Other notable declines occurred in major metros like Austin, Boise, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Los Angeles – all of which saw their median home price shed at least $60,000 since April of last year.
San Francisco and Oakland both saw price drops into six figures with the median value decreasing by $220,000 and $174,000 respectively.
I was speaking to a friend who lives in the Minneapolis area. She commented on how home prices in her town were still high with limited supply, but she knew of people moving out of Minneapolis proper who were losing their shorts on their homes. People are sick of the crime and are fleeing. Unfortunately, like what happened in Chicago, there are fewer and fewer people who care about crime living in these cities. What’s left are people who will continue to vote for Marxists who will continue to encourage the carnage with pro-criminal policies. The cities are in a death spiral.
The trap that we must avoid is to bail these cities out. They have made a choice. They should deal with the consequences. There is no rational reason for people who made better choices in other communities to send their hard-earned money to be flushed down the crime sewer.
There is no rational reason for people who made better choices in other communities to send their hard-earned money to be flushed down the crime sewer.
Correct.
But WE don’t make those decisions. Politicians do, and they are inclined to support other politicians who are in danger of revolt. See, e.g., Robin Vos and LaMahieu. After all, it’s not THEIR money.
That is a nice joke. How about the city of Milwaukee stop bailing out every small city in WI with the shared revenue? Every year MIL sends 500M more and yet has the money sent back has actually declined over the past decade. How about the rest of the state keep their nose out of Milwaukee’s business and allow them to raise their taxes if they choose, and NOT tie it to idiotic policies that they don’t require in any other city in the state. Arrest quotas? Transportation restrictions? School liaison officers! If Milwaukee wants to raise its taxes based on a county vote, LET THEM. Instead we have politicians from all over the state deciding Milwaukee’s fate and future!
Milwaukee & Madison are the areas that DRIVE this state.
C’mon, man!
Friends living in northern Mequon are irate because they’ve recently discovered the need to not leave the chillin’s bicycles in the front yard overnight and also not leave their clubs unattended next to the Land Rover in the driveway in broad daylight. Became doubly irate when the local LEOs refused to get excited about their losses. They thought they had moved away from all that stuff. They pay taxes, dammit! They’re wanting to blame professional criminals coming up out of Milwaukee (maybe), as if their local hooligans are above such sticky-finger commerce. Meh, it’s everywhere.
>Milwaukee & Madison are the areas that DRIVE this state.
Oh we agree with you on that. Many of us just add ‘more’s the pity’ to the end of the comment.
I would be ecstatic to give Milwaukee its own tax control…when they leave or the State abandons the revenue sharing programs propping them up. If you think Milwaukee actually pays more of the shared revenue burden than it gets back, you don’t look up jack. Take a look at the WI-DOR shared revenue bar graph for 2022 for the top thirty payments to municipalities/counties. City of Milwaukee is number one gathering over a quarter of the total dollars. Mke Cty is #2, with City of Racine a distant third. So Milwaukee has about 10% of the state population and gets over 1/3 of shared revenue dollars. With the least effective yet most expensive school system, Mke Cty paid about 220M of the 11.2 billion collected in property taxes in 2020. Fortunately for them, that tax money is not paid back out locally, it is doled back out through the State. They get money from the rest of the state through a waterfall of State programs and when they get more they spend it…on themselves as often as not.
JonnyV, the nicest joke would be giving Milwaukee county more money WITHOUT strings attached. What do ‘Milwaukee leaders’ have to do to finally lose your trust? One might think taking hundreds of millions of State and local money through pension mismanagement and then making it illegal to put it right, might have been enough. One might think beggering themselves (the city, not their pockets of course) and now working on beggering the State might be enough. But no, as long as it is just spending money, the Dem followers are fine, for some reason. You never say no to Dem spending. You might disagree here and there, but you never say no, do you? It doesn’t matter the Party, epic level graft should never be okay and it should be fixable. The Government takes away from me every day, but it can’t take money back from the thieves who are still stealing it? Concerning money, Libs are especially incomprehensible to me.
T. Are you REALLY talking about a pension scandal from the year 2000? The one that they “fixed” in 2006 (for new employees). It was a long time ago, but I believe that the courts ruled that you couldn’t take away the pension from those who received it. Or maybe it was established law. I was in college, so I wasn’t paying much attention to it other than the headlines back then. “Punishing” or holding that against the city when NONE of the people responsible for that are in power any longer, nor have they been for a long time is slightly insane.
The pensions are still weighing down the budget for Milwaukee. But there has been nothing they can do for the past 15 years with that. Just wait for people to retire and die.
What I am saying is that the state should allow the County & City to raise taxes if approved by the voters. They should NOT have any say in that. And I think it should be that way for any city in the state.
And you ask when will I stop supporting Democrats? Maybe when I hear an honest Republican who actually has a realistic plan and isn’t trying to shove their religious beliefs down everyone’s throat.
If the State wants to let Milwaukee politicians paint themselves even further into a corner they should seriously consider allowing both City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County bridled taxing authority, but only after presenting tax proposals to voters by binding referendum. No voter approval, no tax increases or new tax creation. The tradeoff for that new taxing authority should be a corresponding reduction of shared revenue from the state. Requiring Milwaukee pols to suddenly become responsive to Milwaukee voters is not a bad thing. Making it more difficult to pick pockets is not a flaw.
They’ll never go for such a proposal simply because they know they don’t have the skill set for the rapid assumption of such massive responsibility. Their good governance toolbox is fairly empty. It’s so much easier to blame everyone else for not saving you from yourself.
the state should allow the County & City to raise taxes if approved by the voters.
Exactly the position of Robin Vos.
Now, then. What “religious belief” is buried in the tax proposal, pal? Please provide documentation and/or links.
holding that against the city when NONE of the people responsible for that are in power any longer
Nobody is “holding it against” Henry Maier, nor the very corrupt Tom Ament–nor Norquist, nor the totally useless Tom Barrett. However, the City of Milwaukee CONTINUES to suck down out-State tax dollars. IOW, the City (and the County) are draining resources that other towns, villages, and cities could use to repair roads, pay and/or acquire cops, purchase new equipment……
Put it this way: I won’t hold anything against the corrupt-o-crats if they stop taking our money.
>nor the very corrupt Tom Ament
You mean F. Tom Ament.
>“Punishing” or holding that against the city when NONE of the people responsible for that are in power any longer,
Nice word play just one sentence after claiming such little knowledge the situation.
>I was in college, so I wasn’t paying much attention to it other than the headlines back then.
You lie so much you don’t even realize it.
JV, are you seriously saying that Milwaukee has not been badly mismanaging money in the 22 years since? Would you like a list? I just picked the most famous and the most common reason cited for Milwaukee’s CURRENT woes. It was by no means the only reason Milwaukee is drowning in a sea of debt. And the 2006 ‘fix’ still has some of the best payment packages in the country, if you account for regional cost of living. The ‘fix’ did not improve Milwaukee’s money problems even 22 years later? Some fix.
>What I am saying is that the state should allow the County & City to raise taxes if approved by the voters. They should NOT have any say in that.
I am a bit mixed on this, to be honest. First, as both I and Merlin already pointed out, it should come with a significant drop in shared revenue. The ‘driver of the State’ should be the greatest contributor, not the greatest drain to a shared revenue program. Other than that, I would normally be 100% for a city to impose its own tax levels, but a couple of factors rein in my enthusiasm in this case:
Milwaukee officials prove every day that they are not fiscally responsible. Giving them unlimited access to SE WI pocketbooks is an obviously bad idea, because let’s face it, the final regulations will have myriad ways to get around referendums which politicians are already bridling against as the idea is being considered. They don’t want any strings attached, but they have proven they need them over and over. Not every city, town and village need those strings. You only put an ankle bracelet on a criminal you need to keep track of, not every citizen.
A ‘driver of the State’ will have a lot of goods, services, etc that people in the State may not otherwise have access to. When Milwaukeeans screw it up and give their politicians ridiculous taxation rights, it will harm the entire region. So I feel that myself and others that live in SE WI absolutely could and should have some level of say in what taxation rights the idiot Milwaukee Government offices should have. I want strings! All kinds of strings!
T, that is where you and I differ. I am still a Milwaukee Co resident (no longer a City resident recently after 25 years). I believe that people should be deciding their own tax rates. I don’t want it given to the politicians, it needs to be run thru the people and a vote. And I would be OK with automatic sunsetting of taxes after X number of years.
I don’t know if I would tie that to the shared revenue or not, it isn’t something I have really thought about. It kinda feels like you would be defeating the purpose of additional taxes then. Maybe some sort of proportional association.