Governments Are Still Stealing People’s Home Equity Over Modest Tax Debts
Sometimes politicians steal people’s homes.
Really.
If homeowners miss property tax payments, even if they never received the bills, some towns grab the whole house and keep the proceeds. All the proceeds. Even if the total is much more than the property tax owed.
I reported on this (mal)practice a couple years ago. Since then, there’s been good news from the Supreme Court.
But as my new video points out, some towns still steal homes.
Tawanda Hall was behind on her property taxes. For that, she lost her family’s $308,000 house—$286,000 more than what she owed.
When Hall first learned that Oakland County, Michigan, bureaucrats were seizing her home, she went to the mayor’s office to try to pay off her debt.
But “they didn’t want our money,” Hall tells me. “They wanted the house.…They stole our home.”
She didn’t even know she was behind on taxes: “We did not receive anything other than, ‘Get out.'”
Christina Martin, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation, says government officials routinely notify people in legalese so dense that the homeowner doesn’t understand what the town demands. “They have an incentive not to work with people who are honestly trying to pay.”
Martin took Hall’s case to court, claiming the county violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which ensures that private property can’t be taken for public use without just compensation.
But a Michigan judge dismissed her case because the government itself didn’t make a profit. Instead, the county gave her home to the Southfield Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, a private company. It then sold her house and kept most of the money.
“The government shouldn’t be able to steal from its own people and then give it to their friends,” says Martin.
“How
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