The Washington REALTORS® provided the following statement on the state House and Senate proposals to lift the state’s 1 percent property tax cap:
At a time when opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Washingtonians overwhelmingly cite the high cost of living as their top concern, legislators in Olympia have proposed the exact wrong solution to address it. Raising property taxes would be disastrous for many Washington households, whether they are renters or homeowners.
The cost of housing requires serious legislative attention. Our state’s homeownership rates are below the national average, in large part because the median home price in Washington is $200,000 above the national median price and is among the very highest in the nation. Median home prices were among many costs that rose sharply for Washingtonians during the pandemic, having increased more than 50 percent since 2020.
It is baffling that lawmakers would consider lifting the property tax cap of 1% and intentionally adding upwards of a billion dollars or more in costs to the already skyrocketing cost of housing. The House proposal allows property tax increases to triple. This is bad enough, but the Senate proposal is far worse, allowing property taxes to increase by an unlimited and unknowable amount from year to year.
For example, the Senate’s proposal would allow property taxes to quadruple in both Seattle and Spokane. In fact, in Spokane alone, had this proposal been in place during the pandemic – at a time when families were already struggling mightily with rising costs across the board – homeowners’ property taxes would have increased 8 times as much as they actually did in 2021, more than 7 times as much as they did in 2022, and more than 5 times as much as they did in 2023.
In the coming days, we will release an analysis of the impact of these proposals in communities all across the state. We also note that seniors are not held harmless by these proposals, as seniors would still absorb massive increases at the local level.
“The Washington REALTORS® strongly urges lawmakers to abandon these unfair, unmodest, and most certainly unpopular proposals,” said Washington REALTORS® president John Blom. “If lawmakers increase the state’s property tax, our membership will assess all alternatives at our disposal to help protect the affordability of housing in our state.”
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