The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.

That has some not-fun generational aspects.

(1) If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced. That in turn leads to lower home values since the school quality factor is reduced.

(2) If munis are unable to collect a sufficient tax base, they must reduce services. There will be hemming and hawing about things like cutting the pensions promised decades ago to attract competent service workers, but those are harder to reduce rather than not fixing the fire trucks, the water pipes, and other hidden taxes citizens pay for by reduced services. So your property values will also be reduced in the long term. Small towns are prime examples of this happening, when towns fail.

Trying to build a community out of one socioeconomic class works about as well as trying to redline. It leads to a less vibrant community, less adaptable community, and people are poorer in life and in their finances for it.

Are pensions still an effective way to attract workers? I feel like there’ve been enough cases where workers get screwed out of them, that this isn’t much of an incentive. Similar to offering engineers equity in a startup.

Anything past the paycheck is a gamble.

That really depends on the state. Some states have different public school district funding mechanisms that don't depend as much on local property tax collections.

Fire trucks are far more expensive to acquire and maintain than necessary due to monopolistic actions by manufacturers, plus local governments buying fancier apparatus than they really need. There's a lot of room to trim those particular expenses.

https://www.iaff.org/news/fire-apparatus-crisis-sparks-inves...