Interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal:  Property-Tax Frustration Builds; States, Cities Revise Strategy as Homeowners Protest Rising Levies, by Amy Merrick [click on chart to enlarge]:

Falling home values and rising property taxes in many parts of the country are generating the loudest complaints about property levies since the 1970s, forcing state and local officials to address the outcry even as the housing-market slump eats into many sources of their revenue. …

Falling real-estate prices and turmoil in the mortgage market are expected to reduce property values for U.S. homeowners by a total of $1.2 trillion next year, according to Global Insight Inc., a research-and-consulting firm in Lexington, Mass.

Nationwide, falling real-estate prices mean local property-tax growth probably will slow significantly, and taxes could even fall in many places …. In some markets where real-estate values had been rising sharply for years, property taxes are still climbing. That is because it can take a long time for assessments, which commonly are based on a property’s estimated market value, to catch up with the realities of the real-estate market. The lag time has led to an outcry to cut property taxes reminiscent of the 1970s, says Gerald Prante, an economist with the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in Washington. "In many cases, incomes were growing faster than property-tax bills in the 1990s," Mr. Prante says. "Recently, property-tax bills have grown faster than incomes, on average."