So let me get this straight?! As the pandemic hit and governments shutdown society, regular folks lost income, jobs, homes, and businesses. However, the wealthiest of our society gained in wealth by quite a bit! A year and a half into this never-ending pandemic, the cost of living has gone up for regular folks like me by quite a bit. Yesterday my husband spent $9 on three small and medium sized heirloom tomatoes! We’re starting a garden next year! Anyhow, it’s time for a property assessment in our town. The tax assessor is coming!! With the rising costs of goods, food and increasing taxes in Connecticut, this really concerns me, a lot!
A few things to know about the tax assessor. You do not have to let the tax assessor in your home. Heck, you don’t even have to let them on your property. The catch is they can over assess your house, they can do that anyway though. If they over assess the value of your property you can appeal, but you may need to let the town in to assess anyhow. The assessor will gather public information and will assess according to other houses in your neighborhood. They do this regardless of whether you let them in. Here’s a scary reality. You can be taxed out of your own home. It can happen. It has happened.
Here’s the part that really gets my goat. The wealthiest towns pay the least in property tax. In fact, Greenwich has the lowest mill rate in the State of Connecticut at 11.59% they actually lowered their mill rate in 2020 by 1%. My mill rate went up by 2% in 2020. Connecticut is a rich state, but not everyone here is wealthy. In fact, most of the people living in Connecticut are average, and the rate of poverty is rising higher than incomes, especially with Lamont’s emergency powers. In fact, housing prices are artificially inflated at this time. Homes are flying off the market, some at 20% higher than the asking price. How can that be in the middle of a pandemic?
BlackRock and investment firms like it are the force behind the price inflation. Residential homes and rental properties are real assets, they are safer and less volatile. People need places to live and BlackRock is happy to buy up those places, rent them and hire property managers to deal with it. They call this, Real Estate Investment Trusts aka REIT. Venture capitalist firms have found a lot of revenue in residential properties and that is very scary! Regular people are having trouble being able to finance and afford the price jump created by investment firms like BlackRock. Connecticut, along with public-private partnerships, have contracted with numerous investment firms and have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to be part of investment funds like a REIT. Ultimately, we the people, via taxes, pay millions to join funds that the government hopes will yield the means to pay for state pensions. This happens all across the country.
“Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds (CRPTF) has approved a $200m (€166.3m) commitment into listed real estate investment trusts (REIT).The pension fund said in a meeting document that all the capital will be invested in real estate securities with companies that own real estate assets in the US. CRPTF will be funding the investment from its passive panel program which the pension fund created in 2019. CRPTF will have a passive strategy with the REIT allocation with no security selection but with an active sector allocation.The planned strategy for REITs will involve non-traditional real estate and some housing sector investments.”https://realassets.ipe.com/news/connecticut-retirement-puts-200m-into-us-reits/10052307.article
On top of all this, Lamont alone can mandate anything he pleases via executive fiat. He mandated that rental property owners go through UniteCT to evict tenants. UniteCT has to use UniteUs, a company that Lamont’s wife has a holding in. Crazy huh? I am writing an expose on UniteUS and will have more on that later… Lamont is a billionaire, he lives in a mansion in Greenwich with his wife Annie Huntress Lamont. Annie is the most powerful female venture capitalist on the planet. She founded Oak HC/FT in 2014 worth 3.3 billion dollars and rising. Her Oak HC/FT holding, Sema4, just went public starting with a whopping three billion in valuation. That’s a lot of money. Sema4 is also providing most of the testing in CT, it’s a giant money machine for the Lamonts. But don’t worry, Lamont said he was going to donate all the profits they are making from Sema4 to charity. However, Josh Geballe the Chief Operating Officer of Connecticut, who was appointed by Lamont, said the Lamonts can keep their profits. The Office of State Ethics has already dealt with the Lamonts’ conflicts of interest. Yes, you read that right! Please see my article, “Governor Lamont and the Lost Constitution State”.
The tax assessors are hard to miss as they traverse my town inspecting properties clad in the bright red vests. I shudder to think of a property tax increase at this time. I’ve had a lot of anxiety this year and it is not about a virus, it’s about how the government is destroying our middle-class “wealth”. By wealth, I don’t mean grandiose wealth, I mean a house and the ability to purchase food and necessary goods and still be able to save for retirement. Isn’t that the American Dream? Now I wonder if my children will be able to afford to buy a home and have a middle class life too? I told my son, leave Connecticut! Don’t worry about college, learn a trade and open a business! Ahhh dreams of the more simpler days… those days will be gone forever if we contine to allow our governement to gamble with investments firms that seek to take our property to fund their coffers! REIT is a new trend that must be stopped! For the sake of our children, it is time for the American people to take back their government from corrupted oligarchs like the Lamonts and BlackRock.
References:
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2001/rpt/2001-R-0060.htm
https://patch.com/connecticut/across-ct/ct-mill-rates-town-town
