Posted on 01/11/2017 8:09:54 PM PST by CreviceTool
South Dakota narrowly overtakes Oregon, which held the top spot for the previous three years, as the nation's "Top Moving Destination." This is the first time South Dakota has held the no. 1 spot. Vermont inched out Oregon for the no 2. position, with Oregon rounding out the top three. Those are the results of the United Van Lines' 40th Annual National Movers Study, which tracks customers' state-to-state migration patterns over the past year. Retirees are continuing to move to the Mountain and Pacific West.
Excellent...I’ll give my local illegals a map and send them to LA...
Oh, yes, why not.... sigh. Face palm. I hate this place. (Though I love the non people parts)
Kind of makes you wonder how those folks brains work, doesn’t it.
Up until I joined the USMC we lived in what we used to call railroad towns (Dad was a telegrapher); you know, population 18, and that included my brother, sister, and my Mother and Father.
All over the western United States west of the continental divide.
Had to live in the big city for almost 40 years (it’s where the work is) before I finally got to retire up here to my 20 acres of heaven (and sometimes hell).
I looked for a good place in Idaho but decided I was getting too old to build my own house and just couldn’t afford to have it done by contractors.
Pretty country though, used to hunt and pan gold in the country between Coeur d’Alene and the Pend Oreille River.
But if you find a place like the flatlanders are looking for let me know, I’ll even settle for 20 acres like I have here.
Tennessee has started phasing out the Hall income tax. Dropped it by 1% this year with future decreases, and final elimination in 2022.
A lot of Texans move to the Hill Country when they retire. We did. For years people from all over Texas have moved to Georgetown, Cedar Park, and Round Rock, etc. We moved from South of Houston, down on Gulf Coast, to Lago Vista. It is like a suburb of a suburb of Austin. We love it here. I have a 360 degree view of sunrise, sunset, full moon, meteor showers, etc. We are out in the boonies in the Balcones Wildlife Preserve area, but can drive a couple of mile and be in town, small town, 6000 people... or drive 11 miles to Cedar Park, which looks like Houston, lots of businesses...
We have view of Lake Travis too. I love it out here. We won’t have a neighbor to the east, or south, or north. There is a lot For Sale to our West. Hope no one buys it! We have a very mild climate. I can’t take the cold...
I no longer want two places. While having our new Lago Vista home built, and then while moving our belongings here, we were between the two houses. I hated it. If I couldn’t find my prescription drug or my watch, I didn’t know which house my missing items might be. We used to have our house in Lake Jackson Texas, our father’s house in Denver, our apartment in Los Angeles county, our kids’ apartments... we were paying expenses on all of the above. It was too much for my simple little mind.
My high school football coach and his wife retired from Ft. Lauderdale to Wisconsin. Their reasons paralleled yours. They missed having seasons, love being on a lake (water’s water).
I think it usually comes down to wanting to stay near family. Retirees with grand kids like to be close to them.
I think the only way to really keep county and state level governments from using property taxes to club seniors to death is for the property to have a low assessed value. Unfortunately, the county tax assessor controls that valuation in most places.
One of the smartest things California ever did was pass Prop 13 back in the 70’s. That locks in property taxes based on the purchase price plus inflation even if that was 50 years ago and even if property values all around you have skyrocketed. I don’t know if it holds true if the property is purchased at a discount to the general market, though. And it isn’t ideal, because it creates a housing shortage in urban neighborhoods where young people are trying to be close to work, and shortages drive up costs.
I’d rather see gated retirement communities out in the countryside exempt from property taxes that are apportioned for schools and police. Then don’t build any schools in the area. Even to the point of building these retirement communities on Federal lands and removed from the county tax rolls entirely.
I hear ya’, I live in Grants Pass, and while it’s conservative, rural and GOP the state jus becoming very Leftist!
I never dreamed we would actually have background checks on gun purchases, but we did, and that creep Governor is promoting bills to ban semi-autos and high-cap mags.
I love Oregon, but it is becoming Leftist, although Dennis Richardson becoming SOS, a pro-life Republican, is very cool!
Ed
I spent years in North Idaho: Hayden Lake, Sandpoint, Athol, Post Falls, all over...and I miss it to this day.
Oregon’s nice, but it ain’t no North Idaho!
Ed
Here in NJ Governor Christie instituted a property tax increase cap of 2%, because our property taxes were among the highest in the nation while we were losing decent jobs. The problem is that they are already so high, and so few people that could buy homes have children anyway, so there isn’t much demand for detached single family homes anymore. The outright freeze for seniors doesn’t help much because 1) they are frozen at high levels already, and 2) they have to pay the full bill and get the difference refunded a year later.
A friend that lived in California for years described some unintended consequences of Prop. 13; I’m familiar with the concept but not the results. As he described it, the first problem is that as a generation of homeowners starts to retire or die off, it is difficult to sell the homes because new owners would pay much higher taxes than the rest of the neighborhood. They therefore simply buy further out (since land is so plentiful) in new developments that don’t have the high costs of the first area (tenured teachers on the job for decades, veteran cops, etc.).
The second problem is associated with the first; the original area, with capped taxes on residents and a growing number of vacant homes, can no longer pay its bills and services suffer. This would make any new homebuyer even more of a target of the taxman as the area becomes desperate for tax revenues.
Any input on what I’ve described is welcome; again, I haven’t lived there so I don’t know (but I understand it as laid out). I’m much more familiar with the NJ situation, which increasingly boils down to the fact that the population bearing children/seeking schools is very different from the population paying property taxes. While many Americans want nothing more than a puppy park, hordes of foreigners (renting apartments) fill the schools. While the latter have some property taxes built into their rent, it is a fraction of what a homeowner would pay (whether they have children or not).
Living in NJ, I believe that one factor (among many) driving up property taxes is “home rule”, where all of your municipal services are paid from your property taxes. As I understand it, many other states spread these costs over a wider range (county or state).
As a property owner in both Northern and Southern California, I have witnessed gaming of Prop 13 by putting goodies on the ballot to get all variety of special assessments to pay for the flood of mooches. You tax bill can be nearly doubled eith this gimmick.
I’m not sure I buy that first argument about people not buying in established neighborhoods because the property taxes are higher than their neighbors. Property taxes under Prop 13 are mostly a function of the purchase price with another portion of “voted indebtedness” for sewers, parks, and sometimes schools. Established neighborhoods have very little of these extras, so while it is true the same value house will have higher taxes than a neighbor who has been there for decades, the commuting costs and sometimes Mello Roos of new suburbs counter that. An extra $10/day in gas adds up. “Mello Roos” are a type of bond used to build new schools, parks, and roads at the time a developer builds tracts of houses. The homeowners are stuck paying them back — in addition to property taxes — rather than the developer building them into the price of the houses. This makes new houses in the suburbs look cheaper than they are. When people caught on is when we started seeing all the small farms in existing neighborhoods disappear — they could be developed into tracts of houses without the state requiring new schools be built and without the Mello Roos.
There is no doubt that if retirees moved out, property values would fall in the old neighborhoods, but the county would still get more property taxes because they are currently prevented from taxing the real value anyway. The more rotation of property, the closer to taxing the full value the county would come. I keep seeing these commercial on TV about reverse mortgages and wonder how much that contributes to seniors staying where they are. They can cash in on the equity of expensive urban homes without selling and moving out.
That seems to be the workaround here in NJ as well (a ballot question can bypass the 2% increase cap); at least voters have a voice in it. The problem is that many people voting aren’t the property owners, so they think what they vote for is “free”. Again, while tenants pay property taxes indirectly through rent, it is nothing near what the property owner pays. For example, a 2 family home may have taxes of $15K, while the second unit is rented for $1,250 per month; that tenant is contributing a fraction of the taxes.
I’ll defer to your knowledge of Prop 13 because my info is secondhand; my friend seemed to be describing a specific outcome that is being mirrored here in NJ.
For seniors the problem in NJ is that if you basically use your equity to pay your bills then the property taxes alone (even frozen at the level at which you reached 65) would quickly eat away your stake. $10k property tax bills (of which 75% goes to local schools) just isn’t attractive to anyone in the age of McJobs or Social Security...
I have never understood the kind of property tax bills I’ve heard about in places like NJ and NY. Especially considering that they also have income taxes and sales taxes, so they do not even have the excuse that TX and FL do.
In CA you would need to be buying an $800K home to be faced with a $10K property tax bill.
An $800K home in NJ would have taxes of AT LEAST $25K - and the wealthy owners might want that because it keeps a neighborhood “decent”.
As I understand it, the problem lies in the public employees’ unions coupled with the economic decline of these Rustbelt states. Decades ago employers bore most of the burden of public employees, and the education, police, public works, and (to a lesser extent) fire protection became industries unto themselves, with massive political clout. As the private industries declined/moved elsewhere (with those costs as one of many factors), rather than accept that the piggy bank was empty and downsize in response, the Democrats basically transferred those costs to homeowners. My town still has four firehouses (filled with paid firemen), while the industries that built them and really needed the services are long gone; now we pay them to basically sleep through their shifts, and many work second jobs because there are so few fires to fight. They resist regionalization/shared services between town, or being combined with EMT services, because that would result in fewer “union brothers” on the job (and funneling dues to the Democratic Party). The teachers now make more money than most private-sector employees, while working 180 days per year, about six hours per day.
Now we have a massive government worker caste, with employment for life, massive retirement costs, and often raking in 6 figure salaries - and nobody wants a piece of this massive IOU anymore. More and more revenue is needed for the massive retirement entitlements of this caste, and less and less of your taxes go to current services - the can has been kicked to the end of the road, and the states are collapsing financially. Traditional remedies (new companies, for example) won’t work because the potential employer knows they will just be bled dry to pay not just for overpaid gubmint workers, but also countless gubmint retirees. Thus, the government trains its sights on the most static population: homeowners locked into mortgages. That is why no Americans want these homes anymore (young people are fleeing NJ & NY), and foreigners are trafficked to replace them - even if it means housing four generation (about 30 people) in a single family home.
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