> When you own one home free and clear, the price is almost irrelevant. What does this look like in a state like California for property taxes? My understandin

> When you own one home free and clear, the price is almost irrelevant. What does this look like in a state like California for property taxes? My understanding is, due to prop 13, your property taxes are a function of the initial price you paid and increase slowly (much slower than housing inflation in recent decades). That suggests paying a lower price later could have long term impact on cost of ownership beyond just mortgage payments. Apparently there is a prop 8 that allows the property tax to be reduced if the house value goes down. I wonder if this has actually been applied in practice (2008 crisis?), but the process seems to be a lot more bureaucratic (annual revision of home value) so I wonder if it's even feasible to do this in a down market. EDIT: This [0] seems to be a concise explanation with an example. Essentially, if you pay P, that's the base value for property tax. On year k you will pay property tax as if the house was worth min(assessed_value, P * (1.02 ^ k)). If housing prices go down, you may temporarily pay lower property taxes, but in the long term, if house prices keep increasing faster than 2% a year, your property tax will be tied to the P you paid initially. [0] https://www.sccassessor.org/tax-savings/tax-reductions/historical-properties/item/337-an-example-of-how-prop-8-works https://www.sccassessor.org/tax-savings/tax-reductions/histo...