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‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Okay I know it's not such a popular opinion but I'm still on the notion that you shouldn't pay taxes for holding on to the place that you live.
Yeah yeah local governments need income and all that and their house is assessed over 4 million dollars and many people can't even afford a home at a 10th of that and they should have known and blah blah blah but come on, commodified housing is bad enough. Paying what amounts to a rent to the state just to hold on to the property, actual repairs and upkeep and other naturally occurring costs aside is insane.
Tax the sales of property. Tax the legal transfer of control of LLCs that "own" property. I'm not even saying never charge property tax on properties not occupied by the owner, but you should be able to have a house to live in without paying the state for the privilege of them not taking it.
What in the libertarian garbage is this? Do you like roads, schools, libraries, parks, garbage pickup, etc etc etc. Property taxes pay for these things.
But those things do not scale with the (alleged) value oft the property, but with things like property size, number oft occupants, curb length etc. Or could even be billed at actual cost (your garbage example).
yet even if your family doesn't use these services you benefit from safe roads, educated workers, green spaces for all to have access, and public sanitation - you LITERALLY BENEFIT FROM EVERYTHING but don't want to pay.
No. Those things are paid for by other taxes and service fees.
I'm thinking of the untended consequences of that policy. The first I can think of is people simply would never sell their houses because they'd get hit with enormous taxes (large enough to equal decades of property taxes). Home owners would simply rent out the houses when they need/want to move away. So home ownership for those living in the homes would collapse. Further, city services would likely starve from lack of funding because there would be no little revenue and what revenue they got would be very sporadic.
There are absolutely houses like that (in the USA at least). Those houses not in cities with police and fire protection, roads, sidewalks, snow plowing, public libraries, or any other kind of city services. If you want the benefits of a society someone has to pay the bill. Alternatively, some cities have income taxes or very high sales tax. Both of which you'd pay to live in the city.
Who are you suggesting paying the bill for your consumption of city services besides you?
You're planning to tax on events like sales and hope there's enough churn to still fully-fund the things property tax provides for? That's really hard to make a case for.
Given bungalows rarely deliver a town enough to recoup on providing and maintaining services anyway, you're starting with a very tricky goal to maintain. Detroit happened, and that was with consistent, recurring payments.
Then you want to put a home sales tax on that is big enough to pay the back taxes plus borrowing cost to hold the debt and you think people are gonna go for this? What if you've owned your home 15 years, paid no taxes on the infrastructure maintenance, ambulance fire or police service, mail service, street lights and pavement, and then your house burns down? You could very well owe more than the lot is worth alone. What do we tell the homeowner about that? The town can't absorb the loss given margins are so low.
Nah. I don't think you can sell that idea to the voters.
What home steading a home was supposed to be for. I remember in Texas you could homestead up to 10 arces and not have to pay taxes on that. I totally agree. At the very least taxes shouldn't go up just because the value did. Only time your taxes should go up unless you sell the home, then tax you that amount.
This is similar to the property tax structure in California.
You get a property tax rate on the purchase price, then it only goes up 2% a year or inflation (whichever is lower).
It makes it pretty impossible to be taxed out of your house. It has downsides though because it applies to commercial real estate and landlord properties as well.
Why not tax the property for all value above X. Where X is some amount over the average or median property value. That way, if you can afford a luxury home you pay some tax on it.
It's not a bad compromise, it's just a matter of finding a good value for X. And that's hard to do as housing prices continue to balloon and housing costs take up a greater percentage of people's incomes. Houses that would have cost one year's income in the 60s can easily cost 8 to 10 times that today.
I don't know, maybe you should have to pay property taxes if the land occupies more than a certain square footage. That could discourage suburban style development and promote greater population density, which could both act as a net positive.
Yeah, the devil would be in the details, of course, and to make sure there aren’t any obvious loopholes. Ideally it would be at increasing brackets as well.
Wouldn’t taxes on above-X value keep prices down? Buying fancy houses as investment could be countered by the additional running expense of taxes.
Basing it on square footage could also work, or as an additional parameter, but might make more sense in cities where space is more scarce.
Problem I see with price based rather than square footage is that it's going to vary by location and generation. A human being, or a family even, needs a certain amount of space, and beyond that there is some threshold across which one could say this family or person is undoubtedly taking up more than they actually need.
For example, how much housing does a family of 5 people reasonably expect if living a middle class lifestyle in America? I think that's something that changes generationally and regionally based on income and housing costs, but today I think such a family might expect ideally a house with five bedrooms, two or three baths, a kitchen, dining room, living room, laundry room, maybe also a den or other secondary communal room. I'm not saying all houses should be this big, or shouldn't be bigger, but that a house about this big could be a fair measuring stick for determining how much square footage a house could reasonably be without the owner-occupant paying property taxes.
Or it could be based on the number of kitchens. If a house is cut up into apartments as an investment strategy, it has to have more than one kitchen generally speaking.
For price based limits I just don't see how you avoid artificial inflation of assessments by governments or planned neglect by owners to keep houses on one side or the other of the threshold. It would also have very different impacts on different markets. And inflation and changes in the market would require whatever threshold you set to be revised fairly regularly or else fade into irrelevance.