Craig Douglas

Managing Editor- Boston Business Journal

Email  |  Twitter

If my decade of near-uninterrupted service at the Boston Business Journal has taught me anything, it’s that out readers love — I mean L-O-V-E — to consume anything and everything to do with property taxes.
Last week’s story on the highest single-family tax bills in Massachusetts was no exception, and it was no surprise that many of our loyal readers chimed in with suggestions and requests to further refine our analysis to reflect the relative tax burden, and not just the total tax burden, of owning a single-family home in a given community. Your wishes are granted.
Whereas our previous analysis simply calculated the average single-family tax bill for some 338 Bay State towns and cities and then ranked those results in descending order, our updated exercise goes a step further by then comparing those levies to the average assessed value of a home in a given community. The goal: To identify the communities that, relatively speaking, have the lowest or highest tax burdens in the state.
The findings indicate that, contrary to last week’s ranking, the most-onerous tax burdens might actually be concentrated among many of the poorest communities in the state — and not in the suburbs ringing Greater Boston, as last week’s story suggested.
To be sure, the relative property-tax burdens in many Western Massachusetts cities and towns are many multiples of what the average homeowner can expect to pay in the wealthy towns of Weston, Sherborn, Lincoln, Dover and Carlisle. While those five towns boast the highest tax bills in the state, with average annual levies ranging between $12,700 and $17,800, they rank near the bottom when those levies are compared to each community’s average home assessment. For example, in Weston, the average tax bill equates to less than 1 percent of the average assessed value of $1.4 million. In Sherborn, it’s 2.9 percent.
So what cities and towns ask the most of their homeowners, on a relative basis? In Springfield, the average tax bill of $2,600 equates to 15 percent of the average assessment. Farther north in Adams and Athol, it’s 14.8 percent and 14.3 percent, respectively.
Some 20 other towns and cities had relative burdens in excess of 10 percent of the average home assessment, and nearly all of the top 100 on our reconfigured list either qualify as a so-called " Gateway city" or were located in the central or western regions of the state, or both.