government allow taxes to be deferred until time of sale with interest pinned to the cost of borrowing for government. That already exists where I live for people over the age of 65. The government can still get the revenue for free via borrowing and the payback is more or less guaranteed.
This really seems like the most fair situation, if we don't want to a) let retired people stop contributing their fair share, b) kick old people out of their lifetime homes during their most vulnerable years.
I believe you can get a reverse mortgage line of credit that allows you to take out money as needed. That is, a reverse mortgage doesn't have to be a predetermined lump sum or monthly payout.
This doesn't totally automate it, but it takes away the need to manage the proceeds from a reverse mortgage between the time you receive a payout and the time you pay your taxes.
Or just loosen supply side restrictions so much that houses typically don’t go up in value.
It’s really hard to loosen supply side restrictions on “this somehow became a hip neighborhood.” You can in general make more housing available, but not prevent rising prices in specific neighborhoods.
You absolutely can prevent a "hip neighborhood" from becoming the equivalent of a short squeeze. Prices are not only signals of current scarcity, but also future scarcity. Once you've established that any increase in property value will lead to an influx of capital, followed by a swift increase of supply, every increase will partially suffocate itself.
Not everyone needs to live in a hip neighbourhood?
My intuition agrees with the supply side argument. Also higher interest rates to reduce demand? Isn't this how we got here, to these very high house prices worldwide, by a combination of the two? Taxes seem a second order effect here at best.
Of course, the people who already own land in the now-hip neighborhood either don't want it to change and grow at all, or they want the price to go up as much as possible so they can cash out. The existing owner class never have an incentive for ownership to be affordable...
The funny thing about land and population growth is that land doesn’t. It’s fixed.
Only in the most literal sense. In a far more accurate sense what we are talking about is land where people want to live and that does grow, more or less, with population growth. It's only a handful of cities with geography that makes desirable land fixed.
and population in developed world is also no longer growing
Immigration means that population will grow in first tier countries.
The premise of real estate (above survival) is living somewhere other people don’t.
That's basic Econ101: households optimize for (subjective) utility, not for profit on some balance sheet. Taxing households for non-realized gains doesn't take into account liquidity nor the (subjective) negative utility and opportunity cost of selling your home and moving away.
This will drive rent up, punishing people who lack the credit to purchase.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale
Stamp duty in the UK, horrendous tax. It's better than nothing at offsetting the unearned increase in house (land) value, but far worse than a regular tax.
If you live somewhere for 10 years, then move, then repeat for 40 years, you pay far more than if you never move. This encourages people to live in less suitable houses for longer.
As to your worry about land values increasing -- the owner is deriving benefit. The higher the land value is, the more benefit the owner gets from the land.
> If you live somewhere for 10 years, then move, then repeat for 40 years, you pay far more than if you never move.
This sounds like a problem with the way the particular tax is written, not with the idea of taxing housing gains at the time of sale.
> The higher the land value is, the more benefit the owner gets from the land.
What benefit does a homeowner derive from increased land value before selling?
Stamp duty doesn't tax gains. It's a tax on buyers, not sellers.
It's absolute insanity
Oh, so GP was just incorrect in calling this a tax on gains. That explains why repeat buying and selling incurs more tax.
Large sales tax on home purchases is probably a generally bad idea. Looks like Bay Area pricing would incur a 10-12% tax under the UK scheme which seems pretty crazy.
The increased land value is because the land is more desirable. If I buy some land next to a rubbish dump, it's cheap because living there is terrible. If the dump is then closed my land improves in value, and I derive value from that.
Likewise if I buy somewhere cheap in a backwater town, and the town becomes more desirable because there are better employment opportunities, better shops, better amenities, all of which serve to mean people will pay more for the land, then I benefit from that immediately.
The value is subjective, if you lived in a quaint town and now it’s become a bustling place it may be a nightmare for you , despite the price increases. That is actually a win win situation, though, since you can now move to another quaint town elsewhere while taking a pile of cash with you, with the perhaps important caveat that you do lose your proximity to places and people you may consider more important than the money.
These imaginary scenarios do not align with typical real world experiences. Very few people live near a dump that closes or see their small town unexpectedly boom (and as brabel notes, that’s not necessarily a benefit).
Most people’s home values go up because of 1) increasing housing demand and 2) the collective delusion that home prices can continue to far outpace wage growth indefinitely. Neither of these things necessarily result in an increase in amenities or improved quality of life.
My own home value has gone up something like 70% in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, the amenities near me are essentially unchanged. Same schools. Same number and quality of restaurants and grocery stores. My net worth has jumped a fair bit but my immediate benefit seems pretty much flat.
I disagree. In my country we are currently in a inheritance boom. Everyone who has parents is getting free money.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
Forcing renters and buyers to pay for the local services instead of property owners seems extremely unfair.
> Any increase in housing value (and thus property taxes) is mostly an increase in the cost of living.
So? If the property values go up then cost of living is going up for renters too. Why should property owners be shielded from this by imposing local service costs on renters who generally have even lower incomes than owners.
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale
This is how it works for sales in Sweden, via the so called "reavinstskatt", or profit realisation tax. Funnily enough, it is mostly applied to individuals in practice. To avoid the taxation, companies package properties in subsidiaries, which can then be sold and traded like any other stock. The tax is then postponed until the de jure sale of the property, which never occurs. Individuals are not eligible because the loophole is closed if the legal owner also occupies the property they own.
This sounds like a plan to make rented properties a more liquid asset and make rent cheaper. Seems like a sound idea to me.
I don't like taxes but I also like having roads, sewage treatment, 100+ psi water pressure, multi-gigabit internet access, and a reasonably constant flow of electricity. The cost of public education and the management of that system is the only serious concern I have with my local taxes.
I actually don't mind the cost of living in my neighborhood going up. The $2500/yr HOA fee is a feature for me. I picked this location precisely because of it. I've lived in many places with virtually no maintenance overhead or economic friction. You may eventually learn that there are two sides to this coin. Neighbors who can afford and are willing to participate in ridiculously scaled housing markets also tend to take better care of their properties and local communities.
> Neighbors who can afford and are willing to participate in ridiculously scaled housing markets also tend to take better care of their properties and local communities.
Whereas you take great care of your local community by even refusing to live around anyone not as well off as you ?
Imagine the horror of having to live within 10 miles of a low class smelly poor plebeian, you might have to lay your eyes on their 3 days overgrown lawn from time to time.
I wish poorer areas of US suburban localities had overgrown lawns. In many cases, those neighborhoods are blighted concrete jungles with no foliage save the occasional pavement weed.
You should be concerned if you have 100+ psi water pressure. Anything above 70 is atypical for a residence.
They must be mistaken about that number.
This works in other areas of life. A courtesy charge creates a better environment by giving participants skin in the game and filtering out actors who wouldn’t mind abusing you but wont pay to do so.
Someone is pocketing a large fraction of that $2500 while paying 2-3 people a minimum wage to get things done.
In this country of oh-so-much freedom and journalism how can a layperson like myself check whether in the final degree my tax dollars are really paying for someone’s collection of vintage Ferraris, hidden behind an inconspicuous budget item?
I’ll rather know my taxes where used for a Ferrari in someone’s collection than in two or three javelin missiles thrown who knows where.
False dichotomy
He's saying he likes to pay a $2500 HOA fee to keep the poors away. It doesn't matter where it goes, as long as it filters out undesirables.
Wait until you get a tyrannical HOA board and realize you have to make a choice between dealing with them or moving. Dealing with them typically involves lawsuits which come out of your HOA fees, which will go up along with all your neighbors who are now angry that their fees have gone up as well. (Ask me about open records my HOA hasn’t delivered for over 350 days.
I pay my city for sewer, water, and trash. I pay an ISP for fiber to the home, a power company for electricity. If you get all those things for $2500/year from your HOA, congratulations.
I have heard way too many horror stories about obnoxious neighbors in HOAs to ever want to live in one, personally
My friends lost a battle to paint their garage door a slightly different shade of white than the approved Pantone shade. No private entity should ever have that degree of power over one’s private life. Petty tyrants, I tell ya.
They read the contract before moving in though right?
Sure, I meant this more in the sense that my friends' experience trying to very gently and largely unmeaningfully deviate from the petty tyrants' decrees taught me I never want to live anywhere near this type of governance structure. (unfortunately HOA-less developments are becoming more and more difficult to find and so whether you read the contract or not is slowly ceasing to matter - do you want a house or don't you? John Oliver did a great video about this stuff if you're so inclined)
Don't have HOA, have everything you have, AMA
all of those services are ones that should be realized by the city, from taxes paid to the city. If they are not, the problem is that people vote for wrong people
The problem with having the city pick things like your trash pickup is that you end up bound to whatever choices they make.
In Canada for instance, I’ve seen towns where they have pick up once every two weeks and the canister is not even a full size one. It’s a “gentle” push to get people to recycle and compost.
No way that would fly in Freedom Town USA.
This worked in Australia. People complained for like a month, and then just started using the food scraps bin and got over it.
Miracle is garbage doesn’t stink if you don’t put food in it.
HOAs in general are nothing but classic American privatization of that which would otherwise be public, because counties and cities here either lack the tax base (rural), budgeting skills (urban), or both, to provide the services some subdevelopments are built with.
It’s dumb. Here in Washington it’s rather common, I’m finding, for rural land plots to be part of a “Road Maintenance Association”. Exact same legal construct as an HOA, but scoped only to road maintenance on roads the county didn’t want to deal with. It would make so much more sense for the county to socialize those roads and reuse the same maintenance crews and vehicles for these stretches of road! But instead, a private entity pays through the nose to duplicate all that maintenance infrastructure (or pay contractors).
You’re stilling paying taxes for nothing in addition to HOA fees. Another fee isn’t the answer.
What I don't understand is (because I honestly haven't been afforded the time to sit down and think about it, also it's frustrating), why do taxes generally trend upwards for the average person? Doing napkin math it seems to have gone from ~10% to ~28% for average family. These are %-based, why does it need to change? Why can't cities/towns/counties work with the money their citizens can give?
Happening in Austin, Texas recently. City cites:
- Rising cost of core services
- Weak sales tax revenue. This is the city’s second-largest revenue source, and it has slowed or dipped.
- A shrinking property tax base. Officials point to falling property values, appraisal protests, more business tax exemptions, and little new construction adding value to the tax rolls.
- Disappearing one-time money. Pandemic relief funds have run out, and federal funding cuts were anticipated.
- Rising service costs. The new budget’s highlights include $6 million more for permanent supportive housing services, $6 million more for fire overtime to keep four-person staffing, and extra EMS overtime. Employee raises and social services were also major line items.
It is frustrating... if core services are costing more, cut extracurricular services? Why would you lean so much on sales tax, seems obvious this would revert to a mean? If your budget is reliant on infinite new construction it seems a bad budget? Why is pandemic relief cuts a shock to anyone? More housing services? I'm empathetic but there's more homeless than ever before. I know it's simplifying the problem but it just feels like people are punished with permanent tax increases for governments spending more than they should... we start with a new "floor" tax rate and repeat forever? Is it going to get to the point where we work 50% of our time just to pay taxes?
> why do taxes generally trend upwards for the average person?
One-time money from development runs out, but services like sewers, roads, power, emergency services, snow removal, and so on, need to be paid or saved for every year. Most US cities are sprawling, low-density affairs, meaning they're developed (and paid for) once, but all those roads still need money to maintain. Quoting from [0] to draw attention to what I'm talking about:
> What the tax productivity data shows is that "rich-people housing" with big lots and plenty of room for cars, which were subsidized when the neighbourhood was developed, continue to be subsidized throughout their long existence. Suburban single-family houses on big lots simply do not cover the municipal expense of things like repairing all that asphalt and clearing all that snow
People have asked previously how, if this were true, we would see more cities declaring bankruptcy - and some do [1], while others do what you've noticed, and raised taxes. The car-centric, driving-as-the-only-transportation-method way of life is financially unsustainable.
I'm not going to yell death to the automobile, but to make it the default, and in many cases only way to get around, is not a good long-term plan for cities beyond a certain size.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/evs-cities-climate-column-d...
[1] https://wmtxlaw.com/cities-declared-bankruptcy/
People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.
So not only is the cost of service to be thought of, but the quantity of services.
The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.
> People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.
Makes sense, totally agree... however I don't think generally citizens want to pay _more_ taxes... or at least eventually there's a point where they say enough is enough.
https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-11-05/austin-tx-prop-q-fai...
> The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.
This should be stopped. Creates exactly the sort of ratcheting effect you described. Mind boggling to me. I've been in-charge of small budgets and buying more stuff after making more money is a big decision, not taken lightly because we can't assume present returns will match future returns.
> we can't assume present returns will match future returns.
Funnily enough, after spending some time in public service albeit in another country, genereally budgeting for public agencies works almost inverse to this.
If you get allocated X budget but only spend 0.8 * X, then next time you will almost always get <X. This is in itself reasonable, you don't get more allocation than you need. In practice though this means you are incentivised to not save money from your allocation iff you expect to need more in the next period or do not want to lose your allocation (maybe a renovation or smth similiar has been pushed back due to external factors).
Yes, always felt this was ridiculous. There has to be a better way to solve this.
Its a very difficult problem. The exact same dynamic happened in the USSR (my Dad has stories that are basically word for word what is described). I have also seen it in large corporations and US state and federal governments. I would not be surprised if we had papyrii from ancient Egypt about the need to spend the pyramid budget this year or the pharaoh may not allocate enough next year.
I think this misses the important point of how governments tend to get less efficient at scale, and over time.
You could pay more and still get worse services.
Oh for sure, just ask the residents of Austin if they feel services have improved over the last 10, 20 years! I imagine there will be quite a bit of bias and "rose-tinted glasses" but generally speaking I don't think they feel the price tag is reflective of the services they're getting. On that note, not sure why people seem to think of governments as some sort of subscription they pay for and get services in return... but perhaps that is a discussion for another day :)
Percentage increases are the result of your money being worth less. That’s why every good government fights inflation. Stable values of money make it easier to plan budgets, estimate costs, lure investors, and collect taxes.
It’s when the value of money decreases that government has to choose among reducing spending (often by reducing services), increasing tax rates, and electoral losses. Most choose incremental tax rate increases because it’s easiest and the people likely to complain are unwilling to run for office to replace the people who raised the taxes.
Not arguing that sequence of thought doesn't occur, but it bothers me because the reasoning is faulty. If money's worth less, then the appraised value of my home measured in dollars should correspondingly increase. If the biggest taxes are assessed as rates on things that tend to scale with inflation, then it ought to be relatively indifferent to inflation. The only changes you should have to make to your tax system in response to inflation should be raising flat rate taxes.
I don't know about Austin, but where I am the single biggest source of rising costs for the city seems to be its pension fund. Which seems to have severely underperformed the market thanks to the efforts of hedge fund managers who were all hype about dotcoms in 1999, mortgage-backed securities in 2006, cryptocurrencies in 2018, and are probably pretty excited about AI right now.
Very frustrating. ATP the people in charge of that mismanagement are surely out of office...
In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund. This excludes the seperate schools tax which is property based. Health care costs drive up many costs in the US including all libality insurances. The second part of this tax mess comes from the excessive military budgets since the late 1970s most of our national debt as of the mid 1990s was from that waste of resources. I understand we shouldn't just cut abruptly but our spend on weapons needs to slowly decline while we fund the transfer of workers out of the military industrial complex. And there are a lot of structural accounting problems like how personal credit card and automobile financing isn't tax deductbable but leveraged buyout interest is. The tax exemption for share buybacks is another budget drain. My instinct is we need a universal national income tax along with a land tax that in some ways exempts housing up to some middle or upper middleclass level.
> In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund.
That is an insane statistic. Surely the state can throw some weight around to say enough is enough?
I just had my own insane encounter with healthcare. They "accidentally" billed us insurance rate which was about 4-5x more than self-pay. Why is there 4-5x overhead when dealing with insurance? (I know there's the negotiation stuff) but also seems to be quite a mess. I'm actually more mad at hospitals and clinics lately than insurance. Seems they have agreements with companies to "dispense" things at 4-5x the actual price, expecting insurance or taxpayers to pick up the tab. Seems like blatant fraud.
Sorry for the rant, I agree with everything else you mention :)
I seem to recall that NY state medicaid expenditures are completely out of line even when comparing other liberal states with Medicaid expansion, when you compare how much every resident pays.
The answer is almost certainly large scale fraud by organized criminal groups, but investigating and publicizing this is, currently, extremely politically inconvenient.
Not NY resident but recently had an experience that I think is basically fraud but also "legal."
Went to clinic for fractured arm. Was given a sling, told it was included with the visit, verbally by the staff.
Later get a bill for nearly $500 for the sling that costs $50 if you get it outside of the clinic. Was told they think they accidentally billed me the insurance price. I can understand "convenience" being baked into the price but not at a 10x markup. The more I talked with the clinic trying to get them to fix it, the more it sounded like they had a partnership with the stupid sling company where they put slings on people and bill the insurance 10x the cost of the sling.
>Surely the state can throw some weight around to say enough is enough?
How do you know that it's enough? Baby boomers are old now, which means demand for healthcare has skyrocketed. There's an odd thing I've noticed in political commentary where nobody really thinks that healthcare is expensive, but it absolutely costs a ton to keep people alive. America might have problems with too much overhead, but even here in Ontario, healthcare is by far the province's biggest expense.
> How do you know that it's enough?
Because that is 17% above the US average, at an average of $13k per year per patient. This is _after_ medicare handles the bulk of the cost. I'm not disagreeing that healthcare is expensive, just the costs are excessive.
Taxpayers are getting milked by providers and insurance. I was given an arm sling that cost almost $500. If I got it outside of the clinic it would have been $50.
> In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund.
Chicago..hold my beer. 80% of taxes here go to funding pensions for 2% of city population. Our parking meter money goes to gulf countries because we sold them to pay for city services back in 08.
This doesn't explain it all, but worth considering.
As the cost of living increases, so does the cost of providing public safety workers and their union-guaranteed pensions and benefits. In most cities, public safety eats up a large chunk of the operating/general fund budget (in Austin it's 71.2%)[1, pg. 30], and reducing public safety budgets kills your representative's clout. You yourself can advocate for lower hiring rates or pay and pensions if that's a concern. Any new hire comes with long-term costs for your local government, even after they've left service.
Extracurricular services are highly visible and therefore highly defended by the advocates that claim they reduce crime (by providing structure to youth with nothing else to do, for example). Representatives are typically replaced with those that defend those highly-visible services. They will instead reduce less-visible support services (like IT) that make public safety more efficient/effective.
Since you can't outlaw homelessness, citizens that complain about homeless activity motivate local governments to provide more services that make homelessness less visible/likely. Without those services, public safety budgets need to increase to address more desperation on the streets.
As the population ages and needs more medical care they can't afford, demand for EMS and senior services increases. I've seen arguments to freeze or eliminate property taxes for seniors, but balanced budgets mean non-seniors have to pay more to cover their service costs unless the local government finds additional revenue (fees, fines, more local sales tax that increases living costs, etc.)
You can outlaw abortion for unfit parents, but that also likely creates more welfare service demand over time.
To me, private businesses not increasing wages to meet a standard cost of living means an increase for demand of welfare and public safety services. Local governments can attempt to hold private businesses to a higher tax burden, but are usually preempted by state law in Republican-led states. Your local government has no control over that and has to respond somehow.
To me, the frustration is best placed with private businesses that can afford to provide for their workforce, but instead rely on welfare services to give their workers what they need to survive, so that executive officers can earn more and deliver more to their investors. ~55% of households in the U.S. earn less than $100,000 per year (before taxes). [2]
[1] https://austin.widen.net/s/x8q5hmnwtw/fy-2026-27-city-of-aus...
[2] https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2024.S1901
I think land-value taxation, with a cap on properties based on income (and wealth) for your first home, is the way.
I do think there is something special about the idea of home, and that home ownership should be encouraged. It brings people stability. People shouldn't be pushed out just because others have more income than them.
At the same time, we do need property taxes. In California, rate increases are capped, so older owners often pay pennies compared to new homeowners. Harmonize the taxes, while capping it.
Why should there be a cap? If you're so rich as to own some property, why do you need protection from paying a reasonable rate of tax?
Consider my neighborhood in Chicago. It has gentrified rapidly over the past couple decades. But it wasn't always so wealthy. My retireee neighbor probably bought her house for no more than about $100,000, but now the market rate for a house like hers is more like $500,000. With that comes about $20,000 per year in property taxes.
That might be reasonable for the wealthier families who are moving into the neighborhood and driving up the land values. But it's pushing her into poverty.
> But it's pushing her into poverty.
No, its pushing her into a cash flow problem. Its not poverty; she has substantial wealth, but its all in the house.
There are mechanisms, of course, to access that wealth without moving, including ones specifically geared toward income-limited house-rich retirees.
Now, those end up creating a debt that must be resolved before transferring the house, including via estate, so living on the value of the home reduces its utility as a vehicle for generational wealth, but...unless you want to reproduce California’s system which makes it much harder for people to become homeowners while rewarding those who already have, eapecially the wealthiest, making the rich richer and what would be the comfirtable middle class anywhere else in the country poor, that’s the way it works (and your exact scenario was the major sales pitch that was used to sell the California system; its maybe understadable how people without 50 years of California’s example fell for it then, but...)
There are ways other than California's for addressing this. Washington's system works quite well: a disposable income based property tax exemption for people over 61.
It exempts you from "excess levies" (basically levies that are voted on) and some statewide levies and freezes your taxable assessed value. If your disposable income is low enough it also starts excluding part of your assessed value from taxation.
So your solution is to take the house away via a second mortgage?
Why are we trying to take houses away from homeowners? Many who have lived in their homes for twenty years or more. What services that the city has could be so important to push residents out of the homes they've lived in all their lives? Most of it is inefficient pork on admin and roles the people living there didn't choose to hire for.
Build more. Encourage building multifamily. Pay to buy these homeowners out of their single family and convert the land to multifamily. If you can't pay, don't try to make it up with tax increases. That forces people out.
Deregulate and build.
Maybe a city failing to stretch services will send new residents seeking other cities, which would be healthier anyway.
Or maybe property taxes should be based on the services rendered. If they increased from $1,000/year to $20,000/year and you subtract away the inflation here is the city government delivering more value or less?
In my city and others our city council delivers large grants to non-profits and other entities under various auspices. “Defending gay rights” is one, or maybe helping the homeless or something. Of course I support both causes in general, but if the city gives a million dollars away maybe we just have to have some people kicked out of their homes to pay for these programs?
You can say well we will just raise taxes on the wealthy. Sure yea, whatever but that isn’t a viable long term strategy for places outside of California or New York which have an ability to capture wealth better due to intrisinic location value. There are only so many “rich” people. Could I afford another $10,000 in city taxes? Yea. I won’t be able to go out to eat or shop at local business as much though. So then what happens? Do those businesses go under? Raise prices? What about their property tax? Maybe instead I sell and take a loss on the house and the market value goes down so now that home pays less in taxes (depending on how this stuff is measured in a given jurisdiction).
> Maybe a city failing to stretch services will send new residents seeking other cities, which would be healthier anyway.
Yea. Tell Google and Meta and whoever to stop putting more jobs in the “cool” cities and come to Ohio where I live instead of these data centers.
This stuff is rather complicated, unfortunately. Even the case of a city let’s say “building affordable housing” is arguably a benefit to the local homeowners, but if you do that yea sorry Granny McPension has to pay for it too - she has a house, she’s wealthy!
> If they increased from $1,000/year to $20,000/year and you subtract away the inflation here is the city government delivering more value or less?
Probably less.
And probably irrelevant to the people that already live there.
> Probably less.
So probably the taxes should be lowered then and then grandma doesn’t need to be kicked out. Everyone wins
> Pay to buy these homeowners out of their single family and convert the land to multifamily.
But that's what the market is already doing? In your example from above, you can take a $400,000 windfall and move somewhere else, or take out a mortgage against that $400,000 of new equity to pay your taxes and still come out waaaaay ahead. I don't understand your characterization of a second mortgage as "taking the house away" at all.
What poverty--she owns a house worth $500k. I think deferral schemes where certain individuals can pay taxes upon sale of the home (with fair interest) should be fine to avoid forcing anyone into a reverse mortgage.
Well she doesn't have the 500k. This is akin to saying we should force people out if market conditions make their house more expensive. That seems like a really strange consequence to all this, idk
It isn't because the comment had a second sentence suggesting tax deferrals were fair.
Either housing is an economic asset subject to market forces, or it's not.
If it's not, then I would also like to live in a nice neighborhood for $100k and zero property tax, please.
On the other hand, if it is, then this person has a substantial economic asset that she could reverse mortgage, rent out, or sell.
So people that keep buying low (because that's what they can afford) are constantly being forced to move.
Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
Especially not when you're getting older, have limited ability to manage a move for yourself, built a life and raised your kids in the building, and would have to consider unloading a lifetime's worth of objects and/or moving infeasibly far away from your friends and community to get into a living situation that's more financially tenable.
> Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
> Especially not when you're getting older
Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Why are we replaying the dishonest “think of the retirees” now? It was bullshit in California in 1978 to sell Prop 13, and its even bigger (and more transparent) bullshit now when, especially when it is used to sell the same basic idea.
How can someone be so out of touch? A person buys a house, spend a whole life there, and through no action of her own happens to live in an area that drastically appreciates in value over the decades, all she wants is to spend her last few years in the same house that she loves and would never consider selling, and now we ask them to kindly pay all their income or more in property taxes, otherwise fuck off??
And where would she move to? All decent areas probably also increased in price, her property went up 10x in value but so did all other properties she would contemplate to buy. That’s the fallacy of thinking property is wealth when talking about your only residence.
What a morally bankrupt viewpoint.
The suggestion is that this person can get a mortgage to pay their property taxes over the next 20 or 30 years as part of their retirement - or they can sell their property and live well in a cheaper location.
Claiming that the retiree has a right to both the home value and the ability to live there is the friction point. It reads as hollow in the face of rising homelessness and the inability for young people and families to access housing.
The comment you are responding to is saying the opposite. They are saying that the person can access the wealth of the house (eg via a reverse mortgage) in order to pay the taxes while staying in the house. That's what this meant:
> Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Simple example. I bought the house at $100k. It's now worth $500k. That means I owe $20k/yr in taxes, but it also means I have $400k of additional wealth. A bank will lend me money with that wealth as collateral. If you imagine that the interest on the loan is roughly equivalent to the rate of appreciation of the property going forward, that's 20 years of taxes paid for by the increase in home value. Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone!
All else equal, I can see why the ability to live in the same house until you die would be given a high moral value. But in practice, IMO, this culture causes a number of problems. For instance, where I live, there was a lot of growth in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of young families, so they built a bunch of schools. It's an attractive place to live, so a lot of those people who lived in those houses when they were new and raised those families and attended those schools have kept living in those houses. But those kids that they raised there can't live in those same neighborhoods as adults, because there's no turnover, so they can't raise their own kids there. So now the schools are all half (or less) full, because the neighborhoods they were built to serve no longer have a lot of families living in them. So then they have to close and consolidate schools and everybody hates that. I don't really have a strong view on the moral question of whether houses "should" be owned by older people who have lived there a long time or by young people families, but from a pragmatic standpoint, this situation seems quite bad to me.
I think if we had a totally different culture, with multigenerational families living in the same house, then this might work better. But this model where we build new family friendly neighborhoods with parks and schools, and then nearly everyone ages in place and all the family amenities become empty over time, and the families all end up in the next new neighborhood and then it repeats, this doesn't seem ideal to me.
Schools aren't forever. They're just buildings that get built, expanded, replaced, upgraded, mothballed, abandoned, sold and/or destroyed all the time as the needs of the community using them changes. Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long.
It's OK that they don't last forever; they're schools, not irreplaceable shrines.
And speaking of things that also don't last forever: Homeowners. Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts, and then some new family buys it at market price and is free to breed a whole new fleet of kids to raise there.
There's still eventually churn in the marketplace, and in the neighborhood. The churn didn't disappear just because Grandma Sally was able to choose to keep living in the same place until she died quietly of an agonizingly painful heart attack as she stood in the kitchen making tomato sauce after church on a Sunday morning before the family dinner that afternoon.
People die all the time. It's often tragic, but it's natural and ultimately unavoidable.
People also get forced out their forever-homes all the time, too. That's also often tragic, but it happens for artificial reasons that could be avoided if we bothered with trying to do so.
> Schools aren't forever… Some may last for decades, and some for centuries. Some have already lasted far too long.
That seems a bit ironic?
> Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts
Not always, grandma can pass the home down to whoever. IIRC there are ways to do it without triggering a reevaluation on the original purchase price.
Ironic? Is it ferrous or something?
Anyway, Grandma is as dead as that Sunday dinner. She won't care that the new occupants are being complete heathens about smoking dope and makin' babies on the sofa.
GP is not forcing the retiree to move. GP is instead advocating retaining the use of property while reducing the cash flow burden. Asking someone to get a cash out refinance is not morally bankrupt; it is a pragmatic and fair solution. Some states also have deferred property tax schemes; these are even better. It is only fair for someone who, by luck, paid $100k to get a house that is now worth $500k and lives in a neighborhood that is now far better than when she bought the house.
Defered property tax for elderly can be (and usually is) implemented as a lien on the estate, to be settled upon the owners death. Do you heve any problem with that? Or should we now also think of (inheritance of) the children?
Yeah, _seriously_.
"And where would she move to?" -- Either the graveyard or the incinerator? She's dead... the bill doesn't come due until after her death and is settled from the value of the house.
It's classic neoliberalism think which for some reason the tech crowd is unreasonably susceptible to. "Oh you're poor? Can't afford your bills? Must be your fault." It's utterly disgusting.
Everyone needs a place to live, not only boomers. There's a generational injustice at play in the idea that you get for $10 what I must pay $100.
You're not wrong, but that's an entirely different discussion from whether or not someone should be forced out of their house simply because gentrification and inflation causes their taxes to go up year after year likely long after they're done working. Oftentimes people buy homes in low-cost areas because that's what they can afford. It's not their fault when the area gentrifies and their taxes skyrocket past their means through no fault of their own. We can advocate both for homes to be more affordable for people that need one and for people to not lose their homes due to constantly rising taxes.
It’s not a bullshit idea, it is realistic and the problem in California is that it includes commercial and second homes.
I don’t want my country to force old people to either move from their home, or take out risky debt.
There are absolutely problems and prop 13 has been awful for California but it’s a red herring to worry about the primary residence exceptions.
To actually realize this value she would have to sell it.
So your solution is to force her to sell her home and move? Move where? I've seen this in so many areas of the country where property taxes on your property are tied to market value rather than purchase price. It drives retired and lower income people out of neighborhoods that they have lived in for decades, forcing them to move down the scale of home ownership.
Perhaps the retired person is living on a fixed income of $40k/year. Over time their proterty taxes on the home that they have lived in for decades can now be more than half of their total income? How is this fair at any level?
Reverse mortgage.
> How is this fair at any level?
How is it fair that working people have to pay 10x for housing than she did when she was young? How is it fair that the money goes to her inheritance while she made her working neighbors pay her share of taxes?
Of course, let's let yet another corporate land grab take even more residential property off the market for profit-based motives. This can't possibly do any more harm than locking property taxes at the time of sale.
Where I live, we are looking at locking property taxes once you hit a specified age (65) and have under a specified income ($40k+/-). The current debates revolve around exactly what those numbers are and at what level the taxes get locked. The goal is to protect the elderly who have already contributed to the economy and society for 40+ years and not force them into a financial situation forcing them to sell their home just to pay even more property taxes that they have paid for the entire ownership.
A number of states have this. Basically if you are low income, where that may be calculcaed differently depending on cost of living of the county you live in, you can defer or freeze property taxes.
Oregon has a deferral where the delayed property tax comes from the value of the house when it is sold or I guess when you die. https://grantsforseniors.org/property-tax-relief-for-seniors....
Washington has a similar thing.
"All Washington counties offer senior citizens and disabled households property tax exemptions. Eligibility is based on your age or disability status, home ownership, residency in Washington, and income level. Seniors who are at least age 61, or retired from regular gainful employment by reason of a disability, with an income of $64,000 or less are eligible."
The idea is to help people stay in their houses. This is really really important. And if you can afford it, you should be paying property taxes. I'm lucky I can afford mine, but I highly support this strategy.
In my state I occasionally see people in online discussions saying they can't afford their property taxes - I think a lot of people aren't aware of these programs, people are amazed when I post a few pointers and tell them about it.
Meeting the basic needs of the population, by having enough housing and preventing hoarding of housing by wealthy individuals, is not a "coporare land grab."
Quite the opposite.
We are clearly talking about different things. I'm talking about protecting single home homeowners on a fixed income from being forced out of their homes. Staying in the only home she owns is not hoarding.
Telling people that the solution is to sell their home to an insurance company as a solution is most certainly a corporate land grab.
You seem to be arguing about people/corporations that own multiple homes or even entire portfolios of property. These are not the same argument.
The solution is not necessarily to sell, they should only do that if they want.
If their asset is gaining in price so much that the tax burden is getting high, then tax deferement until a liquidity event both keeps them in their home, but also keeps them honest about how much they are taking away from the rest of society by taking that piece of land.
> Of course, let's let yet another corporate land grab take even more residential property off the market for profit-based motives.
The premise does not warrant this conclusion.
They don’t, they move to the ghetto like she did and start the gentrification cycle again
Why should this person take up a family home in a desirable area? It is inefficient. The pressure she is feeling to leave is the system working as intended.
We shouldn’t prioritize efficiency when it comes to moral matters. That’s a bad idea for the government.
People’s primary residences are more than just an economic asset. If you don’t understand that, it’s difficult to have a conversation as we have very different starting points about morality.
$20k on $500k is 4% annually, which is really high. I'm not seeing any Chicago neighborhoods that are this high (looks like a max of maybe 2%) but perhaps I'm missing something about how Chicago works?
Why can’t she pay from her retirement accounts? 20K/yr isn’t all that much considering today’s cost of living. The stock market has skyrocketed in the last decade and change.
I also don’t buy 20K of property tax on a 500K home, that’s a 4% tax which seems unlikely in Chicago.
Something isn’t right. Poor financial planning maybe?
You don’t need to be rich to own. Some people are lucky to buy a home where/when it’s cheap. Imagine the value (and taxes) outpacing your income. Like an elderly person with fixed income.
Either it's really valuable, and they can borrow money to pay taxes, or it's not and taxes are low. But people shouldn't be allowed to freeload on the work others do to make the property valuable.
Borrow money needs to be paid back. It's entirely possible and it wouldn't be a surprise someone retired lives for 30 or 40 years, accruing all that back taxes have to be paid up until eventually the taxes are worth more than the house.
The boatman doesn't charge money, so what's the problem with that? They got to live somewhere other people invested to make nice without extra money out of their pocket.
If you're lucky. There are a lot of scams out there that are variations on the idea of well we'll pay various fees at your house or pay you this or that. Reverse mortgages...
Sometimes it works out and it's fine. It's not all the scam. But there are no scams out there that I would not have any confidence in working out. And as a government (which as a voter I'm part of), I certainly would refuse because there are too many ways that I can lose.
Well you might need to if the property taxes can spike like crazy, which is the point some people may be making. You could budget a mortgage but with taxes as a substantial wild card, it can blow up your budget.
Because a cap or exclusion or credit for your primary home lets people who can just barely afford it to purchase their own home. And that's a good thing.
I'm not sure it is. If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession.
Now, apartments can suck too. Especially in places like the USA where we have a landlord cartel actively pushing up prices, and a professional landlord president who shut down an antitrust investigation into said cartel shortly after entering office.
I certainly can't say I have all the answers here; right now housing sucks every way you look at it. But I do believe quite firmly that this idea that going very deeply into debt and securing it with the actual roof over your head is somehow good for a person's financial security is an idea that mostly serves the interests of people who earn a commission on convincing people to get into that situation.
Even assuming things just increase at the rate of inflation, a house you can just barely afford today is a good investment because in 20 or 30 years that house is going to be worth far more while your payments have stayed the same and your income has increased.
Note that I'm very against cash out refinancing, which a lot of people are doing to get the cash that the house is worth. In my opinion the best reason to have a house is in 30 years it's paid off and now you can live there rent free for the rest of your life.
I just don't believe that that math works out so easily if you run real numbers.
I am a fairly recent homeowner. Before that I lived in an apartment in the same neighborhood. I like owning the house and having control over the space. I like having a bit more space. But, after I add up home loan interest, taxes, homeowner's insurance, higher utility bills, maintenance, etc., the amount of money that I will definitely never see again adds up to quite a bit more than I was paying to live in an apartment that, square footage aside, was aesthetically much nicer and better situated than the house.
And then, yeah, some additional amount goes to equity in an "investment" that is less liquid and historically earns a lower rate than a decent index fund.
When a person buys a home with a mortgage (congrats, by the way!), they gain the possibility of getting some return on the money they spend to have a place to live. It might work out long-term or it might not, but there's a chance (and it's often a pretty favorable one) that it works out well-enough as the years tick by that the light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting actually-closer.
Every day, thousands of folks do emerge from that tunnel and gain the ability to make profound statements like "Well, at least the house is paid for."
This is in stark contrast to renting, wherein: There is absolute certainty that none of the money spent towards having a place to live will ever be returned. It doesn't matter how much is spent: Whether a little, a lot, or a lot more, that money is always just unilaterally gone. There's no chance at all of anything else happening. The odds of winning are nonexistent. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and there never can be -- it's just inescapable darkness in there.
In general, buying binds capital, more than renting.
If you include opportunity cost into the decision, then your contrast can and often will disappear (i.e. renting is financially superior or "winning" in your terminology).
Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.
> Also, is this an AI comment? Because it's surely poetic about something that doesn't call for it.
When I find these kinds of phrases to be directed my way, it is my most charitable interpretation that it is impossible for anything to be gained from the conversation.
Thanks for bringing this up! We're done here.
> But, after I add up home loan interest, taxes, homeowner's insurance, higher utility bills, maintenance, etc., the amount of money that I will definitely never see again adds up
So your landlord was renting your apartment to you at a loss?
The landlord may have been. Sometimes investments lose money.
But it's also probable that the loan is fixed at a lower rate than you can get now, the maintenance costs less if you put a few people on salary vs hiring them for one off repairs, and the utility bills are lower because it's a smaller space.
You need to report back again in 30 years. As a recent homeowner, you are absolutely correct. I don't even need to ask for details. However, things will change over the next 30 years. Your tax and insurance will go up with inflation and so it will actually be free to live there. However, in 30 years your loan is paid off and you get to live there for the rest of your life with no house payment ever again.
As a general rule of thumb, the break-even comes out to be about seven years. It can be as bad as 15 years if you get unlucky and when you buy it what the economy does, but by 30 years it is almost guaranteed you are overall money head buying a house.
Although I do have to point out that I did not consider other investment options. If you take an apartment for cheap rent and then invest the difference between what a house payment would be including all that insurance and taxes versus your apartment and apartment insurance (less buy important) - and invest the difference in stocks, that is going to change your financial situation. All those equal that expect to be equal over in the long run. Since by investing, you are investing less money. However, just to make things tricky, in the U.S., we can invest up to a certain maximum in a 401k or IRA, both of which are going to be much better because of taxes, but it doesn't matter if you have an apartment or you have a house, you're at the same maximum. And so someone with a house can get that advantage of that and their future rent is paid for while someone with an apartment is still going to be pay for that apartment all their life.
There's a few other assumptions above. I'm assuming you're relatively young and you're going to live a relatively long life in the same area. Moving houses that's going to change things, apartments are much easier to move. Be the umlucky person who dies young: you won't get to take advantage of either investment.
Overall apartments and houses can both be good things and you need to examine the situation for your own life. Life includes your future, which is of course unknown. Good luck.
Anyone who claims there is a universal answer for everyone is categorically, utterly wrong.
You're just arguing what "barely afford a home" is. Ok, it has to include a maintenance budget. And maybe a financial buffer. But those are true regardless of taxes. That doesn't mean that there are lots of people who can afford the home and the maintenance and some taxes but not the full tax amount.
> I'm not sure it is. If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession.
'Tis better than to have owned and lost, than to have never owned at all.
> Now, apartments can suck too. Especially in places like the USA where we have a landlord cartel actively pushing up prices, and a professional landlord president who shut down an antitrust investigation into said cartel shortly after entering office.
So rather than ever own a home, just rent. It's about the same as taking a pile of money out into the middle of the street every month and setting it on fire, but what else can a person do?
Die?
That's looking at the ability to buy ONLY as a numbers game, but it says nothing of the emotional effect it has on actual buyers. I bought a house. I can ask for a raise I'm worth it. I am doing well now... I'll get a better job next. Now I have a wife and kid and they want me to do better. etc...
While not all stories are like that, many are (in fact most are).
>"If you can just barely afford a home, that also suggests that you don't have enough financial cushion to deal with all the little surprises that come with homeownership. Worse, you might be ill-positioned to weather a something like a recession. Recessions are nasty things and have a tendency to cause people to lose their jobs and become underwater on their home loans in rapid succession."
Except you have to live somewhere, it's not like buying a boat. All of these dangers apply equally to owners and renters. Yet the protection you get from owning in that situation is massively advantaged over renting. Lose your job and can't afford your mortgage? Oh no, guess I'll have to take out a HELOC, or apply for forbearance, then wait years to be foreclosed on and declare bankruptcy. Lose your job and can't afford your rent? Sheriff's knocking on the door in 90 days to throw you on the street.
Why not just subsidize this directly then?
How is "a discount on your property taxes on your first home" not a direct subsidy?
Likely because of legacy homeowners who bought their $2m home 50 years ago for $25k and are now retired. They don’t have the income to pay those taxes even though their non-liquid net worth is way high
People are arguing about this but just making the cap income-dependent seems an easy fix.
Maybe you’re referring to someone who owns multiple properties… But I think if someone owns the house they live in, there should be a cap once they reach a certain age. My Mom is retired and owns her home, but she still effectively pays rent on the property. She has a fixed income and the property tax comes in around 16% of her monthly income.
That doesn’t seem too bad, until you see all of her other costs have gone up dramatically because inflation has been high post pandemic. She only has so much money to spend every month, and if her property taxes kept going up too, she’d eventually be unable to afford to live in her house. She only owns her home because she was worried about being secure later in life and prioritized it above things like vacations or cars.
For a lot of folks as they age, even if they’re frugal, it’s not easy to survive. If you live for 20-30 years after retirement you’re likely to have your buying power cut by half if not more.
With that said, if someone’s home is worth more than say 10x the average price in your area, or your assets are $10+ million[1], I think there’s room for increased taxation. My primary point was simply being a property isn’t necessarily the right measure to determine a reasonable tax rate.
[1] The number obviously depends on where someone lives. Living in New York or SF, $10 million dollars of assets would be an extremely comfortable life but most likely not a lavish lifestyle. But… $10 million dollars in rural Mississippi is going to have you living an extremely lavish lifestyle.
If property taxes are increasing, the value of the home and the wealth of the resident are increasing far in excess of the home.
The only fair thing to do is to allow some portion of the taxes into a lien that is paid out when the he is sold.
It's extremely unfair to reward excess wealth to the wealthy people of a community, while everyone else is struggling just to find a place to live.
Not only is it unfair, but it skews financial incentives and results in very poor politics for improving the unfair housing situation.
Raise capital gains taxes then on those who inherit the property. It’s not extremely unfair to reward folks with a home to live the rest of their life in… I’m also not sure at all how it’s excess wealth to own a home. Most people in retirement now bought their homes at reasonable prices, that well exceed what they paid for or perhaps even made in life. If they sell they can’t buy something else.
By your logic anyone who is retired and has an asset appreciate should immediately sell it, and be forced to move somewhere else.
I cannot afford a home in Portland where I live. I could probably make the mortgage but it’s too risky in my opinion to have a 30 year debt obligation. None of my friends own their own home, not a single one. We’ve all just entered our 40s. The lack of somewhere to live won’t be fixed by a lien, nor will liens on an individuals actual home due at death fix it. It will absolutely incentivize investors who can exploit that, who will pay the liens and add to their portfolio.
If we want more housing at better prices we need to encourage development of more housing. That means making cities more dense and removing NIMBY policies which prevent it. Sure some of these homeowners may be voting for those policies, but they are the minority in larger cities.
They do get a home they get to live in for the rest of their life with tax deferment.
The wealth gains far outpace any potential tax increase. They just don't get to keep excess wealth that comes from keeping others out of the area.
You may not always be that rich, and having to liquidate your only house to pay the taxes is and should be an unpopular opinion.
lol caps prevent "unreasonable" rates of tax
Get rid of the fixed mortgage rate. Owners will sell when they can't afford the mortgage rate; the new owner will pay property taxes at the current rate.
Apart from the US, there aren't may other countries that allow fixed rate mortgages, and not a 30-year fixed.
Land value taxation is the worst idea ever. I already don’t like the idea of property taxes, where you have to pay for a piece of land you own. The ideal should be that unless you’re making use of public services you can live a free life. You should not have to pay just to exist. I’d much rather that income is taxed for the higher tax brackets more.
In most jurisdictions (not califoria) property tax increases are somewhat unlinked from your actual property value
1) the tax entity sets their budget (usually an increase)
2) the valuation group values all properties
3) the tax entity sets a tax rate to raise their budgeted amount. budgeted amount = tax rate * total value
Most people think if their value doubles, their tax doubles. This mostly isnt the case. If everyone's value doubles, the rate decreases so they raise the budgeted amount. Mostly property tax increases are due to ever increasing budgets not rising values.
1) If everyone's value stayed the same, and the budget increased, your tax would increase by the amount of the budget increase
2) if everyone's value doubled, but the budget stayed the same, your tax would not increase
3) if your value doubled, everyone else's stayed the same, and the budget stayed the same, your tax would double.
Let’s say you wee solid middle class and bought your forever home, in what was at the time, the near suburbs. Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable. The city might set a percentage of the home value as their target but now your well placed forever home is beyond your what your pension can afford. This happened a lot in Canada.
The worst part is that for all these taxes, the level of service has dropped since that home was bought.
Isn't it better for society if retirees downsize to a retirement community and allow young families to move in to the neighborhood with schools and amenities?
People make the best decisions for them and they have the freedom to do so. Who am I to decide that their 2 bedroom bungalo needs to be torn-down for a massive 5 bedroom infill for example.
While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off, and quite well may have built up to support your own aging in place. Some people want a “forever home”, and that’s okay.
In some countries and cultures the good of the many comes before the good of the individual, no matter the sacrifices required to get there. The US (and to a slightly lesser degree, Canada) generally does not subscribe to such a cultural mantra.
Edit to add: for the cases where the societal good really does outweigh the personal good, we have a tool for that: eminent domain, which is how we build train lines and so forth.
>While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off
This line of logic doesn't follow. There's plenty of old people who need to move out for non-financial reasons (e.g. can't live independently anymore), and it doesn't really make sense to me that having to move out because you can't afford your mortgage is okay while not being able to afford your taxes isn't. In any case, we can have our cake and eat it too by building more housing. Homes become affordable for young people if supply increases and the tax base broadens enough that taxes go down for established homeowners.
At least in the US, mortgages are typically fixed cost (I know this is not the case in many other countries, like the UK). You know when you sign the contract what your monthly cost will be, for the life of the loan. ARM loans are an exception to this, but ARM loans are nearly universally considered a terrible idea unless interest rates are egregiously high at signing time, or some other edge case applies to you.
Thus, you can budget around the mortgage payment in a predictable way, and if you have to move out because you can no longer afford it, that's a very different thing than if your property taxes magically change because a theoretical buyer may theoretically be willing to pay some astronomically higher cost for your house than you paid for it.
So, respectfully, I disagree with the framing that we have to take both or neither. They are separate budgeting concerns, and separate policy concerns.
A point against: if someone was an early adopter in a community that urbanized over 30 years, in effect the increased value means their future ownership at present rates requires the collective subsidy of their neighbors. Young families subsidizing the elderly in this way is a huge issue in tax burden disparity where I live.
How so? e.g. anywhere I've looked, schools are a huge part of the budget. Special education alone is over 10% of the county budget where I live. Schools in total are over half of city+county. The elderly wouldn't be contributing to service demand there. They're likely also not going on tons of crime sprees necessitating police, generally another large budget item.
Like another poster said, things like pensions and medicare might overall drain the entire economy, so the end result is the same, but that seems more diffuse than local tax bases, and wouldn't properly appear in local government budgets.
If we're going for a "better for society" angle, I have so many other things that are far more impactful for society and less damaging to the individuals that we will never get around to messing with evicting pensioners so younger families can use their spot to get to school.
Given the enrollment collapse we're not running out of space in our schools LOL such that we have to kick seniors out of their houses to make space.
They're also economically and socially viable participants in the community.
Because boomers voted to defer fully funding pensions until later. Now it's later. We're paying for past work and current work.
In Washington State, Puget Sound Energy is a for-profit utility owned by mostly pension plans! Their guaranteed ROI is sucked out of the productive economy. Everywhere you look rent is being extracted either by the 0.01% or the elderly, and the working class must slave to get 1/10 what they gave themselves.
At the level of an economy, I don't see how funding model can make a difference. Ultimately, there are now old people that want/vote for some level of service, and young people that provide it to them. The young people can and perhaps will at some point decide to revolt, or the old people will die.
Not an economist but I don't see how money can be anything other than an accounting tool at that level. If they had "paid for it" back in the day, young people would still be screwed.
The two big ways to increase prosperity that I see are for people to take care of their health so they need fewer medical services, and for fewer people to be devoted to administration (e.g. the medical billing quagmire, SaaS companies focused on how to better extract rent) or convincing people to buy stupid crap (c.f. the giant advertising industry that swallows up bright workers to build a surveillance and propaganda apparatus instead of e.g. industrial automation), fewer pointless wars, and more people devoted to actually doing things people need or building infrastructure (e.g. solar).
> there are now old people that want/vote for some level of service
The problem isn't that there are old people, is that there's currently a glut of old people, which puts real strain on the system. Being old is expensive for governments. Not only do older people not typically pay nearly as much in taxes, they also require more resources to support.
So many of today's problems come down to the simple demographic fact: there's a lot of baby boomers, and they're getting old.
This is but one of the ways well-meaning people get displaced. And, frankly, th the is hypothetical family is the most fortunate of that class. They have equity and a pension. Playing my tiny Monoprice violin, from the 4th apartment I've lived in over the past 10 years (not including couch-surfing). And even I'm still on the "fortunate" side of the line, if just barely.
I don't think people really understand how bad it is out here. I imagine that if a dignified line on the base standard were held, there would be less of a need for this kind of middle-class pearl-clutching.
I live in a municipality that taxes like OP and you don't understand how OP described it. Lets try with easy numbers:
Y2K: buy an 1/8th of a million dollar house. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $1.25M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.
If your mental model is the city tax rate is 0.8%, that is ... numerically correct but its mere numerology.
2026: house is now worth 1/2 of a million dollars. There are 10 houses in the village and an annual budget of $10K. The total value of all houses in my village is $5M but it really doesn't matter. As the owner of 1/10th of the "total housing value" in the village, I pay 1/10th the annual budget of $10K which is $1K prop tax.
If your mental model is the city tax rate historically was 0.8%, then you'd have to pay $4K/yr, but it doesn't even remotely work that way, so it simply doesn't matter. Its just numerology. My fraction of total property ownership "value" times the annual village budget is what I'll be taxed, which in this case is the same old $1K.
In reality grandma gets kicked to the street because inflation raises the price of everything, including real estate, but real estate is not even remotely the problem or the solution. Grandma might have afforded a house and its taxes when a McDonalds Big Mac was 75 cents each but now that its $13.49 the village budget has gone up 10x, 20x what it was when she bought, so she better find a way to make 10x, 20x more money or not only is she not going to pay her fair share of the budget via taxes, she's not going to eat food either.
"Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable." Thats the real problem. No one can move in and pay the city budget, and the city budget explodes because now they have to pay the dog catcher at least $250K/yr to live there and nobody can afford to rob peter to pay paul quite that much...
Depends on the jurisdiction. I've lived in both, budget based rates like you describe (Minnesota), and fixed rates with market based assessments (D.C.). I wonder which is more common.
I don't know how economics escaped basic elementary/middle school curriculum. There is so much confusion in people's lives around money, and so much destruction that results from it, yet we still don't teach the basics of what is going on in school. It's totally perplexing to me.
Most people aren't capable of understanding numbers: https://politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math.... You can't educate them to do it, any more than you can educate your average person to be able to reliably hit three pointers. It's a physical limitation.
That's why socialization is so important. You can't get voters to understand the difference between billions and trillions or put anything in context when the numbers get that big. All you can do is socialize them from an early age to have directionally correct gut feelings like, "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "saving is good."
Hilarious. They were right to do the comparison, but got it oh so wrong.
I was recently trying to understand Elon Musk's wealth, and come up with similar comparison: For example, he could make millionaire's of every single person in Seattle, and still have hundreds billions of dollars of wealth left over. Truly mind boggling.
Elon doesn't have a pile of cash, and it wouldn't be possible to convert his assets into cash either (without an incredible discount). This is true for most billionaires. In fact this very fallacy is part of what I'm alluding to with "we need to educate better".
So while fun thought experiments are excellent selling points, they aren't actually grounded in reality.
Yeah, but you're not required to transfer cash in order to transfer wealth, are you? Stocks are plenty transferable. Sure, the value would likely drop, but what's 20% to 40%, when you have a trillion to start.
He could totally go into debt for e.g. 80% or his accumulated wealth, designate said wealth as collateral and get a really good deal in terms of interest.
Economics class is usually in high school and it's optional.
Schools are really expensive to operate. Most districts and schools make it easy to graduate to maximize their graduation rates. Standardized testing is suppose to catch local lowering of standards but state departments of education are also under pressure to maximize test pass rate. So resources flow into pulling the bottom quintile of students up to a minimum standard. This means teaching to the test on math and English, and de-prioritizing other subjects or dropping them entirely.
We could expand the breadth of educational basic standards. This would require a cultural shift in valuing formal education more, increasing teacher training/recruiting resources, making schools year round, more centralization of education budgets at the state or even Federal level.
Generally speaking public schools tend to be better in states like Massachusetts than Kansas.
"it's optional."
LOL, no.
In the majority of states in the USA, districts in the state are not allowed to graduate students without taking both an econ class and a personal finance class. Kansas is one of the stricter states. I can only think of three off the top of my head that do not mandate econ/finance classes, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington. Pretty hilarious to claim MA has better education requirements than KS LOL when its the other way around. Also hilarious when the average SAT score in Kansas is 1256 vs a mere 1128 in Massachusetts, LOL. I can't immediately think of any way that the schools in MA are better than KS, which is pretty funny. Is there even one stat or requirement where MA beats KS? Maybe college sports scores...
That said, public schools are mandatory pass, and the kids know it.
I think the problem with education is the prepack solutions sold by politicians intentionally don't reflect reality, sometimes intentionally reflect the opposite, and are designed to be ineffective or even actively counterproductive.
Looking around, it looks like MA beats KS on most metrics. For example, 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test. There is a reason that MA always ends up at the top of lists that rank public education while KS is much lower. To be fair, KS has been improving in rankings quite a bit, which I agree MA has been unable to do.
MA did pass a personal finance requirement for schools earlier this year. Like many other states it doesn’t have to be, but can be a stand alone course. While it may seem like MA is lagging behind, the majority of those requirements have been put into place within the last 5 or 6 years, so this is pretty new in most places. And a lot of states have done things that seem counter productive, like allowing a personal finance course to replace core math requirements. MA typically lets schools figure out how to implement requirements, so as in most cases the wealthier areas will figure out a high quality way to do this, and the poor areas will do their best to meet the state requirements for the lowest cost, providing less benefits to the students than it should. (Yet another reason that relying so heavily on local resources for public education is a poor choice).
> 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test.
This makes me think an interesting metric would be total SAT points per 100k population.
If only 2% of Kansas students are taking the SAT, that's kind of shocking, actually. But maybe the state University there doesn't require it?
Likely it just means that college-bound students (which should be ~1/3 of young adults based off educational attainment levels in the US), strongly lean to taking the ACT.
Scarcity of instructors competent to teach such subjects? Followed by the natural bureaucratic response: Pretend no such need exists.
Destruction? It's by design:
"One man gathers what another man spills."
I know cynics would run to say this, but on the whole the lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be. And they even know this, but somehow it's still expected for people to just innately understand what's going on, but they don't. And everyone else who does have the insight just ends up perpetually frustrated.
The "lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be".
I think it's far more ambiguous and less measured of a net negative, than it is a clear, measured net positive for the "powers that be" if we define them as the wealthy.
You can take a very clear, measured look at wealth distribution over the past 50 years.
I have never worked with anyone in business who wished their customers had less economic/financial literacy. Just endless frustration.
On the other hand, you have a massive contingent of people who are constantly scoring own goals because their economic insight is purely an emotional surface level intuition.
It depends. Predatory salesmen are happy to oblige a customer's desire for a $299 monthly payment, while glossing over the 84 month schedule and 12% interest. They have a very short term view. Uninformed customers are like shooting fish in a barrel.
A mainstream bank takes a longer term view. They offer financial literacy info for customers who are interested. If a customer overdrafts less frequently and is able to leave significant amounts of money deposited the interest spread is more profitable than collecting overdraft fees.
The predatory loan market is a fringe market though, and it's not even that lucrative because delayed payments and default rates are so high (and bankruptcy rinses the lender).
Don't confuse the existence of people who profit on inefficiencies as being a sign that the system works best with those inefficiencies, or that those inefficieces are even particularly profitable.
It is my impression that predatory car loans are basically ubiquitous
If calculators had never been invented then perhaps arithmetic and economic literacy would be required of citizens. A big problem is that we invented a tool for something that's most powerful when you can do it easily and constantly in your head. People are not pulling out the tool to use it constantly because there's friction to that.
It seems like we should tax non economic wealth hoarding more not less. We have a glut of elderly people occupying houses that are far too large for their current needs while young families can’t afford larger homes. People forget that part of what property tax exist is to encourage dormant assets to trade hands from Low economic use to higher economic use. If some isn’t using a property to its highest and best use because there are no carrying costs then they will just hoard it and have no incentive to sell it to someone that could use it more productively.
It would make a lot more sense to increase the carrying costs of homes so that people are inclined to sell them when they no longer need a particular configuration.
How is choosing to continue to live in a house you own “non economic wealth hoarding”?
I have a 4500 sqft home with 6 bedrooms because I have kids a home office a recording studio and workshop. My Nextdoor neighbors are retired and have adult kids that moved out. Their house is the same size. They could downsize and make that inventory available for other next generation families. Instead they hoard it with a mortgage that is long since paid off and thousands of sqft that serve no purpose. They don’t even heat or cool the whole thing. Now extrapolate that across the whole economy. The obvious supply and demand distortion explains part of the reason homes are as expensive as they are.
How is that “non economic”? Your neighbors prefer the value of living in that house to the value of selling it.
What business is it of yours or anyone else’s?
It's not necessarily that people forgot that reason for property taxes existing. Many voters fundamentally disagree with that as a valid reason. This is a matter of ideology and values as much as economics, and not everyone shares your priorities. You can label them as greedy hoarders or whatever but that won't change how they vote.
But they aren’t the majority. And we can enact other policies to shift the incentive structure.
"Housing should be affordable, except when I sell my house for a million dollars" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/housing-should-be-afford...)
I feel like people don't realize that this is how aristocracy happens.
Like, yea, property taxes suck... but the point is you're wealthy even if you want to pretend you're not. Passing the tax burden onto others, just because you can, is exactly how we end up in a world where wealthy landowners live like literally nobility while the people renting their land pay the taxes for their infrastructure.
> I would like the price of my home to rise, because it increases my wealth, but I would also like the prices of all other homes to fall, so that I could sell my house and buy an even nicer house.
There’s a way to do this. Buy in a VHCOL area like San Francisco, wait for 3-10 years, then move to Texas, Florida, South Carolina, etc. Real estate is highly localized so you do not need to stay in the same area all the time.
The homelab guy at CloudFlare did this because the prices of real estate in Austin are actually falling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42156977
I wouldn’t count somewhere I don’t want to live being cheaper as the prices of all other homes falling… ;) Nor as lack of need to stay either - if real estate prices were the only thing keeping people around, cities might not exist.
> Buy in a VHCOL area like San Francisco
How does this work? VHCOL does not mean that prices will appreciate or even sustain.
SF history very much indicates that prices will continue to appreciate and sustain pretty comfortably.
I mean yes it’s a bet, but real estate in SF has historically done very well. The progressives/NIMBYs have a strong presence to thwart new housing so that existing properties increase in value.
ATX real estate is still in free fall. You can win making a move within the state at this point.
Just dont complain about loss of relationships and community while also advocating for policies that make lasting community ties impossible.
No property tax where I live, which is true for about half of the Swiss Kantons. There used to be a system where they would calculate how much you would be paid if you rented out your property and then charged you tax on that value. So basically a property tax.
But they got rid of that tax while at the same time removing the ability to deduct mortgage interest. So now it makes most sense to pay off your loans.
Mortgages are different here - they are interest-only loans for usually 1 to 5 years. And when the loan expires you have the opportunity to pay off as much as possible and then renew the loan for the remainder.
True it's not a direct property tax, but house value is included in total wealth and is thus taxed through the general wealth tax.
I think the surge in people wanting to reduce taxes is because it rose at an unexpected rate that no one was or could prepare for. So I almost blame the speed of increase for the recent conversations, rather than the idea of people wanting their house to rise and others to fall; yes that is part, but I don’t think it is the majority.
> the property tax ... has the standard problems of a wealth tax: specifically, you can have more wealth–say, the value of your home, your business, or your retirement account went up–without having immediate income to pay a higher level of taxes. Thus, older voters who tend to have higher accumulated wealth, partly in the form of home equity, but also lower current income, are a politically powerful and sympathetic group in the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes.
We should expect this phenomenon to grow stronger as more high-earners hit retirement age, right? I'd guess we have another 20-30 years at least before this incentive starts to "level out", and that's only if we somehow see wealth distribution become less extremely correlated with age.
There’s no reason the local government budget should increase at the same rate as the property values in the taxed area. Property taxes should generally increase at the rate of inflation not because property values increase.
However, where I live local government is wildly inefficient. So in that case property taxes should go down while property taxes go up via the expedient of competent governance. Alas.
> There’s no reason the local government budget should increase at the same rate as the property values in the taxed area.
There's some reason. City workers may need to live in the area. If housing becomes more expensive, the city may need to pay higher wages.
Sure. But that’s why schools in California are underfunded.
California doesn’t have a property tax system. They have a tax on newcomers. It’s entirely corrupt.
I pay property tax twice a year in SF, not sure what you mean
I think it's a great idea to let land taxes create incentives for efficient building.
If you view homes as consumer goods rather than financial assets, the tension disappears.
If the value of a house doesn't increase, then the property taxes, upkeep, mortgage interest, and selling fees would make home ownership untenable and worse than renting. And then if you rent the problem gets pushed up to the landlords anyway.
So you are saying that somehow landlord can pay all the same taxes and offer cheaper rent than buying it ?
Also did your six neurons figured out that it would also cause rent to decrease yet ?
Besides the fact that your hostility is unnecessary, rent prices very rarely decrease. There’s been a good deal of journalism investigating this in recent years, especially in my metro area of Seattle. Landlords would rather leave something sitting empty, potentially even off market, waiting for market rents to increase back to their target, than ever let the rent prices fall. This is especially true for landlords who own multiple units: they’ll often trickle those units out one or two at a time to avoid flooding the market, to artificially keep prices high.
This is so much of a thing that there was even a federal investigation into it (particularly the SaaS service used to help feed the data driving this trend).
It's nice that you would like the world to be this way but it's time to put this tired old canard to bed. It's not individuals but the financial system that treats houses as assets. They do so by extending mortgages. Try getting one for your car.
I'm pretty sure people buy cars on finance all the time.
Assets != investments.
It’s a consumer good most people want and will pay for and it retains its use for a very long time. So naturally there are fairly liquid markets and loans for it.
Yeah, I view my house as a consumer good and I don't want the value of my home to increase relative to inflation - ignoring taxes if I have to sell it I'd just have to buy another house at an increased price which will take up any realized gains from the transaction. Plus the fees involved in the cost of buying/selling are higher now b/c they are usually a percentage of the transaction.
I can see how, conceptually, shifting tax burden to companies rather than individuals puts public services at risk. Companies don’t really have a lot of incentive to want things like quality schools, parks, and other non-profit public services.
On the other hand, property taxes seem to be a pretty flawed system that still result in inequalities. Individual homeowners hate them and will do anything to lower their burden. More wealthy and mobile people will move to different jurisdictions specifically to save on tax burden. There are extreme examples like The Villages in Florida where the heavy demographics skew toward older residents means that minimal funding reaches services that benefit younger families who work there as service industry workers. My understanding is that this is a particularly extreme arrangement in the villages: if you lose your employment within the jurisdiction you have to pull your kids out of the local schools immediately.
Then you have issues where you get poor jurisdictions and wealthy ones based on property values. Some states help mitigate this by pooling property taxes across the state for school funding.
I’ve heard that many condo buildings in my area have a standing arrangement with a law firm to submit appraisal appeals every single year and the law firm is paid on a percentage based on the savings they achieve.
This system can’t be efficient for anyone involved. When you really think about it this is like a siphon of money that could be going into public services into a private law firm.
The thing about property taxes especially those that have owner-occupier exceptions is that they sort of work okay because they’re a good approximation for wealth. They’re still regressive but you can pretty safely assume that someone who owns a second home is wealthy enough to pay a high tax rate.
On the other hand, that arrangement passes more costs on to the lower income renter. Their property owner landlord has higher property taxes than owner-occupiers and theoretically passes those costs on to the renter.
I think someone could devise a better system and do away with property taxes as they function today entirely. We need a system that makes all the stakeholders in our society feel like every dollar they invest is a positive investment with returns.
Interestingly enough, it’s the opposite in NH. Our taxes just increase 1,000 each year to pay for horrible public schools while also giving state school budget funds to everyone that wants to homeschool or sent their kids to one of the many alternative schools we have. I would love to know how much of the US this actually reads as true for, because my friends in various other states also feel very similarly about their taxes going up and the housing prices not so much.
School system and taxation for schools in NH is very specific to NH « low/no taxes » mantra. I am a resident of a neighbor state with several co-workers living in NH and I recall 15 years ago that there were massive school funding differences between towns. So there was an attempt at redistributing taxes to help pay for other schools from other towns, which was extended to all schools (freedom!) - so home schooling etc. Is NH state funding local schools in some form ? Typically it’s a mix of local, state and federal funds…
If you really want to rage, read about Hasidic cults in NY/NJ gaming government funds.
I was encouraged by a story I heard from NPR about a Hasidic community turning out the vote and using official powers to take private a school building that had been underfunded under municipal control. It was genuinely impressive how much they changed their local community.
I understand how this would be infuriating to other locals. But it shows the power of community organization. They don’t win because America is systemically pro Hasidic, they simply turned out the vote (after years of non-participation.). This is an encouragement to be active in your own community. If you don’t, someone else may do it for you.
Demographics matter. Organized religions encouraging big families means high population growth. Democracy lets the majority rule.
They don't "turn out and vote"
The cult leaders tell them how to vote and then bus them to the polling station. They also largely are unemployed or work for others in the cult, so there is no obstacle there.
It's a scientology level cult, not a "community", and while certainly impressive knowledge and coordination to hijack tax payer money, it's still nakedly fraudulent.
I swear so many societal problems have their roots in the attitude of "I've got mine, screw everybody else"
I've seen people completely change their attitudes about things once they own a home. I know a self-proclaimed liberal who claims to care about people suddenly go all NIMBY because they are buying a $2M house and now they don't want duplexes in their neighborhood and don't like the idea of more housing being built ("we're full"). They feel entitled to a high (and increasing) property value in a desirable area.
I hate it so much
But isn't it understandable? You work your whole life to buy a piece of property. But not just a piece of property anywhere. It's a specific one, in a specific neighborhood, in a specific zone. All of these things tie into the $ that you paid for that property. Regardless of the change in value, a change there impacts how you perceive living there.
If all of the sudden the neighborhood behind you gets rezoned to industrial and you get a datacenter nearby, everybody understands you're up in arms.
If at the same time the neighborhood behind you gets converted from 200 single-family homes to 200 8-plexes, complaining is NIMBY. Even though it has the same dramatic impact on the quality of life you bought into. Way more noise, way more street parking, cars racing late at night etc.
Why should society value stability of your quality of life (which is a pretty nebulous bundle of your preferences and environment—neither of which we can bet on being stable in any event) over the interests of all those people who want to live on land that can readily support them—and without putting any true undue burden on your ability to do the same on your land?
Because you would be upset if a developer bought every house on your block and converted them to eight-plexes and rented them out to Section 8 tenants, and we should provide some level of protection against that from happening.
I can be upset, but why should I expect the government to “protect” me from that feeling? It’s a free country.
We’re not talking about a sewage treatment plant or even a data center, we’re talking about fellow members of our community living in code-compliant housing.
I wouldn't be upset, actually.
So the fact that we're ladder pulling entire generations of young people is both understandable and natural...
You need extremely high levels of trust and community to incentive the kind of behavior you are asking for. That is not reinforced or taught at any of our schools or government institutions. It only exists in small family or religious communities.
So absent of that, I think your personal incentives also lead you to your current housing policy preferences. Don’t you?
My house has appreciated at a ridiculous rate. Personally I'd be fine if it hadn't. It's not in great shape. It's literally the cheapest house in town.
Corollary: I would like the value of my house to rise, and I would like housing costs to fall to make housing more affordable.
Fixing owner-occupied property taxes to the fair market value or sale price (whichever is higher) at the time of last change in ownership (by any means: purchase, inheritance, transfer, etc.), and then adjusting that amount annually or semiannually for inflation (to account for folks who bought their house 40 years ago and would otherwise get away with paying $5 in taxes) seems like the most reasonable compromise here if we want to retain property taxation (which is debatable - an income tax can achieve everything a property tax can, without punishing folks who own their house free and clear and no longer wish to work as hard as they did while paying said house off... or can't anymore). Modulo edge cases like inflation grossly outstripping investment returns (hi, 2020s!), this ensures retired folks can stay retired.
Taxation based on the theoretical monetary value you could extract if you sold your primary domicile is probably the dumbest possible policy, because it leads to people being pushed out of their homes (or our of retirement, or into higher-paying jobs they don't want, or whatever). Houses do not have to be viewed as investment vehicles, they can simply be residences.
As far as property taxation on non-owner-occupied units... up for debate, but I think fixing to most recent transfer time's FMV works reasonably well here, too.
Houses should be for living, not a financial instrument/investment.
Pretty much "I would like to eat cake for dinner, while my stomach gets salad."
> One might think that homeowners would be happy that their largest asset has appreciated substantially in value, as homes did,...
This is absurd. There's absolutely no benefit to you if the value of your house increases if you have no intention of selling it. That's exactly the point of treating owner-occupied homes differently from commercially owned property. The author should be embarrassed that he, as a an economist, doesn't know that in economic theory, households do not optimize for profit on some balance sheet, but for personal (subjective) utility. That's econ 101.
Yes there is. You own a more valuable asset, so now even if you want to keep it you could take out a loan against it for a greater amount than if it hadn't appreciated.
Your statement is based on assumptions that just don't hold for many people. First and foremost, you imply a subjective utility of receiving a loan. For many people, having loans - especially collateralized against your home - has negative utility, not positive. Case in point: someone who'd need to take our a loan to pay the property tax.
But even if you were right for the majority of home owners: feel free to tax collateralized homes as commercial property based on the volume of the mortgage. Case solved.
You mean take out a loan to pay for the increased taxes? The banks win with that one. Some people, especially as they age, are seeking out simplicity with their finances amongst everything else.
It is basically the billionaire/ unrealized gains argument.
I can take a loan against or collateralized my home value.
I can have greater operational flexibility if I know I have a deep financial backup.
There is something to it, even if overstated
You're making a valid point, but not in favor of taxing owner-occupied homes, but in favor of treating collateralized homes as commercial property. I'd be okay with that as long as the basis for taxation is the volume of the mortgage.
Or just making property tax a requirement of leaving your property or accessing any government services and infrastructure
Yeah that’s the Stalinist way of thinking. No, thanks.
Just reading all of these comments. I am reminded as to why anarchists view property as theft
Millions of us: We would like to be housed please. We're still recovering from the 2021 rental markets that forced people with jobs and savings into homelessness.
Regime in charge: Enjoy these property tax reforms that will lead to higher housing costs and (further) transfer of wealth towards people who already own homes. Let us know what else we can do to keep people in lower classes trapped and vulnerable to exploitation.
I saw a post on YouTube about how someone's dad was struggling to pay their property taxes. One of the comments went like this:
"America, where you can spend your entire life paying off mortgage and then still be one missed tax payment from losing it all."
Is that true and how is this not perpetual serfdom if you can't ever really own a home?
They don’t evict you but put a lien on your home. When it’s sold the gov gets their taxes then. Also, a sheriff is an elected official and evicting an 80 year old because they can’t pay their taxes is not good for their career.
Surely one missed tax payment is not enough for the government to evict and assume ownership? I see these cases in SF occasionally and it takes years of non-payment.
> Is that true and how is this not perpetual serfdom if you can't ever really own a home?
https://phillipslytle.com/a-review-of-new-yorks-response-to-...
Until 2023, some (many?) would sell off your house and pocket the difference, even if it exceeded the tax liability!
Is there any country where I can walk into town with a bag of money, buy a house in cash, and never have to pay taxes on it again? EU countries either have a property tax or a wealth tax that includes people's first homes.
You're looking for allodial title. It's essentially impossible to obtain today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title
So does one ever actually get to retire and rest after a lifetime of "paying one's dues"?
Could someone go off the grid to some "commons" land and build a log cabin there or something?
What the heck are "property taxes" paying for?
The house is just sitting there, not consuming any finite resources (you already paid for the land) or requiring constant maintenance or upkeep from the government..
Whatever utilities you use you pay bills for.
Said house may not be consuming any finite resources in a sense, but there are various services and amenities that are provided to it and to the other homes in a community. These services need to be paid for. There are roads that take you to your house, which need to be paid for. In addition, firefighters and police are funded via property taxes. So are schools, as are other amenities, including parks, libraries, and in some places, public transit.
You can look up a property tax bill and get an idea of what property taxes pay for. Mine is itemized and it breaks down exactly where my money is going.
And, sure, you could go off the grid and live in a shack in the boonies. That's always an option. If you feel like you don't need the services and amenities that property taxes pay for in a particular place, you can move, and many people do. In that case, yes, your property taxes on said shack-in-the-boonies will be low. But that's going to be in large part due to the lower value attached to this property and the land it sits on, in addition to fewer services and amenities available to it. That's a tradeoff that you can make. But at least in my case, I don't mind paying my property taxes because I can easily afford them, and I and others receive many benefits in return.
Fine, you win. We're all serfs. You've redefined "serfdom" to mean living in a modern civilization with public infrastructure, and the property tax tradeoff that comes with it. I'll choose this serfdom until a better viable option presents itself.
Because Serfs didnt own the land. Lords did but had taxes.
Apparently medieval people owned quite a bit of property, possibly more than the average person today (though not the same in technological value of course):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Em96NVxO9Q — So This is Progress (Terry Jones, BBC, 1991)
Probably depends on when you look. I think the point stands that are drawing a false comparison to serfdom. Tax obligations are not the same as serfdom
And I would like for housing costs to fall and become commodity.
I think society should be structured in such a way as to incentivize contributing to society. Heal the sick, get rewarded, feed the hungry, get rewarded, teach the ignorant, get rewarded. Own a thing; no reward as far as I'm concerned. Owning stuff _is_ the reward, not something to be incentivized. It's its own incentive. Why should society give a gold star to someone for owning a toothbrush, or a house? They're a reward in themselves.
One of the most offensive beliefs in this context, one that has been normalized, is that a house is an investment.
Housing should not be a commodity
This is a potentially reductive take, but, property tax is theft.
In the guise of 'paying your fair share to be a part of society', property tax is essentially the institution of serfdom to the royalty of state bureaucracy.
Property tax is effectively the same as rent, but the one collecting rent also has martial and lawfare capabilities. Not to mention effectively unlimited funds with which to crush anyone who doesn't fall in line.
If what you have can be taken by another if you don't meet some set of conditions, you don't really own that thing, do you? It's more like a loaner than it is 'I own this thing'.
---
I'll offer a blanket alternative for state and federal taxation: no taxes on individuals, their income, or their property. Instead we tax exchange. States levy a 10% VAT on all transactions. Federal government levies taxes on interstate commerce, imports, and exports only.
All other forms of taxation are barred. New taxes may not be levied. If the state needs additional funds it may issue short or long term bonds accordingly.
Money printing is shifted away from being owned by an international banker's consortium, re-pinned to durable goods or precious metals.
Yes that is generally what you get down to: you can’t really own land free and clear in a populated area. You depend on the government in many ways to enforce property rights, as well provide services for that property and in return you have to pay for that.
It makes me uncomfortable too actually but I can’t see any alternative that does not get back to a similar spot or violence. In addition if we shifted to a land value tax, it would push taxes onto the very dense developed areas encouraging better use.
So many of our current problems can be traced back to ever-increasing house prices. Homeowners who are voters have been duped into creating a society that allows the hoarding of land and turning your home into an "investment". This hurts everybody in three ways:
1. No matter how high the value of your house, you still own one housing unit of wealth. If you sell it, you still need to live somewhere else. So the only way to "get ahead" is to buy "investment properties", which is hoarding housing;
2. Housing costs are an input into everything you do and buy. Food more expensive? Well, if housing is more expensive then the workers who produce your food need higher wages to survive. The place where your food is made or sold has a higher rent. So higher housing prices decrease real wages even if you own your own home; and
3. When land becomes the best investment, which it has been for years, then it destroys any productive use of capital. It's competing for the same dollars. Why invest in a factory that makes widgets? That might fail. But a housing estate? Banks give you good collaterization. Governments create policy to make sure you will never fail. Demand is inelastic.
Ever-increasing house prices is just stealing from the next generation. That's all it's doing. Yet so many government polices are designed to enshrine and protect increasing house prices as an explicit and implicit policy goal.
The problems with property taxes are:
1. They don't go up fast enough. So it acts as a tax break to market incumbents. If property taxes properly reflected market value, it would act as a brake on increasing house prices.
2. Property tax increases are often capped (eg Prop 13 in CA); and
3. On an investment property, higher rents should increase property values because you've increased the value of the housing and land. This too would act as a brake on ever-increasing rents.
It should be essentially impossible for non-residents to own housing somewhere they don't live. Owning more than one or two properties should be punitively taxed if not outright impossible.
I would also like to not pay any capital gains on that property that rose in value.
Relevant article: The Median Voter is Maoist.
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-...
> Thus, older voters who tend to have higher accumulated wealth, partly in the form of home equity, but also lower current income, are a politically powerful and sympathetic group in the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes.
Miss on two points: there are exemptions for retired that freeze prop tax and equity is wealth that’s rare to access before death
I think most normal people, including me, don't like it when housing costs are so out of step with everything else. The "value" in your primary residence isn't very useful, unless you sell and move to a more depressed area.
I'm a multi-homeowner and I'd love it if house prices fell, or at least stopped rising.
> I'm a multi-homeowner and I'd love it if house prices fell, or at least stopped rising.
What does the phrase "Be the change you want to see" mean to you?
This has been a sticking point for me for the better part of my adult life (~20 years now), and it all started with wondering who that dude in the taxi in “Airplane!” was: Howard Jarvis, one of the major proponents of California’s Proposition 13. From Wikipedia:
> The proposition adjusted the property tax rate, pegging it at 1% of the purchase price of the property.
That sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand why property taxes go down while home values go up, and why raising property taxes is so damn hard in so many states (it’s largely because of caps etched into law by Boomers in the 70s and 80s). It’s also why I have the strong opinions on the issue I hold today.
Tax displacement is a very real issue, but one that theoretically should be solved by a liquid property market where you can sell your home at FMV and downsize to another one you can afford. Americans, special creatures that we are, instead demanded we get the McMansions without the property tax valuations, while also deciding what housing gets built regardless of demand, while also keeping the distorted value of the home should we sell it for a retirement nest egg.
In other words: homeowners keep all the money, while paying decreasing to no taxes on it. This has been a significant contributor to the housing crisis of today, with shitbox properties in major cities selling for upwards of a million dollars but families pulling in not even a tenth of that in yearly income. The typical soundbite responses of “we need more housing” and “we need to reform or loosen regulations”, while technically correct, ignore the root incentive structure crafted back in the 70s with these sorts of inverse taxation schemes, and therefore leave the problem intact. We’d have to build so much housing, so quickly, that property values halve nationally for there to be any long-term fix to this problem, and nobody seems inclined to do this given the ponzi scheme we’ve discovered suburbia to be (just look at new developments in CA with dirt roads as an example of homeowners having to foot the bill and realizing it ain’t worth it given the thin density of suburbs).
And thus we arrive back at the beginning: we need to raise taxes on homes to reflect their high assessment values, which would displace existing homeowners who couldn’t afford said bill, which is leading to the same demographics as before demanding the same solutions as they enacted in the 70s and 80s: caps, limits, or shifting costs onto less-advantaged demographics (like renters via commercial real estate). As perverse as it sounds to most Americans, the actual solution is to finally let property taxes “float” with valuations in their entirety, no caps or cuts, and let the market sort it out. Will that lead to some folks becoming homeless? Yeah, and that’s a whole other ball of wax we’ve ignored dealing with precisely because we catered to homeowners as a political group, but that’s infinitely more solvable than trying to build our way out of a housing crisis engineered by lower taxes and controls on builds.
We gotta eat the pain up front to find a better collective tomorrow for everyone.
> We gotta eat the pain up front to find a better collective tomorrow for everyone
And by “we” you mean not you.
In so many ways it helps to focus more deeply on the fundamentals.
For one thing, in the 1970's lots of true "baby boomers" were still too young to vote.
Maybe what you mean is old folks in general, they were the ones in California who were desperate enough to support the proposition which might be able to save their homes.
They should know, lots of them had been through The Great Depression, and were so much older than boomers they could be their grandparents, well they actually were if you do the math.
And they did the math, getting by just by the skin of their teeth while those just a little bit older who had been on a fixed income earlier had already been taxed out beyond recovery before the proposition.
They already ate the pain, I guess it's difficult to remember how up-front it was if you never spent that many years among Depression survivors.
Nobody ever wanted a depression again, and losing your home through no fault of your own was one of the most visible outcomes that ordinary people could do something about before it got out of hand.
This was supposed to be big, and it is bigger than ever, this is by design.
The problem comes from trying to work against it when the entire economic system surrounding "real estate" was supposed to evolve by now to where nobody pays more tax by now than the most proposition-protected properties.
The idea was for it not to end up making any difference as the years went by, nothing could be more fair than that.
The pearl-clutching comes from the failure of following generations to evolve away from taxing properties or wealth, with all levies eventually falling exclusively onto commerce instead so that only those who are actively making big transactions at the time are logically expected to be able to afford anything at all at the time.
Otherwise things are going to stay as medieval as they can, and the torture will continue until the attitude improves.
Lol
Well good news! Because taxes are there to pay for services, there's absolutely no reason why they should increase just because the value of your property... Oh that's not how local governments see it?
Well at least your property value will go up endlessly. No bubble there. Totally not based on speculation.
> Because taxes are there to pay for services, there's absolutely no reason why they should increase just because the value of your property... Oh that's not how local governments see it?
Actually that often is how local governments see it in many places.
Local bond issues, which are paid for by property taxes, are often not a fixed rate. They are often a fixed amount (e.g., $2 million/year for 5 years) or a fixed initial amount with some growth allowed (e.g., $2 million/year for 5 years with inflation adjustments, often capped at some maximum adjustment).
With these each year the rate changes to keep the amount collected on target. If aggregate property values go up the rate goes down and if aggregate property values go down the rate goes up. If everyone's property values went up or down by the same percentage the amount of tax each person paid would stay the same.
Your share of the tax is proportional to your share of the aggregate property value, so our individual taxes can change regardless of any changes in aggregate value. For example if aggregate value goes up 5%, but your assessed value us up 10% and mine is up 3% your tax for a fixed amount bond will go up and mine will go down.
If the price of housing the rises, the cost of living will rise, employees will demand raises, and the cost of providing services will increase. Even if housing prices remain flat, there will be inflation leading to the same result.
But I agree that pinning all hopes of class mobility or comfortable retirement on perpetually increasing housing costs cannot work for very much longer.
Sounds like a reason to peg to CPI, but not home value.
Also, economies can grow rather than just inflate
Why would government services not be subject to the same cost pressures due to inflation as the rest of society?
Most of local and state gov expenditure is salaries (subject to inflation, particularly local housing) and financial support for low income residents (also tied to inflation and housing).
Because government is the reason for inflation.
The government should face a punishment for targeting constant inflation.
Thurston county WA collects my property tax. Thurston county should not have attacked Iran and caused a surge in energy prices. The county should have hiked rates earlier and more aggressively. Thurston county is out of control!
Government is not a borg. We elected the dumbest motherfucker in the country, he consolidated power, and we got incredibly inflationary (among other things...) policies. Local government is just along for the ride.
lol
Having sat on a county assessment appeal board, this is basically every hearing. People want the comps high when they sell and low when the notice arrives.
Of course. Everyone wants the money they have to increase, the amount of services they receive increase or stay the same, and the money they pay to decrease or stay the same.
This isn't something special with taxes.
in the case of many economic areas of life, you can increase your income and you can find better prices for things. What's special here is when those same people look at municipal governance and can't see that it's a zero sum game and they can't have both of what they want.
Another one of these. Lets see... they want the value of their house to go up but everyone elses down so they can trade up, the gain without the carrying cost any other investor pays, lower taxes because prices are high and the cut pushes prices higher so owners get the windfall and the next buyer eats it, schools and police but push the bill on commercial and rentals, renters pay it back in rent anyway
Fix is not complicated. Tax land not buildings, flat exemption under the primary residence off the local median so nobody proves income, defer the rest as a lien till sale for the cash poor
I would like to work less hard, make more money, and date prettier girls than I currently do.
Would highly recommend, will be doing it again soon :)
Piece of cake really, compared to getting lucky trying to lower taxes.
not my downvote btw