Or working class people. For a large fraction of people if their taxes are going up faster than their wages are going up they do not have a reasonable way to get higher wages to pay for the tax.
There is very little controversy over not taxing unrealized gains when it comes to income tax [1]. I'm not sure why doing the same thing for unrealized gains in property value is controversial.
It's not like most of the things property taxes pay for are proportional to the value of the property. The changes each year in costs to provide roads, schools, libraries, police and fire, and utilities to my house and my neighbor's houses generally has little to do with the changes in the market value of our homes. So why should the taxes that pay those things be tied to market value of the house?
More sensible would be to take the costs to provide the services the tax pays for, and divide it among the houses that receive the services, equally or taking into account usage (e.g., the amount for sewer might be proportional to the number of bedrooms). If we want it to be a progressive tax, apportion it according to the relative market values of the properties, but determine the total amount for the neighborhood solely by how much money the tax needs to raise to provide the services used by that neighborhood.
[1] There is controversy over tricks and schemes used to effectively realize them while escaping taxation.
> It's not like most of the things property taxes pay for are proportional to the value of the property
Exactly! The extraordinary taxes on property are a result of unfair distribution of cost of services. A city needs to collect for a budget of $X... so they distribute the costs the best they can.
You don't get a refund for the intervening years of mania. Oh we're sorry we almost kicked you out of your house because everyone else was paying out the nose for houses because they speculated Amazon would build it's hq there that year so sorry about that. Here's your 50k in taxes back with interest.
In that scenario it sounds like the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back for much less than they sold it for at the height of the mania.
> the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back
Don't assume. That person had to live somewhere, possibly at equally inflated prices. Now add in the the cost of two unnecessary moves.
> and if you sucked it up and paid the state? Maybe you had a sick family member that you were taking care of and the chaos of a move would have been too much to deal with. Sorry, chum. Bad luck of the draw.
What has happened (at least in my locality) is in years of high assessment increases they cut the rates so the increase is buffered. They typically don't set the tax rate until they see how the initial assessments are coming in.
The other program some counties around here do is property tax exclusion for low income seniors.
And if house prices go down do they get a refund?