Buying A House: C or D?

My county/city property tax combined for 2017 was $392.12.

My tax on my house in Brooklyn was I think $2500 a year but it tends to be lower in the city because of density and I had a small footprint. People move out of the city and pay those high taxes because the public schools are "better". I don't know since i don't have kids, but I am fine paying taxes for schools.

I bought in a part of Atlanta that's getting better each year, but is still slow/resistant to gentrification. That means the people who live here want to be here and aren't just flipping houses and moving on to the next hot neighborhood. The downside is that there's not a lot of cool stuff nearby and I have to drive into Atlanta proper for that, but the major upside is that I can afford to actually live within spitting distance of a major metropolitan area.

ours are $5200 per year, up from $4400 or so per year at the condo we lived in before this house. DC has really low property taxes, certainly lower than Maryland or Virginia, everybody in the suburbs assumes the opposite of course.

probably 2500-3000 a year here in Oregon, of course that's partly because of a property tax limitation ballot measure passed in the 90's that has totally fucked over the schools

Uh my wife tells me it was more like $7k in urblanda, ok I see why buyers were upset. That’s about how much in debt the bank « forgave » on our short sale.

When I buy a flat here it’ll probably cost a mil so we’re uh saving I guess.

$19K a year is probably on a very expensive house.

Not by NY metro standards. I think it's in the $600-700k range.

I was just told by my spouse that our apt here in Chile, the property tax is about $1000usd for the apt and parking space, paid separate from building maintenance.

my area generally has higher property taxes per square foot in the city, partially due to suburban leeching of resources and various political machinations. about $3500/year

Re: tree - no further discussion, no contact, no response. Anything else is just legitimising this guy trying to shake you down. Zero response is the only way to shut such people off. It's not his business, but he thinks he is negotiating with you when in fact he's not.

this is my preferred approach. What I think we'll end up doing is hiring a licensed arborist to prune all the trees on our lot, and give us some background data on rate of growth, maintenance etc. We want to make sure we are "reasonably maintaining" the trees by the standards of the law in case the neighbors want to proceed to get litigious with whatever fictions they cook up next.

Beyond that I'm going to make sure not to talk to them any more than is absolutely necessary.

What a fucking un-neighborly thing to do, it really stinks the more I think about it.

16 viewings in under a week. sick of hoovering right about now

my house was not expensive but the inner ring suburb i live in has very high taxes. i think we pay $5000 a year. still not as high as some other inner ring suburbs in cleveland

|||||| where are you looking

I've bought. I'm selling now, so having to keep the place super clean for viewings

ah got it

Keeping a house in showing shape is the worst. Even when we had an offer they still had open house, repeat showing until the contract was signed. I got my procedure of cleaning and putting personal items away clocked in under an hour.

We've been doing it with a baby and a 3-year-old. There's a LOT of crap to clear away before you can even Hoover

We are planning to not move until at least the littler one is in kindergarten (and we hence have no more childcare expenses). That dovetails nicely with the age at which they will probably stop drawing on walls and floors.

Also with a big clutter reduction (no more stroller, both will actually be old enough to do proper cleanup, etc)

old enough to do proper cleanup

hahahaha when is that exactly

judging from my own life, hopefully somewhere approaching age 40

https://i.imgur.com/sZdRkr7_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

sup

lol at my image idiocy

https://i.imgur.com/sZdRkr7_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

shrug

whoa is that your house mh? it looks spectacular!!

beautiful house

oh yeah really like that, that pic just makes me go "ahhhhh"

that me

painters finished yesterday but y’know, could always use a second coat on a couple spots

what's that nice big tree on the right

Someone spot me some cash for this https://chicago.curbed.com/2018/5/21/17377998/for-sale-lucien-lagrange-lincoln-park-condo

^ $3.2 million.

https://i.imgur.com/uLqQ3ys.jpg?1

Or $3.7 million without the wallpaper.

big tree is a maple. the property line goes right through the middle of it, and the trunk is pretty huge

it's gone from the dropping red buds part of the season to the dropping aerodynamic seed pods part

I actually kind of like that wallpaper? I don't know if I could handle living with it day-to-day though

cleaning that mirror frame, that's the thing

We've got a tree on our property line too. In fact ~*takes a deep breath*~ it's growing through one of the fence planks, warping it enough to where the dogs can touch noses through the space in between.

This of course would be one of the fences not replaced 100% by one of my neighbors. In fact, it's a rental, so unless I want to drive up to Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., and knock on the owners' door, dogs are going to be touching noses for awhile.

noice, mh

i chucked strollers, bouncers, etc in my car for viewings

Dogs touching noses is awesome and harmless; why fix what ain't broke?

Everything in my neighborhood dates from 1938 or so; everything is very lived-in and entangled. None of my feared awkwardnesses about property-line trees and fence ownership have come to pass.

I highly recommend giving people bottles of wine and inviting them to barbecues.

I need to have that walk that goes from the sidewalk to my front porch torn out and replaced. The aforementioned giant tree has sent roots underneath it and it's all over the place.

Was that the tree that messed up your pipes?

Another reason why tree damage is on you if it's on your property. Is Sparkle's neighbor going to dig up the neighborhood to go Aha! It's your tree's roots that did this!

i love the colors you chose mh

i'm doing this thing, closing on thursday morning! very excited!! my little ranch home in the city

thanks, marcos!

and yeah, that tree is the main one that was growing into my sewer pipe. it's a hardy old rascal

i wish we had bigger trees on our property. we have two hickories (i think?) that are 20-30 ft in the back and that's it. we have a lot of other trees but they are all really young - river birch, tulip, maple, horse chestnut, magnolia, one of those cool tricolor beeches. in 10-20 years our yard will be amazing but right now there is nothing big. there are some big silver maples in neighboring yards though

I had a huge tree in the parking area (or whatever you call the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street in your locale) but it had a rotting hollow in it and the city removed it after I had them check it out a few years back. I still miss it a little because my house faces the west and the sun really hits it in the evening now

I only recently checked my house on google street view (mapped in july of 2011) and noticed that there was a tree in the front yard and two in the grass strip that were taken down some time in the last seven years and I got kind of sad about that, even though I never experienced them and honestly they probably would have blocked a lot of sunlight in a bad way and made our living room much too dark.

Speaking of dark living rooms, I finally painted our living room yesterday after living with a horrible yellow color for 9 months and holy shit my wife and I are terrible picking paint colors. Every single time, without fail, we pick a color that's way darker on the walls than we expect or want it to be. We looked at like a dozen swatches, taped a bunch of them to the walls and looked at them in all sorts of light, and specifically eliminated all the ones that seemed even slightly too dark. And still it went wrong.

xp we call it the "tree lawn" here. in high school, a friend of mine wrote a very clever college application essay, the assignment for which was "look outside your window. what is one thing you would change, and why?" and his essay was very witty and smart but had a punchline that used the word "tree lawn" and he didn't know it was a regional term. i don't know if he got into that school.

xp oh yeah, swatches are decent for guesswork, but getting testers is where it's at

it's like, why am I wasting money and materials on a little container of paint that's not even the right type, but I narrow things down to three or four colors, get samples, and then just make stripes on the wall and let them dry

ime the sample pots can still come out different from the actual tin

it's very important to use the same kind of paint from a particular brand.
For example if you pick a typical Benjamin Moore color and pick the same sheen, it will look different between Ben, Regal, Regal Select, and Aura due to the additives in the paint. Also if you're going from a color to a color and don't prime first you'll have a hell of a time getting good results. Lastly, high-chroma colors always need 2 more coats than you think they will.

I’m a huge dumbass and thought I’d give painting a new mailbox I bought a go with the latex house paint. I just determined how much of a bad idea that was when I was able to peel all the paint off it in one big piece.

doing inside painting, just splurge for the “paint+primer” in one can every time imo