While I would dispute that a condo owner can't move to a better place and have money left over, in my mind, moving to another condo is just frying pan/fire, DoChen. You could probably buy a farm around where I live with the proceeds of selling a condo in a big city, not just a dinkier condo (which are rare around these parts). That's just a life-decision you maybe don't admit to making.
Land here is at most $4k an acre, there's plenty of people who can build a house on it for not all that much - I spent 20k. Work it out. Or just check real estate listings for my area for already-all-done stuff. It's not that high. No home owner association and fees and limits, either. You don't even have to mow your lawn if you don't mind how it looks.
Now, let me tell you a story about tax increases in my county - which amounted to 3x in one year - not 30% but 300%. They've gone up more since, which is one reason I practice all the tax evasion I can muster (I'll explain how later).
Here's how they pulled it off - despite my warning a goodly fraction of the populace what the trick was going to be.
We used to tax farmland (most of the county) at X$/acre, flat tax, simple, and the number was pretty low - around $3/acre/year. There was in addition, the usual PP tax on things you owned - home, cars, tools, but it was quite reasonable since both the rate, and the values were in general pretty low.
Some county councilman comes up with the idea that we have to do it all based on assessed values, you know, like the prosperous city-based county next door. Not to worry, he sez, as we'll just assess everything really low, and no one's tax bill will change much. Yeah, right - that's when all my alarm bells went off. The initial tax rate was only .02 - it's now .04. The initial assessments were quite low - less than I have money in my place to just buy the land quite awhile back when it was a lot cheaper/acre too.
This goes on for about a year, and no one is pissed, because no one's tax bill really went up all that much.
Then we have the crash etc. Some smart politician points out that, while we all have to tighten our belts, the gov does not - and think of the children etc etc. We need to "fairly assess" all the stuff in the county, and bingo - 3x tax bill increase. So bad, they went from once a year to twice so most people might miss it. And most, while grumbling a little more or less did. During a time you couldn't hardly eat (or make a profit on your farm due to this) - they rebuilt the entire courthouse from the inside out - the most expensive possible way to do things - built a new school - not needed, the student numbers are down, and so on - pure waste of our money. Now people are getting pissed, but there's nothing at all that can be done about it - bureaucracies grow without limit anytime they can, and it's a ratchet effect - they never shrink. Every county around us has even higher rates and property values, justified I suppose by asking prices on places - since there are few to zero sales to actually go by.
I know this because it hit me - and they reassessed my land based on "comparable" stuff - say a home on similar acres that had been on the market two years at a ridiculous asking price, but never sold at that price, and I had quite a battle getting that pointed out and accepted. And in fact, there IS no comparable place to mine - off grid - within 20 miles anyway.
Further, how do you argue with even a completely fair assessment - the super low one was the lie, not the new one. Nice trick in politics, eh?
And that's how I still pay less taxes than almost anyone anyway. I'm off-grid. Completely other than telephone/internet. Turns out, the people in charge of building permits are the power company - that was delegated to them by the county many years ago. And almost everyone - needs the power company, so the enforcement is nearly 100%. Except me, that is. All 4 of my liveable spaces - homes if you will - have no permits, and as such are taxed as "barns and sheds". There are some rules for this -
1. I had to start with bare land, obviously, and then build on it - myself. No contractor would risk losing his license doing this. If the land hadn't been bare to begin with, it'd already have permits and records.
2. There are some things I can't do, legally, without permits, or practically - see above. No one will drill me a well. No one will install a big "truck comes to refill" oil or propane tank. I'm not supposed to have running water or a drainfield (but I do in one building, well hidden stuff). Of course, I can't get grid power as that triggers the entire enforcement chain.
So, I pay taxes on my cars, and on my "barns" - this building, which cost an amazingly low ~20k to build and finish (about $20/sq foot) is assessed as a barn at $5k. That's less than the cost of my lathe on the ground floor alone. They just don't know how to handle this situation, because I'm "the only" and policy isn't made for one customer.
And, not too long ago, the building inspector dropped by, seeing the big to-do we had going on putting up all those new solar panels. He wanted his piece of the pie, asked me to go fill in some forms and pay like $25 for doing it. I simply never went in there - and he forgot, and forgot to check that I have no permits for anything else anyway. This guy was pretty straight up - I couldn't simply bribe him with a joint like his predecessor, and I guess he assumed that since everything looks OK, nothing has collapsed or started on fire...that it's OK.
We even discussed what I could do to "get legal". The one building I have that has the right number of doors/windows (there are specs for that for firefighters etc) is a very old trailer from W VA, that has aluminum wiring - which of course is not to code itself, and is actually kind of dangerous - I plan to re-wire it, after having it all fail after a previous re-do (leaving the same wire, but re-doing all the outlets with the magic aluminum wire anti-corrosion goop, which only lasts a few years - and most of them had fires in them - and have again, this time I'll really just replace the whole system.
But politics is the art of the possible. He quickly realized I was a complete outlier, and really could not drop everything to do that, so he shined it on. After all, when I ran a business, I brought literally millions of dollars into the county to be spent here - that's well known. If unhampered, I might do so again, also well known.
Funny old world, eh?