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Comment by csnewb | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Bay Area resident but visited Austin for the first time over the weekend. It's an amazing city, but the locals were openly unhappy about any more Californians moving there. Seems like there's already a big ex-CA population.

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Longtime Austin resident, frequent Bay Area visitor here..

Yes, the problem we run into with people from California is that they move here and immediately start trying to create similar policies they left.

It was the local left (backed my Mayor Adler, local Hillary organizer) that banned Uber & Lyft, have raised property taxes to the legal maximum every year, pushed for a state income tax, and many other things.

My property taxes are 1/2 of my mortgage payment now and only going higher. While I can adjust and make due, it's pushing out more and more of the people who make Austin great.

> similar policies they left

> raised property taxes

California property taxes are super low thanks to Proposition 13 (which ironically makes housing less affordable because low tax coastal housing attracts investors like crazy).

So higher property taxes are not what made California unaffordable, if anything it's the opposite.

The people leaving California likely didn't luck into the prop 13 handout and are mad as hell about it which would explain why they are voting for higher property taxes.

Personally, after living here for a decade, I've seen how much damage that stupid law has done to our public services and housing market and wish for nothing more than Copenhagen-style land taxation applied across the state.

Yeah, land value taxes are loved by economists. But opposed by voters because the voters own land. shrug

Hasn't Austin always been the liberal bastion of Texas, an island in a red sea? It seems odd to blame newcomers.

Longer time Austin resident living in CA now. Property taxes in Texas are a function of your low-service State govt policies rolling costs down to the counties.

I know three families not in Travis county who left TX this year because their valuations and tax rates have soared. It wasn’t the left that did it to them.

Enjoy it while you can without Prop 13.

> It was the local left (backed my Mayor Adler, local Hillary organizer) that banned Uber & Lyft

When were Uber and Lyft banned? I recall when they left because they did not want to comply with driver fingerprinting requirements, but don't recall any ban.

Also, Uber and Lyft began and are headquartered in literally the most leftist city in the country, San Francisco. The notion that "leftists" don't want Lyft or Uber seems odd.

"The left" is a broad group with many different ideologies. I don't think ride share companies that flaunting regulations to even be a left vs right issue. It's more entrenched encumbent/rule of law vs anti-regulation/technocracy which doesn't fall into any neat categories.

San Francisco has attracted many sects of contrarians over the years. It is like a leftist museum.

While leftists have all kinds of diverging attitudes, there definitely is a large population who don't want Lyft or Uber -- especially Uber. When companies reach a certain scale, no matter how liberal they are, there are large portions of the left that push to see them taxed or hemmed in somehow, because deep in the leftist world view is a sense that something unfair has happened. Part of this is due to the contrarian ethic, that rejects playing by society's rules; and part of it is due to communism's lasting influence. Entrepreneurs enjoy only tenuous legitimacy, and inevitably lose it when their company proves to be just like all the others.

While fingerprinting was the public claim, the City also demanded ride level trip data. That one didn't get the same coverage. Of course, it came out later the City wants to regulate all online transactions including Craiglist, Airbnb, and even Tinder. I still don't understand that last one.

I wrote about this in great detail quite a while ago and quoted Mayor Adler: https://medium.com/@CaseySoftware/mayor-steve-adler-is-scamm...

Is there anywhere in the US with a baseline property tax credit? Its not something I have looked into thoroughly but it seems so backwards that states aren't giving everyone 400 square feet worth of exemption from property tax. If the tax rates are exponential enough it would do a lot to help fix the housing crisis to pressure people into fully occupying their homes, punishing those who use them as investments, and incentivizing owning your living spaces.

Sort of. Texas has a homestead exemption which allows you to exclude a portion of the value of your home from having property tax applied. It caps out at $25k unless you're over 65. While that works for many rural parts of the state, it's almost irrelevant for much of Austin.

Ref: https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/property-tax/exemptions/...

CA does this, but only for about $70 of property taxes a year for homeowners.

Only 1/2 your mortgage payment?

In Williamson County I was paying 3.1% of assessed value several years ago.

With a 4% mortgage rate fixed for 30 years, it would only be a matter of time before the house would appreciate roughly 30% and then then 3.1% property tax rate applied to the higher value would be more than the mortgage interest.

Californians knew that experience clear back in the 1980s.

A popular bumper sticker read, "WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA. NOW, GO HOME."

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