This is one area where (I hate to say it) the red states have tended to do a better job than the blue states. Take Texas as an example. Up until this last year

This is one area where (I hate to say it) the red states have tended to do a better job than the blue states. Take Texas as an example. Up until this last year at least, Texas had relatively low property values but high property taxes. But high property taxes on a $200,000 house aren't the end of the world. But here's a big one: in Texas, seniors (65+) can defer their property taxes to be settled upon their death. This allows seniors to stay in their house if they really want but incentivizes seniors to downsize to avoid passing on that liability onto their children. This is exactly what you want. Compare that to California, for example. "But what about the Seniors?" led to Prop 13, which was a massive tax giveaway to Disney and affluent property holders. Capping property taxes deprives the state of taxes to fund services for no good reason. Even worse, when your children inherit that house, they inherit the house on a stepped up basis (meaning they pay no capital gains tax and the capital tax base gets reset to the market value so if you sell immediately you won't pay any CG tax) and children and grandchildren can inherit the artifically low property tax rates. New York has a different set of problems. A big one is that single family homes are subsidized. A $1m SFH will pay less than half the property tax of an equal value condo. And there's all sorts of caps on property taxes on SFHs too. Additionally a $100m condo only pays about 10-15x the property tax of a $1m condo in NYC. I'm a big fan of making property speculation less lucrative. High property taxes are a good thing. We need to stop giving away money under the auspices of "but what about the Seniors?"