Our Land Reassessments

One day two weeks ago, all the property owners in this tiny rural Virginia county of about 13,000 simultaneously opened a piece of mail that immediately drew their full attention, and in most cases this interest was accompanied by genuine shock. It was a notice from the county government showing the results of the latest land assessment, which is done every five years.

My notice was probably typical. Already in the last reassessment, done in 2003, the 20 acres on which my wife and I live had been judged to be worth three times what we had paid for it in 1976, 27 years earlier. Now, in 2008, what the county is calling the “fair market value” of our land has jumped up to being four times what it was only five years ago, or 12 times what we paid for it only a generation back!

To me, and I think to most others of my neighbors throughout the county, this news is on the crazy side, and I wish there was some way I could simply ignore it, but I can't, because of one cold, hard fact. This means that, through no fault of our own, our property taxes are going to go up again, and maybe pretty sharply this time, unless the four county supervisors do something about the tax rates that will make things bearable.

I've been asking around to some of my nearest friends and neighbors, and they've had the same reactions, and I think most people are waiting for the hearings on the rates to begin, though provisions also exist for them to question the assessments. Almost all have had an increase of about four times in the land value, while on our houses the jump averages a little less than twice as much as the value set in 2003, leading to a total jump of about two and a half times. Still, I am struck by the fact that they're saying that my little wooden house that I built myself – I mean really really built myself and not with the use of contractors, as many people, using the language sloppily as usual, have done when they claim to have built their houses “themselves” -- this 1,400 square foot “green oak” house with one bathroom and two bedrooms, that I built myself for only the $15,000 cost of the materials and the septic tank, is now officially worth eight times that.

Though it is typical of these uncomfortable times, this is a troubling development. At least it is in my case and in those of two of my neighbors on this road, who also bought some acres here and built their houses with their own hands at exactly the same time as I, and likewise still heat their modest abodes with wood.

Some would say that instead we should jump up and down with joy, at seeing how the presumed market value of our property has risen so sharply.

The kicker, however, is that when we bought our land, its monetary appreciation was among the least of our considerations, and even now we have no intentions of ever selling it. Instead we saw our land as a great place on which we and our families could build a house and live for the rest of our lives, peacefully and humbly, with enough surrounding woods to look at, to explore, to insulate ourselves from more than just the wind, and to furnish fuel to keep warm in frigid winters like the current one, and in the meantime we could provide a good stewardship over that land, doing our bit to keep it in nearly the same wondrous state as nature had maintained it through the eons. We thought we and the land were safe from certain unpleasant forces that we had already seen rolling over the cities and the suburbs. We thought we were protected, deep in the howling wilderness, for at least the next hundred years. And for 32 years we enjoyed exactly that kind of assurance.

But notice that I didn't say “insurance.”

Now the real howling wilderness, of “investment,” with all its accompanying threats, has stepped up its pace and is coming after us, with a vengeance.

Meanwhile it's interesting that one of the meanings of “invest” is “to surround with troops or ships (as in a siege), so as to prevent escape or entry.” .