Virtually no jurisdiction straightforwardly calculates the tax liability for a property as a fixed percentage of its market value. Instead, property tax rates tend to vary with the use to which a property is put or the identity of its owner. As a consequence, many of the potential benefits of property tax, such as ease of administration, transparency, the clear reflection of the costs and benefits of local services, and the intuitive fairness of imposing taxes in proportion to property wealth, are lost. In this Article, I report empirical evidence on the distributional effects of one such deviation: caps on annual assessment increases. My study provides a more comprehensive and detailed description of who benefits from assessment caps than has previously been reported. This study is also the first to examine how the neighborhoods that benefit the most from assessment caps have changed over time. I find that, in the case of New York City’s property tax caps, the cure for what ails the property tax has been worse than the disease, and I propose either a means-tested circuit breaker or a property tax deferral regime to address the liquidity issues facing truly cash-poor homeowners without conferring an unnecessary and expensive tax benefit on other households.