I work for a city where the stupid-rich live. Their houses are NUTS. I recently approved construction of a 5,000sft guest house with a rooftop tennis court. We have over a dozen houses in active construction that cost over 15 million dollars, and no new structures being built under 4 million.
We actually have standards in our development code regarding servant’s quarters. And the most important thing to know about those standards is that they’re required to be smaller than the minimum allowable size for guest quarters. Can’t have the Servant’s getting all uppity.
But the thing is, they pay very little in taxes as a portion of their wealth. They have enough political power that they founded a 4mi^2 enclave as its own city entirely surrounded by a major city. They also managed to get their own school district. As a result, they have some of the lowest taxes in the state. Someone with a 7 million dollar house here will pay the same amount of money in property taxes as someone with a half-million dollar condo 2 miles away, because the rates for the school district and city for the wealthy are so low.
For utility districys, they get out of paying property tax by having the city provide it directly without a WCID by contracting to the major city next door that gives them the utilities at a loss to keep the rich assholes happy and supplying campaign donations.
All that to say, then people that are hurt by property taxes aren’t the rich. It’s people living in areas where the value of homes go up faster than income can keep up with the taxes. My parents eventually had to sell and move. And yeah, they made a nice profit off their house, but they still had to move away from the city they’d lived in for 60 years, and now live 30 minutes from the nearest gas station even though they used to be solidly urbanites.
It sounds like your parents just don’t want you to know that they suck with money.
I work for a city where the stupid-rich live. Their houses are NUTS. I recently approved construction of a 5,000sft guest house with a rooftop tennis court. We have over a dozen houses in active construction that cost over 15 million dollars, and no new structures being built under 4 million.
We actually have standards in our development code regarding servant’s quarters. And the most important thing to know about those standards is that they’re required to be smaller than the minimum allowable size for guest quarters. Can’t have the Servant’s getting all uppity.
But the thing is, they pay very little in taxes as a portion of their wealth. They have enough political power that they founded a 4mi^2 enclave as its own city entirely surrounded by a major city. They also managed to get their own school district. As a result, they have some of the lowest taxes in the state. Someone with a 7 million dollar house here will pay the same amount of money in property taxes as someone with a half-million dollar condo 2 miles away, because the rates for the school district and city for the wealthy are so low.
For utility districys, they get out of paying property tax by having the city provide it directly without a WCID by contracting to the major city next door that gives them the utilities at a loss to keep the rich assholes happy and supplying campaign donations.
All that to say, then people that are hurt by property taxes aren’t the rich. It’s people living in areas where the value of homes go up faster than income can keep up with the taxes. My parents eventually had to sell and move. And yeah, they made a nice profit off their house, but they still had to move away from the city they’d lived in for 60 years, and now live 30 minutes from the nearest gas station even though they used to be solidly urbanites.