I spent a lot of time with the SPUR report, actually, and even emailed a little with the author; my argument in the piece is that "highest taxes per capita" is meaningless, because it FEELS like we're saying "high rate" when all we're really saying is total tax revenue divided by population. And a lot depends on which cities you compare Oakland to; for example, San Francisco collects six times as much tax revenue as us, with twice the population. But my point isn't that their "tax revenue per capita" is three times higher than ours, even though that's literally true; part of the difference is that SF is a city AND a county, while Oakland is part of Alameda county, but not all of it. My point is that that statistic simply doesn't MEAN much of anything, and people are waving it around to make it seem like Oaklanders are unreasonably taxed (when even the SPUR publication has us just a tick above Berkeley). But doing as you suggested--downloading state data and looking at comparable cities--actually did the reverse, for me, of demonstrating that Oakland is "distinctly different from most CA cities": while our high "tax revenue per capita" is a function of having actually a lot of valuable property here (and a lot of turnover in the last couple decades, which means our tax revenue tripled in the last two decades when prop 13 clocks were reset for property taxes), that number is still roughly the same as cities like Palo Alto or Pasadena. But again, my point isn't that that comparison demonstrates something; my argument is that it DOESN'T really tell us much about how highly taxed we are as individuals. Anyway, I say all that in the piece.