I’m not sure SatinDoll’s house is in King County. From reports of relatives who have traveled in coastal Washington State recently and from reading, it seems like the economy outside the tech segment in the Seattle-Tacoma area has never recovered from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. With sky high property taxes, it seems possible that a few years of past due taxes could equal or exceed the collapsed value of a home.
But why would socialists care about this? The result is that detested private property escheats to the State, to be used “for the good of all.”
I had assumed King County because the article was about Seattle. However, you are correct, SatinDoll did not state where in Washington state the home was located.
I briefly owned a house in Seattle in the mid-1970s while attending the University of Washington on a military scholarship. It was located in the Greenlake neighborhood about half a block from the lake. It was an older house (built @ 1920?) but in relatively good condition. Two bedrooms, large basement (multiple additional bedrooms possible) and a separate one car garage with a servicing pit in the floor!! It still has the same footprint on the lot and same street view when I look at it on Google Earth. So, it doesn’t appear to have been expanded since I owned it. Bought it for $20K in 1975. Gave it to my first wife as part of a divorce property settlement in 1977.
The neighborhood even then was starting to see the first inflow of capital from the California housing boom. A block further up along the same street, three adjacent homes were purchased for their lots, torn down, and a magnificent modern home of stone and glass was built on the combined lot.
Houses on the street now go for $700K and up depending on how extensively they have been renovated. I recently saw one on the same size lot as mine being listed for $1.3 million. The 2016 county property tax on that property ($1.3 M) would be $11,440.00 according to this estimator:
http://www.tax-rates.org/washington/king_county_property_tax
King County does have a program to aid low income seniors to reduce, defer, or exempt them from payment of property taxes:
http://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/assessor/Common-Questions/Seniorss.aspx
The maximum income limits are well above the DHHS poverty level. So a person living solely on social security should qualify.