Why are you always such an ass?

The point was brought up that Nashville is more expensive in some ways, I was responding to that.

I agree with you. I am just talking about averages that normal people drive. Here in Chicago I also do half that milage in a year.

The numbers you've list show the Chicago family spending about $860 a month more than the Nashville family, assuming they went ahead and sprung for the $400,000 house and paid more taxes.

That's not nothing! Two working adults would each need to earn about $5,160 more per year in Chicago to make up for it. If you cared about nothing else than dollars and cents, there would need to be more or better job opportunities in Chicago to justify living here versus Nashville.

...unless that family owned one car in Chicago and needed two in Nashville. That single metric flips the cost benefit in Chicago's favor. Cars are extremely expensive!

Personally, I like visiting Nashville. And I really like the Smokey Mountains as a place for recreation. But it would take a LOT more than a few thousand dollars a year for me to give Chicago's airport connectivity and abundance of cultural activity (completely ignoring career prospects.) And in Chicago I say "hi" to my mailman when I'm walking my dog around 5:00. I walk to buy coffee in the morning or a bottle of wine for dinner, as needed, and don't need to get into a 6000 pound machine to do it. I walk to my dentist. In the summer, kids fill the sidewalk to buy stuff at the corner store when school gets out.

Even if I would save some money in Nashville or Northwest Indiana, there's a tremendous cost to replacing a walkable lifestyle with one that largely consists of trips from parking lot to parking lot. I have a couple friends who moved to the Detroit burbs for specifically this kind of financial calculation and are looking to move back to Chicago. They thought they would save some money, but both have ended up earning substantially less in Detroit than they expected and they hate that their life has been reduced to endless trips to Walmart or Target.

Absolutely. As Marothisu mentioned, everyone's situation is different. Incomes change over time, people have kids, cars are needed (or not), cars a paid off, homes are paid off, kids are off to college...etc. etc.


Hell, my situation is quite different today than it was when I first moved to Chicago. My wants and needs have changed over time also.

First of all, why are we comparing Chicago to Nashville?

I lived in Nashville for 4 years and sorry, it’s not for me. Not that it’s not booming and becoming better, but of course there are more factors than taxes.

By most important metrics, Chicago is a tier one global city, period. It’s got some serious problems that piss me off, but it should be compared with peers, not Nashville.

My point is never to say that Chicago is bad, but simply that it frustrates me that this city can’t do better. The issue with the haphazard and corrupt, and even unnecessarily punitive property tax system is something that CAN and SHOULD be remedied. It is driving away potential investment.

right.

but when the owner of a $3M home complains about his property taxes doubling, are you really shocked that most regular people just shrug their shoulders and say "tough shit, that's life"?

regular people have never, and will never give much of a shit about the "burdens" of being rich.

Handro isn't going to be the only one you'll accuse of being an ass. You mentioned $4900 in income taxes in Chicago (so the same as Illinois standard flat rate). So you're assuming well north of $200k/year income? In that case, why the hell are you worrying about relatively small differences in taxes anyhow, all things considered?

I swear, it's amazing what so many SSPers consider "typical" income figures nowadays. ;)

Aaron (Glowrock)

Good point. And even then there's more factors:

1) Yes, it's predicated on 20% down for financial institutions but each lender does allow you to put down less than 20% down in various circumstances. And the terms of that are always different per lender. For example, at the institution my wife has some money in, they didn't even require PMI if you put down more than 15% based on her account status and our credit scores. For where our joint money is (elsewhere) though, they wouldn't allow anything under 20% unless we showed that we have other liquid (or could become liquid) assets outside of our source able funds (even 401ks) that amounted to 18 months of our monthly mortgage+insurance+property taxes. And that limit was 15% so they wouldn't allow it under 15% - we would have gotten denied for our mortgage if we tried to go below 15% down.

For properties under a certain value various programs may allow pretty low down payments like 1.7%, 3%, 5%, etc. But then you'd have to pay monthly PMI which increases your costs for awhile anyway. And if you have a jumbo loan then a lot of lenders won't even allow anything below 20% and the ones who do maybe the minimum is still 15%. And most likely you'll be bidding against people with actual money which brings me to this next point...

2) In a hot market with multiple bidders on a property, a seller may actually pick a bid which puts even more money down. So you might have saved the ~$81K for a down payment but someone else may have committed to putting down $120K and the seller may go with them instead of you only because that buyer is putting more money down and you'll lose anyway despite having that money. Other factors obviously but it is something that sellers do factor in. Oh and don't forget about earnest money down. Being able to pay some $$ right away instead of waiting until closing is attractive to sellers/agents too.

I don't know, anyone who just thinks they're going to walk into a hot market even with the ability to pay 20% down and automatically win a bid has probably never purchased property before let alone in a hot market where they might be up against multiple other bidders for the same property. There's a reason why property values increase in various areas. It's supply and demand - and you get a few people bidding on a property, and an area has enough of that going on then voila - prices are going up.

The fact that people don't even see the current issues in some places right now as a supply/demand type of issue and are still blocking new housing development blows my mind.

Income taxes are 4.95% - not sure how you came up with $200K/yr. Just under $100K/yr in income is when you'd pay $4900/mo in income taxes in Illinois. Income taxes really aren't bad in Illinois anyway - there's really only a handful of states like Tennessee, Texas, Florida, etc with 0% that are lower. Especially at most low 6 figure incomes even South Carolina, Arkansas, etc are higher than Illinois.

well gross income for tax purposes is a bit lower (tax deferred things, since I assume people are saving for retirement, and pre-tax things like transit passes, not to mention exemptions), so it would probably have to be like 110k-120k to get to 4900/year. Not that it matters really.

But comparing salaries at UChicago to Vanderbilt suggests that a Nashville salary is ~80% of a Chicago salary.

Am not familiar with all the tax change discussions in IL but I believe I had seen the idea of exchanging some property tax for income tax bandied about in the media some years ago (which I believe someone suggested upthread). But I would think a graduated income tax would have offered more room for those kinds of creative changes.

Here you go. Property taxes by county for not only Illinois, but also the rest of the country. The map is interactive: https://taxfoundation.org/county-pro...tax-paid-2021/

I hadn’t seen one with the actual values paid and not just the percentages, much appreciated.

I can understand what you're saying.

The issue really shouldn't be framed as "rich people deserving sympathy" because obviously that would never sell well.

To me, it's about the impact this has on investment. Instability of any kind, particularly sudden and unexpected hikes in taxes, are going to discourage out of town investment in Chicago's real estate.

Furthermore, it will affect regular homeowners as well because their home values fail to climb. Being that a significant source of wealth for most people is their home, this is a bad thing that will harm a lot of people. There is a reason why metro Chicago continues to perform near the bottom of the Case Schiller home price index when compared to other metros in the country, and out of control property taxes is a major factor.

^ i totally get what your saying.

big picture, predictability is pretty important to just about everyone, regardless of economic class.

and i am certainly not here to defend cook county's asinine property tax situation.

this whole discussion about property taxes probably would have gone very differently if, instead of millionaires and investment property owners complaining about onerous property tax increases, it had been started by a plumber who owns a $300K bungalow over in portage park complaining about his property taxes going from $4,000 to $8,000 over the course of two years. that's a relatable situation to a FAR broader swath of regular people.

Per Mackensen

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^ Some time in the 80’s?

#1: early '90s when big stan was getting reclad

#2: mid '60s when marina city was U/C and close to topping out.

#3: early '70s, hancock ('69) is there, but no IBM ('73)

The corncobs are under construction in the last one. What was that older taller building like at Randolph and Michigan?

The Prudential Building?