Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Also people who don't have their taxes go up when real estate values go up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

First I'm hearing of this. That's royally fucked up. I guess the only solution is to wait for all those people to die so that the homes will change hands and trigger re-assessment.

Nope. They can pass them to their kids, and it won’t trigger reassessment. > 60% of houses like that in the LA area are rented out for tax arbitrage reasons by the kids that inherited them.

They can buy multiple houses rent them out, and then let the kids live in them when they grow up.

Also, businesses can own multiple properties and sell them without reassessment (there is a well-known loophole involving shell companies that makes this possible).

Basically the only people that get hit by prop 13 reassessments this are young working families that need to upgrade, or want to buy into a stable housing situation to raise their kids.

Yeah I don't understand aggression toward long time residents. Like... On what basis is anyone wanting to move I to an area and opposed to... Exactly what's good about the area. More population density in SF sounds like a deal breaker to me.

It's already not worth any money to me to move between SF and mtv. Tried it for years. It's terrible already .

This also boggles my mind. The only ones allowed a say in what happens to a city are.. the people just moving to it? Aka the same ones who are responsible for a majority of the current issues?

Longtime residents of the city also suffer. The ones who weren't wealthy enough to but a house before the boom. Should homeowners be the only ones with a say?

If I were to speculate about the outlines of the “shell company” loophole you describe - I figure you would form a company to own the property, and then sell the company instead of the property directly? Is that right, and if so, any reason you can’t do that for a house?

Why is it royally fucked up? Where are you from and how long have you lived in CA to not know this? Because the guy working at UPS who grew up here depends on these laws so he doesn’t get priced out of his neighborhood.

If you move somewhere especially the Bay Area be prepared to pay the transplant tax.

> Guy working at UPS who grew up here depends on these laws so he doesn’t get priced out of his neighborhood.

Leaving aside how these laws led to the dire situation for the UPS guy in the first place, what if he has children? The firstborn maybe gets the place for cheap but others are essentially forced to "pay the transplant tax".

I call it "early adopters". This proposition basically secures guaranteed profits over 5 years. Once I saw this I did whatever I could do to buy California property. It's like a pyramid scheme, as long as people keep hitting big on those startups :-).

I don't live in the bay area and never will. I only travel there for work sometimes.

I think it hurts non-homeowning residents because it eliminates a powerful incentive for densification. Where I live, homes are taxed as if they were developed to their maximum zoned potential. This motivates people to move out of single-family homes so they can be redeveloped into higher density and add much-needed supply to the market.

It's true that the homeowner is worse off, but society does not function unless we prioritize the needs of the many over the few. IMHO. Also, the homeowners usually make an incredible amount of money selling homes that they bought for nearly nothing, so they get some compensation for the trauma of having to move.

It was originally not a terrible idea. You can be a poor family owning a cheap home, and rising property values can push up your property taxes to the point where you suddenly can't afford to stay in your own house.

Sure they could sell the now very valuable home and downgrade, but I find it inhumane to force someone out to "downgrade" from a home they already own.

They could take out a line of credit on their house and still be vastly better off than they were before the housing boom. Sure, they might not be overnight millionaires, but hopefully they didn't buy their homes _expecting_ the value to triple within a decade.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com