Funny enough, it was on an NPR podcast where I heard that Hurricane Katrina had a net benefit on people's lives. It got them to move out of the manmade disaster that is Louisiana for greener pastures, improving every metric of well-being the researchers cared to measure.
I left California in 1987, presciently, perhaps, due to the cost of living. We all know, now, that their politics have gone off the rails. Your complaints are valid. You are the enemy to NYS. I'll do you a favor. Get the fuck out, and own your life, if it's worth owning. You decide. Godspeed.
Cheers, and God bless California. I've also lived in CA -- twice -- and just like NY, I adore the land but cannot stomach the government there. And thankfully, my favorite lands there were in the desert -- so Yuma or Beatty might suit me fine...
Dear AM: try this. It is a tax protest company. I work with one in Houston TX, which has greatly slowed the growth of my property taxes. They get paid only if they actually reduce the level of your tax burden. It seems that this this company will either represent you or will give you tools to represent yourself. If you learn how to protest taxes, you may develop a side hustle helping your neighbors do the same.
At this stage, I only bought the property a year ago. If my welcome to town is to see my assessment double, I’m more than happy to move our things out and put the house on the market. We’re not in deep enough to where the fight is worth it (plus our Priest just retired).
The fact that you've only been there a year is probably very helpful. When I moved into my present house in 1999 I paid $56,500. For the House. My assessment for the next year's tax bill was considerably higher. I went to the tax office and they reduced the valuation on the basis of “recent sale.” It was only a few years later that I started using a tax protest company on a regular basis.
Same with us. We just showed up to challenge the assessment the first time property assessment increased and were able to keep the market value at our purchase price for the first five years.
The trouble is we’ve been here 15 years and had fixed the fixer upper that first five years so in 2025 our unpaid labor has increased the value 7x of which the county wants its share. We’ve challenged assessments two more times with diminishing returns.
But we are not moving because it’s worse everywhere else, and we are enjoying the fruits of our labor. My husband has read rumors that Trump wants to abolish property tax, but this isn’t a federal issue, it’s corruption on the county level. It’s hard to know how to “community organize” to fix it.
2025 was the year of reassessment. Nationwide, the permanent high prices from Covid finally got the attention of all the govt assessors and they decided the high home prices were here to stay and homes must be reassessed and taxed accordingly.
I bought at the end of 2024 and saw my taxes skyrocket both because of the 2025 reassessment and having to start at the new value because I was a new owner. (The previous owners who had owned it 50 years were paying less than half of the “old” market value because of the state limiting how much homeowners can be charged in taxes even as their home values rise).
When I went to challenge the increase, the county helpfully explained that my yearly tax rate increase would from now on be capped at the max allowed by the state govt, so I wouldn’t see such a jump again, but if I challenged their rate increase, got it reduced, and then I improved my property AT ALL, when it was reassessed I would be taxed on the new full market price like I had just bought it again.
From now on your taxes will probably never jump as much. But if you buy somewhere else you most likely will be assessed after the 1st year and your taxes will jump. Check the state laws.
Oh, buddy. I could write a book on this. Moving “back home” is becoming one of my biggest regrets. Upstate New York is a hard place to live. And honestly, my biggest issue might surprise you - but really, it’s the people. A bitterness has really grown here, and I struggle to find the words to describe it, but I feel it, day in and day out. I’m so sick and tired of people doing, legitimately, nothing. It feels impossible to make friends and even more impossible to find semblance of a real community. For a while I chalked it up to just how “things are now”, but when I travel, even to places like Los Angeles, I see far more neighborliness and overall cohesion than rural NY. It feels like everyone here has given up. A weird example, but even just the way folks are dressing in public. I recently asked a friend who lives outside of Boston how many people he sees wearing sweatpants to the grocery store, he said “what? Never. I guess unless someone’s leaving the gym?”. Literally 90% of the people at my local store are in sweatpants or full out pajamas. But who can blame them? The town looks like hell. Everything is shuttering. It’s a very painful thing to watch, and I’m not sure I want to be here to continue to witness its demise. I’ve tried and tried and tried to make a good life here, and it just feels like everything is working against me.
Wow -- I couldn't have said it better myself. There's a kind of bitter, silent, intense parochialism that seems to have seized most of rural / small-town NYS. A total disinterest in everything, including dressing well, keeping your house up, and a deep disinterest in other human beings. It's hauntingly lonesome unless you're in a handful of very-liberal and very-rich pockets that I frankly have no place in.
And astute to note that it's better even in LA. California has many similar problems to NYS, yet at least the people there are generally FRIENDLY. They speak to each other; they tend to dress nicely, take care of things, weed the garden so to speak.
Worst of all -- it brings you down watching this place's unmitigated decline. At first it was morbidly fascinating, but as time has gone one, it's just a relentless bummer. Grueling, really.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
Your post echoes my thoughts, A.M.! The environment NY Politicritters gleefully promote is an anthesis to my soul. Taxes ever increasing, to become fodder for fraud and grift. Social policy that mirrors that of Sodom & Gomorrah promoted in the guise of "human rights".
Yet to leave means to abandon the house built by my Dad (actually constructed by him, family and friends). Property that is increasingly becoming desecrated by the encroachment of developers who want to build cheaply constructed mansions, barely affordable by those fleeing Buffalo as the city becomes a Progressive Paradise. (Of taxes, crime and social decay.)
But where? I've been to many of the places you mentioned. One common thread is that home is home.
I so admire your courage and clear-sightedness - to ask these difficult questions, given how very much you love your "Pais Chico" - and how publicly you are asking them - hat's off to you, Mr. Hickman. God guide you clearly - you obviously have the courage to do what He tells you.
the fantasies that the stayer feeds himself have kept me here for 40 years now and probably until death, although I tell myself that next year is the year I finally leave. .. than another year goes by and still here.
Love your essay and agree with all of it. I left the Chicago area at age 66 because my dad, who lived in Phoenix with my mom, was starting his final trip around the sun. I wanted to be with him and mom every day that he had left, and in that I was successful. I fully intended to go back to Chicago when he passed.
I never did, and I never will. It's better here.
The land of Arizona is beautiful in a different way from Northern Illinois, the landscapes are far more diverse with desert AND mountains, sand AND snow, it's far more free from overbearing nanny government, has no gun regulations other than "don't shoot innocent people" yet rivals gun-hating Illinois on its homicide rate, and property taxes are literally one-tenth that of Illinois. I'm a political liberal but I've found my home here.
Sometimes being forced to move away makes you realize it had been time for some time.
Beautiful story, thank you for sharing. Being compelled by circumstance seems like it was a blessing in your case -- it'd certainly be a blessing in mine. I'd relish any opportunity to leave that would be a "no brainer, must-do" sort of thing.
In my case, I'd be going for no clear reason, without anyone or anything to go towards save the scenery and culture. Makes it all so much more random! An adventure, sure, but one so limitless in its structure that there is no obvious way to know where it begins. Then again, I know the directions to the Amtrak station... it may be as simple as that.
You're welcome, and thanks for this lovely reply. My wife died in 2015 of cancer, her mother the same year of heart failure, and her father the year after from pneumonia. All of a sudden, no family left! (My side had moved from Chicago to Phoenix in 1980.)
I stayed in Chicago to clean out the houses and do all the legal work, but couldn't bring myself to join my family in Arizona because I'd always Been a Chicagoan. Couldn't imagine permanently moving.
Then my dad got sick and so I sold my house and moved here quickly, figuring I'd go back when he passed. The year that made me fall in love with a very different part of the world. (Plus mom and my sisters and their families are here, and that's been wonderful.) Sometimes it takes a kick from the Heavens to get us out of the inertia that we all have to some degree.
I wish you happy hunting on something with fresh new landscapes, because those high taxes and utter lack of services of NY are murder on the soul. IL had good services, but the taxes were a killer.
An extremely accurate description of the internal battle so many of us face in where we live. Do we have an internal discontent comparable to the dreamer who always seems to think that something better lies just beyond the horizon or are we so overexposed to disappointment that nothing really would satisfy us?
I think of the world in each of its reimaginings, its refuges, its paradises and its hells as being the essential human condition.
Do we think that a merchant in 15th century Holland, with all of its wars, shortness of life and freezing winters was content with his circumstances, that a Roman citizen living in Brittannia with its constant threat of Pict or Scot invaders, unreasonable taxation and, as an inhabitant of an outlier province, usually forgotten about by the Emperor wasn’t thinking of possibly moving to Gaul, that a member of a once proud tribe now subject to the Inca or Aztec, his goods subject to seizure and his life expendable in internecine warfare wishing he was a noble in the court didn’t feel the same as we do?
It's so strange to be doing these kinds of calculations in an era of such hyperabundant material plenty; because in all of the eras you describe, material abjection (and for that matter, violence) was a lot closer to the everyman's life than it is today. Now, I can stay in NY and I won't starve, likely won't get shot at, abducted. I'll have clean water and a house that would rival those of former minor princes.
But I'll nevertheless be subject to the sneaking feeling that I am not the master of my own fate; that I must cow to the regime to do anything that I might want to do -- things that only a day's drive away in WV are completely legal and would go entirely unnoticed (for one-twentieth the property tax). This gnaws on a man in such a heavily mental way; it's not material, it's not direct, the "risk" is so abstract -- but I find it is real nevertheless. Deeply real. Maybe even heightened by the fact that this kind of "fat and happy" tyranny now exists; it ups the states to a cerebral, existential level.
The human condition is to make the most out of bad circumstances. Wherever we go this problem will haunt us, whether violence is just outside our door, whether we’re rich or poor, whether we’re young or old, alone or together.
Have you thought about rural NE OH? Tons of Lake Effect Snow, Temperate Climate. Low Taxes. Very kind people. NW PA around Clarion, Warren or McKean County are great.
I gotta admit, and I don't mean it to be offensive to Ohio or places like it -- I just don't get the right feeling out there. If I did go to the trouble of leaving NYS I could only insist on a place with a lot of "spice" that has a very-high tolerance for eccentrics and freaks.
Desert towns, Louisiana Bayou, West Virginia, etc. Outlaws, decay, cheap land, strange people. Places that either don't feel like America at all -- or feel so American they seem basically unrecognizable to the mainstream of what this country has become.
Howdy neighbor snowman from one kind and kinda blah NE Buckeye to another. I find my spice in the urban art communities about a half hour drive in from the rural no man’s land of creativity of our humble abode in the hills the glaciers didn’t touch. Taxes are killer but still lower than most other places, I guess (if paying 1% of property value every six months is low)
To Mr. Hickman, West Virginia is a dark chapter in collective Buckeye history, as most Ohioans are escapees of the coal mines. Black humor abounds around the topic amongst us. If you want West Virginia cleaned up and educated with a full set of teeth, move to NE Ohio. Thanks for opening up the topic of heart-sapping taxes and longing for greener pastures. May you find your fruitful place when the time is right.
My entire family from both of my parents is from upstate NY. I have cousins in Baldwinsville, Weedsport & Skaneateles. Every summer of my childhood our family would rent a cabin on Owasco Lake and have a family reunion. That area is quite simply beloved to me in all of my most cherished memories. I have never lived there but I sure understand your feelings about the area.
I lived as a child all across the US and I can say with certainty that my parents faced few of the challenges you face now. Times have changed and we are now taxed to death, face arcane state and even federal laws and safety and security of our family unit has become a full time job where we live and where we go.
I hope you find the place you seek for you and your family. I have lived so many places in my life and there is good and bad everywhere. Good luck!
I think you've already made your decision. Just reread what you wrote. As an ex-New Yorker, I remember everything you're talking about. I lived in a cheap, tiny apartment in Manhattan and took it all for granted, but when my husband and I bought a house in NJ and started paying those property tax bills, and applied for a gun permit (almost impossible to find a character ref for something so evil as a gun!), but at the same time we were now living in a place that was pretty and clean and safe with school-going, well-behaved kids, our eyes began to open. Life could be different than the degradation of the city, but beware the price of civilization. Go West, young man. You are trying to carry more responsibility than one pair of shoulders can handle.
“Help fund road maintenance in Manhattan NY (300+ miles from where I live) today by becoming a paid subscriber!”
😆
What an excellent piece! The New Yorker, Atlantic, The Free Press, ought to pick it up.
Funny enough, it was on an NPR podcast where I heard that Hurricane Katrina had a net benefit on people's lives. It got them to move out of the manmade disaster that is Louisiana for greener pastures, improving every metric of well-being the researchers cared to measure.
Wow. I never thought about my subscription paying for NYC streets. While that is definitely a negative, your writing is worth every penny.
Cheers, Cowboy.
I left California in 1987, presciently, perhaps, due to the cost of living. We all know, now, that their politics have gone off the rails. Your complaints are valid. You are the enemy to NYS. I'll do you a favor. Get the fuck out, and own your life, if it's worth owning. You decide. Godspeed.
Cheers, and God bless California. I've also lived in CA -- twice -- and just like NY, I adore the land but cannot stomach the government there. And thankfully, my favorite lands there were in the desert -- so Yuma or Beatty might suit me fine...
Dear AM: try this. It is a tax protest company. I work with one in Houston TX, which has greatly slowed the growth of my property taxes. They get paid only if they actually reduce the level of your tax burden. It seems that this this company will either represent you or will give you tools to represent yourself. If you learn how to protest taxes, you may develop a side hustle helping your neighbors do the same.
https://www.ownwell.com/lp/welcome
Fascinating. I’ll look into it for sure.
At this stage, I only bought the property a year ago. If my welcome to town is to see my assessment double, I’m more than happy to move our things out and put the house on the market. We’re not in deep enough to where the fight is worth it (plus our Priest just retired).
The fact that you've only been there a year is probably very helpful. When I moved into my present house in 1999 I paid $56,500. For the House. My assessment for the next year's tax bill was considerably higher. I went to the tax office and they reduced the valuation on the basis of “recent sale.” It was only a few years later that I started using a tax protest company on a regular basis.
Same with us. We just showed up to challenge the assessment the first time property assessment increased and were able to keep the market value at our purchase price for the first five years.
The trouble is we’ve been here 15 years and had fixed the fixer upper that first five years so in 2025 our unpaid labor has increased the value 7x of which the county wants its share. We’ve challenged assessments two more times with diminishing returns.
But we are not moving because it’s worse everywhere else, and we are enjoying the fruits of our labor. My husband has read rumors that Trump wants to abolish property tax, but this isn’t a federal issue, it’s corruption on the county level. It’s hard to know how to “community organize” to fix it.
2025 was the year of reassessment. Nationwide, the permanent high prices from Covid finally got the attention of all the govt assessors and they decided the high home prices were here to stay and homes must be reassessed and taxed accordingly.
I bought at the end of 2024 and saw my taxes skyrocket both because of the 2025 reassessment and having to start at the new value because I was a new owner. (The previous owners who had owned it 50 years were paying less than half of the “old” market value because of the state limiting how much homeowners can be charged in taxes even as their home values rise).
When I went to challenge the increase, the county helpfully explained that my yearly tax rate increase would from now on be capped at the max allowed by the state govt, so I wouldn’t see such a jump again, but if I challenged their rate increase, got it reduced, and then I improved my property AT ALL, when it was reassessed I would be taxed on the new full market price like I had just bought it again.
From now on your taxes will probably never jump as much. But if you buy somewhere else you most likely will be assessed after the 1st year and your taxes will jump. Check the state laws.
Oh, buddy. I could write a book on this. Moving “back home” is becoming one of my biggest regrets. Upstate New York is a hard place to live. And honestly, my biggest issue might surprise you - but really, it’s the people. A bitterness has really grown here, and I struggle to find the words to describe it, but I feel it, day in and day out. I’m so sick and tired of people doing, legitimately, nothing. It feels impossible to make friends and even more impossible to find semblance of a real community. For a while I chalked it up to just how “things are now”, but when I travel, even to places like Los Angeles, I see far more neighborliness and overall cohesion than rural NY. It feels like everyone here has given up. A weird example, but even just the way folks are dressing in public. I recently asked a friend who lives outside of Boston how many people he sees wearing sweatpants to the grocery store, he said “what? Never. I guess unless someone’s leaving the gym?”. Literally 90% of the people at my local store are in sweatpants or full out pajamas. But who can blame them? The town looks like hell. Everything is shuttering. It’s a very painful thing to watch, and I’m not sure I want to be here to continue to witness its demise. I’ve tried and tried and tried to make a good life here, and it just feels like everything is working against me.
Wow -- I couldn't have said it better myself. There's a kind of bitter, silent, intense parochialism that seems to have seized most of rural / small-town NYS. A total disinterest in everything, including dressing well, keeping your house up, and a deep disinterest in other human beings. It's hauntingly lonesome unless you're in a handful of very-liberal and very-rich pockets that I frankly have no place in.
And astute to note that it's better even in LA. California has many similar problems to NYS, yet at least the people there are generally FRIENDLY. They speak to each other; they tend to dress nicely, take care of things, weed the garden so to speak.
Worst of all -- it brings you down watching this place's unmitigated decline. At first it was morbidly fascinating, but as time has gone one, it's just a relentless bummer. Grueling, really.
You walk the life mentioned by Frost:
"I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
Your post echoes my thoughts, A.M.! The environment NY Politicritters gleefully promote is an anthesis to my soul. Taxes ever increasing, to become fodder for fraud and grift. Social policy that mirrors that of Sodom & Gomorrah promoted in the guise of "human rights".
Yet to leave means to abandon the house built by my Dad (actually constructed by him, family and friends). Property that is increasingly becoming desecrated by the encroachment of developers who want to build cheaply constructed mansions, barely affordable by those fleeing Buffalo as the city becomes a Progressive Paradise. (Of taxes, crime and social decay.)
But where? I've been to many of the places you mentioned. One common thread is that home is home.
I so admire your courage and clear-sightedness - to ask these difficult questions, given how very much you love your "Pais Chico" - and how publicly you are asking them - hat's off to you, Mr. Hickman. God guide you clearly - you obviously have the courage to do what He tells you.
the fantasies that the stayer feeds himself have kept me here for 40 years now and probably until death, although I tell myself that next year is the year I finally leave. .. than another year goes by and still here.
Love your essay and agree with all of it. I left the Chicago area at age 66 because my dad, who lived in Phoenix with my mom, was starting his final trip around the sun. I wanted to be with him and mom every day that he had left, and in that I was successful. I fully intended to go back to Chicago when he passed.
I never did, and I never will. It's better here.
The land of Arizona is beautiful in a different way from Northern Illinois, the landscapes are far more diverse with desert AND mountains, sand AND snow, it's far more free from overbearing nanny government, has no gun regulations other than "don't shoot innocent people" yet rivals gun-hating Illinois on its homicide rate, and property taxes are literally one-tenth that of Illinois. I'm a political liberal but I've found my home here.
Sometimes being forced to move away makes you realize it had been time for some time.
Beautiful story, thank you for sharing. Being compelled by circumstance seems like it was a blessing in your case -- it'd certainly be a blessing in mine. I'd relish any opportunity to leave that would be a "no brainer, must-do" sort of thing.
In my case, I'd be going for no clear reason, without anyone or anything to go towards save the scenery and culture. Makes it all so much more random! An adventure, sure, but one so limitless in its structure that there is no obvious way to know where it begins. Then again, I know the directions to the Amtrak station... it may be as simple as that.
You're welcome, and thanks for this lovely reply. My wife died in 2015 of cancer, her mother the same year of heart failure, and her father the year after from pneumonia. All of a sudden, no family left! (My side had moved from Chicago to Phoenix in 1980.)
I stayed in Chicago to clean out the houses and do all the legal work, but couldn't bring myself to join my family in Arizona because I'd always Been a Chicagoan. Couldn't imagine permanently moving.
Then my dad got sick and so I sold my house and moved here quickly, figuring I'd go back when he passed. The year that made me fall in love with a very different part of the world. (Plus mom and my sisters and their families are here, and that's been wonderful.) Sometimes it takes a kick from the Heavens to get us out of the inertia that we all have to some degree.
I wish you happy hunting on something with fresh new landscapes, because those high taxes and utter lack of services of NY are murder on the soul. IL had good services, but the taxes were a killer.
An extremely accurate description of the internal battle so many of us face in where we live. Do we have an internal discontent comparable to the dreamer who always seems to think that something better lies just beyond the horizon or are we so overexposed to disappointment that nothing really would satisfy us?
I think of the world in each of its reimaginings, its refuges, its paradises and its hells as being the essential human condition.
Do we think that a merchant in 15th century Holland, with all of its wars, shortness of life and freezing winters was content with his circumstances, that a Roman citizen living in Brittannia with its constant threat of Pict or Scot invaders, unreasonable taxation and, as an inhabitant of an outlier province, usually forgotten about by the Emperor wasn’t thinking of possibly moving to Gaul, that a member of a once proud tribe now subject to the Inca or Aztec, his goods subject to seizure and his life expendable in internecine warfare wishing he was a noble in the court didn’t feel the same as we do?
It's so strange to be doing these kinds of calculations in an era of such hyperabundant material plenty; because in all of the eras you describe, material abjection (and for that matter, violence) was a lot closer to the everyman's life than it is today. Now, I can stay in NY and I won't starve, likely won't get shot at, abducted. I'll have clean water and a house that would rival those of former minor princes.
But I'll nevertheless be subject to the sneaking feeling that I am not the master of my own fate; that I must cow to the regime to do anything that I might want to do -- things that only a day's drive away in WV are completely legal and would go entirely unnoticed (for one-twentieth the property tax). This gnaws on a man in such a heavily mental way; it's not material, it's not direct, the "risk" is so abstract -- but I find it is real nevertheless. Deeply real. Maybe even heightened by the fact that this kind of "fat and happy" tyranny now exists; it ups the states to a cerebral, existential level.
Very strange stuff.
The human condition is to make the most out of bad circumstances. Wherever we go this problem will haunt us, whether violence is just outside our door, whether we’re rich or poor, whether we’re young or old, alone or together.
Have you thought about rural NE OH? Tons of Lake Effect Snow, Temperate Climate. Low Taxes. Very kind people. NW PA around Clarion, Warren or McKean County are great.
I gotta admit, and I don't mean it to be offensive to Ohio or places like it -- I just don't get the right feeling out there. If I did go to the trouble of leaving NYS I could only insist on a place with a lot of "spice" that has a very-high tolerance for eccentrics and freaks.
Desert towns, Louisiana Bayou, West Virginia, etc. Outlaws, decay, cheap land, strange people. Places that either don't feel like America at all -- or feel so American they seem basically unrecognizable to the mainstream of what this country has become.
Howdy neighbor snowman from one kind and kinda blah NE Buckeye to another. I find my spice in the urban art communities about a half hour drive in from the rural no man’s land of creativity of our humble abode in the hills the glaciers didn’t touch. Taxes are killer but still lower than most other places, I guess (if paying 1% of property value every six months is low)
To Mr. Hickman, West Virginia is a dark chapter in collective Buckeye history, as most Ohioans are escapees of the coal mines. Black humor abounds around the topic amongst us. If you want West Virginia cleaned up and educated with a full set of teeth, move to NE Ohio. Thanks for opening up the topic of heart-sapping taxes and longing for greener pastures. May you find your fruitful place when the time is right.
My entire family from both of my parents is from upstate NY. I have cousins in Baldwinsville, Weedsport & Skaneateles. Every summer of my childhood our family would rent a cabin on Owasco Lake and have a family reunion. That area is quite simply beloved to me in all of my most cherished memories. I have never lived there but I sure understand your feelings about the area.
I lived as a child all across the US and I can say with certainty that my parents faced few of the challenges you face now. Times have changed and we are now taxed to death, face arcane state and even federal laws and safety and security of our family unit has become a full time job where we live and where we go.
I hope you find the place you seek for you and your family. I have lived so many places in my life and there is good and bad everywhere. Good luck!
I think you've already made your decision. Just reread what you wrote. As an ex-New Yorker, I remember everything you're talking about. I lived in a cheap, tiny apartment in Manhattan and took it all for granted, but when my husband and I bought a house in NJ and started paying those property tax bills, and applied for a gun permit (almost impossible to find a character ref for something so evil as a gun!), but at the same time we were now living in a place that was pretty and clean and safe with school-going, well-behaved kids, our eyes began to open. Life could be different than the degradation of the city, but beware the price of civilization. Go West, young man. You are trying to carry more responsibility than one pair of shoulders can handle.