Yet another reason not to live in New Jersey
MONTGOMERY, N.J. – Barbara Lehman has lived in this central New Jersey community for 30 years, but her time here is nearing an end.
She sent her children through Montgomery’s well-regarded schools. And she enjoys the rolling landscape even as housing developments have spread across it in recent years.
But her property taxes have climbed 56 percent since 2000 to a knee-buckling $14,000 a year — a heavy load for a high school French teacher whose salary goes up only about 3 percent a year.
“Oh, it’s terrible,” Lehman said.
Despite efforts by governors and lawmakers to do something about it, New Jersey has the highest property taxes in America — a burden that is alarming young couples and retirees alike and deepening public cynicism in a state with a long and rich history of graft and self-dealing.
The average property owner in the Garden State pays about $6,000 a year in property taxes, twice the national average.
Wow, pay a premium rate to live in New Jersey. Awesome.
(And yes, I’ve been there. That’s why it amuses me so much.)
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I live in Bergen County. It’s INSANE.
Comment by Typo Lad — August 14, 2006 @ 4:47
My folks place is now worth somewhere around $1.5 mil in Morris township on three acres, taxes are around 20-25k. You go to Mendham or Harding Township and that looks cheap.
…and honey…you haven’t really seen New Jersey until you’ve been to one of the nicer counties where now no-one can afford to live, not anyone in my tax bracket anyway. The taxes would not be so high if everyone still thought New Jersey looks like A) anything around NYC, B) “the shoreâ€?, which is laughable, C) the turnpike – which is where everyone wishes transplants had stayed instead of moving in and raising all the damn taxes.
Comment by KLS — August 14, 2006 @ 17:05