c-jags said:
mazzag,
not to link things to the zoo 2.0 but....
interesting. i'm assuming that everybody statewide had some major issues with landvalue increases this year.
not to get in to any left/right arguments here, but one of the reasons that Texas has been able to stay so competitive in today's landscape is that our big tax gainer is property taxes and not sales or a state income tax.
hence... i can have a very low tax burden if i choose to live below my means. i have a 100k house i bought in northside 10 years ago and my annual property tax will make my Belton friends cry at how low it is. whenever my wife gets the inkling to move out to west Temple, i ask her to talk to our friends living in that area and how much their mortgage is.
the one thing that i like about Texas' tax structure is that you get to have a say in how much you're paying in taxes. don't want to pay a lot? don't buy a huge house and keep your expenditures low. other states don't afford their tax payers that option.
I wish I could find the article, but Texas is the third highest property tax state, based on '17/'18 values, behind Illinois and New Jersey. We built our house about 12 years ago, so since it wasn't a real estate transaction, the county based our value on similar homes with 6 acres. The value increases every year but never this much at once.
I do feel bad for folks that buy their home and budget their payments based on whatever the current taxable value is. A home in Sage Meadows, an older West Adams neighborhood, had a value increase of $15k. I'm guessing the owners don't live above their means, but that's probably a $40/month increase based on our horrible school taxes and whatever they pay to the city of Temple, county, TC, etc...
The cost to live is West Temple is not worth it, IMO.
A friends home and 50 acres In Salado went from $600k to $1.1million. Another's went from &400k to $700k. If they weren't living above their means before, they are now. (Both homes were custom built)
As long as folks from OOS continue to overspend for land and homes, it'll become less and less affordable for folks to live here.