Pittsburgh’s hot housing market + Allegheny County’s largely frozen assessments = ‘fundamentally inequitable’ tax bills
by Rich Lord, PublicSource
Property taxes are supposed to reflect the values of the properties, but that’s no longer the case in parts of Pittsburgh.
On the southern side of Mt. Washington, for instance, stand three similar houses with very different tax bills.
Richard Reiter bought one of those houses, featuring a shady porch and a turret, for $28,000 in 1980. His total property tax bill is under $900. “It’s good,” he said. “It could be lower.”
The house two doors down is around 30% larger — and gets a tax bill that’s five times higher. Reiter shrugged that off. “They paid a lot more for the house,” he noted.
Such chasms between tax bills result from the combination of rapidly rising housing prices, related assessment appeals and largely frozen valuations of houses that have not changed hands.
The county has, for a decade, used assessments of property values that it assigned in 2012 as the basis for the taxes levied on many homes and commercial buildings.
Properties that are sold, however, are often the subjects of assessment appeals filed by school districts or municipalities seeking more revenue. As housing markets have heated up in certain neighborhoods, some new buyers have been the subjects of appeals and have seen their assessments – and thus their tax bills – soar.
The county’s decision not to regularly reassess property has allowed assessment divides to worsen, said Pittsburgh Controller Michael Lamb.
“The more you stand still, the more unfair it gets,” he said. Without regular reevaluations of properties, “every 10 years or so, you get into this situation where you’ve got this horrible, unfair system of taxation.”
Read entire article here
About Post Author
