The mayor has been touting that Everett has the area’s second lowest single-family tax rate.
Such a statistic is all well and good, but is rather meaningless in a city populated largely by multi-unit structures such as 2, 3, and 6 family homes and dozens of multi-unit apartment houses.
The Everett single family home is a like a stranger in a strange land compared with the thousands of multi-unit homes dotting the crowded landscape here.
The lower tax rate for single family homes, and the attendant smaller tax bills is not what is driving older families out of the city.
It is the much higher tax bills facing multi-unit owners, as well as water bills that often constitute a new mortgage of sorts for multi-unit owners here.
It has grown extremely expensive for longtime Everett multi unit owners to pay the consistently larger tax bills for the properties, which is a result of the consistently rising tax assessments.
Single family owners are in great shape.
But there are so few of them that talk about low taxes here for residential properties is an illusion and not a fact.