Hamtramck Star

I stopped by the Treasurer's office on Friday and picked up these taxing authority lists:

Summer tax rates, 2008
Winter tax rates, 2008

My 2009 bill is identical to yours, to the penny!

Taxable value of your house for 2009 went down 10.93% - nice break!!! Is it across the board?

I believe every property in Hamtramck was assessed lower by the same percentage. We didn't have any special circumstances. People who bought their houses more than 5 years ago may not have benefited from the reduction.

This explanation was printed by the Detroit News in 2004:

Proposal A raised the state sales tax 2 cents and limited property tax increases to the rate of inflation, even as property values soared in the 1990s. Once a property was sold, the new owner was taxed on the higher value, which should mean higher revenues to pay for services like schools, police and fire protection.

(The) Headlee Amendment to the state Constitution limits the growth of government revenue to roughly the inflation rate, so local governments never see an increase in property tax when homes are sold. Headlee requires the community to lower its mileage rate to keep revenue to the set amount.

In our case, our taxes were based on the taxable value before the sale for the first year, which had only been allowed to rise around 3% per year for the last 15 years, since the passage of Proposal A. After the first year, we were reassessed at around 50% more than we paid for the house. (We were incredibly lucky in that we were not reassessed until after the 14 mill "Charter PF" police and fire pension judgment tax expired.)

If the previous owner still lived here, his taxes would have increased this year because his taxable value of $18,707 would have continued to adjust upward toward his SEV of $43,200 this year.

after i went in front of the board they lowered my assessed value down to my taxable value and left my taxable value untouched. gee, thanks. so no break for me. paying the same amount I did in 2003, which appears three times as much as you for the same size house in the same city. a crap ton of taxes on top of income taxes. i'm staring to like what i'm hearing from the political opposition. thanks for sharing. tough to swallow but nice to know.

I dont look forward to the headache of reassessment and uncapping in march of 2010. I *like* only having $290 a year for taxes.

I paid 40k for my house, and the city promptly gave us a tax bill with an assessed value of 96k, which put our SEV well above what we paid. When we went to the city to appeal, I told them I planned to make improvements to the house, and some moron on that committee wanted me to estimate how much those improvements were worth. I told him that since they weren't done yet, it would be impossible to tell, but they wanted me to estimate it anyways, because it would have some bearing on my house's assessed value. I desperately wanted to say, 'millions!' but that would just have opened the door to some kind of property tax insanity I couldn't hope to deal with. They ended up kindly lowering the assessed value to 75k, still nearly twice what we paid.
This was for the year that we lived in an unfinished, gutted house, with duct tape literally holding back the leak on the main sewage pipe. We had cold water from a faucet in the kitchen that drained into a bucket for a few months as our only source of running water, and when I managed to get some of the old plumbing working, we had an old chipped cast-iron tub with visqueen all around it, since there were no walls. I had to prop up a piece of drywall between the toilet and the front door, for privacy. During this time, I did manage to replace the windows, which were all broken or rotten, but I did not fix the siding because we hadn't gotten enough money to *buy* the new siding, and all the new windows were a little smaller than the old ones. We were literally living in a run-down, ramshackle hut with only the bare minimum of civilization's ameneties 0 and happy for it. At one point, Michigan Basic dropped our insurance because they said someone drove by and didn't believe anyone could be living there. We had to get an inspector to come upstairs and see our makeshift 'kitchen' made out of a dorm fridge, a portable 2-burner that would fry the fuse if you used both burners, and a *really nice* toaster oven, in order to get our insurance coverage restored.
When we finally got to the state tax tribunal, they gave me a telephone hearing, and the city assessor, I guess was who represented the city at that hearing, actually said, and in so doing, committed perjury, 'oh yes, I've been to that house, it's the nicest house on the block.' So needless to say, we didn't get our assessed value reduced from 75k.
In the end, we got totally hosed by the city, which is one reason why I can't sit by and let the city actually refuse to provide basic services for my household - we paid out the arse for it, and we continue to unfairly pay nearly twice the property tax we ought to owe. Those idiotic, thieving, bastards completely robbed me of my very hard-earned sweat equity, which was the main reason we invested everything we owned in that house, and then they turned around to tell me that they couldn't figure out how to write parking tickets - which they are still claiming, by the way. And oh yes, we had to file for our homestead exemption 3 times before they would apply it to our tax bill.

In retrospect, I think I may be a little bitter. My experience with the property taxes left me feeling violated and abused. Our house is extremely nice now (custom concrete countertop, slate floors, built-in bath/shower with porcelain surround, and frankly, our kitchen actually is the kitchen of my dreams), but it's only a one-bedroom, one bath place until I figure out if the city will try to royally fuck me over again when I attempt to renovate the second floor.

you are not alone,they doing this with smile on face

Any word on assessment for the upcoming tax year? Did the value go down much?

Neighbor

I think the new assessments are done in March. Have to wait and see :)