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You can't understand prop 13 without understanding the environment in which it was passed. The price of houses was shooting up 20-30% a year, and people who ha
by gozur88 11y ago
You can't understand prop 13 without understanding the environment in which it was passed. The price of houses was shooting up 20-30% a year, and people who had owned their houses for decades were being forced to sell because they couldn't pay the taxes.
The idea that somehow a higher property tax will keep prices under control is not borne out by experience.
- vkou 11y agoWhy on earth were property taxes rising along with the price of housing? Instead of collecting a flat percentage of the home value, the cities/state could have just divided the taxes they were going to collect across all properties, proportionate to their value. Just because there's a property value boom doesn't mean that the regional budgets should expand by 20% year over year...
- gozur88 11y agoWhere I lived pre-prop 13 taxes were based purely on the assessed value of the house. If the assessed value doubled in five years, so did the taxes. And there was no cap on tax rates. I don't know if it was a state-level thing or if tax districts all did their own calculations back then.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago> You can't understand prop 13 without understanding the environment in which it was passed. The price of houses was shooting up 20-30% a year, and people who had owned their houses for decades were being forced to sell because they couldn't pay the taxes. Is that very different from the present day, in which there is very little property tax?
- gozur88 11y agoThat's my point. It wasn't different, so people who say getting rid of prop 13 will somehow cause house prices to fall are probably wrong.