13 ms·

I would look also at the seriously distorted property and land taxation system in California as an additional contributor along with zoning. A few decades of P

• PretzelFisch 9y ago
  what do you mean "leveling the playing field" if you buy a house your property tax increase is limited to a fixed %. how is that not level.
  • ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    It's leveling it between existing owners and purchasers. As it stands, it's essentially subsidizing commuting. If you bought a house at $100k that's now worth $1M, and your job moves an hour away, you'd be giving up the property tax lock-in by moving to cut down your commute. Rent stabilization/control measures have a very similar problem.
    • Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
      You could always rent the home so someone else could occupy it. Presumably you would've paid off the $100k home by now, and then you could get a second mortgage on a new property, or rent and break even (given the income from renting the first property).
      • CydeWeys 9y ago
        Why should people owning investment properties be given huge tax breaks that wouldn't apply to someone buying the same home in the present day in order to live in it? Basing property taxes on the current value of the property makes sense, and is how it is done essentially everywhere else in the world. Basing property taxes on what the property cost the last time it was sold, even if that was decades ago and is some tiny fraction of the current value, is very unusual, and has all sorts of negative repercussions.
        • Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
          I'm not disagreeing. I was attempting to show how you might make the housing market less rigid. Even if the numbers of units for sale is low, you could at least get people to rent them. A larger rental supply would help meet the demand in California and keep prices for renters and buyers lower. I completely agree, though, that Prop 13 isn't helping the situation. But politically, we might as well accept that it won't go away. Your best bet is to save up enough to afford a down payment, and hope that property appreciates and you too can also reap Prop. 13's benefits down the road when you're older. And if you're house is worth 10x as much then, you won't lose it for being on a fixed income, like most retired people are. ...I'd still prefer not having Prop. 13. The more fruitful discussion is how to best navigate a world where it continues to exist. Voters will never approve its repeal; if politicians try to do something about it, they will get thrown out the next election cycle.
        • sjg007 9y ago
          There is an active debate with people lobbying Congress to remove the second mortgage deduction. Current value makes sense but California introduced Prop-13 and rent control around the same time to basically allow senior citizens to stay in their homes/rentals. Problems with prop-13 include the fact that commercial buildings are not excluded. California also has Prop-58 and another one where the parent or grandparent can transfer the house to a child/grandchild without an FMV appraisal as well. I believe it works like this.. Say a $50k house is paid off by the parent, then the gift tax on that can be paid by a home equity loan on it's current $1m valuation. I'm not sure if the gift tax though is calculated on the $50k or the $1m. Or if it is calculated at all. It may depend on if the parent/grandparent is still alive. You may be able to specify the value as the last real property value or the FMV (to cut future capital gains). Either way you just pay the taxes on it. But I think you can exclude a certain amount up to $500k if married. But you could rent it out as well and use it as collateral on another mortgage. It could also be that these houses will continue to be passed down the generations.
          • khuey 9y ago
            It's not the capital gains taxes that prop 58/etc allow you to escape, it's a reassessment of the valuation for property tax purposes. So in your example, the inheritors get a house with a $500/yr property tax bill (1% of 50k) instead of a $10000/yr property tax bill. (1% of 1M) Meanwhile all their neighbors who had to buy their homes recently are paying that $10k/yr. The estate tax doesn't kick in until 5 or so million so the capital gains thing is mostly irrelevant.
      • deleted 9y ago
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    • PretzelFisch 9y ago
      Why would you buy a new property and lose 6% to realtors? Or take out a new possibly more expensive loan. I am not sure property tax is a big motivator. Do you have studies that show it's negative effect?
      • cjlars 9y ago
        Why would it not be a big motivator? don't know about LA, but in SF tax is just shy of 1.2%, if you have a mortgage at 3.5%, and you've held your property for a long time, you can easily see your property tax triple and your cost of living go up ~10-20% in aggregate just by being assessed at the current market level in a new home (with the same value) on the other side of town... And that's every year, not just once on the sale. It seems pretty clear to me that 10% or 20% makes a big difference. Plenty of people will move across town to pay $2,400 a month instead of $3,000, why would home-owners be fundamentally different.
      • mturmon 9y ago
        Your comment indicates you may not know about how Prop. 13 works. Property valuations can get small year-to-year bumps, but a sale triggers a re-assessment, with vastly increased property taxes after that. My neighbor across the street bought in 1975 for $28K, and their valuation for tax assessment last year was $162K. Their next-door neighbor bought last year for $1.5M and their assessed value is $920K. Their houses are quite similar, but one pays $7500 more a year in property taxes. That difference can motivate people to endure a long commute, to hang on to a low assessment.
        • rosege 9y ago
          As someone living in a country without annual property taxes Im not really qualified to comment, but, it almost sounds like the solution is to allow people to transfer their low assessments on to new properties - this is obviously a huge advantage to older people but it would allow real estate to be used more efficiently.
          • exclusiv 9y ago
    • m-j-fox 9y ago
      Freeways also subsidize commuting. Would people sit in traffic every day if they had a choice? But if you suggest dynamiting a few stretches of interstate you get the same reaction from the public as you get when you suggest taking away prop 13.
      • closeparen 9y ago
        Would people sit on public transportation every day if they had a choice? Cleary not - BART ridership is falling during leisure time (when people have a choice) even as it rises during peak hours.
  • orik 9y ago
    because your property tax is no longer tied to what your house is worth, but instead tied to some arbitrary measurement (fixed % increase on what it used to be worth) x != y
    • PretzelFisch 9y ago
      how is that not level? once someone buys a house they are in the same system?
      • henrikschroder 9y ago
        Over time, you accrue a large tax benefit as a homeowner, if the actual value of your home increases more than 2% every year. By moving, you reset this benefit, which is a disincentive to moving.
    • WillPostForFood 9y ago
      The price you paid is no more less arbitrary than approximate current worth.
  • galago 9y ago
    Proposition 13 declared property taxes were to be assessed their 1975 value and restricted annual increases of the tax to an inflation factor, not to exceed 2% per year. A reassessment of the property tax can only be made a) when the property ownership changes or b) there is construction done. Property often increases in value more than 2% per year, so your actual rate goes down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
    • aidenn0 9y ago
      Even more damaging is when housing prices go up much faster than 2%; then there is a disincentive to move or enlarge your unit, because doing so would increase your tax liability by oftentimes staggering amounts.
      • djabatt 9y ago
        One solution for tax relief for elderly would be to remove or reduce tax payments at age 65 or earlier if one is handicapped. It seems to be a fare method to handle this for issue. For the rent inflation in LA I don't have a answer. That said allowing people to get homeless seems to be a great cost on society as a whole and their should be a smart and scalable solution.
    • PretzelFisch 9y ago
      When someone buys a property today, it is subject to the same 2% a year rule. I don't see how this is not a level field.
      • mrbabbage 9y ago
        Age The benefit accrues over many years, similar to rent control. As a result, the benefits flow to long-standing landholders, who skew disproportionately older. The result, at least for me in San Francisco: I pay twice as much in rent for a bedroom in a four bed apartment as my grandmother does in property tax for a 4000 square foot mansion. She bought her place over fifty years ago; by definition, I could not have done so. Indeed, with the direction things are heading, huge categories of people are locked out of all segments of the SF housing market due to excessive prices; there's nothing level about that.
  • PretzelFisch 9y ago
    I don't understand the downvotes. Using the term "leveling the playing field" implies that a new home purchaser has a different contract with the state then a home purchaser last year or 10 years ago. Yes what you paid for the house is more, and therefore your taxes are higher but the contract with the state is still the same.
• dv_dt 9y ago
  I support Prop 13 for primary homes that owners are actually living in, but commercial rent deriving properties should have never been covered by it. I take this position because I'm really not interested in kicking little old ladies out of their homes of multiple decades just because some property price bubble has driven real estate to crazy levels. Basically without prop 13, every bubble is going to drive the poorest and most vulnerable home owners out of their homes, and that is a pretty ugly side effect. That is the original intended protection of prop 13, but commercial properties were somehow rolled under that same umbrella.
  • electricEmu 9y ago
    While I understand the sentiment, how many people are estimated to be displaced? It's possible the local governments could work with very small amounts instead of coding another loophole into another law. Nuke Proposition 13, one-time grandfather some uses, and drop the remaining pain all at once.
    • deleted 9y ago
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    • dv_dt 9y ago
      In general principle, I want to favor owners living in their property. That creates social stability, instead of upheavals of neighborhood on every bubble. Without prop 13, the stronger the bubble, the more people with deep pockets are favored because they can hold out longer on property taxes. You'll just end up kicking people out of their homes sorted from poorest to richest as the bubble intensifies. Without prop 13, you may end up exacerbating bubbles - the system ends up favoring risky behavior: the uptake of buyers willing to take out the larger loans, or people taking out taking out loans to pay their taxes and try and ride out real estate bubbles. When the bubble bursts, there will be more people with more highly leveraged loans. Cities working on random rules to help subsets of property owners is, by definition, coding loopholes. By comparison, a primary residence of a homeowner isn't a loophole, that's a basic tax status used by the IRS.
      • 9y ago
• fiter 9y ago
  We could then re-evaluate rent control on the same logic! I think both of these controls have some helpful effects that last way longer than they should. We are trying to damp market oscillations (speculation), not remove them completely! Perhaps the increases could be the moving average of the last 5-10 years, so increases would slowly phase in if they are real growth and be smoothed over if they are temporary fluctuations.
  • closeparen 9y ago
    >We are trying to damp market oscillations (speculation), not remove them completely! I don't think proponents of rent control and Prop 13 would agree. They are trying to protect existing communities over the long term, and feel (somewhat understandably) that "the market" should not have the authority to disband communities on any time scale. Speculators are an easy rhetorical target, but if you dig deeper it's really about locking in the existing physical and social character of a neighborhood indefinitely, market forces be damned.
    • fiter 9y ago
      Thank you for pointing that out. I still think it is useful to make the argument explicitly and separately and see where people land. The percentages of people that support limited term prop 13/rent control may be larger than the percent that support it as a general concept.
• m-j-fox 9y ago
  Like the mortage-interest tax deduction, NIMBY zoning benefits so many people, once you do it, it's hard to undo without tanking the economy. It's a regressive tax, but so many voters benefit I doubt anything will ever change.
  • kcanini 9y ago
    And the capital gains tax exemption on the first half million dollars of profit from home sales.
• Medaber 9y ago
  I don't think you know what you're talking about. California has the highest state income tax and the highest sales tax in the nation. The property tax, thanks to prop 13, is just at the "median" level. I bought my house for $300K in 94087. Because people think houses here are now worth $2MM, my property tax should now be $25,000/year? Right now, with prop 13, my property tax goes up 2%/year. That's more than inflation, and that's enough.