When someone buys a property today, it is subject to the same 2% a year rule. I don't see how this is not a level field.
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...
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.