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Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

I realize I'm likely in the minority, but my property value has gone up almost 100% since 2019, and I don't like it one bit. I'm going to be burned by property tax increases like everyone else. Even if I did sell, there's nowhere to move--and I'd be paying stupidly-inflated percentage-based real estate commissions on both transactions.

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In CA you can have your cake and eat it too. My property values have gone up 30% just in the last year and yet, with Prop 13, my property taxes will only go up 2%.

can you imagine the long term ramifications of such a taxation policy? the guy who made 2 million $ in equity gains over the last 20 years is paying 5 times less property taxes than the poor schmuck with 0 equity gain who just bought the same exact house at 4 times the cost. sure they're both paying a lot of property taxes but the one who just bought into the system, is paying a lot lot more.

If you're in Canada (or at least Ontario) huge upticks in property values across a city don't result in higher property taxes. Municipalities set their budget and then divide by the real estate value to arrive at each lot's property tax (the actual formula is more complex, but that's the basic concept, plus MPAC values lag way behind actual sales). When everyone's property goes up by the same amount no one's taxes increase.

It's still a very bad thing property values have gone up so much. This isn't free money; the cost is being extracted from young people and new immigrants trying to enter the market and it's turning our economy into a giant real estate shell game.

In Toronto, commercial real estate carries the largest property tax burden - single family houses are the lowest in the entire province.

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