Steve D.: The property tax issue was the nail in the coffin.
Steve D. owned a 1,212 square foot, 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom Chicago Heights home that is currently assessed at $119,490.
Steve paid $30,777 in property taxes between 1999 and 2008.
“We moved to Indiana 12 years ago and bought a house twice as big as the house in Illinois and I only pay about $2,000 in property taxes,” Steve said.
Steve’s final tax bill in Illinois was 2,968 per year in property taxes on his home, about 2.4 percent of the Cook County Assessor claimed value of $119,490.
Steve’s final tax bill in Illinois was 2,968 per year in property taxes on his home, about 2.4 percent of the Cook County Assessor claimed value of $119,490.
“The tax rate was just so egregious,” Steve said. “The house was my father’s house and he was receiving a senior discount at the time, but if I had bought the house from him it would have been upward of $5,000 a year. My brother moved in and he was paying $4,000 to $5,000 while he lived there, but he has since moved and the house has been sold.”
Indiana has a hard 1 percent cap on property taxes. This means local governments are not allowed under state law to charge homeowner’s more than 1 percent of their home’s assessed value per year. The average property tax rate for the state of Indiana is 0.89 percent. Meanwhile, the average property tax rate in Illinois is 2.3 percent.
“The property tax issue was the nail in the coffin. It’s a shame because my father built that house and has been there since the beginning,” Steve said. “Property taxes were spent poorly. The schools in Chicago Heights were abysmal. Nothing changed. There are some problems that need to be fixed.”
Steve lives in Indiana. In Indiana, the most he could be charged in property taxes would be $1,194 per year or $1,774 less than what he previously paid in Illinois.
“Illinois needs to institute something like Indiana with the one percent hard cap,” Steve said.
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