Let’s continue on with the show. We got to go over into the money, y’all. We got to get to the money. Let’s talk about Chicago. I want to spend 10 minutes on Chicago, and I want to have a conversation about property tax hikes. Y’all ready? Let’s get to it. A dramatic increase in property taxes in Chicago’s South and Southwest suburbs has homeowners howling, and today some of them got a chance to vent at the man who assesses those properties. We don’t know how to sell those houses. You might call it property tax sticker shock.

South Suburban residents gathering today at the Homewood Auditorium to hear from Cook County Assessor Fritz Kagee, who says he sympathizes with their frustration. You do not need to hire a lawyer to make an appeal. Actually, people who appeal on their own were slightly more successful last year than people who hire lawyers for representation. A study by Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas of the property tax bills mailed out last month show that on average homeowners in the South and Southwest suburbs saw their property tax bills jump nearly 20 percent, the highest increase in 30 years.

But for others, it’s even worse. Could y’all imagine, listen, listen, you own your home, or maybe you don’t even own your home. Maybe you bought a home because I don’t believe that people truly own their home until they paid off their mortgage. As a matter of fact, I’ll go so far as to say, I don’t believe that people ever own a home. You’re leasing from the state. You’re leasing from the county. You’re leasing from your city, because if you don’t pay your property taxes within the first or whatever, or if it laps over a period of two to three years, they can then take your home and then list it and sell it at auction.

And as people, it’s wolves. It’s wolves at the door that is ready to take your property and then resell it or flip it or live in it and take it right from under your feet. So regardless of whether or not you pay it off your mortgage or you buy the house, because now mortgage companies, they’re not even giving you a chance. They’re including it in whatever your mortgage is. So when you go and buy your own at a very basic level, it’s three things that you have to pay attention to. They’re going to require you to have homeowners insurance.

If you put less than 20% down, you’re going to have to pay PMI, which is private mortgage insurance, which is the dumbest thing that anybody can do, because people will justify and say, well, I was able to get into a home. I was able to get into the home. But here’s the problem with that. You’re paying for insurance just in case you default. PMI is a scam. It’s to protect the lender from you defaulting because you put down less than 20%. So you’re just wanting to get into the property to say, hey, I’ll have a mortgage.

I don’t have, I don’t pay rent. I got a mortgage. You’re giving away more free money in addition to the interest that you’re giving over to the bank, especially within the first 10 to 15 years, you’re giving over more free money. That’s not actually going into the principal. So you’re hoping that the property appreciate, but you’re not taking into consideration the true cost of owning the property, which includes maintenance. And then the second thing, right? In addition to the mortgage, which is the property taxes. So now they’re including insurance and escrow the property taxes.

And if you undervalue or you underpay the escrow, they then going to send you an additional bill to cover the difference. And this man is getting property tax bills. That’s basically saying they jump in 86% over in Cook County, 86% in Cook County. Could you imagine your property taxes jumping 86 months? We’ll just say a hundred percent. So you paying double what you were paying the year before in property taxes. And you know why they doing it? Do you know why that they’re raising your property taxes over in Cook County? Because a lot of y’all say, Oh no, we love Chicago.

We never leave it in time. You’re not really being fair to what’s going on over in Chicago and tell you not being nice. Show Chicago some love. Stop trying to hold us accountable for things that we do and blah, you know why they doing that? Because they mismanaged the money. And whenever you start to mismanage the money, you can go to the well. That’s what the church do. The church is no different than Cook County and your assessor’s office because they’re going to justify it by saying, well, the value of the property actually continues to go up.

So we’re going to reassess and then give you a reissued bill. And you so dumb that you happy to pay them because you want to feel good about what’s written on paper. You so dumb that you want to pay them and you want to pay more than you have to. And so, but at least my property value went up. You have no realized gains, no real realized gains. At least my property went up. You don’t even know how to play the game. You don’t even understand his real estate game. You’ve been taking courses and you’ve been buying five and $10,000 courses instead of jumping into the bag chasers and getting it for practically for free and rocking out with a group of people that can really break down exactly what’s going on with this real estate game.

And so you don’t understand it. So now, because you can’t afford it, that’s when you start to feel the pain. You say, Oh man, 86% property tax bill. Yo, that man got a $10,000 property tax bill that is due. And if he’s late, it goes up another $150, $200. In two of the towns, Dixmore and Phoenix, property taxes have more than doubled. Gigi told the crowd that taxes have been rising faster in the south suburbs because the industrial base has been drying up. They are raising your taxes because the industrial base is drying up.

Retails getting hit by online shopping and the COVID crisis extracted a bigger toll. So what they’re telling you, listen, listen, they’re telling you out of their own miles. Cook County, the assessor’s office, and this is not just in Chicago or Illinois. This is happening all across the country. What they’re telling you is this. We mismanaged. We didn’t plan effectively. We don’t have enough money to actually fund the things as meaningful to you. We gave them a lot of money over to the migrant crisis. We’re trying to plug holes in the bill. We knew that we didn’t have enough money.

We knew that we couldn’t project this accurately. We don’t have enough police officers. Your schools is going to suffer because teachers can’t get raises. You know how y’all always asking a dumb question. How come teachers don’t make more money? How come teachers, teachers should be getting paid when the athletes get paid? Well, guess what? You don’t want to pay them. See, entertainment works differently because you get what you can negotiate. So when a WNBA loses $50 million a year, between $10 to $50 million a year, then that means it has to be subsidized by the NBA.

And then the people that actually watch or subscribe or go to the games or buy the jerseys are the one that pay for the salaries of the players that’s negotiated with the players union. But see, it worked differently with the teachers because the teachers are being paid by the city that comes out of your property taxes. So if you wonder why the teachers ain’t getting paid more, that’s because you don’t want to pay more in property taxes. When you wonder why your schools are underfunded, that’s because you don’t want to pay more in property taxes.

When you wonder why your community college and the cost for a credit costs more, that’s because you don’t want to be paying for your property taxes. See, the property taxes directly affect what happens in your community, but you don’t think it’s important for you to vote even on a local level to determine what happens. So now when you get that 86% increase in your property taxes, don’t sit here and start complaining to the assessor’s office. You didn’t vote in the right leadership that ultimately can manage your money effectively. See, it’s all trickle down.

It’s all a trickle down effect, but you don’t want to have that conversation because you think that you know better than me. You know better than me. I ain’t voting because ain’t nothing going to change anyway. Yeah, I bet that property tax bill going to change. I bet when my mom get kicked out of her house and she started going to the church and saying, law, please, send me a miracle, Jesus. And in the past I’ll say, listen, baby girl, I know you’ve been paying ties and offerings here for a long time, but we can’t help you.

And in the end time from Anton Daniels and in the back chairs just come in and they say, listen, I want that house for pennies on the dollar because his grandmother wasn’t able to pay her property taxes and he didn’t want to vote. So he don’t get to determine what the millages are. He don’t get to determine what the leadership is saying. He don’t know his per treasurer. He don’t know his ultimate and he don’t know what’s congressman. He don’t even know how much funding goes into the school and why teachers ain’t getting paid what they supposed to get paid.

But we got more money going over to the things that don’t really matter. I want you to still hold that same sentiment and tell me about how you don’t vote and why you don’t participate in the election process to then determine what’s happening within your leadership and then they assess whatever it is that they supposed to do on you, which you don’t have no choice to deal, but to deal with it. That’s all I want to know for everybody that sit here and tell me that they don’t vote because they don’t really care.

That’s cool. Pay your mother effing income taxes, your property taxes. I want you to make sure that you don’t run that red light. You don’t get to determine what happens as far as the infrastructure that happens in your city. You don’t even get to determine whether or not you’re going to get a parking ticket and how much that’s going to cost. You don’t get to determine what’s going to happen in the sentences and the judges that selected inside of your counties and inside of your cities. You don’t even get to determine whether or not they’re going to be liberal, more conservative, whether or not people can open up a liquor store right next to your crib, how big the houses is going to be.

You don’t get to participate in anything, anything that goes on in your community. And when it happens, don’t complain about it because you never participated in the election process. Just take it. Just take it. Just bend over. Let them rub you down. Bend over. Let them rub you down and then just go ahead and take the bus down. Take the beat up. Take the bus down. Don’t worry about that. We’re going to go and see what’s happening later on that. I’m T. A. U. A. We’ve been covering Cook County property tax hikes all this month.

And you know what? 10 days from now, that is when those bills are due unless you set up a payment plan. But what if you don’t have that money at all? Many people here in Calumet City tonight confronted the Cook County tax assessor with that exact issue, hoping to get some solutions. And many of them walked away frustrated. Everybody in line now, all of a sudden, everybody want to have a conversation with the county assessor’s office. Everybody want to participate. Everybody want to have their voice heard. It’s no getting out of it.

The lines are long residents in the South suburbs frustrated and downright angry with Cook County property taxes that are through the roof. Adrian Hatton has lived in her home in Markham for 17 years. Most of the homes around her are abandoned. She was one of 700 people that gathered here in T. F. North High School in Calumet City asking the Cook County tax assessor Fritz K. The tough questions about why taxes in places like Calumet City have soared 72 percent. Majority of people in the room overwhelmingly people of color. Nope. Nope. It’s not always a race thing.

It’s not always a race thing. It’s called a class war. Baby is called ignorance. You created this and you was hoping for somebody to save you. But the reality is that they let you they let you create the environment that wasn’t going to be best for you. And now you got to suffer as a result of it. This is being this is being assessed upon us because it’s overwhelmingly going to affect the people of color. How am I supposed to come up with six thousand dollars? Look like you need to go and make sure you get you a sugar daddy.

Yeah. Look like you’re going to be doing it for forty dollars. That’s a lot of forty dollars. That’s a lot of forty dollars. How many forty dollars is you going to have to come up with in order to be able to come over six thousand. Let me let me get my calculator out. How many how many forty dollars is this. Give me a second. Calculator six thousand and that’s not the total cost. That’s the additional amount that it says divided by forty is that’s one hundred and fifty one hundred and fifty plays that you got to make.

Hoping that don’t nobody run off on a plug. That’s one hundred and fifty plays you got to make to come up with that extra six thousand dollars. You got to do a lot of forty dollars in order to get there in order to get that additional six thousand dollars. That’s what my calculator is saying. It’s the greatest of America. Days ago, Kage told Fox 32 the tax burden being placed on residents and Calumet City and other South suburban communities is based in part on the Cook County Board of Review giving big businesses tax breaks like the Home Depot in town that received three hundred seventy thousand dollars he says shaved off of their tax bill.

The finger pointing didn’t stop. The Board of Review says Kage’s office made mistakes on how they assessed properties. The first thing I can do is exemptions. Second thing I can do is make sure your assessment is correct. Calumet City Mayor and Illinois State Representative Thaddeus Jones of District 29 says his bill went up too and he says he has a solution that will give property owners relief. The bill is in draft form to have the governor and assessor create a special tax designation for the south suburbs. And that program that Jones was just talking about is a pilot program.

If it is approved and that bill goes through if it’s passed that would last three to five years but you do still have time to file for what is called a certificate of error. That is if you believe that the assessed value of your home is absolutely incorrect and at that time they will also check to see if you have exemptions you can do that online. Listen they need their money because they believe and there’s a lot of these cities that’s ultimately going bankrupt because they don’t know how to manage the budget correctly and so instead of y’all requiring them to manage the budget more effectively and to stop having all of these legacy costs that go into what it is that they’re doing then y’all just gonna go ahead and have to foot the bill because they can always go to the well.

They can always go to the well and get some more money when they start to mismanage the budget. No accountability just go to the well. Anyway. [tr:trw].

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