I think I have a limited amount of empathy for the new homeless couple that’s about to have $4.4 million in the bank. -Rarely do cases of eminent domain go so well and unlike eminent domain, this was apparently their own doing.
So you were house rich but they never reassessed meaning last year you paid 15k on a 3.9m home nicw
Yeah people bitching about the property tax they now have to pay after not paying it for a long time should probably stfu and take the L or W or whatever it is
Having your home valued at $4,400,000 is what most of us would call a nice problem to have.
Actually it’s a pretty bad problem to have. If you bought an affordable house at the time but gentrification comes for your area you suddenly can’t afford to live in the house you bought and despite whatever roots you’ve put down, now you have to try to migrate somewhere else.
Note that even if your tax assessment says you can get a few million out of your house, it’s likely not that easy, it can take a long time to find a buyer in the best of times, I imagine especially if you are seeking a buyer willing to pay millions…
It’s not as bad as renting in the same scenario, but it’s not great to suddenly have rich person cost of ownership come at you when you bought into a non rich person level house
It’s not so nice if you can’t afford to live in the home you own.
and its not even because you are wasting resources, like water for a large pool, but property tax/land value tax imposed on you.
I remember that last year pro-LVT people were very loud here on lemmy for some fucking unbelievable reason, and they were completely deaf to being called out that this will happen, that rich people will fuck you over in yet another major aspect of your life
You don’t “own” your house, peasant! You must pay the landlord his rightful share - it’s called
feudalismFreedom!I thought lemmy loved taxes?
I’m not entirely unsympathetic since property values have skyrocketed ridiculously mostly due to the super rich and hedge funds buying up housing like it’s candy.
However, these people got an assessment for doing some renovations without replacing the walls or a major overhaul of the property, then promptly added a whole second floor to the building when they said they were just replacing the roof. They gambled that the assessors wouldn’t take note and lost.
yeah, and the guy was professionally working in the real estate space… feels like they are in the “find out” stage.
What the hell did they even need a house that size for? They look like empty nesters, which means they don’t need that size of a house. They want that size of a house. Since it’s an investment at this point, and they had that monster reassessed at a ridiculous price, they’re better off just selling it and moving somewhere cheap. Well, cheaper.
they should know better if they are building in a disaster prone area.
Yearly property taxes never made sense to me. So you supposedly bought and own something, except if you don’t pay the government then they can just take it away.
My property taxes, largely, go to support public schools.
I’m fine with that.
Doesn’t mean I should be exorbitantly overcharged.
House tax I understand, there is a finite limited of land.
Vehicle tax however can go fuck itself.
This is what is needed.
Gotta maintain the roads somehow. Vehicle and gas taxes mean that only those using the are paying.
I disagree, mostly due to i pay vehicle registration and tax when I buy it. VA does vehicle property tax, MD does not. How are they surviving?
update: so I just checked Virginia’s property tax rates and apparently we are one of the lowest in the country at like .76%. so maybe the vehicle property tax makes up for that since most states are just a bit under 1% at around .9. MD is higher, 1.02%
I think it would help if they called it something else also just to clear it up.
I’m surrounded by multimillion dollar homes and $100,000 cars on the road. Just feel like you’re getting fucked left and right all the time.
The alternative is banks hoarding real state without any need to rent it out or sell it soon. They can just wait until prices get higher.
That’s why in most countries people pay way less property taxes in the house they live in.
The alternative is much higher income tax.
It’s depressing that we can never truly own even the land we live on. How many seniors lose it all over property taxes? FFS, we have auctions to rape these poor people.
I don’t know about where you live, but here the property taxes pay for the locality’s services: streets, parks, city employes salaries, snow removal, garbage removal, summer camp, community center, etc. So this taxe is very useful. Now, it needs to be well managed and it’s a whole other topic.
Taxes are the price of civilization. You pay taxes on your land, because if you don’t, a gang of armed thugs will come and steal it from you and bury you under it.
Lol
In China 70% of the population pays no income tax, a very small sales tax, and there’s no property taxes at all. Who you tax is just as important as how much you tax. It is not necessary to tax everyone in a society to maintain a modern civilization.
Your leaving out a critical piece of information…
That you can own the building, but the property is on a 75 year lease that can be extended two times for under a hundred dollars for a total of 225 years of that home being in your family for less than the cost of a single years property tax anywhere in the US?
Uh, yeah, that was on the tip of my tongue. That’s exactly it.
Taxes are, but not necessarily property taxes - they’re just one of the many possible ways to tax people.
I see your point for general taxes, but if the federal and state government are already taking your income and many other things how come they’re also taking so much in property tax? Many other countries seem to be able to protect you and give you what you need without property tax.
Most modern nations have higher taxes especially on the rich
Because collecting only one type of taxes would cause massive economic distortion and would inevitably burden people unequally. Different taxes have different properties. Some hit certain groups harder than others. Some hit certain types of businesses harder than others. Far better to have a whole series of modest taxes than one form of ruinous taxation. Do some countries not have property taxes? Yes, but they’re small tax havens that aren’t really a good model for the vast majority of nations.
But as far as optimization, consider some examples.
Property taxes also work best at the local level because the spending needs of municipalities don’t swing heavily with economic conditions. The federal government has spending needs that vary wildly with the economic cycle. During a recession, the federal government needs to massively ramp up its spending. But at a local level, a recession doesn’t mean you suddenly need twice the number of firefighters. Property taxes are pretty steady over time, so they’re a good match for the needs of local government. The federal government’s income tax revenue goes down during a recession, but that’s ultimately fine, as the federal government controls the currency. They can afford to sustain massive deficits during bad years and make it up with surpluses in the good years. (Well, if the federal government was functioning as designed.)
Income taxes also make more sense for government entities whose jurisdictions are difficult to avoid. If you fund your city entirely with income tax and no property taxes, you may find your community completely overrun by retirees who want services like anyone else, but don’t actually earn much taxable income to pay for them. If you fund your city entirely through a large sales tax, people can just drive and shop outside of city limits. It’s much harder for people to avoid federal income tax simply by moving house. Unless you’re leaving the country entirely, you’re not avoiding the reach of federal income taxes. (And sometimes even that doesn’t cut it!)
But property taxes? The only way to avoid those is to not live in the city at all. Which, from the city’s perspective, is fine. If you don’t live in the city, then you’re not putting much burden on the city’s infrastructure and services. But if you want to live in the city and enjoy all the benefits that come with living in a city, you have to pay the city’s property taxes.
In short, different taxes have different properties, different benefits and drawbacks. Funding a society through a diverse arrangement of taxes allows much more efficient optimization of these taxes. It’s a much more intelligent system than just trying to fund it all with one big dumb tax of a single type. That’s more the way of Medieval head taxes, not modern nation states. We used to have simple tax systems. We stopped using them because we realized there were better ways to do it.
Like almost every issue, property taxes aren’t a binary issue - it’s not a matter of either having them or not having them. There’s the sub-issue of how the rates are set. Simply tying property taxes to home value isn’t fair, because the burden a person puts on city services doesn’t increase just because the perceived value of their home rises. You don’t actually receive any of that value until you sell your house and leave, but you’re taxed on it anyway. Being taxed when you sell the house would make perfect sense to me, because that’s when you actually reap the benefits.
The argument that people in high-priced neighborhoods are rich and can afford or deserve to pay higher property taxes is unrealistic. Recent newcomers, yes, but not people who bought homes when they were still cheap because the area wasn’t so desirable. Those people are no different from people who buy cheap houses today, they just did it a long time ago. But they get charged premium rates because the perceived value of their home increased. That way of assessing property taxes isn’t fair, it’s just bureaucratically easy.
I think property tax should be heavily weighted by the original price you paid for your house, and should go up with inflation and the cost of services. It should not be flatly tied to the price you would get for your house if you hypothetically sold it.
Simply tying property taxes to home value isn’t fair, because the burden a person puts on city services doesn’t increase just because the perceived value of their home rises.
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.
They are actually rich. They have earned in many cases more money in real estate than many people have earned working
Uhhh no… the value of your house is what somebody might buy it for IF YOU SOLD IT. Until you actually do sell it, you don’t get that money or “make money in real estate”. As I said, taxing you at the point where you sell the house would make sense to me - because that’s when you’re actually getting money. The way property taxes are now, people are being taxed on money they might hypothetically get in the future.
Now it’s true that you can borrow against your home value - this is known as a home equity loan or a line of credit. So you potentially have that available - but even that is not “making money in real estate”, it’s borrowing money that you have to pay back.
Srsly, what grade are you in?
Now it’s true that you can borrow against your home value - this is known as a home equity loan or a line of credit.
That is literally how every billionaire funds their lifestyle, just borrowing against stocks instead of home equity. If people with $4 million homes are not rich, then neither are most billionaires.
I think property tax should be heavily weighted by the original price you paid for your house, and should go up with inflation and the cost of services. It should not be flatly tied to the price you would get for your house if you hypothetically sold it.
That is how you end up with California, where the old generations get wealthy, and the young generations are driven out of the state completely.
Yes, the economic conditions in a state with 40 million people are probably due to one specific factor. Classic meme-level thinking!
Prop 13 is real, yo
China is a small tax haven?
I suppose they haven’t. But they are planning on doing so. And their lack of a property tax is a major reason their cities struggle financially.
Also, the key context here is that land in China is technically owned by the state. It’s leased out on very long term ground leases, but it’s all still owned by the state. In principle, the government doesn’t need to add another property tax, as it’s already leasing out the land. It would be like if a landlord also charged property tax to their tenants.
Mao was right about landlords
That being said these people can afford to pay this, their house is millions of $s.
If the house you’ve been living in for ages goes up in value, that doesn’t turn into money you can spend.
Unless you’re my brother, who spends untold amounts of money renoing various portions of his house, then has it reassessed so he can add to his home equity-based line-of-credit, so he can have more money to do more renos ad infinitum. I mean he’s done this a dozen times (or more).
It’s a never ending circle of financial death over there.
There’s a whole cottage industry dedicated to convincing people their kitchen and baths need to be remodeled to the studs every 10/15 years, windows need replacing, new siding, all sorts of crazy shit, just get yourself a home equity line, it adds to the value after all! But that just means you’re in more debt to own what you already owned. Home equity lines of credit can be super useful but people use them like lotto tickets.
Eh, I mean it kinda does. They’re complaining about having to 91k dollars of tax for nearly 4 million dollars of equity. They could just get a tax free loan guaranteed by their equity and receive millions to live off for the rest of their lives, paying the loan back when they sell.
They just want to have their cake and eat it. They like the free equity, they just don’t want to pay the taxes associated with it.
Sure, but it also makes a human need unaffordable for more people every year.
I was living in a neighborhood that gentrified and my rent went up a “life altering” amount. I had to move to a different, shittier neighborhood and had nothing to show for it. If a property owner has the same thing happen, they may be forced to sell, but they will get a massive windfall. Renters get nothing besides a kick in the butt.
No but it does turn it into a financially valuable asset which they can sell for a profit. Emotionally I feel for them, I wouldn’t want to sell a house I’ve investment time and energy into. But they’re FAR better off than a lot of people on a purely financial basis.
It’s the same reason Elon is a multi-billionaire, even though he doesn’t have that as “spending money”
Land Value Tax would solve this.
Also they live in Florida where there is no income tax so got to tax something.
“We do have the law to comply with,” Schwartzreich says. “It really puts us in the middle.”
🤣🤣🤣
no sympathy for people living in florida or any disaster prone area, that knowingly there is a chance that its expensive. just like the wildfires in california, where all the rich people were crying.
any disaster prone area
Ummm is anybody going to tell him about climate change
until disaster hits your area.
And someone will shit on it because one rich person lives within 5 miles of you, and calling you a stupid fuck for living there.
and oh god will the tears of indignation flow from you then.
The homeowners have two options, and both options suck.
- sell
- don’t sell
Both alternatives carry costs. But they own a home worth 4.4mil and have to pay 2% of that each year. That’s pretty low.
Renters have two options:
- get fucked
- move (and get fucked)
At least if the homeowner sells they get the windfall.
Hmm. So if you buy a house in your 20s, by the time you retire, you would have bought the equivalent of 2.5 houses. One for you, one from the government for the privilege of living in the one you bought, and half a house worth of interest to the bank.
That’s an insane amount of money.
Yes. Living in a safe and orderly society has a subscription fee.
American cities must be terribly poor to need to tax houses
We don’t have any rich people to tax.
.
Wait, we do? The fuck is going on then‽
I mean, if the US government wasn’t so stingy about, y know, actually spending on it’s people instead of the military, tax cuts for billionaires and buerocracy, it would be fine imo. Here, in CZ, I’m mostly fine with the taxes since we’re a pretty safe country with decent healthcare. Despite the country still having a huge corruption problem and housing market in flames, it still somehow has higher living Ng standard than the US.
Your property taxes don’t go towards those things though. Maybe a bloated police force, but that’s still usually funded via earned income tax.
Your federal taxes could go towards local governments if we prioritized it. There’s a choice made, and that choice forces cities to adopt as many taxes as they can get away with in order to fund themselves.
100% we should complain about how our money is used, and how much is paid by whom. But that’s a different complaint.
Don’t you pay tax also for the purchase itself? Might be anothe 10%
And the yearly tax, is it based on purchase cost or current value? The later would be harsh seeing how they increase.
There’s no tax on buying property, however, property taxes are a percentage of your property’s assessed value. In my locality, the assessed value has a lot of deductions whereby my 400K house is only taxable as 32K in value, so I pay 3K/year in taxes.
I can’t speak for Florida, but if it’s like Arizona, their property is worth a lot more than 4M if their total tax burden is 90K/year.
Current value, unless you have some exemption. Which is what stung these people.
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.
My alternate take. This is a prime example of why housing shouldn’t be viewed as an investment. If the value of a home outstrips the rate that wages increase then isn’t this story always the logical conclusion?
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.
Yeah 10 acres seems a bit excessive to me but I like the basic principle.
This is almost how the taxes work in California.
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.
Yeah, I agree it’s always harder to define than it seems at first glance. Square footage might be a better proxy with fewer loopholes. Problem is that a shitty rundown house will be taxed the same as a luxury house of the same size. That might be fine, I don’t know.
I think regardless of how you do it, taxes need to be adjusted for inflation or change of average living costs, like any tax brackets could/would. I think one of the goal should be to avoid artificially inflated living costs.
And also regardless of approach, tax limits should probably also depend on how many people live in the house. That can probably be abused too though.
Either way, I don’t know much about economy and taxes, this is just me thinking out loud on a complex topic.
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 in the libertarian garbage is this? Do you like roads, schools, libraries, parks, garbage pickup, etc etc etc. Property taxes pay for these things.
Tax Other Stuff
I think you’re misunderstanding the post… He’s saying property taxes are a necessary source of government revenue (that we all benefit from) but you shouldn’t have to pay it if it’s a primary residence and there should be a different structure or revenue stream. I agree with that, since a property tax is basically a wealth tax on ordinary people because it is a tax on their single biggest asset.
He’s saying property taxes are a necessary source of government revenue (that we all benefit from) but you shouldn’t have to pay it if it’s a primary residence and there should be a different structure or revenue stream. I agree with that
Where do you want the revenue needed to fund the city to come from if not from property owners?
Workers. Employers. Commuters. Capital gains. Sales.
There are so many things you can tax, so many points where money moves from one set of hands to another where you can shave a little off the top. It’s just a bit absurd to me that we will shake people down for money for just having a home that an assessor figures could sell for some particular amount of money.
No. Those things are paid for by other taxes and service fees.
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).
Why do millionaires pay more taxes than minimum-wage workers?
Whatever answer you come up to my question can probably answer yours.
But your taxes don’t scale with the alleged value of the property either. There are caps and protections in place. That’s why they were only paying $15k previously. And they didn’t just repair their old house, they put an entire second story on it. Hence the reason they triggered the “major improvements” clause.
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.
Tax the sales of property.
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.
but you should be able to have a house to live in without paying the state for the privilege of them not taking it.
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?
Every think about downsizing?
It’s always funny when looking at the tax-system in the US from an EU perspective. Americans looking at any receipt they get in an EU country and immediately pointing out the huge VAT tariff.
Then one only needs to point to the property tax in the US.
Sales taxes are regressive. People who spend more money on services and less on goods are typically wealthier. Sales taxes hit the poor the hardest. Whereas the property tax on a multi unit building is typically a better rate for each family than a single family home.
If you read the article these people tried to abuse a loophole that had kept their propery taxes capped for years and they failed miserably. They tried to keep just enough of the home to avoid the value of the home being reassessed for taxes. But they added an entire second story and that triggered the reassessment. Essentially they thought they could cheat and build more home than they could afford to pay for.
True they abused the system. That wasn’t my point, which is that these high property taxes have a tendency to give high quality services to affluent neighbourhoods and low cost housing get low quality services.
Which country doesn’t charge VAT on services?
If you hire a nanny do you pay VAT?
Not sure over here in Germany. Plenty of services are exempted from VAT.
The EU has standardized what is tax exempt though. You can read everything which falls under VAT here. The word “service” appears 472 times by the way.
These states in the US have zero sales tax: NH, OR, AK, DE, MT
Some US states don’t have sales taxes
Debbie, who had worked for a real estate attorney for nearly 25 years
Lol, a real estate attorney didn’t see this coming? I feel sorry for any clients of hers.
She worked FOR a real estate attorney. And apparently learned nothing.
Fair enough, ya I misread that. But still!
