User talk:Cheesywhiz

January 2009
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, adding content without citing a reliable source is not consistent with our policy of verifiability. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you are familiar with Citing sources, please take this opportunity to add references to the article.  Litho  derm  00:51, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

ok to use the source from which most of this page's content was plagarized (uncredited)? that would be: http://tripatlas.com/Property_tax

"Nevertheless, the property owners complained that the much grander camelback down the street paid the same tax as the single story house. In exasperation, the assessors made an entirely new rule: the tax would be based on the number of rooms within the house."

"Before the American Civil War, New Orleans was one of the largest cities in the United States, with a population of over 100,000. The federal government was funded by import and export duties and the states and local governments were funded by property taxes. New Orleans was sensitive to property taxes. To make the job of the assessors easier, the assessors adopted a rule that said that property taxes were proportional to the front footage of the lot, that is, the length of the lot along its street. The depth of lots was fairly consistent due to the streets' fairly consistent layout. The rule was thus relatively accurate since land, not the structure, represented the value of the property. To minimize property tax, lots were narrow but deep. As a result, houses were similarly narrow but deep. This is a striking difference from the contemporary ranch-style homes. The New Orleans house of that time became known as a shotgun house because it was said that you could stand in the front door and shoot a shotgun all the way through to the rear wall without hitting anything within. Hallways were avoided because they took up valuable room width inside the house. The shotgun double became popular then. A shotgun double was two residences under one roof and the building was two rooms wide, instead of the shotgun’s single room width. The double has two front doors and the two residences share a common set of center chimneys. Each room had a fireplace for heat. This style saved the narrow alleys between each house that lead to the back yard as well as the construction cost of the multiple chimneys. Citizens of New Orleans complained that their neighbor with a two-story house paid the same property tax as that paid by the owner of a one-story house. The assessors changed their rule to one that determined property taxes under a formula: the front footage times the number of stories the house had.

"As a result of that rule change, the camelback house was born. A camelback house has a hump at the back;"

(...arrived in the 30s about the same time as the invention of plywood!)

"it was two stories tall in the back but only one in the front. In response, the assessors made a new rule that determined how far back the hump began before the house was determined to be a two story house. Nevertheless, the property owners complained that the much grander camelback down the street paid the same tax as the single story house. In exasperation, the assessors made an entirely new rule: the tax would be based on the number of rooms within the house. To the extent that anyone considered it previously, closets became totally unrealistic. A closet was counted as a room because a closet is an enclosed space with a door. So instead of closets, home owners used furniture to store clothes - the chiffarobe was born."

(...another foreigner without the whole story..a chifforobe is actually used for dishes, armoire is the word they want to use!)

So, the New Orleans house is narrow and deep. It has no closets or hallways but every room has a fire place. City water and sewerage was added later so all the rooms that require this are at the back of the house at the site of the back porch.

if not I could use this one:

http://www.nps.gov/archive/rocr/olst/history.htm

"Considered rooms and taxed as such by the British crown, closets were not often built during the colonial era. After the American Revolution, the "closet tax" was abolished, allowing homeowners to construct closets without additional taxation."

...that or I would hope that my being born and raised here and thirty years as a renovator/restorer of these historic New Orleans homes might qualify?

J. Ottercorp Worldwide LLC, New Orleans

let me know! thanks! Cheesywhiz (talk) 22:03, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

...come to think of it, the first article tells the whole story that the page guesses at, wrongly most of the time!


 * Shotgun house is a featured article, meaning that it went through a rigorous process of evaluation-- I doubt that there are any blatant copyright violations in it. I am afraid that your personal experience in the field has no bearing on the matter, and would remind you of our policy on original research. Nevertheless, I assume your issue with the article is valid in some respect, and because I know from nothing about this subject, I would encourage you to copy and paste what you typed above into a new section on the article's talk page, which you can do by clicking this link. There you can discuss this issue with the contributors who brought it to FA status in the first place. Thank you,  Litho  derm  22:58, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

eesh. i am still having a hell of a time with citing. i need to re-read that bc I thought I knew how to do it....

I tried to enter the text (the second time) but I could not get the cited link to work... I see from the title 'shotgun house that I am only thinking of this in terms of louisiana shotguns, will need to adjust my scope on that. the british crown transferred its original means of calculating the number of rooms to find the taxable property amount which went out with the american revolution, then american property taxes were calculated from lot frontage from that point on but frontage was switched (I only know that to be true for new orleans) in the 20s-30s when camelbacks appeared and it was switched (only here as far as I know) back to rooms and our spurious local government decided to count halls as well as closets as rooms.

im going to click that link thingy while i go reschool myself on the finer points of gettin a durn link citing to work right.

thanks, j Cheesywhiz (talk) 05:12, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

which held for colonial properties until