Across the nation, older homeowners are being pushed out of homes they’ve lived in for decades, not because they’ve missed a mortgage payment, but because the land beneath their feet has become too “valuable” to afford. As property taxes skyrocket, many fixed-income seniors find themselves facing an unthinkable reality: the risk of foreclosure or homelessness, even when they own their homes free and clear.
Take Greg Romine, a homeowner in Cincinnati’s Bond Hill neighborhood. In just two years, his property tax bill jumped from $1,400 to nearly $4,200. “I’ve just been so depressed right about now,” Romine told local reporters. “It’s just unbelievable. It’s like, you can’t stay where you want to be comfortable anymore.”
Romine’s story isn’t unique. From Montana to Georgia, Indiana, and beyond, communities are watching long-time residents get priced out of their neighborhoods—victims of a property tax system that punishes people for staying put. In Atlanta, the city recently expanded its Anti-Displacement Tax Fund to help low-income homeowners over 60, but even that effort is struggling to keep up with the pace of gentrification and speculative real estate investment.
What makes this crisis especially cruel is that most of these seniors did everything right. They bought modest homes, paid off their mortgages, and planned to age in place. But they’re now being penalized by a tax system that ties liability to market value—not income, not age, not ability to pay.
A Potential Lifeline for At-Risk Homeowners
A reverse mortgage could provide a crucial financial lifeline for older homeowners who struggling to survive what many see as a government money grab. Older homeowners with substantial equity could get a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage and use the loan’s line of credit to pay annual property taxes. While the upfront costs of a reverse mortgage may be significant, they pale in comparison to the potential loss of a lifetime of equity.
A Broken Tax System
While reverse mortgages can be a lifeline, the deeper issue is systemic. Property tax laws that treat a retired teacher and a tech investor the same, simply because they live on the same block, are inherently unjust. Tax policy should account for income, age, and length of ownership, not just speculative market growth.
Programs like homestead exemptions or tax deferrals are steps in the right direction, but they’re often fragmented and underfunded. What’s needed is bold, structural reform. Seniors should not be punished for staying in homes they’ve built, neighborhoods they’ve shaped, and communities they’ve supported for generations.
It is morally indefensible that someone can spend 30 or 40 years paying off their home, doing everything the American Dream told them to do, only to lose it because of property taxes they can no longer afford.
Until that injustice is resolved, the reverse mortgage may remain one of the limited viable solutions available to protect aging homeowners from displacement—and from a system that too often seems eager to seize their home.
By Shannon Hicks