Welcome to ChicagoPropertyTaxes.com. This site is not operated by any governmental authority whatsoever and cannot offer any help with your own property taxes. This site has been posted as a warning to anyone who is thinking of buying a home in Chicago, where in many areas, homeowners have been subject to staggering property tax increases of one-hundred percent and more in spite of an alleged seven-percent property tax cap instituted in 2004. People are actually being taxed out of their homes and I am one of them.
The property taxes on my crappy 110 year-old, frame two-flat, which I had to sell because I couldn't afford them anymore, went from $1,547.61 to $11,192.46 in just 13 years! That's a 623 percent increase. And consider this, if you were to buy a home with only $6,000 in current taxes, in another 13 years they would be $43,380 at that rate. Do you think you'd be able to afford that? Probably not. And don't think it can't happen. I didn't think it could either.
And what's even more incredible is that Chicago always seems to have one kind of financial crisis or another. Except during election years, of course. How those jackass politicians can take in such huge amounts of money and still claim poverty is just mind-boggling.
Anyway, if you decide to buy a home in Chicago and later find that your pay raises can't keep up with the skyrocketing property taxes in addition to a mortgage anymore, you can't say you didn't know about it. Oh, well, you can always live on cat food if you'd like. Mmmmm, yummy cat food!
If you're on dial-up these two pages might take awhile to download.
Click here to see my 1990 tax bill.
Click here to see my 2003 tax bills.
If you have a site and would like to link to mine, go ahead and knock yourself out.
This site first posted on December 27th, 2007.