Oddities: A Look Back At Weird Property Taxes

I have been reading recently and came across some interesting information about property taxes from the days of yore.  We have to credit the English for their rigorous methods in collecting taxes.

For instance, in 1066 A.D., when William the Conqueror swept in from Normandy in France and vanquished king Harold, William adopted most of the English form of governance.  One of his great achievements was to perform a census on England's people and property so it could be taxed.  The statistics were condensed in a book called the Domesday Book.

Back then, people who owned homes were assessed a tax.  How was that tax assessed?  It depended on the number of chimneys you had in your home.  Each chimney was levied a certain amount.  Since central heating and air condition were 900 years in the future, if you wanted to have a warm room in your house, you had a fireplace in it.  Thus, fireplaces, and their accompanying chimney's became a measure of wealth and value for the property.  Large manors had many chimneys.  Cottages had maybe one.  This became known as the Hearth Tax.

Fast forward to the 1800's in the United States.  Have you ever wondered why old store fronts are so narrow yet the building space is very deep?  Back then, property taxes were assessed not on square footage but on store frontage.  So, the wider your storefront, the more you would pay in taxes.  Thus, there was an incentive for shop owners to build their stores as long and skinny as possible to avoid paying the tax while still benefiting from the square footage.

Finally, comes another oddity from the same era.  Many times in older Victorian homes, closets are very hard to come by.  Why would these people build homes without closets?  Well, it turns out that it was an innovation to work around property taxes.  At the time, residences were taxed based on the number of rooms in them.  Closets were included in that count.  So, rather than pay the tax collector each year for a place to hang your shirt, people used armoirs and forsook the closets.

Today, in Weber County, we are taxed based on approximately 1% of the market value of the house or land which we own.  Today's taxes are much more equitable in my opinion and prevent the unintended consequences of people modifying their property to avoid them.