69°
66º | 77°
57° | 69°
As I have previously shared with you, when Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo claimed that the Commissioners’ Court was raising property taxes by 8%. Her statement was, to put it nicely, untrue. Tax bills for Harris County began going out shortly after Thanksgiving and many homeowners are seeing jaw-dropping increases. Of course, each homeowner’s tax bill is highly dependent on their individual circumstances, but on average, the increase may be the largest ever imposed by a local government in Texas. Here are the numbers.
The Commissioners’ Court set the tax rate for four entities: the County, the Hospital District, the Flood Control District, and the Port Authority. Here are the increases in the tax rate for each:
This shows that the tax rate for these four entities increased by 14% in just one year. To be fair, voters narrowly approved the Flood Control District's increase, although I wonder if they would have done so, had Hidalgo not lied to them about how much their Harris County taxes were really going up.
But the Flood Control portion of the County’s tax bill is a relatively minor portion. Even if we eliminate the Flood Control District’s rate increase, the increase in the rate that was imposed by the Commissioners’ Court was still over 11%.
So, there was no universe in which the tax increase was only going to be 8%, as Hidalgo promised.
But it gets worse because your actual tax bill is the product of the tax rate and the taxable value of your property. According to the last report from HCAD, the taxable value of the average home in Harris County is up by just over 3% this year. Because of the compounding effect, the average homeowner will see a nearly 15% increase in their actual county tax bill this year.
Commissioners’ Court was primarily able to cram down this onerous tax increase by using a loophole that allows local governments to exceed the State imposed limits in the case of the declaration of an emergency (Derecho and Hurricane Beryl). The Court also used several other exceptions to the State limit available to it in previous years but was blocked by the two Republican commissioners boycotting the meeting called to set the tax rate.
Harris County was not the only jurisdiction that jumped on the tax-raising bandwagon. Almost 100 other taxing entities in Harris County raised their tax rates. However, several large jurisdictions held their tax rate even with the City of Houston and Houston ISD being the most notable.
Some homeowners will see truly eye-popping increases, especially if they live in a jurisdiction that raised taxes like Harris County and had a large valuation increase. HCAD raised the value of the home of a friend of mine by 10% this year. He lives in the Houston Community College District, which raised its tax rate by 4.3%. His total tax bill was nearly 18% higher than last year. This is the five-year history of his tax bill from the Tax Assessor-Collector:
You will notice that his tax bill declined in the previous two years, due to the property tax relief passed by the Texas Legislature. However, in his case, local governmental entities have clawed back about half of that relief.
By the way, the five-year history for your home is included on the back of your tax bill or you can access it on the County Tax-Assessor’s website by looking up your property and then clicking the blue button in the left-hand margin titled “5 Year Account History.”
This year’s tax increases came on top of an average increase of over 10% last year because even though a taxing entity did not raise its tax rate, HCAD increased the average home value by that amount. As I noted in my earlier post on this topic, wages in the Houston region have been rising for the last five years at a 3.9% annual rate. So, Harris County’s taxes over the last two years have risen roughly four times higher than wages.
Recent polls have shown the growing frustration of young people, in particular, at the unaffordability of owning a home. The combination of a storage of single-family homes, high interest rates, and spiraling insurance costs and taxes has simply made it impossible for many young people to purchase a home.
Many attribute this frustration to the trend of many younger Americans abandoning the Democratic Party in favor of more populist candidates. However, many of our local officials, and especially some on Harris County Commissioners’ Court, do not seem to recognize that they are contributing to this home affordability crisis with their obsession with ever-larger budgets fueled by ever-higher property taxes. Perhaps Harris County voters will help them make that connection in the next election.