Anyone who lives in the Indianapolis area, or probably in the state, is aware of the problem we’ve had with housing taxes. Specifically, many people saw their taxes double or worse from last year to this year. Since the big hoohah over the situation, the state has backed off, allowing people to pay at last year’s rate and apparently just about the whole state is getting reassessed.

In a neighborhood near where I work, many houses have had this particular sign up since it all hit the fan. It’s in protest of the taxes, but the sign itself really bothers me. It says:

For Sale
     By Owner     
Due to
(Unfair Taxation)

I get their point and all, but if you’re going to put a sign in your front lawn and leave it there for months, maybe you should give a LITTLE thought to its internal logic.

  1. First of all, if you really wanted to even SLIGHTLY interest someone in buying the house, you wouldn’t broadcast the fact that the local taxes are unfair.
  2. What’s with the parentheses?? You’re selling your house because of (unfair taxation)? What the heck is THAT supposed to mean? It MIGHT make some sense if you moved the open parenthesis to right before the “Due to,” but because of font size choices that would look kind of weird also.
  3. All you show by displaying this sign in your yard is that you’re saying you want to sell your house but you’re not really serious about it, that you have no sense of proper grammar, and, oh, you’re also unhappy about the tax situation.

If it were me and I were going to keep a sign in my yard for any length of time, especially more than a couple months as has been the case with the above-mentioned signs, I’d want to make sure that the sign said what I really felt and didn’t insult my intelligence. But that’s just me….