Unless you are selling the house (which still means you have to buy another one…) it’s paying for unrealized gains which the rich fucks making the rules tell us is so unfair whaaaa whaaaa whaaa (insert child crying noises here)
On the contrary: as a single-family homeowner, I’m being massively subsidized compared to the amount of city services and infrastructure I consume. (It could be worse: I could have a large lot in a car-dependent suburb instead of a small lot in a streetcar suburb and therefore be even more of a leech – i.e., like those rich fucks you’re talking about – but still, I’m definitely not paying my fair share of taxes.)
If you want to know who’s really getting ripped off, it’s all the renters in dense apartments. Not only are they paying extra so their landlords can profit, they’re paying even more because they’re the ones funding the subsidy for single-family homeowners like me. Basically, I’m exploiting them via the skewed way property taxes are assessed. Thanks for funding my privileged lifestyle, people too poor/unluckly to be able to buy a house! 🤑
(But seriously, it really is very unfair and we need to reform the property tax code and, even more importantly, the zoning code.)
The problem is that property value of homes has nothing to do with cost of building out city services. In many areas the value of homes is going up much faster than the cost of maintaining the roads and services around them.
Property taxes should be tied to things like acreage, road access, zoning type, and the city’s budget. Not the free market value of the home, which is unrelated.
Housing prices have gone up roughly double in the last 10 years, while inflation has only gone up 35%.
It is extremely unfair to single homeowners to be paying for the housing demand increase, and I say this as someone who’s only able to rent. Those property taxes get passed right along to me through rent increases.
