If you can't afford high property taxes you're incentivized to allow building so market rate housing price goes down (or at least increases slowly). With Prop

If you can't afford high property taxes you're incentivized to allow building so market rate housing price goes down (or at least increases slowly). With Prop 13 people have zero incentive to allow building because they benefit from extreme housing value increases with no downside. Prop 13 also means only new people are paying any of the real costs for the town since their property tax dwarfs the tax of old owners (one year of a new owner's property tax can be more than the entire cumulative thirty year payments of a neighbor). I wish Prop 13 was changed so every year local town failed to build X houses (where X is some large value determine by how large the property tax spread is from new and old owners) property tax on those protected by Prop 13 would jump 10% capping out at the actual fair market valuation of the property. This way if people don't want to build at least they're actually paying for it. This will never happen though given the current incentives. I think the key problem is that housing can be an investment or affordable, but it can't be both.