The negative side of rising home values in Phoenix, and Los Angeles


Whenever I'm hanging around with people who talk about their houses, and money is mentioned, most people proudly tell me how much more their house is worth than when they bought it. I guess it's just human nature, like buying something at a garage sale and later finding out that's worth a lot on ebay. But if you're like me, you really don't want the value of your house to go way up. I saw the negative aspects of that when I lived in Los Angeles, and it's while it's good for Real Estate Agents, and investors, it's very bad for people like me who just want to live in a house. Please let me explain.

I bought the house that I'm in right now, here in Glendale, when I was in my mid-thirties. I just love it here. It's a great neighborhood, and besides, my dog likes it here. I never want to leave here. No, this house is not for sale. Not until I'm done with it, if you know what I mean. And I plan on living for a very long time!

So, let's do some math. I'm not very good at math, but I know that although my mortgage is fixed, other factors around owning a house aren't. Yes, I'm talking about taxes. The taxes that are paid on a house are based on its value. The higher the appraised value, the more taxes you have to pay on a property. And I guess that's fair. I know that taxes help support the infrastructure that help to make this a nice neighborhood, and I'm willing to pay my share, as most people are. But this is where it gets complicated, and it's a lesson I learned in Los Angeles in the 1980s - when the value of the houses goes way, way, up, like ridiculously way up, so do the property taxes, and it can have devastating effects on the people who live in them.

Time-travel with me to the 1960s, and 1970s, in Los Angeles, especially places like Woodland Hills, which is in the San Fernando Valley. At the time, you could have bought a nice new house there for as little as $50,000. And, if you're following me here, you paid property taxes based on $50,000. But by the 1980s, those houses were being appraised at a quarter of a million dollars, and are now closer to a million. That sounds great, if you're a Real Estate agent, or if you want to sell the house, but terrible for people who just want to stay, and live in those houses. It meant that their property taxes were spiraling out of control. People who were unable to pay their mortgage along with the higher property taxes were simply losing their houses.

A law was passed in California, called Proposition 13, which changed all of that for people who were at risk of losing their house because of the increase in appraised value and the subsequent rise in property taxes. That law is still in effect for many people in California who would be crushed by the payment of taxes based on current appraised value.

Of course, house values in Phoenix have never done that. The house that I'm in hit its highest appraised value just before the crash of 2008. And yes, my taxes did go up, and it did worry me. But the crash brought the value back down, and it's still fairly low, which is what I want. Like I say, I'm happy to pay my fair share of taxes, but not if this house were to be appraised so high that I couldn't afford to pay it, along with the mortgage.

Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/PhoenixHistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more