You don't get a refund for the intervening years of mania. Oh we're sorry we almost kicked you out of your house because everyone else was paying out the nose for houses because they speculated Amazon would build it's hq there that year so sorry about that. Here's your 50k in taxes back with interest.

In that scenario it sounds like the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back for much less than they sold it for at the height of the mania.

> the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back

Don't assume. That person had to live somewhere, possibly at equally inflated prices. Now add in the the cost of two unnecessary moves.

> and if you sucked it up and paid the state? Maybe you had a sick family member that you were taking care of and the chaos of a move would have been too much to deal with. Sorry, chum. Bad luck of the draw.

What has happened (at least in my locality) is in years of high assessment increases they cut the rates so the increase is buffered. They typically don't set the tax rate until they see how the initial assessments are coming in.

The other program some counties around here do is property tax exclusion for low income seniors.