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Fri 27 May, 2005 08:39 am
I teach at Arlington (MA) High School. Immediately adjacent Cambridge, this is an expensive town in which to live but there is no problem when it comes to selling real estate. Perhaps, real estate sales here are healthy enough to account for a projected 12% increase in school enrollment for academic 2005-06.
1.) Real estate skyrocketed here a few years back when rent control ended in Boston, Cambridge and Brookline, thanks to a referendum put forth by a right wing resident of Brookline, whose patrolling of the schools in that community drove him to steal lesson plans from teachers' backpacks and meeting notes from the secretary of the school board.
2.) We all know that the right supports what it calls "accountability" in education and that the only measure of success that the right allows in standardized tests.
3.) We also know that the right publically fulminates not just against abortion but, in many cases, against birth control. Witness the support a druggist who failed to fill a prescription for THe Pill received. We see middle class families with three and four children!
4.) On the one hand, the cost of domecile is ridiculous. Nation-wide, the average house is now more than $200,000. When the Baby Boom began, the average price of a house was under $15,000 or about two years gross wages for the average wage earner. Elevator operators could afford homes. The reader needs to keep in mind that the tax rate is based on the value of the house and if the tax rate is high, it is largely because the price of homes is out of bounds.
5.) We know the right hates taxes.
6.) Taxes support schools.
Well, we have a situation in which large families are becoming fashionable. In which the cost of rearing said families is rising and the rearing of those families includes educating the children. Yet, in the face of the increased enrollment that larger families bring, people are moving against a tax increase. Hmmm. Seems to me they need to step back and consider the logic of the situation.
Oh please! Those nasty "right-wingers"! They're over-running Massachusetts! Jeez, they must be up to what? 20% of the state's population now? In Cambridge it must be what? 2% of the population?? Was it those "right-wingers" that bombarded the state's polling places where 49% of the voters voted to eliminate the state income tax too?
The problem with taxes for schools in MA has zip to do with rent control. 20% of the property owners in Cambridge are over retirement age and living on fixed incomes. Under MA law and Boston and Cambridge city ordinances they get exemptions and/or reductions on their property taxes. Boston and Cambridge are both overwhelminigly controlled by leftists who refuse to raise their own property taxes to pay for the schooling of their own kids. Apparently the left hates taxes too.
The end of rent control sent an already rising home market out of control.
Read what I wrote.
Yeah, yeah. I read your silly drivel about those big, mean, nasty, right-wingers.
Generally, I bite my keyboard when responding to you, but, you obviously didn't understand it. Contradictions galore!
fishin': I disagree and will not stand for your libel--right-wingers are NOT nasty; they're delusional, paranoid, rabidly anti-logic and insecure with themselves, but they are NOT nasty.
plainoldme: there's another issue to consider--if property values are increasing there as fast as you say, then not only has it become more expensive to acquire a home, but to maintain one. I'm not talking about the recent buyers (they obviously have the money), but of the folks who purchased their homes when they were still relatively reasonable--living on a fixed income or a working class income, they might very well not be able to afford the increased property tax payment that resulted from the increase in their property value.
We're seeing a similar, but vastly magnified, effect out here in the Las Vegas area--it's the fastest growing urban area in the nation. To give you an example of our real estate situation: I purchased my home for about $145k two years ago this June. Last July it appraised for over $230k. That's over a 50% increase in ONE year! Almost everybody's property is increasing in value like this out here and some people were beginning to approach the point where they literally couldn't afford their property taxes. The state passed a cap on property tax; however, primary residences are taxed at a lower rate than commercial property.
Housing bubble. It'll all end in tears.
Housing bubble is something that people have started talking about within the past few weeks.
There are many factors that caused the price of domecile to rise rapidly over the past 30 years:
1.) The baby boomers coming of age -- the results of the greatest homecoming since Ulysses bought houses.
2.) Using houses as an investment (see Paper Money by Adam Smith).
3.) Awful, money grubbing realtors who thought the end all and be all was to sell houses with $1M price tags.
4.) The high divorce rate -- since the rate is close to 60%, that means more than half the families are living in two places at once.
5.) The rise of the house as status symbol.
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