I know they are higher in relative terms, but are they higher in absolute terms? I live in a single-family house in SoCal and pay over $12k/year in property taxes.
[edit] absolute <-> relative
Average property tax rate for the Houston area is 2.31%. There's lots of things that come into the equation (homestead caps, exemptions, etc.), but for an average priced home of, say $350,000 you'll be owing ~$8,000 in property taxes.
The trickiest part is that your property values are reassessed every year, so for a long time our tax bill has just gone up, whether your income has or not.
I'll still take Texas economics over California economics, but everywhere has its tax pros and cons.
I kind of wish it was that way here; the previous owner of the house I am in was paying $1400 per year in taxes, after purchasing it (pre-covid price boom) we pay $12000 in taxes (note the extra zero). I get people not wanting to be priced out of their housing by taxes, but:
1. If your property actually went up by a large fraction in value, so did your equity, and if you have a mortgage, then the equity goes up faster than the value due to leverage.
2. MIN(2%, inflation) is an absurdly low cap. Since it is applied annually, even if inflation averages 2% per year, the property tax increase will lag inflation.
Ultimately when far more people want to live in a place than there is housing, bad things happen, and Prop 13 and rent control just try to shift the advantage from "has lots of money" to "got there first" with lots of annoying second-order effects.
Also the most expensive states by this metric are almost all in the Northeast, which matches my intuition.
1: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...
My previous residence in particular was "interesting" because under the now-current zoning rules it would only be allowed to be 1/2 the square-footage, but as long as it stays as the current floor-plan it's grandfathered in. If you make it illegal to improve the usage of a property, then an LVT has no effect!