A recent change to state law lets cities freeze property taxes for disabled and senior citizens.

Roddy Stinson's column Sunday was headlined, "Cold-blooded City Council rejects elderly/disabled aid." Roddy, it's more complicated than that.

Seniors already are exempt on the first $65,000 of their home's valuation. The average cost of a house in San Antonio, according to 2001 Census Bureau data, is $74,360. We're not discussing, as Roddy maintains, "our neediest citizens" but rather middle-class homeowners.

Our slightly above-average house is appraised at $90,800. We just paid $521.35 to the city and $97.20 to the community college district, the two taxes under discussion.

My husband turns 65 in 10 years. If current trends continue, our house's appraisal could double by then. With the over-65 exemption, our 2014 tax bill would be only about $175 more than the one we paid last month.

If this freeze were to be approved, the city estimates it could lose $37 million in tax revenue over the next decade. That money has to come from somewhere.

Only 11 percent of senior citizens live below the poverty level, compared to 14 percent of all families. Those in the deepest trouble are children (24 percent live in poverty) and female-headed households (34 percent in poverty).

When I turn 65, should I cough up the extra $15 a month, or should I shift the tax burden to a poor young mother? Now let me think....

Property taxes are, however, a worrisome problem when home values rapidly escalate. Take my old neighborhood in Washington, D.C.

In the mid-1980s, I lived 11 blocks southeast of the Capitol. Ten or 15 years earlier, you couldn't have given away a house on my street, which still was recovering from the '60s riots. Last week the Washington Post advertised a similar row house for $679,000.

Twenty years ago, elderly African American widows who had moved to the district during World War II owned many houses on my block. They were besieged by yuppies, clutching a copy of Architectural Digest in one hand and a checkbook in the other, eager to restore the houses to their Edwardian splendor.

The women didn't want to sell. They wanted to live out their years in the houses where they raised their families.

But here's the catch. As the neighborhood gentrified, assessments skyrocketed. Within a decade, taxes went from reasonable to ridiculous. And many of them had no choice but to sell.

Is this happening in San Antonio?

I did a quick check on a few houses in the Baja King William neighborhood. Many appraisals of modestly priced houses increased by as much as $25,000 between 2001 and 2003. The appraisal of one 1,341-square-foot, one-bedroom house almost doubled in the past two years, from $132,253 to $240,300.

Another area to watch is the South Side. If, as expected, the area blossoms with the opening of the Toyota plant there, housing values could soar, placing a crushing tax burden on elderly homeowners of modest means.

But these are the exceptions. On average, appraisals in Bexar County go up less than 7 percent a year.

Before we start doling out tax relief to every retired CEO who moves to San Antonio to live in a condo at PGA Village, we need to think it through. We may be trying to find a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

On this everyone agrees: We want to make sure that senior citizens do not lose their homes because they are unable to pay rising property taxes.

The most elegant solution is Oregon's. There, a disabled or senior citizen applies for a deferral program, and the state pays the property taxes directly to the city or county. A lien is placed against the house for the taxes plus 6 percent interest. When the house is sold or the property owner dies, the state collects the tax from the sale proceeds or from the estate.

The program is voluntary and self-sustaining. Could it work here? Let's work on a creative solution instead of pitting the city against its seniors.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.