Who is paying 2.6% of their property value each year on those things? Who gets utilities for free with their rent. That calculator is very dishonest.
Nationwide the figure of a couple grand per acre is remarkably constant. Although property costs may vary two orders of magnitude or more, a firefighter gets paid "about" the same everywhere, ditto a new police car costs about constant, etc. So I would guess someone living where an acre costs about $200K would pay about 2.6%.
I would imagine in Detroit you could buy 50 houses for $100K but have to pay $100K/yr prop tax on them if the surface area adds up to enough acres.
The only utility bill I paid in my apartment was electric and it averaged about $10 over the course of a year. In a house you'll find its another order of magnitude plus of course all the other utilities.
In general, acreage is cheap. The millions of small lots with $X00,000 houses on them tend to make up for all the acres with nothing on them.
Depends on what you mean by 'utilities', but in New York City, landlords are required to provide heat and hot water to all tenants. Technically they are allowed to itemize this as a recurring surcharge on top of the rent, but in practice I have never seen this done.
Electricity is not included in most modern buildings, though it sometimes is for older buildings which cannot separate the meters per unit easily.
The property taxes in CA are lower than they might otherwise be if the home values weren't all so high. The government is going to get it's money one way or another.
From what I understand, property taxes in the north east are very very high though.
It'd be interesting to see a UK version of the calculator that took into account the local housing agreement rent prices, which are the maximum prices that can be paid for properties within an area by benefits.