Cynically, would having a black family show up to to meet the assessor next time they come by tend to reduce your tax assessment?
> State by state, neighborhood by neighborhood, black families pay 13 percent more in property taxes each year than a white family would in the same situation, a massive new data analysis shows.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/02/black-pro...
https://web.archive.org/web/20211127203735/https://www.washi...
Cities don't just levy higher taxes on minorities. It's more likely the city retained the levied amount and did not change it after the white people moved. Now because it's in a "bad" neighborhood, appraisal values fall, but the city government still believes it retains it's specific value.
One would hope so. But your unsourced claim isn't especially compelling given that the post you are replying to directly provided evidence to the contrary.
Edit: Looks like only a strong majority as opposed to the vast majority: https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_t...
Chicago has 50 aldermen (city councilmen) and not a single official Republican. That has been the case for at least a couple decades if I recall correctly.
The de facto segregation or concentration of minorities in urban areas, in say, the northeastern US, and the progression to having the highest tax rates in areas with declining tax base, without a doubt, produces a substantial correlation between higher tax rates and minorities' property.
Is that an excuse for anything? Of course not. But it's institutional racism that does not require specific human beings to look at skin color and discriminate.
Institutional racism hardly rules out there being also regular discrimination. But when a problem is pervasive everywhere, and intractable, shouldn't institutional racism, the way the system produces outcomes without individual intent, be a primary focus?
Both because it might be a larger contributor to the problem and because, while difficult, reforming it might be easier than changing the nature of individuals.
[P.S. Other people in this thread are making this an either/or, to try to dismiss evidence of ordinary discrimination. I'm not, just saying I think institutional racism should be a priority]
What should (can?) that town do about it to address the problem?
In general, I think it's a technical problem that lives in the details.
How can institutional racism be anything else, as it is defined?
In order to solve the problem, it seems important to ascertain whether it's institutional racism or direct discrimination.
I don't know the answer to why local government can't function on a fixed percentage of the tax base everywhere. Something that made an impression on me years ago, was how a bike trail ran from a well-off suburb into a small city, and after a snowfall, the plowing stopped exactly at the city limits. They had, and have, about the highest tax rates anywhere but they basically did not plow.
In the data set you reference, I wonder how they deal with different owners grieving (or not) their assessment.
That seems pretty obvious no? Town of 100k people each making $20k a year, taxed at 10% (just making a number up) means you have $200 million in taxes. Vs another town with 100k people each making $50k a year means you have $500 million on taxes. Further, probably (maybe) the town with people only making $20k a year, the residence probably need more government support (examples: free meals at schools, free child care, more policing (lower incomes correlates with more crime). etc...
Given that more services are needed in a town with lower-income people it makes total sense to me at least that the taxes would need to be higher. Heck, even if they didn't need more services, a 100k people need the same services but the tax base of the lower-income people is lower so they need higher taxes to pay for the same services for the 100k people. The alternative is the higher income town pays for the services of the low-income town. That happens to some degree via federal grants in the USA but I suspect most people in the high income town would not want to be paying for the low-income town's needs.
I don't see any racism or discrimination here. It just seems like fact. 1 < 2. There's no racism or discrimination in that fact.
If there is any discrimination, it's why that low-income town has low-incomes, not why it's taxes cost more.
It seems pretty obvious to a lot of people that the cost of schools is not proportional to the number of students who are being educated.
I remember years and years ago someone explaining how, if you have X fewer students, you can't just heat part of or sell part of a building, so costs don't decrease.
>I don't see any racism or discrimination here
I'm sure there is both individual racism and institutional racism.
I'm not certain how the former works, since I have never seen a tax assessor in person. For that matter, I've never seen an insurance assessor, they seem to just drop by when I'm not there.
article: racism means that as a black person your home increases in value by a whopping 50% if the appraiser does not know you are black.
you: does anyone know if i could make a similar person-switching trick work to reduce my taxes?
> you: does anyone know if i could make a similar person-switching trick work to decrease my taxes?
That's a wildly belligerent take on what the parent actually said. They never implied in any regard that it was a personal question, using "I" or the equivalent to indicate an interest in personal benefit.
> Would this work to have a black family show up to meet the tax assessor next time they come by?
you write:
> That's a wildly belligerent take on what the parent actually said. They never implied in any regard that it was a personal question, using "I" or the equivalent to indicate an interest in personal benefit.
wow that's a creative take. the person typed the question themselves, but because they didn't say 'my tax assessor' it's all ok? i mean, sure, technically i agree. i guess my reaction came from the amazement that this question was the first thing they thought of after reading this disheartening article. OP's comment was also the very first comment on this thread.