A Short History of Property Tax in America

It goes back further than the country does

Colonial governments were taxing property directly before the United States existed. Massachusetts required residents to support both the government and the church through direct taxes as early as 1638. By the time of the Revolutionary War, colonists were already pushing back — not against property tax itself, but against flat taxes that charged every acre the same regardless of what it was worth, demanding value-based assessment instead.

Even by 1796, most states weren't doing what we do now

Here's what most people get wrong: property tax as we know it today — assessed at actual market value — is not what the founders set up. By 1796, only 4 states taxed property based on its actual value. The rest used flat, per-item rates that had nothing to do with worth. Value-based assessment, the system that now decides what every homeowner in America owes, was rolled out gradually, state by state, over the following century:

• 1818 — Illinois adopts the first state constitutional "uniformity clause," requiring property to be taxed at a uniform rate based on value
• 1820 — Missouri follows
• 1834 — Tennessee follows
• By 1900 — 33 states have written uniformity provisions into their constitutions

Kansas is part of this same pattern: its property tax framework was written into the Wyandotte Constitution in 1859, two years before statehood, and has been amended six separate times since (1923, 1963, 1974, 1985, 1992, 2012) — each amendment chipping away at the "one uniform rate" system the state started with.

It used to matter a lot more than it does now

Property tax hasn't just been rewritten — it's been in freefall as a share of how government actually gets funded. At the state level, it went from 45.3% of state government's own revenue in 1902 to just 1.8% by 1999. States have already proven, over the course of a century, that they can run on other sources of revenue. The reliance on property tax specifically is a choice, not a necessity.

Proof it can be done: Proposition 13

In 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, a constitutional amendment that capped property tax rates at 1% of assessed value and limited how much assessments could increase per year. It didn't abolish the tax, but it proved something important: a state's property tax system is not fixed. When enough people decide it needs to change, it changes — by amendment, by ballot measure, by the same legal process that built the system in the first place.

What this means

Every one of these numbers is a moment where the system got rewritten by people who decided the old version wasn't good enough. Nothing about property tax is permanent. It was built in pieces, over centuries, and it can be dismantled the same way.