How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my home of years, where I have built a life and have all my things? If you think that, you are a sick person and I have to imagine you are younger and only thinking "but I want that nice house, so f*k off old person, take some money and go die somewhere else."

A 600% increase in property taxes over 7 years is an extreme outlier. Zero of my friends or family have ever once experienced such a thing happening.

I certainly am not a fan of how heavy my property taxes are in one of the heaviest taxed cities in the US - but I would absolutely vote down anything resembling something like Prop 13. It's an immoral bit of tax code that favors old people over the young and productive - like seemingly most of our current policy.

I should not be paying a different rate than the young couple moving in next door to me simply because I got here first. The services need to be paid all the same regardless of my age.

> How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my home of years, where I have built a life and have all my things?

Yes, obviously. I have this giant asset called property I can sell and downsize to something reasonable in retirement. Or in the worst case - move. I could also use the equity in my home to pay for living expenses if I must. This was considered normal and expected just a couple generations ago.

This whole "let the old eat their young" streak of society needs to die off sooner than later.

At least when being subsidized by the young via tax rates. The old voted themselves in a benefit at the expense of those taking care of them - it’s not sustainable. They cannot have their cake and eat it too. I say this as someone far closer to “old” than young. I should be paying exactly the same amount as my young neighbors for the same house value. Anything different is immoral at best.

The young productive couple with kids has far more utility being located closer to work and other economic opportunity than a retired couple, so retirees sitting on the most productive bits of real estate is a problem beyond even taxes. That we forced young couples to buy places out in the exurbs and spend hours a day commuting while also trying to raise kids would be laughable to an alien species looking at us from a big picture standpoint.

We have an inverted sense of priorities at the moment - likely due to demographics and voting power. These will rapidly shift as demographics change, hopefully without too much backlash over what we have done to the young.

If we want to make a point that overall property taxes are too high in general I’m much more receptive to that idea. No (residential) property owner should be privileged over another due to age.

Renters have to move all the time, regardless of where they built a life and have all their things, many times because their income is being taken to subsidize people living on large lots (earned income tax is stupid, it’s working people paying for the rent seekers who get to enjoy living and profiting from larger spaces).

Another option is to have multiple kids, and bet that a few might support you in your old age.

Also, I would like to see which region nominal property taxes increased 6x in 7 years. I research real estate all around the US, and I have never seen anywhere close to that increase. You can link to a Zillow link of any random home in the broader region, as they all would have experienced the same rise.

Property tax rates are usually 0.5% to 2.5% of market value, and you would be in very rarified company if the market value of your house went up 6x from 2017 to 2024.