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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

My neighbor pays half the property tax that I do, despite our houses both being worth the same amount. My new neighbors pay %25 more than I do, also in a similarly valued house.

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.

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All of CA has the prop 13, where we see it get blamed for high prices are in very high demand areas. How much price reduction would you really see without it? Looking at New York it doesn't look like much since the primary issue seems to be supply.

But in New York, if you find Manhattan to be unaffordable, then you can move to a suburb. In San Francisco, the suburbs are even more expensive than the city.

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...

Sucks if you at some point can't afford property tax because house prices went up 1000% around you. Think everyone can pay $20k / year?

Yeah it does suck. No I don't think everyone can afford that.

suck is all relative.

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.

That's a pretty shitty solution for everyone involved if they don't actually want to be separated from the rest of their family by 3,000 miles. And not just their families, but their friends and communities, which have a profound impact on overall well-being in their later years.

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.

You don't need to move 3,000 miles away, you just have to move outside of commuting range where the prices fall off a cliff. You can still live in the same quality house and see your family frequently.

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.

Eh, "community range" turns out to be pretty massive around the SF Bay Area, for example. Moving people two or more hours away by car can still do a lot of damage to their relationships, especially when their ability to drive is becoming weaker.

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.

If your house just went up in value by 1000%, then yes, you can afford $20K per year. Just do what Texas does and allow the home owner to stop paying property taxes and have the state get their money when the person dies or sells the house.

The only way to afford what you say is taking a reverse mortgage.

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.

So what you're saying is that without prop 13 this set of people would vote for policies that keep housing prices at sane levels?

NIMBY is a real thing, there is no denial in that.

Using your example, of 1000%, you're looking at a house purchased for $100K going to $1000K.

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.

Why is it any different if their property hadnt appreciated? One gets the burden, other doesnt?

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