The recent publication of 33,000 names of those who have abandoned real estate-homes, apartment houses, industrial and commercial buildings, etc., are the manifestations of an enormous impending catastrophe, of which our elected officials are either ignorant or indifferent to.
Mayor Daley has said that 500 pieces of real estate go off the tax rolls every month. That means the real estate tax base diminishes by 6,000 every year and, in consequence, the county has to make unfair and extortionate real estate tax increases of 100 percent, 150 percent and more. To impose a 100 percent property assessment increase in light of today`s deflating real estate market is nothing but cold, calculated fraud that merely hastens the day of reckoning.
It is like a man paddling a canoe who hears the sounds of a terrible waterfall around the bend, and instead of paddling upstream, he paddles even more furiously downstream.
Thirty-three-thousand property owners paying an average of $1,500 per year would mean $50 million for the insatiable local government coffers-all of which a shrinking tax base is expected to make up. And yet, our mayor says he`s going to raise property taxes again next year. Isn`t it about time someone started paddling upstream?
