Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
A commenter on Jonathan Turley's blog (scroll way down to Nov. 16th, a comment by Vince Treacy) pointed this out and it looks like he's right. The C Street House, which has been scamming the city of Washington DC by pretending to be a church and therefore being exempt from taxes, has now been reassigned as residential and assessed for property taxes.
You can find the details here on the DC city website. It is now listed as residential and taxable and valued at $1,834,500. And here it shows that they paid their property taxes of $1,714.70 on October 21. Now they should go after the tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes they owe.
Politics
Comments
If there's evidence it was a deliberate scam they should also be charged with fraud.
Posted by: Taz | November 17, 2009 9:51 AM
That seems like an awfully low valuation.
Posted by: KristinMH | November 17, 2009 9:56 AM
The low valuation is probably due to all the residual jebus dirt left all over the property.
Posted by: MikeMa | November 17, 2009 10:35 AM
Awesome. I can't believe the property tax is so low... I paid twice that for a $500K house. California sucks.
Posted by: Rox1SMF | November 17, 2009 10:50 AM
I am living in a "house" that still has no real plumbing, wiring, insulation, sheetrock, kitchen, etc (although I did get a pellet stove yesterday--are empty Quaker Oats tubes okay to use as the chimney?). My evaluation si $25K. Because of a program in place in upstate NY, the first $35K of the evaluation is not considered in my tax bill. Otherwise I would be paying somewhere between $800 and $1,000. There's gotta be a misplaced decimal point somewhere in that paragraph; either that, or the property is being taxed at less than 1/10th% of it's evaluation.
Posted by: democommie | November 17, 2009 10:58 AM
Thats a good point democommie, according to the site that Ed linked, the tax rate for DC is $0.85/$100 of assessment. So the tax on that property should be $15593.25. The only way thier payment makes sense is if they are paying taxes in 9 installments, which seems rather weird. Quarterly, I would understand, Monthly, I would understand, but 9 times a year?
Posted by: Dave | November 17, 2009 11:08 AM
I have to agree that something is still up or wrong with those numbers but I could be wrong.
Howver, the point of my post here is: I recently read Jeff Sharlet's book The Family and it seemed that there are other houses throughout the country that function like C Street, though with differing purposes. One example may be Ivanwald, where Sharlet resided during his initial investigation of The Family. I think these should be looked into as well.
Posted by: Jeremy S | November 17, 2009 11:56 AM
To be fair, if you're in California, you're probably subsidizing somebody else on your street with an equally valuable home who pays a lot less. It doesn't suck for everybody.
I guess that's probably not helping, is it?
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | November 17, 2009 12:12 PM
Keep in mind people whingeing about taxes in California passed Prop 13, effectively destroying what was among the best educational systems in the States.
Posted by: blf | November 17, 2009 2:49 PM
One thing to keep in mind is that anything DC government does is pretty much subject to Congressional Oversight. For instance, while they've been good about it in recent years, Congress can and has in the past made completely abritary changes in the city's budget because they felt like it. For example, we had a medical marijauna question the ballot a decade ago, but several conservative House members didn't like that so the city was forbidden to spend any money to count or report the vote.
They push too hard and all of a sudden, DC has no budget for property tax collection and enforcement. We only have home rule when Congress feels like it.
Posted by: katydid13 | November 17, 2009 4:05 PM
The house has only been partially redesignated, according to TPM Muckraker:
Posted by: Ed Brayton | November 17, 2009 5:27 PM
From WaPo:
My Congresscritter, Heath Shuler, is another of the residents.
Posted by: kehrsam | November 17, 2009 6:29 PM
That's exactly what I was referring to. We've taken the flawed but semi-sensible concept of property taxes and turn them into a bizarro world in which we need to extract more and more money from a strangled subset of the tax base. A big part of the reason why some people have high property taxes in CA is because they're carrying the burden of the property taxes that should be paid by their neighbors who bought houses before they did.
Of course, on the other side of the debate are the people whose tax burden is largely carried by somebody else who would say that Prop 13 is the only thing saving our fragile democracy from tyranny. Or something like that.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | November 17, 2009 11:14 PM
I happen to live in the same Washington, DC neighborhood as the C Street house. (I'm now about half a mile away on A, but when my now-wife and I were first hanging out she lived around the block on D and I another block over just off E.)
One relevant thing is that while DC property taxes are based on assessed value, the amount they can rise each year is capped at 10 percent. There was a big run-up in assessed values in the neighborhood from the late 1990s through about two years ago, followed by relatively modest decline. Even with the declines, the net increases over the last decade are a lot more than 10 percent per year, so although my house lost assessed value the last two years my property taxes kept going 10 percent a year and will do so until they "catch up".
It may similarly be some time before the owners of C Street see a property tax bill that's as high as it "should" be.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 18, 2009 2:01 PM