Team profile by Warren Lowell, Anna Gassman-Pines, Adrienne Jones, Clinton Boyd Jr., Ally Thomas, Aria Assil, Audrey Patterson and Courtney Lucius

For Melinda, a proud Durham resident in her early 60s living in her home near downtown, taxes were always a bit of a mystery. Her ex-husband always handled the tax bills, but after their divorce, she was shocked when the tax bill arrived in the mail. A bill that had once cost $300 when they had bought the home back in the late 1990s (about $550 in present-day dollars), was now over $4,000, reflecting rapidly growing property values in Durham County.

Living paycheck to paycheck, Melinda had no way to afford this cost on her income alone (it was nearly 20% of her annual income), but after the bill’s due date had passed, the county warned her that a lien would be filed on the property. She became desperate.

With her housing security on the line, Melinda scrambled and found a friend who could lend her the amount she owed, just days before the process of property tax foreclosure was set to begin. Soon after the bill was paid, however, Melinda began to worry about how she would afford to pay her property taxes the following year, how she could repay her friend and where she would move if she faced foreclosure again.

Stories of struggles to afford skyrocketing property taxes like Melinda’s (her name is a pseudonym to protect her anonymity) are becoming increasingly common in rapidly growing cities across the United States. Durham County, North Carolina, saw residential property assessments (and taxes) rise by an average of 26.6% during the most recent reevaluation in 2019, with some census block groups seeing average jumps between 50-80%.

Access to property tax relief is also limited in North Carolina; state-sponsored tax relief is restricted to households with very low incomes (below $36,700 in 2023) who are also either elderly (65+ years old) or permanently disabled. This means that many younger, low-income homeowners who struggle to afford their housing costs must pay property taxes without aid, despite facing similar housing cost burdens as the elderly.

Recognizing the growing financial strain of property taxes on low-income homeowners, Durham County enacted the Low-Income Homeowners Relief (LIHR) program in 2022, which provided property tax relief to all homeowners in the county with incomes below 80% AMI who had owned their home as a primary residence for five or more years. The program was developed in reaction to rapidly growing property valuations and taxes in the city, which have been particularly concentrated in the city’s historically Black neighborhoods. The stated goals of the program were to support Durham homeowners to “age in place and remain in their homes.”

In partnership with Durham County, our team studied the implementation and outcomes of the LIHR program. We conducted 41 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with homeowners who participated in the program, and asked them to describe how their housing security, household budgets and opinions of local government have been affected by increased property taxes and their participation in the LIHR program.

In interviews with Durham residents like Melinda, we learned about residents’ prior struggles with property tax payments, how reassessments left them with bills that were double or triple their original cost. Findings from the study illuminate how valuable the property tax relief program has been for budgets that have been stretched thin for households surviving on a single income or social security checks. Our findings have already been used in testimony before the county commissioners, and we plan to translate these findings into public-facing literature as well as a peer-reviewed research article in the coming academic year!

Supporting Low-Income Homeowners Through Property Tax Relief

Poster by Anna Gassman-Pines, Clinton Boyd, Jr., Warren Lowell, Adrienne Jones, Aria Assil, Courtney Lucius, Audrey Patterson and Alexandria Thomas