Are property taxes stopping many from home ownership

[whatthehey]

47. Renters pay them too

No not as a separate check but as a landlord I can assure you I'm not paying property taxes out of my own pocket (higher too when not homesteaded in this and I think most areas) but that rent needs to cover all my costs including them.

But they are a hugely variable cost. Here in WKY taxes are less than 1% of value homesteaded. When I lived in the NE they were 4-5%. Other places in the Midwest I've lived somewhat in between. While the public schools here do, frankly, suck, the ones when I lived in WI and IA did not, and had much lower tax rates than the NE corridor, so it's certainly not a linear scale of good schools to high taxes.

Certainly people on low fixed incomes in NYS for example could find property taxes on sizeable properties higher than rent on modest properties, but they would also certainly find themselves unable to rent a comparable property anything like as cheaply as even the highest property taxes, because any actual owner will need to pay them. In all but the most extreme cases of charity though, tenants will bear the costs somehow. Few individual people are saintly enough to take on the responsibilities and costs of property ownership and not pass them on to tenants. I don't make a huge amount renting houses, and frankly I'm only interested in beating CD level rates of return in the first place, but I am certainly not interested in paying for the privilege of letting other people live in them, and I really doubt I'm uncommon in this regard.