Tread lightly and fly under the radar

Yesterday, I paid my property taxes. Close to $7000, and rising. I can’t afford this.

Yesterday, I also ran across the Fab Prefab website, which carries news about avant-garde prefab housing.

Growing up in Chicago–and then leaving–gave me an appreciation for good architecture. There’s so much good architecture in Chicago, and so little around Austin, that it became conspicuous by its absence. I’ve always loved the traditional townhouses around Chicago, but Buckminster Fuller’s Wichita House, which I first learned of back in college, has always struck me as something special, and the stuff featured at Fab Prefab is in that same spirit.

Another interesting aspect of many of the projects featured there is that they qualify as mobile homes. The way property tax works, some of the tax is on the land itself, but in most cases, more than half is on the “improvements” (ie, fixed structures). A mobile home doesn’t count as an improvement–I’m not sure what the make-or-break criterion is, but my guess is that it would be a fixed foundation.

I’m very attracted to the idea of a futuristic pod-home that lets me avoid perhaps two-thirds of my property taxes. Obviously there’s an ethics question here. I will let Socrates and Achilles debate this for me:

Socrates Is it ethical to work the system this way when most schmucks are paying their fair share?

Achilles When you put it that way, no. Then again, there’s nothing stopping other people from doing the same.

Socrates If everybody did that, then the school system would go bankrupt. After all, it’s property taxes that pay for the schools.

Achilles And why is that, anyhow? I always thought that was unfair, as the level of taxation is not tied to one’s ability to pay. People of modest means get priced out of their homes. (And about those schools–I gotta tell ya, we’re not getting our money’s worth out of them.)

Socrates Well, that’s not very fair either, I guess. But they knew the way the system worked when they bought, so they’ve got nothing to complain about.

Achilles What about renters? Landlords just pass through their property-tax increases, so unless you are a bum, there’s no way to completely escape property taxes.

Socrates I concede the point. Still, where’s the money going to come from if everybody lives in mobile dwellings, even if they’re only nominally mobile?

Achilles Well, the state could pass a state income tax.

Socrates You know that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Achilles Yeah…

Socrates So in the meantime, do you think you can ethically avoid your tax burden this way?

Achilles Well, yes. If the taxing authorities decide they don’t like it, they can close the loophole. In the meantime, it’s there, and I’m under no obligation to pay as much in taxes as possible.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

5 thoughts on “Tread lightly and fly under the radar”

  1. O kinodoku ne (re the heinous tax bill).

    Oh, it’s TOTALLY ethical. If you choose to live in a more modest, low-end dwelling, why should you not be exempt from a chunk of tax. And if pod homes catch on widely, and tax revenue drops commensurately, then in order to support the school system we will need to develop NEW PARADIGMS, which given the fucked-up state of school financing we obviously have needed to do for a long time anyway.

  2. No comments on the tax thing; just reading my W-2 and am too pissed off to talk about taxes. However, I want to thank you for the link to the prefab building site, and from there, I got to a site called MemeCentral that is really great. Two new things to explore.

  3. Thanks for the URL, Adam. Hopefully this site will grow w/ the prefab market. The darling publication of the modernist DIY set, Dwell magazine, is a big prefab supporter. They have a nearly content free website, but their magazine is full of elegant, inexpensive ideas. And expensive ideas.

    They have an annual prefab design contest where a lucky person actually gets a house built from the plans of the winning design; sadly the site seems to have been removed. It was dwellhome.com, I think. Last year’s winner was Resolution 4, which used stacked rectangular boxes to good effect. Their winning design is at http://www.re4a.com/modern-modular/dwell-home.html. Turns out that they went overbudget, and are working with the owner/builders on reducing costs. But I like the idea: Build the boxes in a factory, then assemble on site.

    I sympathize with your $7k tax bill. You are indeed paying for the location. Austin taxes are a tad over the top for services rendered. I like the idea of a pod home, aka disguised mobile, but I’m willing to bet that there are a few building code laws preventing you from building that in most residential areas in Austin. I’m not up on Austin as of ’97, but when I left, you still had problems building straw bale houses inside the city limits. It wasn’t impossible, but difficult. How is it now?

  4. Dave–

    I really have no idea what the regulatory issues surrounding a manufactured and transportable home on an (otherwise) empty lot would be, but I suspect they’d be completely unrelated to the issues of building a haybale house. The latter, I suspect, gets nailed on fire-safety questions and the like; the former–since it probably isn’t even classified as a house–would fall under a completely separate regulatory heading.

    There may well be other rules regarding what can go where–neighborhood plans may bar something like what I’ve got in mind–and the whole subject is something I’d need to research.

  5. Since you live near me, I doubt very much that 1/2 or even 2/3 of your property taxes is for improvements. It appears that TCAD likes to inflate the improvement portion and deflate the land portion, when you compare to similar homes in other neighborhoods of the city. But even with TCAD’s current numbers, my split (on a very nice house for the street) is about 60% land, 40% house.

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