However, I have no sympathy for your argument. It is essentially, "I don't like the way people are voting so we should find a way to run them out of town."
Prop 13 correctly protects against such a situation. That is a good thing.
"It also prohibited reassessment of a new base year value except for in cases of (a) change in ownership, or (b) completion of new construction."
I live in Los Angeles and we have a similar problem being a popular location in California. Basically, there are people living in their homes paying the same taxes they paid in 1978, while anyone trying to buy a similar house will owe modern taxes. So you might be paying $15,000/yr. in taxes and your next door neighbor in a comparable house is literally paying $500/yr. That makes no sense. I've owned property in other states and assessments are done every 1-5 years.
The fallout is that certain areas pay significantly lower taxes, thus contributing significantly less to the community than other areas. It's made worse by the fact that if you inherit your house from your parents (or if they gift it to you before they die), you continue paying the 1978 taxes (or whatever year they bought or built the house). That's insane and it's unfair. It has nothing to do with how people vote. If they paid their fair share, you might have a point, but they don't, unless they decide to do construction on their house. It makes for a very uneven (and I would argue unfair) market.
I bought a home. It was a responsible purchase, in line with my earnings. 30 years later, I pay the home off. I retire on a fixed income which accounts for the roughly fixed costs of my home and its upkeep.
Now a big company builds a campus next door. Home prices skyrocket. What do I do? If my property tax is bounded, I'm fine. If not, then suddenly I lose my home because my fixed income did not account for my property taxes skyrocketing.
Sure, Prop 60 accounts for that by transferring basis, but maybe I'm 54 when this occurs so it doesn't apply. Or maybe I'm not retired, but have 3 kids in the local school district and having to uproot my family because I can't afford my home is extremely disruptive.
One of the points in buying a home, rather than renting, is to guarantee that stability.
I agree that there are problems with prop 13, but fairness is a two sided coin. It is certainly not fair for my home (which I own) to suddenly become unaffordable due to external circumstances. Likewise it's not fair for a neighbor to pay double for roughly the same consumption of public services.
I don't know the solution. Possibly decoupling property tax from home values might be the answer. It certainly isn't a very good tracker for public good consumption.
Also, I don't see why property tax increases for existing homes couldn't be capped in some way (say no more than inflation) to make this situation reasonable for people in the scenario you've laid out. But just saying, "Your taxes will never increase again as long as you stay in your home," hardly seems reasonable.
Second, I agree on the inheritance piece. That is a problem.
The argument is NOT to run them out of town. The argument is that them not feeling the pinch of high prices encourages them to vote for policies that drive housing supply down, to everyone else's detriment. This comment summarizes it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822124
> have not been forced to sell due to real estate taxes
We're discussing why high real estate taxes forcing people to sell is "good thing"... That's pretty much running them out of town.
Like you, at the moment, I am not sure what a proper solution will come up to.