12 ms·

You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. I’m sure your feelings will c

You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older.

gowld 5y ago
Paying taxes on unearned gains is not "driven out of your house". You can keep the house and pay taxes on the gains. > I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older. Yes, this is the problem. Extreme self-interest and entitlement to massive windfalls.
- plank_time 5y ago
  How are old people with no income supposed to afford capital gains taxes? And if house prices go down do they get a refund?
  - mattmcknight 5y ago
    Mark to market property taxes do go lower when assessments go lower.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      You don't get a refund for the intervening years of mania. Oh we're sorry we almost kicked you out of your house because everyone else was paying out the nose for houses because they speculated Amazon would build it's hq there that year so sorry about that. Here's your 50k in taxes back with interest.
      - arrosenberg 5y ago
        In that scenario it sounds like the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back for much less than they sold it for at the height of the mania.
        dnautics 5y ago
        > the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back Don't assume. That person had to live somewhere, possibly at equally inflated prices. Now add in the the cost of two unnecessary moves. > and if you sucked it up and paid the state? Maybe you had a sick family member that you were taking care of and the chaos of a move would have been too much to deal with. Sorry, chum. Bad luck of the draw.
      - mattmcknight 5y ago
        What has happened (at least in my locality) is in years of high assessment increases they cut the rates so the increase is buffered. They typically don't set the tax rate until they see how the initial assessments are coming in. The other program some counties around here do is property tax exclusion for low income seniors.
  - tzs 5y ago
    Or working class people. For a large fraction of people if their taxes are going up faster than their wages are going up they do not have a reasonable way to get higher wages to pay for the tax. There is very little controversy over not taxing unrealized gains when it comes to income tax [1]. I'm not sure why doing the same thing for unrealized gains in property value is controversial. It's not like most of the things property taxes pay for are proportional to the value of the property. The changes each year in costs to provide roads, schools, libraries, police and fire, and utilities to my house and my neighbor's houses generally has little to do with the changes in the market value of our homes. So why should the taxes that pay those things be tied to market value of the house? More sensible would be to take the costs to provide the services the tax pays for, and divide it among the houses that receive the services, equally or taking into account usage (e.g., the amount for sewer might be proportional to the number of bedrooms). If we want it to be a progressive tax, apportion it according to the relative market values of the properties, but determine the total amount for the neighborhood solely by how much money the tax needs to raise to provide the services used by that neighborhood. [1] There is controversy over tricks and schemes used to effectively realize them while escaping taxation.
    - JAlexoid 5y ago
      > It's not like most of the things property taxes pay for are proportional to the value of the property Exactly! The extraordinary taxes on property are a result of unfair distribution of cost of services. A city needs to collect for a budget of $X... so they distribute the costs the best they can.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  It's not a tax on the gains, it's tax based on the estimated current market value, which could go up or down.
- GloriousKoji 5y ago
  Prop 13 is a limits how much property tax can increase in a year. So hypothetically without prop 13 it would possible that the value of your house jumps 10x and then you're stuck with paying 10x the amount of property tax that year. I don't think we need to remove it completely but some adjustments like applicable only to a primary residence and not investment or commercial properties would probably go a long way.
  - cycrutchfield 5y ago
    If the value of my home jumped 10x in a year, I would be ecstatic. Are you kidding?
    - secondcoming 5y ago
      Why so? You don't see that gain unless you sell, at which point you'll probably buy another house that has also risen 10x.
      - cronix 5y ago
        In a lot of places, if not most, property taxes are based on the assessed "current market value" of your house and audited annually, which can change a lot from year to year. Property taxes are paid annually, not when the house sells. If the house goes up 10x in a year, the property tax also rises which makes it very hard on a fixed income when you're retired, especially when the gov't artificially calculates inflation at a lower rate so they don't have to pay as much in social security benefits to those seniors reducing their purchasing power over time.
        JAlexoid 5y ago
        Property taxes are supposed to cover your local government's running services - police, fire brigade, trash/sanitation, water and roads. Properly distributed, they should not be high. Property taxes are not a slush fund for the government, nor should they be deferrable. They are intended to be running expenses.
throw737858 5y ago
Someone who owns a house in cali is a milionaire. I am not sure it applies to immigrant who just moved to California.
- plank_time 5y ago
  The old person would have sold the house a long time ago because of the rise of their property tax. They wouldn’t be millionaires. They would have to sell their home for a small gain and then rent for the rest of their lives. And since they are old they have no income so they need to keep moving to cheaper and cheaper apartments. Sounds like a great way to live a life, just because younger people feel like they deserve to live in their house.
  - throw737858 5y ago
    > just because younger people feel like they deserve to live in their house. Well, they do deserve those houses. If we expect young people to work, pay taxes and raise new generation. This is yet another middle finger to young people. No wonder birth rate is in toilet.
  - cycrutchfield 5y ago
    If their property taxes increased to the point where they cannot afford it, then that means that their property value increased significantly. Excuse me if I don't feel too bad for somebody who just reaped a massive windfall. The "won't somebody think of granny?" argument doesn't really work when advocating for a policy that disproportionately subsidizes non-grannies.
    - selectodude 5y ago
      The greatest day of my life will be the day I owe the IRS $1 million dollars.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      People generally buy a house because they want to live in it. The nominal value of the house does nothing to benefit them.
arrosenberg 5y ago
That may have been the case when Prop 13 was sold to the public, but at this point it's mostly being used to accumulate wealth, not keep people on fixed incomes in their lifelong homes. If that was the goal, there is a much better solution - let the elderly accumulate the tax bill against the value of the house, and collect from the estate when they pass.
- plank_time 5y ago
  When houses get sold, capital gains need to be paid. This is nothing new.
  - arrosenberg 5y ago
    Meanwhile, in many neighborhoods, the older, wealthy, established residents are paying 1/3rd the taxes needed to support infrastructure and services, compared to newer, younger residents who are trying to establish a nest-egg and raise families without the benefits the older generations had. There is no one solution that will work for every neighborhood, but prop 13 is economic warfare on the young. Portraying it as young tech millionaires against poor, old retirees is not true for a large portion of those affected here in the present.
    - plank_time 5y ago
      Citation otherwise this is just your biased anecdote. There’s plenty of turnover in California on par with other states. If prop 13 were somehow so powerful a factor not to sell, you would see a lot less house sales which you don’t. In my city, half the houses were sold in the last 20 years which sounds pretty good to me. The idea that property taxes are frozen to 30 years ago and governments are starving for money is fiction. In places like Toronto where property taxes get assessed every year, the property taxes 1/3 for an equivalent house price.
      - jedberg 5y ago
        California could have increased their property tax revenue by 12 billion if they had passed the partial repeal last year: https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/Updated_2019_Rev_Est_memo_Design_v5.pdf https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/Updated_2019_...
ska 5y ago
Something like prop 13 isn't the only way to avoid that. Some jurisdictions allow you to defer property tax indefinitely in the form of a lien against the house which seems like a reasonable way to do it.
- plank_time 5y ago
  Some of my neighbors are seniors who are on social security. Their houses were bought for about $160k in the 1970s. Which is expensive back then. Now they are worth $2M but they have no intention to move. Where would they live? And how can they afford the $30k/yr property tax? What stops people from selling their homes isn’t prop 13, it’s the ridiculous rise in house prices in the last 15 years. It creates no mobility. Stop bitching about Prop 13, that is a lazy and short sighted and wrong explanation for house prices. Look at the inventory these days. It’s low because no one wants to sell their homes because where are they going to move to?
  - ska 5y ago
    You misunderstand - the whole point of the scheme is they don't have to pay the property tax. It gets (partially or entirely) accumulated in a lien against the house, and the seniors stay as long as they want. When they choose to sell, or their estate sells, the property tax is settled first from the proceeds of the sale. I'm saying this scheme is in place in other locations to address the same problem you describe, and seems to be working better than prop 13 (at solving that).
  - jonfw 5y ago
    Where would they live? With a budget of 2 million dollars- they could own an extravagant home practically anywhere in the US while pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have no idea why people who are living off of social security should be in the most desirable housing in the entire country
    - potta_coffee 5y ago
      Why should they be forced to sell a house that they earned and paid for?
rcpt 5y ago
the California Tax Postponment Program protects low income seniors and the disabled. They have 0 risk of being displaced by property taxes no matter what. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary
yongjik 5y ago
I own a house in East Bay, and paying >$10k/yr of property tax. While I don't mind tax in principle, it greatly annoys me that I'm paying much more than my neighbors just because I bought it a few years ago. And why would my opinion change when I get older? Prop 13 won't do shit to lower my taxes, I'll have less income and still be paying through the nose, because the city needs money and half of its residents are paying virtually nothing. If anything, I'll be even crankier about the whole situation.
- delaynomore 5y ago
  >why would my opinion change when I get older? Your opinion might change if property price around East Bay continue to appreciate and your new neighbors are paying even more.
  - rcpt 5y ago
    A pitch copied straight from pyramid scams.
- krferriter 5y ago
  It's a pyramid scheme, people newly entering the housing market radically subsidize the asset values of those who entered before them.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > And why would my opinion change when I get older? Prop 13 won't do shit to lower my taxes It will, in real terms, since the assessment increase limit is the lower of 2% or the rate of inflation each year, guaranteeing that over the long term the assessed value and tax go down in real terms. Which isn’t to say your opinion should change, just that the self-interest equation does.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    That's BS. If I pay $10k in property taxes(excl school taxes), that means I cannot invest that money into something more tangible. Thus depriving me of working investments to subsidize wealthier individuals is worse, than steadily increasing taxes.
Ekaros 5y ago
Or maybe property tax shouldn't be a thing... Or be substantially smaller.
jedberg 5y ago
This was a red herring when prop 13 was passed, and is a red herring now. 49 other states don't have prop 13, and yet seniors aren't priced out of their homes. There are plenty of other solutions. Some states allow you to just pay the same amount each year and put the difference as a lien on the house until you sell. Some states have something like prop 13, but it is applied to entire counties. ie. They allow the entire county to raise their income from property tax by 1% annually. So everyone's home gets reassessed for its value and then the tax rate is set so that the whole county goes up 1%. This means that in some cases people's property taxes actually go down if one area had a massive increase in value. Every other state figured out a way to avoid this problem. California just loves its "rent control for the wealthy" which is what Prop 13 is. Prop 13 is the single worst law in California and must go. And I say this as someone who owns multiple properties in CA, and in fact for one of them, the profit comes entirely from the fact that the tax rate was set in the 70s. If I had to pay property tax on the current value, I'd just sell it because there would be no profit to be had. And in my primary home, my neighbors subsidize me by paying twice what I do even though their homes are worth less. And I subsidize my neighbor who has been here since the 60s and pays 1/10 of what I do for the same services. And if you're still really concerned about old people losing their homes, at least support getting rid of Prop 13 for all non-primary homes. There is absolutely no reason a rental property should be protected from property tax increases.
- wwweston 5y ago
  > This was a red herring when prop 13 was passed, and is a red herring now. 49 other states don't have prop 13, and yet seniors aren't priced out of their homes. Prop 13 is bad in at least half a dozen ways, but I'm not so sure this problem isn't coming elsewhere or even is absent. It seems to me California may have experienced a leading edge of metro dynamics that are going to come for other states soon. > everyone's home gets reassessed for its value and then the tax rate is set so that the whole county goes up 1%. That's interesting. > And if you're still really concerned about old people losing their homes, at least support getting rid of Prop 13 for all non-primary homes I think something like this is right (and wasn't this attempted by proposition a few years ago?). Residence-first real estate policy needs to include tax that increases on the number of properties owned (and maybe even more steeply in a supply constrained market).
Manuel_D 5y ago
> You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older. Or maybe, make it so that property tax increases are limited but only if the owner: 1. Is past retirement age 2. The owner lives in the property. 3. The owner does not have the means to pay the normal property tax rates. This is how most other States' solve this problem. Instead of freezing property tax rates across the board, they narrowly limit property taxes of old residents that don't have the means to pay the normal property tax rate.
- krferriter 5y ago
  What you're suggesting is that the solution to the problem should be targeted at the actual problem trying to be solved. Seems like a lot to ask, so clearly the best way forward is to just continue shoveling more wealth onto the already-wealthy at the expense of people entering the workforce and housing market, and even then still not actually solving the original problem we sought out to solve in the first place.
thehappypm 5y ago
These poor millionaires!
dragonwriter 5y ago
> You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. Believing that tax bills should be equal doesn't imply that; one can believe in equal taxation of same-value property and not think that property tax should ever force people out of property they own. Deferrable-by-default property tax (either entirely or increases above base year) are better than assessment increase limits at avoiding people being forced out, but do less to transfer wealth up the to already-wealthy elites.
s17n 5y ago
Except that prop 13 tax rates can be inherited.

You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older.

gowld 5y ago

Paying taxes on unearned gains is not "driven out of your house". You can keep the house and pay taxes on the gains. > I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older. Yes, this is the problem. Extreme self-interest and entitlement to massive windfalls.

plank_time 5y ago
How are old people with no income supposed to afford capital gains taxes? And if house prices go down do they get a refund?
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  Mark to market property taxes do go lower when assessments go lower.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    You don't get a refund for the intervening years of mania. Oh we're sorry we almost kicked you out of your house because everyone else was paying out the nose for houses because they speculated Amazon would build it's hq there that year so sorry about that. Here's your 50k in taxes back with interest.
    - arrosenberg 5y ago
      In that scenario it sounds like the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back for much less than they sold it for at the height of the mania.
      - dnautics 5y ago
        > the person "forced out" would have received a huge windfall of cash, and could ostensibly buy their same house back Don't assume. That person had to live somewhere, possibly at equally inflated prices. Now add in the the cost of two unnecessary moves. > and if you sucked it up and paid the state? Maybe you had a sick family member that you were taking care of and the chaos of a move would have been too much to deal with. Sorry, chum. Bad luck of the draw.
    - mattmcknight 5y ago
      What has happened (at least in my locality) is in years of high assessment increases they cut the rates so the increase is buffered. They typically don't set the tax rate until they see how the initial assessments are coming in. The other program some counties around here do is property tax exclusion for low income seniors.
- tzs 5y ago
  Or working class people. For a large fraction of people if their taxes are going up faster than their wages are going up they do not have a reasonable way to get higher wages to pay for the tax. There is very little controversy over not taxing unrealized gains when it comes to income tax [1]. I'm not sure why doing the same thing for unrealized gains in property value is controversial. It's not like most of the things property taxes pay for are proportional to the value of the property. The changes each year in costs to provide roads, schools, libraries, police and fire, and utilities to my house and my neighbor's houses generally has little to do with the changes in the market value of our homes. So why should the taxes that pay those things be tied to market value of the house? More sensible would be to take the costs to provide the services the tax pays for, and divide it among the houses that receive the services, equally or taking into account usage (e.g., the amount for sewer might be proportional to the number of bedrooms). If we want it to be a progressive tax, apportion it according to the relative market values of the properties, but determine the total amount for the neighborhood solely by how much money the tax needs to raise to provide the services used by that neighborhood. [1] There is controversy over tricks and schemes used to effectively realize them while escaping taxation.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    > It's not like most of the things property taxes pay for are proportional to the value of the property Exactly! The extraordinary taxes on property are a result of unfair distribution of cost of services. A city needs to collect for a budget of $X... so they distribute the costs the best they can.
mattmcknight 5y ago
It's not a tax on the gains, it's tax based on the estimated current market value, which could go up or down.
GloriousKoji 5y ago
Prop 13 is a limits how much property tax can increase in a year. So hypothetically without prop 13 it would possible that the value of your house jumps 10x and then you're stuck with paying 10x the amount of property tax that year. I don't think we need to remove it completely but some adjustments like applicable only to a primary residence and not investment or commercial properties would probably go a long way.
- cycrutchfield 5y ago
  If the value of my home jumped 10x in a year, I would be ecstatic. Are you kidding?
  - secondcoming 5y ago
    Why so? You don't see that gain unless you sell, at which point you'll probably buy another house that has also risen 10x.
    - cronix 5y ago
      In a lot of places, if not most, property taxes are based on the assessed "current market value" of your house and audited annually, which can change a lot from year to year. Property taxes are paid annually, not when the house sells. If the house goes up 10x in a year, the property tax also rises which makes it very hard on a fixed income when you're retired, especially when the gov't artificially calculates inflation at a lower rate so they don't have to pay as much in social security benefits to those seniors reducing their purchasing power over time.
      - JAlexoid 5y ago
        Property taxes are supposed to cover your local government's running services - police, fire brigade, trash/sanitation, water and roads. Properly distributed, they should not be high. Property taxes are not a slush fund for the government, nor should they be deferrable. They are intended to be running expenses.

throw737858 5y ago

Someone who owns a house in cali is a milionaire. I am not sure it applies to immigrant who just moved to California.

plank_time 5y ago
The old person would have sold the house a long time ago because of the rise of their property tax. They wouldn’t be millionaires. They would have to sell their home for a small gain and then rent for the rest of their lives. And since they are old they have no income so they need to keep moving to cheaper and cheaper apartments. Sounds like a great way to live a life, just because younger people feel like they deserve to live in their house.
- throw737858 5y ago
  > just because younger people feel like they deserve to live in their house. Well, they do deserve those houses. If we expect young people to work, pay taxes and raise new generation. This is yet another middle finger to young people. No wonder birth rate is in toilet.
- cycrutchfield 5y ago
  If their property taxes increased to the point where they cannot afford it, then that means that their property value increased significantly. Excuse me if I don't feel too bad for somebody who just reaped a massive windfall. The "won't somebody think of granny?" argument doesn't really work when advocating for a policy that disproportionately subsidizes non-grannies.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    The greatest day of my life will be the day I owe the IRS $1 million dollars.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    People generally buy a house because they want to live in it. The nominal value of the house does nothing to benefit them.

arrosenberg 5y ago

That may have been the case when Prop 13 was sold to the public, but at this point it's mostly being used to accumulate wealth, not keep people on fixed incomes in their lifelong homes. If that was the goal, there is a much better solution - let the elderly accumulate the tax bill against the value of the house, and collect from the estate when they pass.

plank_time 5y ago
When houses get sold, capital gains need to be paid. This is nothing new.
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  Meanwhile, in many neighborhoods, the older, wealthy, established residents are paying 1/3rd the taxes needed to support infrastructure and services, compared to newer, younger residents who are trying to establish a nest-egg and raise families without the benefits the older generations had. There is no one solution that will work for every neighborhood, but prop 13 is economic warfare on the young. Portraying it as young tech millionaires against poor, old retirees is not true for a large portion of those affected here in the present.
  - plank_time 5y ago
    Citation otherwise this is just your biased anecdote. There’s plenty of turnover in California on par with other states. If prop 13 were somehow so powerful a factor not to sell, you would see a lot less house sales which you don’t. In my city, half the houses were sold in the last 20 years which sounds pretty good to me. The idea that property taxes are frozen to 30 years ago and governments are starving for money is fiction. In places like Toronto where property taxes get assessed every year, the property taxes 1/3 for an equivalent house price.
    - jedberg 5y ago
      California could have increased their property tax revenue by 12 billion if they had passed the partial repeal last year: https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/Updated_2019_Rev_Est_memo_Design_v5.pdf https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/Updated_2019_...

ska 5y ago

Something like prop 13 isn't the only way to avoid that. Some jurisdictions allow you to defer property tax indefinitely in the form of a lien against the house which seems like a reasonable way to do it.

plank_time 5y ago
Some of my neighbors are seniors who are on social security. Their houses were bought for about $160k in the 1970s. Which is expensive back then. Now they are worth $2M but they have no intention to move. Where would they live? And how can they afford the $30k/yr property tax? What stops people from selling their homes isn’t prop 13, it’s the ridiculous rise in house prices in the last 15 years. It creates no mobility. Stop bitching about Prop 13, that is a lazy and short sighted and wrong explanation for house prices. Look at the inventory these days. It’s low because no one wants to sell their homes because where are they going to move to?
- ska 5y ago
  You misunderstand - the whole point of the scheme is they don't have to pay the property tax. It gets (partially or entirely) accumulated in a lien against the house, and the seniors stay as long as they want. When they choose to sell, or their estate sells, the property tax is settled first from the proceeds of the sale. I'm saying this scheme is in place in other locations to address the same problem you describe, and seems to be working better than prop 13 (at solving that).
- jonfw 5y ago
  Where would they live? With a budget of 2 million dollars- they could own an extravagant home practically anywhere in the US while pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have no idea why people who are living off of social security should be in the most desirable housing in the entire country
  - potta_coffee 5y ago
    Why should they be forced to sell a house that they earned and paid for?

rcpt 5y ago

the California Tax Postponment Program protects low income seniors and the disabled. They have 0 risk of being displaced by property taxes no matter what. Prop 13 is wholly unnecessary

yongjik 5y ago

I own a house in East Bay, and paying >$10k/yr of property tax. While I don't mind tax in principle, it greatly annoys me that I'm paying much more than my neighbors just because I bought it a few years ago. And why would my opinion change when I get older? Prop 13 won't do shit to lower my taxes, I'll have less income and still be paying through the nose, because the city needs money and half of its residents are paying virtually nothing. If anything, I'll be even crankier about the whole situation.

delaynomore 5y ago
>why would my opinion change when I get older? Your opinion might change if property price around East Bay continue to appreciate and your new neighbors are paying even more.
- rcpt 5y ago
  A pitch copied straight from pyramid scams.
krferriter 5y ago
It's a pyramid scheme, people newly entering the housing market radically subsidize the asset values of those who entered before them.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> And why would my opinion change when I get older? Prop 13 won't do shit to lower my taxes It will, in real terms, since the assessment increase limit is the lower of 2% or the rate of inflation each year, guaranteeing that over the long term the assessed value and tax go down in real terms. Which isn’t to say your opinion should change, just that the self-interest equation does.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  That's BS. If I pay $10k in property taxes(excl school taxes), that means I cannot invest that money into something more tangible. Thus depriving me of working investments to subsidize wealthier individuals is worse, than steadily increasing taxes.

Ekaros 5y ago

Or maybe property tax shouldn't be a thing... Or be substantially smaller.

jedberg 5y ago

This was a red herring when prop 13 was passed, and is a red herring now. 49 other states don't have prop 13, and yet seniors aren't priced out of their homes. There are plenty of other solutions. Some states allow you to just pay the same amount each year and put the difference as a lien on the house until you sell. Some states have something like prop 13, but it is applied to entire counties. ie. They allow the entire county to raise their income from property tax by 1% annually. So everyone's home gets reassessed for its value and then the tax rate is set so that the whole county goes up 1%. This means that in some cases people's property taxes actually go down if one area had a massive increase in value. Every other state figured out a way to avoid this problem. California just loves its "rent control for the wealthy" which is what Prop 13 is. Prop 13 is the single worst law in California and must go. And I say this as someone who owns multiple properties in CA, and in fact for one of them, the profit comes entirely from the fact that the tax rate was set in the 70s. If I had to pay property tax on the current value, I'd just sell it because there would be no profit to be had. And in my primary home, my neighbors subsidize me by paying twice what I do even though their homes are worth less. And I subsidize my neighbor who has been here since the 60s and pays 1/10 of what I do for the same services. And if you're still really concerned about old people losing their homes, at least support getting rid of Prop 13 for all non-primary homes. There is absolutely no reason a rental property should be protected from property tax increases.

wwweston 5y ago
> This was a red herring when prop 13 was passed, and is a red herring now. 49 other states don't have prop 13, and yet seniors aren't priced out of their homes. Prop 13 is bad in at least half a dozen ways, but I'm not so sure this problem isn't coming elsewhere or even is absent. It seems to me California may have experienced a leading edge of metro dynamics that are going to come for other states soon. > everyone's home gets reassessed for its value and then the tax rate is set so that the whole county goes up 1%. That's interesting. > And if you're still really concerned about old people losing their homes, at least support getting rid of Prop 13 for all non-primary homes I think something like this is right (and wasn't this attempted by proposition a few years ago?). Residence-first real estate policy needs to include tax that increases on the number of properties owned (and maybe even more steeply in a supply constrained market).

Manuel_D 5y ago

> You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older. Or maybe, make it so that property tax increases are limited but only if the owner: 1. Is past retirement age 2. The owner lives in the property. 3. The owner does not have the means to pay the normal property tax rates. This is how most other States' solve this problem. Instead of freezing property tax rates across the board, they narrowly limit property taxes of old residents that don't have the means to pay the normal property tax rate.

krferriter 5y ago
What you're suggesting is that the solution to the problem should be targeted at the actual problem trying to be solved. Seems like a lot to ask, so clearly the best way forward is to just continue shoveling more wealth onto the already-wealthy at the expense of people entering the workforce and housing market, and even then still not actually solving the original problem we sought out to solve in the first place.

thehappypm 5y ago

These poor millionaires!

dragonwriter 5y ago

> You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. Believing that tax bills should be equal doesn't imply that; one can believe in equal taxation of same-value property and not think that property tax should ever force people out of property they own. Deferrable-by-default property tax (either entirely or increases above base year) are better than assessment increase limits at avoiding people being forced out, but do less to transfer wealth up the to already-wealthy elites.

s17n 5y ago

Except that prop 13 tax rates can be inherited.