Why taxes can vary for nearly identical homes.
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Every spring, I pay my city, school district and county property taxes. In recent years, it’s seemed like a pretty good deal. That’s because my tax bill is based on the approximate value my home had in 2012, even though values in my neighborhood have risen since then.
But are you getting a similar deal?
You likely pay property taxes, too, whether directly, via an escrow account or through a rent check that a landlord uses to pay that tax.
This year, PublicSource is addressing the property tax system in a series called “Unbalanced.” The latest installment ([link removed]) zooms in on Mt. Washington, the South Side Slopes and Lawrenceville – where property taxes are bearing less and less of a relationship to home values.
The takeaway: Some Pittsburghers aren’t getting a good deal. In all three neighborhoods, some homeowners are getting property tax bills that are two, three or four times higher than next-door neighbors who live in similar houses.
How could this be when the Pennsylvania Constitution requires uniform taxation?
A decade ago, then-new Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald reluctantly allowed a court-ordered full reassessment of the tax values of all 580,000 property parcels. But he had campaigned in opposition to further reassessments. So, he declared 2012 the county’s “base year,” whose values would guide property taxation indefinitely.
Mostly frozen county tax assessments have ramifications for education, public safety and everything else that’s handled on the local level in our fragmented region.
Look at the tax bills on a single street – or five streets, as I did – and you can see that property taxation raises issues of simple fairness.
But the issues are bigger than that. We’ll explore those concerns in the coming months.
Click here ([link removed]) to read the second installment of our Unbalanced investigation and learn more about the city’s ‘fundamentally inequitable’ tax bills. (In case you missed it, catch up on part one here ([link removed]) .)
And if you want to share your tax assessment story with me, and with our readers, write to me at
[email protected] (mailto:
[email protected]) .
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** Pittsburgh’s hot housing market + Allegheny County’s largely frozen assessments = ‘fundamentally inequitable’ tax bills ([link removed])
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