Wow, maybe we should all take Rob's cue

[iris lilies]

My taxes run about $700 a month--which pays, presumably, for the loud, annoying street sweeping machine that's made six passes so far today to clean perfectly spotless streets.

Jan, we only got a street sweeper machine for the city of Hermann last year. I just laughed to myself because I didn’t really know quite where it was necessary, but maybe it was. And the city of St. Louis is necessary because of all the trash that the non-Germanic lawbreakers throw around. But here in Deutschland the folks pick up their trash.

[Teacher Terry]

The house is cheap compared to here. But my property taxes are cheap at 35/month. We have a weird system where the age of the house is figured into the equation. The older it is the cheaper.

[sweetana3]

Teacher Terry, we had that in Indiana until Gary, IN (Lake County) sued the State. Lake County won and the whole tax computation system changed. Many elderly and poor actually ended up losing their homes when the taxes doubled and tripled overnight. Costs for this were stupid high.

Now neighborhoods being gentrified are causing the taxes of old homes in the area to go up and people again are having to make the choice to stay or leave due to real estate taxes.

The new residents say "you should be happy that your house is worth more". But older owners and rental tenants facing higher costs dont see this.

[Teacher Terry]

That’s sad Sweetana. Nevadans hate taxes in general so don’t see that happens here but you never know.

[sweetana3]

Teacher Terry: It was a judicial requirement and nothing to do with the state or local governments. And court cases can happen anywhere anytime over anything. Lake County has bitterly complained about the result of their court suit due to unintended consequences.

[LDAHL]

In a long career in municipal finance, I found property taxation to be one of the more bizarre aspects of the job. The property valuation always struck me as more art than science, often with significant differences between assessed and market values. Then you had strange issues like agricultural or conservation land valuation rules. We had one owner of a failed drive-in theater drill holes in the pavement and planted Christmas trees to claim the lower ag valuation. He beat us in court on that one. Dark Store Theory was another issue: owners of thriving stores argued that they should be valued as if they were closed down.

We at least didn’t have to deal with weird stuff like CA’s values depending on how long you owned the place.

The situation is so complex that I understand in most jurisdictions appeals of assessments have an extremely high success rate.

[beckyliz]

A group of wives in a FB private group I'm in moved their husbands with dementia to Ajijic Mexico. They got wonderful care for very little compared to the $10K a month it would be here. The wives were also able to rent a nice apartment to be close by. They'd have to come back to the US every now and again (6 months?) to renew their visas. They were quite pleased with the area.