Property taxes enforce economic segregation

And it doesn't only affect one race.

http://clatl.com/freshloaf/archives/2015/09/29/what-gentrification-looks-like-on-georgias-coast

By Rodney Carmichael
Sept. 29, 2015

The word gentrification, loaded though it may be, is typically reserved to describe the displacement affecting longtime residents of the inner city. But the New York Times' Atlanta bureau chief Kim Severson has uncovered a similar cultural shift happening in a less predictable corner of the state.

For the Sept. 25, 2012 news feature "Taxes Threaten an Island Culture in Georgia," Severson traveled to Sapelo Island's Hog Hammock, where the remaining population of the Geechee culture hovers around 50. Of the residents she talked to, one family's property taxes on the one acre of land that houses their three-bedroom tin-roof home jumped 540 percent in one year — from $362 to $2,312.

These Creole-speaking descendants of slaves have long held their land as a touchstone, fighting the kind of development that turned Hilton Head and St. Simons Islands into vacation destinations. Now, stiff county tax increases driven by a shifting economy, bureaucratic bumbling and the unyielding desire for a house on the water have them wondering if their community will finally succumb to cultural erosion.

“The whole thing just smells,” said Jasper Watts, whose mother, Annie Watts, 73, still owns the three-room house with a tin roof that she grew up in.


It almost resembles genocide more than gentrification, but county officials blame it on years of bad management and artificially low property values finally being corrected.

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