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‘My Property Tax Went From $15K to a Life-Altering $91K a Year’
(www.yahoo.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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It depends how much home value correlates to house size and lot size. A $1M 1500 sqft bungalow on a 1/4 acre lot in a gentrified neighborhood may not burden city services more than a $100k 1500 sqft bungalow on a 1/4 acre lot in a bad neighborhood, but a $1M McMansion on a 2-acre lot on the edge of the city absolutely will. That's because the cost of city services scales with things like increasing the length of pavement and sewer pipe across the lot frontage and decreasing the number of homes emergency services can reach within a reasonable distance/time from the station.
Yes, you an come up with edge cases like McMansions next to golf courses, but houses on identical lots right next to each other can have different values and pay different property taxes even though they take the same amount of city services. Remodeling a house, or even just painting it frequently and keeping the yard nicer than others, doesn't make you consume more city services, but it will raise the home's assessed value and property taxes. That's a false link.
Putting a second story on likely includes increasing the number of bedrooms, which theoretically increases the number of people who could be living there and thus increase the burden on city services. Renovating for quality and building additions to the square footage aren't equivalent.
I think lot sizes are still a much bigger factor, though: a house renovated/rebuilt to max out the allowed FAR (floor-area ratio) on a 1/4 acre lot still ought to get taxed less than a modest-sized house on a 2-acre lot.