Reply to Why is City of Baltimore stealing houses from Black residents?

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Why is City of Baltimore stealing houses from Black residents? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I know Baltimore pretty well. It's a black-run city, meaning the government and bureaucracy are almost entirely black. It's been like that since the 1970s. So it's hard to argue black residents were singled out based on race.

I don't know all the ins and outs of the case but I'm aware that for arrears, it's not just a case of paying back the owed taxes but you also pay interest and penalties, which can be quite stiff and quickly accumulate. The reason for why penalties exist is because it's to prevent people from playing games with taxes, deciding we'll pay taxes this year but skip next year as long as we catch up the following year. You can sort of do that with the city water bills but they're not letting anyone do that with property taxes and for good reasons!

I also don't doubt some people will try to play the data game to distort pictures. Saying black residents pay more for property taxes than whites with comparably valued houses is problematic because black and white Baltimoreans are largely apples and oranges. There's a huge poorer / working class black population but very few whites in that category because they all live in West Virginia now. I can easily see a situation where a lower educated poorer homeowner fails to take advantage of homestead tax credits while the city's white population, more affluent and higher educated, takes full advantage of it, and presto, you get "unequal" taxation despite that the homestead tax credit itself is hardly race-based. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics