Property Taxes
Circuit Breakers Are a Better Option for Property Tax Relief
March 13, 2025 • By Brakeyshia Samms
To curb the impact of property taxes on working families, lawmakers should improve or implement a property tax circuit breaker program. The program works like this: when families are overloaded with their property taxes, the circuit breaker kicks in and helps alleviate the pressure these taxes put on family budgets.
Learn from Prop 13 History to Avoid Repeating Past Mistakes
February 26, 2025 • By Rita Jefferson
Worries about housing costs and property tax bills are leading people to check the history books for solutions, but there’s a danger that they’ll repeat past mistakes. If anti-tax lawmakers carelessly weaken property taxes as they did in the 1970s, as they did with California’s Proposition 13, they will undercut public finances, making municipalities, school districts, and other special districts worse off.
State Tax Watch 2025
January 28, 2025 • By ITEP Staff
ITEP tracks tax discussions in legislatures across the country and uses our unique data capacity to analyze the revenue, distributional, and racial and ethnic impacts of many of these proposals. State Tax Watch offers the latest news and movement from each state.
Policymakers Unwisely Propose Cutting Property Taxes in Favor of Sales Taxes
January 14, 2025 • By Rita Jefferson
Lawmakers across the country are taking aim at property taxes with a new strategy: raising sales taxes instead. Doing so would create a regressive tax shift that puts unfair burdens on renters and reduces the strength of local government revenues.
2024 State Tax Ballot Questions: Voters to Weigh in on Tax Changes Big and Small
October 17, 2024 • By Jon Whiten
As we approach November’s election, voters in several states will be weighing in on tax policy changes. The outcomes will impact the equity of state and local tax systems and the adequacy of the revenue those systems are able to raise to fund public services.
Five Tax Takeaways from 2024 State Legislative Sessions
July 18, 2024 • By Aidan Davis
Major tax cuts were largely rejected this year, but states continue to chip away at income taxes. And while property tax cuts were a hot topic across the country, many states failed to deliver effective solutions to affordability issues.
Property Tax Circuit Breakers Can Help States Create More Equitable Tax Codes
June 24, 2024 • By Brakeyshia Samms
Well-designed property tax circuit breaker programs allow states to reduce the impact that property taxes have on the upside-down tilt of their tax codes.
Tax Policy is a Part of the Black American Story
June 17, 2024 • By Brakeyshia Samms
Juneteenth is a reminder of the hard-fought victories that helped Black Americans secure their delayed freedom, justice, and suffrage. And in the chapters about tax policy, the tales are no less fraught. From America’s prologue to the last paragraph of the Civil War, governments raised more tax revenue from the taxation of Black bodies than […]
Tax History Matters: A Q&A with Professor Andrew Kahrl, Author of ‘The Black Tax’
April 24, 2024 • By Brakeyshia Samms
In his new book, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, Professor Andrew Kahrl walks readers through the history of the property tax system and its structural defects that have led to widespread discrimination against Black Americans.
Is California Really a High-Tax State?
April 16, 2024 • By Carl Davis, Eli Byerly-Duke
Key Findings For families of modest means, California is not a high-tax state. California taxes are close to the national average for families in the bottom 80 percent of the income scale. For the bottom 40 percent of families, California taxes are lower than states like Florida and Texas. The highest earners usually pay higher […]
America Used to Have a Wealth Tax: The Forgotten History of the General Property Tax
November 2, 2023 • By Carl Davis, Eli Byerly-Duke
Over time, broad wealth taxes were whittled away to become the narrower property taxes we have today. These selective wealth taxes apply to the kinds of wealth that make up a large share of middle-class families’ net worth (like homes and cars), but usually exempt most of the net worth of the wealthy (like business equity, bonds, and pooled investment funds).The rationale for this pared-back approach to wealth taxation has grown weaker in recent decades as inequality has worsened, the share of wealth held outside of real estate has increased, and the tools needed to administer a broad wealth tax…
2023’s State and Local Tax Ballot Measures: Voters to Weigh in on Property Taxes, Wealth Taxes, and More
October 24, 2023 • By Jon Whiten
Even in this slow year for candidate elections, the decisions that voters in states and cities make could strengthen or weaken revenue for needs in their communities and could change how taxes are distributed across the income spectrum. In the places where tax fairness is on the ballot, much is at stake.
States are Talking About the Wrong Kind of Property Tax Cuts
May 11, 2023 • By Brakeyshia Samms, Carl Davis
Concerns over property tax affordability have been at the forefront this year as housing prices have climbed and property tax bills have often increased along with them. As lawmakers mull a range of property tax cuts, circuit breakers are the best possible approach—and these policies are receiving far too little attention in the states.
Preventing an Overload: How Property Tax Circuit Breakers Promote Housing Affordability
May 11, 2023 • By Brakeyshia Samms, Carl Davis
Circuit breaker credits are the most effective tool available to promote property tax affordability. These policies prevent a property tax “overload” by crediting back property taxes that go beyond a certain share of income. Circuit breakers intervene to ensure that property taxes do not swallow up an unreasonable portion of qualifying households’ budgets.
State Lawmakers Should Break the 2023 Tax Cut Fever Before It’s Too Late
January 18, 2023 • By Miles Trinidad
Despite mixed economic signals for 2023, including a possible recession, many state lawmakers plan to use temporary budget surpluses to forge ahead with permanent, regressive tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the wealthy at the expense of low- and middle-income households. These cuts would put state finances in a precarious position and further erode public investments in education, transportation and health, all of which are crucial for creating inclusive, vibrant communities where everyone, not just the rich, can achieve economic security and thrive. In the event of an economic downturn, these results would be accelerated and amplified.
Election Day in the States: Voters Deliver Important Victories for Tax Justice
November 10, 2022 • By Jon Whiten
Voters in Massachusetts and Colorado raised taxes on their wealthiest residents to fund schools, public transportation and school lunches for kids while making their tax codes more equitable. And voters in West Virginia defeated a proposal to deeply cut taxes, mostly for businesses, and drain the coffers of county and local governments.
Tax Foundation’s ‘State Business Tax Climate Index’ Bears Little Connection to Business Reality
October 31, 2022 • By Carl Davis, Matthew Gardner
The big problem with the Index is that it peddles a solution that not only falls short of the goal of generating business investment, but one that actively harms state lawmakers’ ability to provide the kinds of public goods – like good schools and modern, efficient transportation networks – that businesses need and want.
Racial Discrimination in Home Appraisals Is a Problem That’s Now Getting Federal Attention
March 31, 2022 • By Brakeyshia Samms
With both assessments and appraisals being unfair, homeowners of color are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to determining the worth of what is, for most homeowners, their most valuable asset.
The Impact of Work From Home on Commercial Property Values and the Property Tax in U.S. Cities
November 4, 2021 • By ITEP Staff
The fiscal implications of a decline in commercial property values are important because the property tax is the dominant local source of taxes, and commercial property makes up a significant portion of the property base in cities.
Gentrification and the Property Tax: How Circuit Breakers Can Help
April 27, 2021 • By David Crawford
Property tax circuit breakers are effective because they provide property tax relief to families whose property taxes surpass a certain percentage of their income. If a family in a gentrifying area sees their property tax bill (or their rent) surge to an unaffordable level, a circuit breaker credit kicks in to offer relief. This targeted approach assists low- and middle-income families without significantly reducing overall tax revenue.
Putting California Proposition 15 in Context
October 8, 2020 • By Dylan Grundman O'Neill
Californians are voting now on Proposition 15, which would require commercial and industrial property worth $3 million or more to be taxed based on an up-to-date assessment of full market value. Proposition 15 is sound tax policy that would raise much needed revenue and help to advance racial and economic justice.
States Can Make Their Tax Systems Less Regressive by Reforming or Repealing Itemized Deductions
February 5, 2020 • By Carl Davis
Itemized deductions are problematic tax subsidies that need to close. The mortgage interest deduction, for instance, is often lauded as a way to help middle-class families afford homes and charitable deductions are touted as incentivizing gifts to charitable organizations. But the dirty little secret is that itemized deductions primarily benefit higher-income households while largely failing to achieve their purported goals.
State Tax Codes as Poverty Fighting Tools: 2019 Update on Four Key Policies in All 50 States
September 26, 2019 • By Aidan Davis
This report presents a comprehensive overview of anti-poverty tax policies, surveys tax policy decisions made in the states in 2019 and offers recommendations that every state should consider to help families rise out of poverty. States can jump start their anti-poverty efforts by enacting one or more of four proven and effective tax strategies to reduce the share of taxes paid by low- and moderate-income families: state Earned Income Tax Credits, property tax circuit breakers, targeted low-income credits, and child-related tax credits.
Property Tax Circuit Breakers in 2019
September 26, 2019 • By Aidan Davis
State lawmakers seeking to make residential property taxes more affordable have two broad options: across-the-board tax cuts for taxpayers at all income levels, such as a homestead exemption or a tax cap, and targeted tax breaks that are given only to particular groups of low- and middle-income taxpayers. This policy brief surveys the advantages and disadvantages of the circuit breaker approach to reducing property taxes.
One Tax System for Most Americans, and a Second System for the Wealthiest
August 16, 2019 • By Matthew Gardner
Last year, the Walton family's fortune grew by $100 million a day. This level of wealth is particularly obscene in the context of the Walmart Corporation’s dark store strategy. The company works nationwide to reduce its property tax assessments, which, when successful, deprives local communities of revenue necessary to fund education, libraries, parks, public health and other services.
The property tax is an important mechanism for funding education and other local services. But it is unpopular among many taxpayers, in large part because it affects low- and middle-income families more heavily than the wealthy. For example, the tax remains the same when a taxpayer’s income drops significantly due to job loss or retirement. ITEP’s property tax resources explain how property taxes work and evaluate a variety of policies to remedy the regressive nature of the tax.
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