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Consider the cost to the community, not just the people being priced out. The first people we lose are often those who have been here the longest, contributed

Consider the cost to the community, not just the people being priced out. The first people we lose are often those who have been here the longest, contributed greatly to the community, but are on a fixed income and cannot afford the tax increase. Case in point, we’re losing our volunteer fire department’s rookie coordinator and training captain because he’s been priced out of the area. He’s elderly, been a member of the department for decades, is hugely valuable and has a trove of institutional knowledge. I’m glad he’s able to move elsewhere with the payout he’s getting from his home, but the loss to our community is enormous. How is arbitrarily forcing people out of the communities they’ve built the moral (or constructive!) thing to do?

TimPC 4y ago
Taxes can have negative consequences but a single anecdote of negative consequence doesn’t prove that overall tax is net negative. Every household that moves out of a neighbourhood is replaced by the household moving into a neighbourhood. A society where the most valuable neighbourhoods for working families aren’t disproportionately occupied by retirees paying a tiny fraction of the true cost of living there has benefits. Some households in the Bay Area are being undercharged in property tax by over $50,000/year at current rates. That’s $50,000 a year less for schools and services. It also means other, newer home owners have to pay a disproportionate amount more since if property taxes were based on market rates the percentage rate of the tax would go down.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  Your arguments for social engineering are based in ignoring the true individual human cost, and the true cost to the communities you’d happily destroy in pursuit of your bland generalized vision of how things should be. That seems immoral to me, and I’m not convinced you’ve actually thought through the implications of your idealized grand vision. “Your lost decades-long community members will be replaced by brand new people” is not the argument you seem to think it is, and could only be made by someone who had no experience building a functioning community.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    My primary point is not that the old people are replaced by new people. My primary point is that you have huge costs related to maintaining the community you want in the form of massive subsidies that reduce taxation and collect resources in an unfair and biased way from the community. I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea because it’s pretty much a historical accident in California and implemented just about nowhere else. California can’t get rid of it because the policy creates a huge amount of inertia but people have tried on many occasions because the policy is also extremely bad. The solutions to property tax rising are myriad. A person can take a mortgage out against the gains in property value. Since property taxes are well under 1%, this can pay for the property tax for 50 years easily and the only drawback is not owning 100% of the property. A person can also downsize to a smaller home or condo in the community, providing the community gets its act together enough on housing to provide said options. Ultimately, your community is losing someone because they decided the best option was to cash in the value of their home, take their profits and leave. They also decided there best bet for cheaper housing was elsewhere, which is something the community could have done something about with better policy. People should have that choice. The problem in this scenario is not property taxes going up with land value increases. Lastly, artificially keeping communities together through massive subsidies to people who’ve been there a long time is just as much social engineering as having a property tax that’s based on current market value.
    - teakettle42 4y ago
      > massive subsidies You’ve invented this idea whole-cloth. We’re not subsidizing someone’s existence just because we could derive much more value from their land if we forced them to sell it to us. > A person can also downsize to a smaller home or condo in the community, providing the community gets its act together enough on housing to provide said options. We’re not obligated to pave over our community and turn our population into a permanent rental class, pouring wealth into the pockets of rent-seeking developers that will extract it from the local economy, just because you don’t like how we live. I realize this is a bit inappropriate for yc, but just about everything you’ve said demonstrates a gross moral failing inherent in believing you have a rightful interest in forcing others to behave the way you want them to, instead of the way they’ve chosen to live.
TimPC 4y ago
There is also the issue that by failing to build low-cost housing it’s your community’s responsibility for pricing people out and not giving them the option to downsize within their community. Giving artificial tax breaks to subsidize bad housing policy seems to me more like a cause of Bay Area problems than a solution to anything substantial.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  > … not giving them the option to downsize within their community The “option to downsize” is an odd euphemism for “forcing people from their homes to live the way I think they should have to”. > Giving artificial tax breaks … The tax itself is already an artificial, arbitrary construction.

TimPC 4y ago

Taxes can have negative consequences but a single anecdote of negative consequence doesn’t prove that overall tax is net negative. Every household that moves out of a neighbourhood is replaced by the household moving into a neighbourhood. A society where the most valuable neighbourhoods for working families aren’t disproportionately occupied by retirees paying a tiny fraction of the true cost of living there has benefits. Some households in the Bay Area are being undercharged in property tax by over $50,000/year at current rates. That’s $50,000 a year less for schools and services. It also means other, newer home owners have to pay a disproportionate amount more since if property taxes were based on market rates the percentage rate of the tax would go down.

teakettle42 4y ago
Your arguments for social engineering are based in ignoring the true individual human cost, and the true cost to the communities you’d happily destroy in pursuit of your bland generalized vision of how things should be. That seems immoral to me, and I’m not convinced you’ve actually thought through the implications of your idealized grand vision. “Your lost decades-long community members will be replaced by brand new people” is not the argument you seem to think it is, and could only be made by someone who had no experience building a functioning community.
- TimPC 4y ago
  My primary point is not that the old people are replaced by new people. My primary point is that you have huge costs related to maintaining the community you want in the form of massive subsidies that reduce taxation and collect resources in an unfair and biased way from the community. I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea because it’s pretty much a historical accident in California and implemented just about nowhere else. California can’t get rid of it because the policy creates a huge amount of inertia but people have tried on many occasions because the policy is also extremely bad. The solutions to property tax rising are myriad. A person can take a mortgage out against the gains in property value. Since property taxes are well under 1%, this can pay for the property tax for 50 years easily and the only drawback is not owning 100% of the property. A person can also downsize to a smaller home or condo in the community, providing the community gets its act together enough on housing to provide said options. Ultimately, your community is losing someone because they decided the best option was to cash in the value of their home, take their profits and leave. They also decided there best bet for cheaper housing was elsewhere, which is something the community could have done something about with better policy. People should have that choice. The problem in this scenario is not property taxes going up with land value increases. Lastly, artificially keeping communities together through massive subsidies to people who’ve been there a long time is just as much social engineering as having a property tax that’s based on current market value.
  - teakettle42 4y ago
    > massive subsidies You’ve invented this idea whole-cloth. We’re not subsidizing someone’s existence just because we could derive much more value from their land if we forced them to sell it to us. > A person can also downsize to a smaller home or condo in the community, providing the community gets its act together enough on housing to provide said options. We’re not obligated to pave over our community and turn our population into a permanent rental class, pouring wealth into the pockets of rent-seeking developers that will extract it from the local economy, just because you don’t like how we live. I realize this is a bit inappropriate for yc, but just about everything you’ve said demonstrates a gross moral failing inherent in believing you have a rightful interest in forcing others to behave the way you want them to, instead of the way they’ve chosen to live.

TimPC 4y ago

There is also the issue that by failing to build low-cost housing it’s your community’s responsibility for pricing people out and not giving them the option to downsize within their community. Giving artificial tax breaks to subsidize bad housing policy seems to me more like a cause of Bay Area problems than a solution to anything substantial.

teakettle42 4y ago
> … not giving them the option to downsize within their community The “option to downsize” is an odd euphemism for “forcing people from their homes to live the way I think they should have to”. > Giving artificial tax breaks … The tax itself is already an artificial, arbitrary construction.