The mayor of South Portland, Maine, recently acknowledged that property taxes in the region are particularly challenging for those living on a fixed income. When offering advice on how to manage these costs, the mayor brought up the potential for a reverse mortgage.
This is according to local reporting by The Maine Wire from a recent city council meeting. Property taxes in the city — as is the case with many localities nationwide — are higher, and the tax burden is increasingly shifting from commercial to residential properties. This led to discussion of a proposal to “allocate an additional $50,000 to the city’s Senior Property Tax Relief Fund,” according to the outlet.
Such programs exist in other cities and states, and allow older residents to defer tax payments to a later time, but they do not waive them. The age of eligibility for South Portland’s program has been lowered from 70 to 65, so more people are eligible. But in turn, this reduces the potential benefit for individual households.
“This is very much a perfect storm,” Mayor Misha Pride said, according to the reporting. “We live in a coastal community, it’s very attractive to live here. And unfortunately, that means lots of people are buying lots of residential properties.”
With buying and selling activity for commercial real estate diminished, Pride argued that reviewing the percentages and potential new allocations to the program may not be worth it. This led to the mayor’s recommendation, which the reporting said elicited “an audible gasp and agitation among those present at the August meeting.”
“I just throw this out there because I’ve also been thinking a lot about how especially those with fixed incomes can deal with this,” Pride said. “It is kind of a last resort measure, but seeing as our property values are so high, seniors may want to consider a reverse mortgage.”
Pride then read the room’s reaction.
“I know it’s an ugly word, but I’m just saying,” he said. “I know it’s horrible, but it’s sort of a last resort.”
The mayor clarified that he does not make the recommendation lightly, reiterating the “last resort” phrase and saying the idea is only tied to addressing the challenging financial circumstances for the city’s seniors.
“This is really difficult for everyone, we don’t take any pleasure in this, and the city doesn’t get any more money,” he said, according to the reporting. “And that’s something I think is hard for people to hear, is that the city is not getting a penny more from taxes, it’s really truly just a shift of who’s paying them, which is, I think, the hardest thing for people to hear and understand.”
A subsequent meeting on Sept. 3 meeting saw unanimous passage of an additional $100,000 for the tax relief program. HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) reached out to Pride’s office, but he could not be reached immediately.
Pride’s statements are eerily similar to those made by another mayor — in another country —earlier this year. Tim Cadogan, the mayor of the Central Otago district in south central New Zealand, recently fielded a question from a constituent about rising rates that are akin to U.S. property taxes.
After suggesting that reverse mortgages could be employed by qualified borrowers to help pay for the rate increases, local media reported that he received a raft of backlash that accuses him and other elected leaders of being “out of touch.” Another labeled the suggestion “disturbing.”
Cadogan, however, pushed back on these assertions with reasoning similar to Pride’s.
“I was accused […] of being out of touch with reality,” he said in a weekly column published in June. “But, here is the reality of what I was faced with more than once during the drop-in sessions; an elderly person telling me that the proposed rates increases on top of all the other bills that have skyrocketed in recent times would mean they couldn’t afford food or heating.”
Cadogan, like Pride, also labeled the underlying problem as a “perfect storm” that led to the suggested remedy of a reverse mortgage.
