An Illinois man living in an unincorporated suburb of Chicago was hit with a sky-high tax bill that threatened to force him out of his modest 1950s home.
Darryl Lloyd bought the three-bedroom, one-bathroom home in 2006. He says the home’s current market value is just over $180,000.
But when Cook County valued the home at $1 million, authorities demanded he pay more than $30,000 in property taxes this year, FOX 32 reported.
The year before, Lloyd paid $1,800, meaning the county increased its tax bill by 3,811 percent from two decades ago.
“I was literally devastated when I saw that increase,” Lloyd said of the bill he received days ago. “I’m looking at 960 square feet. I don’t have a second floor. I don’t have a basement.”
Pictured: Darryl Lloyd’s Chicago Heights home, a property he insists is worth $180,000, which is nowhere near the $1 million that county tax officials have levied on it. As such, he was initially faced with a $30,000 property tax bill
An extract from the tax bill Lloyd received in the mail, showing his property was worth just over $1 million
The houses in his neighborhood are also modest, which causes him even more confusion.
“There’s nothing here that’s … worth $1 million,” Lloyd said, adding, “I’ll have to move in with a relative or something. You know, I can’t afford it.”
But before Lloyd threw in the towel, he decided to fight it, convinced that there had to be a misunderstanding or a mistake.
He went to the Cook County tax assessor’s office, but that proved fruitless and frustrating.
“I said, ‘Let me go down to City Hall downtown, to the tax assessor’s office.’ And then I showed them my taxes and told them I got a substantial raise, and they said something like, ‘Everybody’s got a tax raise,’” Lloyd said.
The IRS office only admitted guilt after the local FOX affiliate in Chicago contacted them on Lloyd’s behalf.
“This property was assessed incorrectly due to a permit that was inadvertently applied to the property. We will be processing a corrected tax assessment for this property in the coming weeks so that the homeowner ultimately pays the correct amount of property taxes,” a representative from the office told FOX 32.
Lloyd is not alone. He is just one of the homeowners who has caught the media’s attention.
This shows the dramatic increase in property taxes since 2004, before Lloyd lived at this address.
Now that he knows his tax bill was sent by mistake, Lloyd, pictured outside his home, said: ‘If it happened to me, it’s probably happened to others. I want immediate action to be taken.’
The Cook County Treasurer’s Office has conducted an analysis that shows the county assessor miscalculated the land values of more than 4,400 homes in Chicago’s south and southwest suburbs.
The excessive assessments were levied on real estate on larger parcels of land and the errors were discovered too late, before the tax assessments were printed and mailed.
“If it happened to me, it probably happened to others. I want immediate action to be taken,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd is now awaiting an explanation for the error, though the appraiser’s office has not given an exact timeline.
Lloyd’s one-story ranch-style home, seen from the side. It has three bedrooms, one bathroom
The hidden costs of sky-high property taxes are forcing Americans in many states, both red and blue, to move.
A Florida woman was shocked when she was hit with a 174 percent increase in property taxes on her dream home this year, from $2,700 a year to $7,400.
She had to put her house back on the market after putting most of her savings into it.
And many longtime Colorado residents are selling their homes as home prices soar due to the pandemic and tax bills climb rapidly.