One hotbed is the normally bucolic retreat of Edgartown, Mass., perhaps better known as the city that governs Chappaquiddick Island. The assessed value of one of Walter Cronkite’s homes there increased from $4 million on the local assessor’s roles to $6.3 million in just one year, according to the Boston Globe. The assessed value of the family home of the late Ernest J. Boch, a car dealer and businessman, rose from $10.5 million to $13.5 million. In other vacation home enclaves across the United States, these types of increases have turned normally docile part-time property owners into irate tax protesters. They are descending on the offices of assessors to demand relief, often to no avail, even though they typically provide the bulk of their community’s tax revenues. In Edgartown, for example, summer residents account for 80 percent of the tax revenue.

The National Taxpayers Union estimates that 20 states now have antitax initiatives brewing at the local level.

Residents of Incline Village, Nev., near Lake Tahoe, were recently spurred to act when the county reestimated the price of an average house upward from $450,000 to $750,000, only five years after the last reestimate, prompting an increase in property tax bills of 30 percent. Local homeowner Ted Harris organized protests supported by thousands of Nevada residents, which led the state to cap property tax increases at 3 percent annually. The National Taxpayers Union, a nonpartisan lobbying group, estimates that 20 states now have antitax initiatives brewing at the local level.

The Washington Post recently reported that in Arlington County, Va., the average home value increased by 18 percent between 2004 and 2006. In Maryland, home values went up at about the same percentage rate. Residents fear that equally robust assessments–and higher taxes–will soon follow. Over the last five years, notes Elizabeth Karasmeighan at Americans for Tax Reform in Washington, D.C., "local property tax collections have exceeded population and inflation growth by 55 percent."

For many affluent families, this dark side of the housing bubble is threatening to overshadow the enjoyment of seasonal retreats. Homeowners who have steadfastly hung on to a favorite summer beach house or a winter ski chalet for generations are now wondering if rising tax rates make these part-time residences viable.

Of course, the boisterous housing market of the past few years that has led to these dramatic changes in valuation has also created vast amounts of new wealth. Housing flippers, who bet on the rising tide of the housing market and won, have in many cases used profits to fund new second and third homes and remodel older houses. New construction boomed in once-quiet vacation spots at beaches, lakes and on mountainsides. These large second and third homes helped drive up real estate values in places like Edgartown and Lake Tahoe.

Local property tax revenues increased from $238 billion in 2000 to $286 billion in 2003, approximately 5 percent per year. State governments, unlike their local counterparts, have begun to roll back taxes. According to the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York in Albany, state governments cut overall taxes last year for the first time since 2000. But this relief may not be enough.

In 1978, taxpayers in California enacted the watershed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and raised the rallying cry for a much broader tax revolt that some credit with igniting the Reagan revolution. Twenty-eight years later, similar cries can once again be heard.

Samuel R. Staley, PhD, is director of urban and land use policy for the Reason Foundation and coauthor, with Ted Balaker, of The Road More Traveled: Increasing Mobility and Reducing Congestion in America’s Cities.