Home sweet tax bite
Rising property taxes have some homeowners irate
Houston, meanwhile, illustrates anti-property-tax forces on the march at the local level but with a twist: Local officials are trying to outflank them with a less restrictive competing measure. The citizen measure would require voter approval before the city adopts any budget with revenues that are up, regardless of source, by more than population growth and inflation. Like the Maine activists, the Houston advocates are trying to prevent an end-run. "Houston [is] prospering since it went through the bad times and the big wring-out in the '80s," says Barry Klein, president of the Houston Property Rights Association, which gathered signatures to put the measure on the ballot. But "there was not a commensurate decline in the tax rate," he says. At the mayor's urging, the city council approved a rival plan to cap property taxes plus utility rates.
The specter of service cuts is almost universally invoked when tax caps arise. But today, there's more pressure on localities, in the form of state and federal mandates to improve education, says Dwight V. Denison, associate professor of public and nonprofit finance at New York University. "The dollar amounts for [reform] are becoming staggering," Denison says. "Where are they going to look for this money?"
Of course, there's one quick fix for rising property-tax bills: a housing recession that would cause values to tumble. Few, though, are likely to pronounce that cure as better than the disease.
On the rise
Top 10 states with the biggest change in per capita property tax 1996-1997 to 2001-2002
Change in property tax
Wyoming 36.4 pct.
Tennessee 33.9 pct.
South Carolina 33.9 pct.
Texas 32.9 pct.
Alabama 32.5 pct.
New Mexico 32.2 pct.
Maryland 32.1 pct.
Nevada 32.0 pct.
California 31.6 pct.
Kentucky 29.3 pct.
U.S. TOTAL 19.4 pct.
Note: Adjusted for inflation.
Source: USN&WR from Census Bureau data
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