what do you mean "leveling the playing field" if you buy a house your property tax increase is limited to a fixed %. how is that not level.
Property often increases in value more than 2% per year, so your actual rate goes down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
The benefit accrues over many years, similar to rent control. As a result, the benefits flow to long-standing landholders, who skew disproportionately older.
The result, at least for me in San Francisco: I pay twice as much in rent for a bedroom in a four bed apartment as my grandmother does in property tax for a 4000 square foot mansion. She bought her place over fifty years ago; by definition, I could not have done so. Indeed, with the direction things are heading, huge categories of people are locked out of all segments of the SF housing market due to excessive prices; there's nothing level about that.
That's what parent is likely referring to. I'm not making a value judgement either way. Prop 13 was intended to address the real issue of people being forced out of their own homes due to rising values. But it appears to have the side effect of pushing the values even higher by restricting the sell side of the market.
That person is now sitting on a property worth megabucks. They can't afford the taxes, but they can sell it and retire to Florida.
I personally wouldn't mind having a little more of that kind of suck in my life.
I wouldn't call your suggestion deliberately cruel since you don't seem to have any idea how socially damaging this kind of isolating displacement can be. But I would say that the forced separation of people from their famalies and communities is a really hideous policy outcome, and one that should be strenuously avoided.
Obviously, if somebody wants to move far away, fine. But forcing them to do so is horribly wrong.
It's nuts to tax Joe Worker who needs to live in that area to get to work double or triple the property tax of the rich old guy next door who spends his days playing golf or w/e.
No the answer here is "sorry, but no" to all the people who have decided to block density in central areas in order to keep their own property values astronomically high.
There's no good reason why we should be shipping everyone but the richest workers in their economic prime to painfully remote locals because people in San Francisco's Sunset District are blockading the kinds of buildings that make places like Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Brownstone Brooklyn such attractive places to live.
It sounds problematic on so many levels: in some parts of bay area houses are worth 2.5m, but they werent that expensive years ago. Think mountain view before google.
That is around 30k in taxes right there, per year.
Assume at 1.5% property tax rate and it's $15K per year. With a $900K capital gain, you could pay the property taxes for 60 years.
And if the value of the home drops, then the gov't eats the difference.
I just don't think it's fair that the people who received most of the gains in property value are the ones that get the most generous tax break.
The bad incentives of Prop 13 reward cities for favoring offices over housing. The property tax generally doesn't support the infrastructure, so they approve other activities that they can tax. Cupertino just opened the Apple Spaceship, but they have no plans to approve housing for thousands more workers.
In the news a month ago, in the midst of a teacher housing affordability problem, San Jose rejects teacher housing. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/08/san-jose-city-hall-bal...
As it stands, it's essentially subsidizing commuting. If you bought a house at $100k that's now worth $1M, and your job moves an hour away, you'd be giving up the property tax lock-in by moving to cut down your commute. Rent stabilization/control measures have a very similar problem.
Basing property taxes on the current value of the property makes sense, and is how it is done essentially everywhere else in the world. Basing property taxes on what the property cost the last time it was sold, even if that was decades ago and is some tiny fraction of the current value, is very unusual, and has all sorts of negative repercussions.
But politically, we might as well accept that it won't go away. Your best bet is to save up enough to afford a down payment, and hope that property appreciates and you too can also reap Prop. 13's benefits down the road when you're older. And if you're house is worth 10x as much then, you won't lose it for being on a fixed income, like most retired people are.
...I'd still prefer not having Prop. 13. The more fruitful discussion is how to best navigate a world where it continues to exist. Voters will never approve its repeal; if politicians try to do something about it, they will get thrown out the next election cycle.
Current value makes sense but California introduced Prop-13 and rent control around the same time to basically allow senior citizens to stay in their homes/rentals. Problems with prop-13 include the fact that commercial buildings are not excluded.
California also has Prop-58 and another one where the parent or grandparent can transfer the house to a child/grandchild without an FMV appraisal as well.
I believe it works like this.. Say a $50k house is paid off by the parent, then the gift tax on that can be paid by a home equity loan on it's current $1m valuation. I'm not sure if the gift tax though is calculated on the $50k or the $1m. Or if it is calculated at all. It may depend on if the parent/grandparent is still alive. You may be able to specify the value as the last real property value or the FMV (to cut future capital gains). Either way you just pay the taxes on it. But I think you can exclude a certain amount up to $500k if married.
But you could rent it out as well and use it as collateral on another mortgage.
It could also be that these houses will continue to be passed down the generations.
The estate tax doesn't kick in until 5 or so million so the capital gains thing is mostly irrelevant.
It seems pretty clear to me that 10% or 20% makes a big difference. Plenty of people will move across town to pay $2,400 a month instead of $3,000, why would home-owners be fundamentally different.
Property valuations can get small year-to-year bumps, but a sale triggers a re-assessment, with vastly increased property taxes after that. My neighbor across the street bought in 1975 for $28K, and their valuation for tax assessment last year was $162K. Their next-door neighbor bought last year for $1.5M and their assessed value is $920K. Their houses are quite similar, but one pays $7500 more a year in property taxes.
That difference can motivate people to endure a long commute, to hang on to a low assessment.
For example, there have been some local measures I've seen where they want tax assessments based on a percentage of your current tax, not a flat rate. As such, new residents end up paying massively higher amounts of the new measures than long-time residents.
Long-time residents have had the ability to make use of the services their tax dollars have provided for a long time, whereas new residents have not. Old residents might be all about taxes that get them things they want because they don't have to pay much at all, whereas new residents might see a material impact because of how high some of those amounts might be.
x != y