One year after Willa Staats and her brother inherited their family’s East Austin home and the adjacent lot, they were hit with a combined property tax bill of $48,000.
It was nearly 90% higher than what their father had last paid, and more than half of Staats’ salary at the time.
On paper, the siblings had inherited something immensely valuable: two properties in a Texas city where homeownership had minted enormous wealth during the COVID-19 pandemic boom, and a foothold in one of the country’s most competitive housing markets…