Who really owns your house?

God is interested in the subject of property—His own and other people’s. As to His own, He says things like this: “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof” (Psalms 24:1; 50:10).

As to other people’s, no sooner did Adam blink in the light than he was entrusted with real estate (Genesis 2:15). God knew that ownership is good for a man, and that ownership responsibility fosters flourishing. Who hasn’t noticed that people take better care of a house they own than one they rent? (Once when I considered buying a car from a local car rental agency, my son quipped: “Would you marry a prostitute?”)

Even animals, we are told by wildlife biologists, thrive when they have territory, resources, and inherited wealth, producing more offspring when they have “property,” and fewer when they don’t.

There is a sense in which the whole Old Testament is property law. (See Joshua 13–19; Deuteronomy 2:9; Leviticus 25:23–25 for a sampler.) When King David is rebuked by Nathan for stealing another man’s wife, the prophet employs the most reprehensible comparison he can think of: A rich man with many sheep steals the single lamb of a poor man.

All of which is to say that it is no trifling matter to defraud a man of his property.

You may have noticed that these days young people can’t seem to buy houses, and old retired people are having difficulty holding on to them.

In the case of seniors like me, these are houses whose mortgages we paid off decades ago. We reasonably assumed we now own them free and clear. Turns out (this is a huge paradigm shift for us boomers) that we never really own our houses after all. Turns out we can still lose them. An estimated 42 million homeowners are presently in danger of going bankrupt and losing the roof over their heads.

The reasons that people who thought they were homeowners are learning they are effectively home renters are complex: Stagnant wages, rising homeowners insurance, and runaway inflation are among them. But in an 800-word column, let me confine myself to a single contributing factor—property taxes.

In all 50 states, K-12 schools rely on revenue from property taxes. In a cozy relationship between local governing bodies, the local central appraising district sets the value of your house—often inflated—for taxing purposes. The legitimate worth of your house (what people not under duress are willing to sell or buy it for) is thus fraudulently overvalued, which gives the taxing entities an extra few thousand dollars’ worth of value to play with. (They may even boast that they have lowered the tax rate, neglecting to mention that the important number is tax rate times assessment value.)

That extra value flows to the school district and is then levered into school bonds—basically IOUs that they promise to pay back to homeowners with interest, but that are in fact never paid back. Instead, when the bonds come due, they are simply rolled out or restructured, and new bonds are issued.

What makes your house worth $100,000 or $200,000 more than it was five years ago? Intrinsically, it may be nothing. It happened because school districts are borrowing money and using your house as collateral, thus strip-mining your hard-earned equity.

You have trustingly believed the bonds are for school building upgrades, teacher salaries, road improvements, and fire and police departments. Little have you guessed that the money also goes to hundreds of NGOs with names like Hmong American Partnership, Interfaith Action of Greater St. Paul, and American Indian Family Center.

Worse yet, when bonds are involved, this is no longer a state issue. You have now entered the big boy world of federal markets, of $23 trillion in property overvaluation affecting every home in the country, and of compound cumulative interest that can never be paid off. A Ponzi scheme, in other words.

The vet who bought his house in 1960 is bewildered to discover his modest Cape Cod appraised at such a high value in 2026 that his property taxes are quadrupled. It amounts to another mortgage he never knew existed. On a fixed income, this is unaffordable. The government stands by to slap a lien on it and sells it at auction.

One of President Donald Trump’s proposed affordability measures is to repeal property taxes. Good for him. How about we get the local schools out of the bond business and have them operate on a cash-only basis. My grandmother, with her second grade education, could have told you as much.