Are property taxes stopping many from home ownership

[customerserviceguy]

127. Depends on where you're talking about

In the immediate NYC metro area, they're scandalously high compared to even what I saw in the urbanized areas around Seattle and Portland in the Pacific Northwest. And they are on top of high income and sales taxes, each of the cities previously mentioned does not have one or the other tax. I think a LOT of the tax money collected in this area is simply wasted, infrastructure was way better maintained when I lived in the Pacific NW.

However, there are other factors to consider when you're talking about affordability of homes. First, down payment requirements are more stringent, some folks have trouble saving up enough. It's also a LOT harder to get a mortgage than it used to be, although that's not necessarily a bad thing in some cases. And when owning your own home, you have a lot more maintenance costs to think about setting aside for.

Add to that the fact that buying a house is never again going to be the 'investment' that it was in most of the post-WWII era. The baby boom drove the prices of housing up, and now that that generation needs less housing, the market has suffered from a drop in demand. The main reason to buy a house is to have the autonomy in what to do with your living space, but at the cost of mobility. If your job dries up, and you have a house worth less than you owe on it to have to sell to move to another part of the country where job prospects are better, you have a hard time just picking up and moving.