A post about Gary Rabine’s criticism of Jesse Sullivan’ California financing stimulated this comment aboiut the shortcomings of Woodstock from rural Woodstock resident Susan Hndelsman:

Illinois is an undervalued asset, but ONLY if activist shareholders can shake up the current corrupt management.

Risk venture capitalists recognize the raw value in Illinois, a value which is crammed down due to incestuous corrupt political-class malfeasance.

As one example, Woodstock Illinois is the poster child for what corrupt self-dealing politics does to a local economy over the course of a family’s child-growth lifetime of 20 years:

Home value severely depleted relative to inflation and home prices elsewhere, and 20 years’ household income meant for college funds diverted to pay property taxes.

Woodstock property tax rates have remained in a range around 4% of fair market value for over a decade.

Woodstock D200 and Woodstock City continued to hire more highly paid, defined-benefits-entitled persons even as enrollment fell and EAV (property values) fail to recapture pre-crash (2007) levels. Woodstock City created more TIF to benefit political insiders, at all other taxpayers’ expense.

Woodstock median household income families ($65,000) in a median value home ($200,000) pay ~10% of household income in property taxes!

BLS puts mean and median in America at around 3.5%!

That is: PEOPLE IN AMERICA MUST ONLY SPEND 3.5% OF HH INCOME ON PROPERTY TAXES, WHILE WOODSTOCK FAMILIES MUST SPEND 10%!

Consider that one metric and how it affects local economy:

families must go woituhout college savings funds, or pets, or eating out or buying from local businesses.

6.5% of hh income is a huge number to have diverted to an expenditure of zero value (property taxes).

Woodstock hasn’t seen any contributory growth since 2006.

Why would any right thinking investor risk building in a 4% property tax rate environment without deep subsidies/grants/TIF?

Property tax rates in Illinois are 3% in collar counties, below 2% in Chicago area, and ~1% in almost all of America.

Woodstock property values have remained severely depressed.

Why?

Cost of carry = 3% MORE annually than similar real estate investment in almost everywhere else on Earth.

(Also, Woodstock D200 has incurred public debt in excess of Statutory limit of 13.8% of EAV, that is a symptom of the same local disease).

But the severe property value discount, while warranted due to the seemingly intractable corrupt sociopathic predators who seemingly can never lose their grip on local power…that discount would disappear in a NY minute if the disease infestation of local grifters were to be cured.

McHenry County property could double in value, p-tax rates would be cut in half, and taxing bodies would collect just as must from homeowners if only a white-hat investor would come save us from our current predatory board.

Is that you, Rabine?

Or are you just looking to replace with current regime with an equally corrupt predatory regime?