Not a rant and doesn’t drive me into a frothing fury but curious.
In my office, several coworkers who don’t own property were trying to get people to go out and vote for a property tax increase. It bothers me in that they can vote to take money from people at no cost to them. In fact, it seemed the biggest selling point to them with them mentioning that fact over and over.
Help me sink back into acceptitude or stoke my fury since I don’t know if this is ‘right’ or not.
Everyone pays property taxes. No landlord sets a rental rate that will cause him/her to pay the taxes while the tenant gets off with no such payments. (Some might argue that it is typical of landlords to set rents even higher than the amount required to cover the mortgage, upkeep, and taxes, but I suspect that market forces would generally prevent that from happening with any frequency.)
I should probably note that in places where rent controls are in effect, the margin may be uncomfortably thin, but outside Manhattan, I am not sure how many places actually have rent controls–or whether they are adjusted for taxes.
I had a guy pose an interesting twist to me the other day. He said he should be able to vote in some local elections where he owns a vacation home, seeing as he pays taxes on it. Made some sense to me.
I never thought about it but must be true that rentors must pay this property tax. This would be news to them since the big selling point to them was that they could vote for other people to pay taxes and have it not affect them.
Do I wait a few months and ask them how much their rent is going up? 
Why can multimillionaires propose so called “flat taxes” that exempt all their income?
Why do non-childbearing dudes have to pay taxes so that others can send their “precious darlings” to school?
Why does a portion of Gasoline taxes go into the general Fund instead of being all spent on road improvements & maintenence?
Life ain’t fair. But as the above dudes pointed out- property taxes are paid by everyone- and are not exclusive to property owners. Usually any property tax increase is not suff to require a rent increase by itself. An increase of 2% in property taxes might mean an increase of less than 1/10 of a % in overal rental expenses.
Note that property taxes on businesses are passed on to their customers.
Unless you can think of a workable proposal to exempt selected voters from every issue that does not affect them personally, I wouldn’t worry about it.
blowero, it doesn’t get me worked up but bugged me a little. Tomndebb placated that.
If you wanted to see me worked up, go back in time when some of my neighbors wanted a sidewalk for their pwecwious widdle dawlings to walk to school on but then demanded that it be on my side of the street and insisted that since it was on my side of the street that they didn’t have to pay for it.
THERE I was a frothing, seething, psycho looking for vengence.
I settled for organizing and fighting and got the city to rule that they could force the sidewalk but that they had to share the cost.
Of course, since it would then cost THEM money, they didn’t want it anymore.
I haven’t spoken to those neighbors since and have heard them blaming me for endangering their children.
putzes…
I don’t know how you state works. Here we pay property taxes on our cars, boats, trailers and business property at the same rates as real estate. Almost everyone would have some increase in taxes if they raised property tax rates.
All decisions about taxation are also decisions about expenditure and/or about public borrowing.
Hence those who have a claim to a say are not only those who would be affected by the taxation (taxpayers) but also those who would be affected by the consequential expenditure decision and/or public borrowing decisions - i.e. everybody.
I’m looking forward to Libertarian’s post in this thread…
Oh, well maybe for the same reason that people who don’t own buildings also get to pay taxes to support the fire department that helps keep the buildings owned by other people from burning down.
Dinsdale, makes sense to me too.
My family owns a four family home that is rented out as an investment. The renters can all vote in that town to raise property taxes. The owner, who lives in another town cannot vote on the property tax raise.
Question:
Would it be legal, proper, moral, etc. to send a letter to all four tenants letting them know that their rent would be going up by $100 a month each if the property tax bill is passed?
The letter would be sent before the election to influence thier votes. Also, it would justify increasing the rent if the property tax increase passes. It would be a win-win for the landlord.
True, however the property tax that get’s shifted over to the tenant is usually far lower than if the tenant had owned a house and had to pay property tax on it. My monster-in-law owns appartment buildings and I’ve seen the taxes for them.
An example of my arguement is a small 8 unit building she has. It’s assessed value is $420,000. If all 8 tenants were to go out and buy 100k houses (cheap in this area) the municipality would be collecting taxes on 800,000 values instead of 420,000.
So, by living in those appartments, those tenants are paying less taxes than home owners, even though the landlord passes the taxes through to them.
It is never a benefit to have a bunch of appartment buildings within a municipality. The tenants use the same services as home owners (schools, police, fire, garbage, etc.) yet the municipality collects less taxes from them as compared to if they owned houses. This arguement is true, of course, only if the municipality charges the same rate for all dwellings. I know there are some that tax appartments at a higher rate. And they should.
But, getting back to the OP. Personally I think that only property owners should be allowed to vote, but me and George washington are alone in that belief.
Assuming those tenants also pay no income tax to the municipality, nor sales tax to the municipality, nor do they frequent businesses there that pass on corporate tax to the municipality. Greater population density has some advantages.
pkbites- gee, you need to tell that bit about “never a benefit to have a bunch of apartment buildings within a community” to the Professional urban planners who work for just about every city in the USA. Funny, they are of the belief that High Density Housing is WAY cheaper than sub-urban sprawl. Amazing that all those experts can be so wrong, eh? The concentration of resisdents grants the City a huge savings in services- worth far more than any loss in Property tax revenue.
Debaser- wow- that building must be extremely valuable for the prop tax increase to be $4800 a year. I’d like to see the figures on that. I suppose you COULD do that- but they could also give you their 30 day notices. In Santa Monica (pre-Prop 13),the Landlords promised rent rollbacks if Prop 13 was passed. Needless to say- there were none. Next year, the voters enacted the most brutal rent-control law in the State. Think about it.
pkbites- gee, you need to tell that bit about “never a benefit to have a bunch of apartment buildings within a community” to the Professional urban planners who work for just about every city in the USA. Funny, they are of the belief that High Density Housing is WAY cheaper than sub-urban sprawl. Amazing that all those experts can be so wrong, eh? The concentration of resisdents grants the City a huge savings in services- worth far more than any loss in Property tax revenue.
Debaser- wow- that building must be extremely valuable for the prop tax increase to be $4800 a year. I’d like to see the figures on that. I suppose you COULD do that- but they could also give you their 30 day notices. In Santa Monica (pre-Prop 13),the Landlords promised rent rollbacks if Prop 13 was passed. Needless to say- there were none. Next year, the voters enacted the most brutal rent-control law in the State. Think about it.
Well, I deliberately used a high number. The idea was to really give a good incentive to have them not vote for the increase.
But, the building could be worth 1 Million easily in my area if it’s 4 nice units. That could put it in the range of having a 5K tax increase.
I pay about $100 a month of taxes on a condo that is appraised under $100.000. So, if it’s worth 10x that, 10x as much taxes, that number isn’t unreasonable. Especially with property taxes, where they often have very large increases to pay for new schools being built and such, which is a big hit to take all at once.
Cite? If this were true, then the property taxes throughout the state would be pretty much the same. But it isn’t. Property tax in Milwaukee is more than double than that of Glenbulah. And the services are almost identical. The greater concentration of population in Milwaukee has not made things cheaper for the city.
Every time I have worked for a municipality, I have been shown evidence that it is not better for there to be appartment buildings as opposed to private homes. Your error is, you assume that all of the tenants would build new houses, contributing to sprawl.
Not so.
Well, you’d have to find two municipalities of the same buildable area, with the same population, same services (i.e., city sewer, water, trash collection, mass transit vs. individual septic tanks, wells, homeowner-contracted trash pickup, and personal cars), one of which has lots of apartment buildings and one of which has lots of privately owned homes.
I think the problem you run into is not how you choose to house the people in question, but the more basic fact that places that warrant apartment buildings usually need them because of higher population, period.
Anytime a municipality’s population grows, you’re going to have an increased demand on services, plain and simple.
I can’t imagine how centralizing those services–fewer central sewage treatment plants, shorter water mains, more centralized garbage pickup locations, etc., could possibly result in higher costs vs. a much more dispersed system.