3 ms·

On a percentage basis. 1% of $1m is still way more than 4% of $150k

• TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  That's a difference of $10k vs $6k - which is way less than the percentage difference in the relative value of the homes.
• brandur 6y ago
  It's also worth calling out that when people make claims about lowest in the nation, they're almost certainly calculating that based off average price paid across all homes in the state. Thanks to Prop 13, many homeowners do pay quite tiny property taxes. But this turns out to be extremely nefarious because along with removing a fair tax base and liquidity from the market, it also means that the disproportionate burden for paying California property tax is placed on new home buyers, who are often younger people/young families. New entrants are often paying incredible levels of property tax (as it's a percentage of the already highly inflated prices), and because they're disproportionately more likely to be working, they're also the ones paying state and federal tax, along with the miscellaneous municipal taxes which can also be quite high in cities like San Francisco. Meanwhile, legacy owners make off like bandits. I looked up the property I rent in once, owned by a large real estate holder that's decades old, and it was assessed at a few hundred thousand — for a 5 unit building in central SF. I don't know what the actual value would be, but it'd be closer to a ballpark of $3 to $6M. A differential of ~20x, and this isn't uncommon. It's this framework that gets you to "lowest in the nation". I tend to think about it as _both_ the highest and the lowest in the nation, largely determined based on when your family moved here.