San Francisco proposes “IPO tax” on eve of Uber offering
axios.com
axios.com
The issue here is, first and foremost, supply and demand. San Francisco has made the process of building new housing so incredibly onerous that, once a developer finally succeeds in erecting a building, the only ones they can sell to are the wealthy. If it was easier to build in SF, with less regulation, less restrictive zoning, and less expense, then housing would be built for the middle class. Then, the city could apply affordable housing policies to reserve units in middle income buildings, and the housing crisis could be averted.
But instead, our legislature continually enacts nonsense like this, which accomplishes little beyond rabble rousing.
Now, I’m not endorsing this particular tax proposal, just merely defending the general high tax policies here.
Edit:
I probably spend about $40/month on transportation. I do not own a car and bike to work and most other places. I spend $2700/month (market rate rent, no rent control) for a 1 bedroom apartment in a very walkable location. While the cost of living is higher, it's not so high as to make my life in the Bay Area worse than back home.
* Vehicle Registration, Public Transportation, Gas
* Housing (rent/mortgage)
* Sales tax
* Etc.
The housing is a huge factor, given that 30% of $55k is $1300/mo (A decent house in most of America), yet 30% of 150k is $3750/mo (A nice cardboard box in the bay area)
That article continues on with "Start a Family [...] It’s been 10 years". It is indeed common that people in high-cost areas feel unable to start families earlier, but that isn't something to just accept as normal. It is better to have kids when you have energy for them and when birth is safer. Starting earlier also allows for the possibility that you might end up wanting a larger family than you had initially expected. For example, I sure didn't imagine I'd be having 12, but that probably could not have happened in the Bay Area.
In 10 years, one ought to have paid off a house.
The article mentions college, which can be had cheaply, but neglects to mention private schooling. Normally this would be the larger expense by far.
The "middle of nowhere" comparison also seems a bit low for salary. It might be right if you tossed a dart at a map of the USA to determine your location, but not if you chose a low-cost area with a suitable industry.
I agree but people have gotten used to constantly rising house prices and started depending on it to pay off their home. In an environment with rising house prices your best strategy is actually to avoid paying as much as possible. Low down payments and 30 year loans mean that if you spend $50K on a 2 million dollar house and it appreciates by 10% to $2.2 million you have received a 4x return on your investment. If the house price tanks by more than $50k your mortgage is underwater and because you never planned to repay the entire loan, you will have to apply for bankruptcy.
[1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...
True, though collecting hard verifiable proof of prior residency from homeless folks seems beyond what can be expected from a one-day citywide survey. :)
If you know of a survey that did collect that information, I'd certainly be interested in the results.
> The homeless and activists/nonprofits advocating on their behalf have an incentive to make it look like they’re mostly local.
I suppose a high out-of-county population might make locals stingier, but getting caught providing bad data also seems like a pretty bad outcome for any of the local non-profits that helped conduct the survey.
Do you believe that estimates of the total counts of homeless people might be more or less accurate, since there's no supposed incentive for activists to discount it? SF's homelessness per capita is actually not particularly high compared to other major cities, which is not at all what you would expect if homeless were swarming en masse to SF from those other places: https://medium.com/hatchbeat/homelessness-a-tale-of-three-ci... . What's really high in SF and other West Coast cities is the percent of unsheltered homeless. It may be that it only seems like there are more of them because they are more visible because besides SF's dislike of building housing they also don't build sufficient homeless shelters: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
[0] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-...
> If not, why should we believe that it happens with any degree of frequency?
Why should we believe they are from here by default? We should assume they are not until it is proven, and therefore feel no obligation to create more levies against local law-abiding tax-paying residents to support out-of-town homeless, or permanently nomadic lifestyles, or willful drug abusers who often commit petty property crimes to feed their addictions. We should only provide that aid if we know they are long-term residents of the area, and otherwise enforce laws against them strictly.
> It may be that it only seems like there are more of them because they are more visible because besides SF's dislike of building housing
I'm sorry but if someone moved to SF or Seattle within the last 7 years, they really should have displayed more personal responsibility and known what they're signing up for cost-wise and whether they can afford it. These are some of the most desirable places to live on the planet, and are rightfully expensive. The cities are not obligated to change their character or density to accommodate others who want to move there but can't afford it, just like I don't have a default right to live on the beach in Maui. And as such, I feel these cities don't have to do anything other than enforce the law except when someone is a proven long-term resident who was swept up in increasing costs.
* Sixty-nine percent (69%) ... were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless... 8% had lived in San Francisco for less than one year.
* Of their previous living arrangements: 32% with friends or family, 11% in subsidized housing, 8% in a hotel, 6% incarcerated, 3% in hospital, 3% in foster care.
So it's probably more accurate to think of at most 50% of the population as having come from stable housing situations in SF.
On the other hand, I can't identify any logic or argument to your comment. As far as I can tell your unspoken logic goes a little like this:
"The difficulty in building housing causes a constrained housing supply. Making it easier to build housing would solve part of the problem. The other part of the problem with the constrained housing supply is people without existing housing moving to the city. But I don't mean people without housing who can afford housing. I mean people without housing who can't afford housing. They constrain the housing supply in the city further."
I was reminded of this video as well when Tokyo was mentioned:
https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf
https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/houston...
Houston is a nice natural experiment on zoning laws impact on affordable housing. I believe Houston has more net immigration that SF or Seattle, but has much more affordable housing.
But is that true? As a Midwesterner, I have no skin in the game. But is it ever OK for city to say "We like the size we are, we don't want drop zoning and turn our entire coastal town into 100 story mega-skyscrapers?"
I don't think the end game of every city has to be to become Tokyo. As prices rise, more industry moves out of the city. Seems like a valid case for a local resident to want?
It seems more like the proponents of cheap housing want to encourage lots of people to move into the city (which is how the existing supply becomes insufficient), at the expense of the people who were already living there.
Though what I haven't been able to understand is why these groups are not in favor of creating housing further off where the land is cheaper? In the bay area why is "goodness" only measured in distance from downtown?
This is a sincere question, I'd love to understand.
No. The person pouring coffee to the wealthy shouldn't have to drive 50 miles to work one way. Or live in an apartment with 7 roommates.
That's not encouraging people to move there, that's taking care of the people already there.
It's important to be a bit more rigorous. What is "the city" in this thought experiment? The city government? The "will of the people" (what does that even mean, does it require a majority or a plurality to decide the size of the city)?
Sure, and cities "say" what their preferences through their elected representatives, at the local and state level.
> I don't think the end game of every city has to be to become Tokyo.
Nobody said that has to be the endgame for every city. San Francisco's politicians and residents aren't debating the aspirations of your Midwestern city, they are debating the aspirations of their own city and region. If the balance of political power turns toward pro housing policies in San Francisco, maybe it becomes more Tokyo like. If not, maybe it moves in the other direction.
But dynamic cities by their nature don't stay still, so you can be assured things will move in some direction.
Cities are dynamic, and always changing. They are either growing or dying. A very few may have found temporary equilibrium.
If a city wants to stay the same size, what they usually mean is that they wish to stay the same size at the same affordability level. However, since change is constant, their best attempt regulates growth. The natural result is economic stagnation (leading to eventual death), or city growth in spite of the regulation (leading to runaway prices).
Every city has the right to choose HOW they will change. They do not have the right to insist that they WON'T change, or that such a thing is even possible.
The above logic doesn't apply to pensions exclusively, either. Much infrastructure, in CA especially which has Prop 13, needs growth to sustain.
Stasis is neither natural nor sustainable.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/In-Oa...
Neither is perpetual growth. Observation of nature shows that growth has bust cycles. aka, population grows till resources run out (food) and then the bulk starve and die.
> Instead, we have extremely vocal NIMBYs who lobby to get laws passed that benefit the rich minority of residents and harm everyone else.
The politicians understand economics perfectly well, they just know who puts food on their table.
My point is that my basic economic understanding makes me expect this to be how the legislators behave regardless of what the legislators know about economics. They may not in fact have any understanding of economics, but I wouldn't expect this to affect their behavior either way.
They are not -- they are on the side of property prices going up.
Physicians want to get paid 300k/yr. Pharma is obsolete by computers and paid over 100k/yr.
Not to mention the pharma companies and hospitals.
Its why healthcare only gets worse with legislation.
And pharma companies? You think computers are going to automate drug discovery? Not for a long time, they won't.
That will require hammering downward what doctors (for one example) are earning. No more radiologists making $650k per year.
The side conflict to that, is you have to simultaneously make it a lot cheaper to become a doctor, otherwise you generate a shortgage of doctors that gets worse by the year.
As the Federal and State governments take on ever larger responsibility in the US healthcare system, I'll be curious to see how this problem is dealt with. I suspect at first they'll simply avoid the conflict entirely, and try to keep paying healthcare workers what they're presently earning. However, you can't have universal healthcare in the US in any manner at the current expense levels, it's financially impossible. Something will have to give, and it ultimately will have to be the costs in the system.
One thing that might help is eliminating the undergrad requirement before medical school.
There's a whole infrastructure on one half of the political spectrum in SF that you have to defeat.
Ban plastic straws, but don’t prosecute people who defecate on the street. That’s SF politics. Nothing of consequence happens except when something has the potential to propel them into state politics, and again it’s a high viz low impact issue.
Also where are they supposed to go to the bathroom, not like there are many readily available in SF, especially at night.
We got what we deserve, then.
"Well, it's time to poop and there's no public restrooms open at 3am. Hmm don't wanna get prosecuted though. I guess I'll just shit myself."
If the city can afford injection sites and needles I’m sure they can afford to have bag dispensers or ports johns, if it’s an unmet scute need.
The city is also putting up portable restrooms. The biggest obstacle is neighborhoods protesting restrooms being put nearby. I guess residents like shit on the sidewalks more than restroom trailers?
This is exactly it. When you look at initiatives pushed by SF politicians, they remind me of model government in high school.
“Let’s van keeping goldfish as pets”
“Let’s ban fois gras”
“Let’s ban company cafeteria’s.”
I really makes you wonder if the city is run by a bunch of amateurs.
And then I dig a little deeper into the “it’s just supply and demand, dummy” narrative and find articles that document how luxury housing development actually is associated with a rise in rents for the working class.[2] Who would have thought macroeconomics is complicated?
I feel the narrative here is highly politicized around are particular market-driven philosophy, so much so that people feel comfortable posting unsourced polemics. In the spirit of HN I would like to steer us toward a real analysis of the facts in the ground.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Turns-out-SF-s-b...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-expensive...
Your other article is paywalled, but I imagine that tightly planned cities introducing only new luxery housing is the same general situation and would be similarly vulnerable to the very arguments you’re responding to.
Construction generally blocks a lane of traffic on one side of the street, rerouting the other lanes and pedestrians, for several weeks at a time. Then they move on to the next block or to the other side of the street.
Just from a layman's perspective, it seems incredibly tricky to try to construct a housing development with that going on around it. The "bus line" construction has already put additional pressure on traffic up and down Van Ness, and it's got to be very tricky to get permits for parking spots, dumpsters, and other necessities with everything else that's going on. And anyway the city could probably just come through and close everything down for weeks or months so that they can perform another stage of "bus line" construction.
(I'm putting "bus line" in quotes because they haven't even really started on that part. This whole project is a pretty incredibly yak shave that's taking 5 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for a bus line.)
Anyone who has built a house in any urbanized area with an highly environmental conscious outlook can tell you that building a house is difficult - I think anyone can also tell you that San Francisco has a large amount of demand - I think there would also be universal agreement that San Francisco is also basically built out. Upmarket housing tends to get built first when market demand is high, and its expensive to build in a place, because its harder to recoup the costs on cheaper housing.
Without significant densification (which has proven untenable politically) no significant amount of new housing will be built - so you can pass all the affordable housing bonds in the world, but until you change the zoning (regulatory) construct - nothing will change.
This generally is not how reasoned debate occurs. The onus is on the person making an assertion to provide facts supporting it, not on everyone else to disprove an unsourced claim.
I will point out that there is an article on the front page of HN right now in which multiple economists argue that "it's supply and demand" provides an insufficient explanation for, and solution to, the problem of affordable housing in San Francisco: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872015
So arguing that we must accept the "it's just supply and demand" argument by acclamation with no sourcing seems flimsy. Educated minds are arguing otherwise, and providing evidence to back up their claims. It hardly seems unreasonable to expect the other side of the argument to do similar.
Or maybe the regulations are so insane you spend millions in legal fees before you even have a glimmer of hope and eventually say “this isn’t worth it.”
Let's bring this back to a fact-based discussion, ok? That's what HN is supposed to be about.
I can't read the chronicle article, but your wapo article is mainly just the opinions of interested people like this. For example, nowhere does it give the actual number of "luxury" units built in Seattle, SF, or Portland -- those would be important numbers if you're trying to comprehend the argument being put forward.
Here is a deeper analysis of the Seattle market with specific housing construction figures.[1] It argues "there is no general housing shortage, that the catastrophic figures above are a product of the Great Recession and the normal lag in construction. Because the market appears to be duly responding to demand, efforts to 'free' the housing market are not as effective as efforts to shape the market toward more just ends."
This is consistent with the causes cited in the SF Chronicle article that hold back approved projects, as well as the SF Business Times(!) article pointing to the 2008 recession as a cause of the labor shortage, cited previously.
[1] https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/11/22/what-housing-shortage...
Note that it predates prop 13, so I hope that doesn't play a central role in this enormous mountain of evidence.
Edit: After seeing your profile, I feel even more disappointed. Imagine if a Lambda School student asked a plausibly sincere question and they were met with a response which amounted to, “That is so stupid, I don’t even know where to start.” Let’s strive for better.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2018/01/24/sf-...
Additionally the Chronicle article I posted concerns approved projects still facing delays due to labor and tightening capital markets. That undercuts the "it's just due to NIMBYs & regulations holding up approvals" narrative.
Intuitively, how is it that Seattle can afford to build high rises while San Francisco cannot even though the selling and rental prices of a high rise is meaningfully greater than that of Seattle? Shouldn't all that Seattle capital just move to developing in San Francisco instead?
As for your second question I can only refer you what I’ve already cited on construction costs, tightening capital markets and other factors beyond mere permitting or “NIMBY” issues. Intuitively, approved projects would move forward if the math made sense.
1. Slow uptake of skills, lower productivity. Related to recession.
2. Hard to get bids due to uncertain approval process. Entirely caused by city policy. Now you say let’s condition on approved projects: however, given that it can take up to half a decade to gain approval (infamous historic laundromat was just under 5 years), controlling for approved projects is misleading. In five years, construction costs doubled and a project that might have penciled out at inception may no longer. The developer would have to propose a more dense, taller, etc. building for the project to make sense, but that would be another half-decade round trip through city planning.
3. City rules about prevailing wage, local sourcing, etc. limiting the available labor pool which directly drives up labor cost. This is entirely a local control problem.
Are you saying 2 and 3 are not consequences of local regulation?
Additionally, most of what you’ve cited is true across the nation. What you fail to provide is a reason these macroeconomic factors seem to have a disparate impact on SF’s ability to build which is evident in, e.g., the number of new housing units per capita it has delivered vis a vis a comparable city such as Seattle.
Which would be exacerbated if workers cannot afford to live in the region. I once saw a map set that visualized where you could transit to in various metros in under an hour from an affordable neighborhood. Even in NYC you could get to most of Manhattan, from the outskirts of Brooklyn or Queens. SF really stood out. You could only reach a few blocks around the BART stops. The whole city is cut off from a labor supply. It’s affecting staffing at restaurants and retail too — Nopa advertises for cooks in its menu because who wants to ride a motorcycle to San Leandro at 3am.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-to...
[2]: https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/01/apartment-rents-...
[3]: https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/personal-finance/hi...
It notes how Seattle is often cited by deregulation advocates, but that "in spite of decades of indisputably strong development, Seattle’s share of cost-burdened renters has barely budged." And "by overbuilding housing for the wealthy, Seattle has achieved some short-term improvement in affordability for the middle class, at the expense of substantial displacement and continued upward pressure on the most vulnerable."
This I think is at the heart of what in SF some call the YIMBY vs. PHIMBY[2] debate. YIMBYs tend to skew towards more privileged techie types (happy to dig up sourcing on this.. I recall the YIMBY national meeting being called overwhlemingly white). Whereas the PHIMBYs or whatever you want to call them, the deeply affordable housing advocates, see flaws in that simplistic trickle-down economics model based on lived experience in working-class neighborhoods undergoing gentrification.
[1] https://knock-la.com/seattle-a-cautionary-tale-for-supply-si...
[2] https://yahbayarea.org or https://twitter.com/YahBayArea
The parent is wrong, and is cherry-picking data. Seattle rents may have gone down “recently”, but they’ve been amongst the fastest-rising rents in the US until about a year ago. They’re far higher than they were a few years ago, let alone a decade ago.
Also, saying that prices are lower than San Francisco is utterly meaningless. San Francisco is a different economy. It was more expensive than Seattle twenty years ago, and it’s more expensive now. You can’t make the comparison without controlling a bunch of variables.
Regarding the second site that you linked, and the PHIMBY idea in general -- if it's summed up by "housing is a human right", then there is a certain weakness built into it from the start. If you do not have a house, can you sue someone? Can you sue the government, for example? That is an important part of what a right is -- it provides a "cause of action", a basis for suit, when it is abridged. If it doesn't provide that, then it is not a right.
Freedom of movement within the United States, guaranteed by the Privileges & Immunities Clause of the Constitution, is a right. When someone writes something like "by overbuilding housing for the wealthy, Seattle has achieved some short-term improvement in affordability for the middle class, at the expense of substantial displacement and continued upward pressure on the most vulnerable.", they seem to be operating from a frame where it is the government's responsibility to provide housing, but it's not clear where the government gets that charter. Not every nice or good thing needs to be effected by government agency. However, respecting the right of people to move in -- to buy or rent property on the same terms as non-residents -- would seem to be completely in line with a broad commitment to the equality of all American citizens, regardless of their place of birth, before the law everywhere in the country.
Thanks for the upvote. Allow me to critique your argument. You focus solely on interpreting the term “right” and suggest that it is beyond the charter of government to provide housing, which is just completely and utterly ahistorical.
Calling housing a right is extreme and inaccurate.
No doubt that construction costs exacerbate the problem. But there absolutely are people deliberately blocking housing construction. There was a proposition to outright block private housing construction in the Mission that got ~40% yes votes. For further examples, see the infamous case of the developer that wanted to replace a laundromat with an apartment building:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4
> And then I dig a little deeper into the “it’s just supply and demand, dummy” narrative and find articles that document how luxury housing development actually is associated with a rise in rents for the working class.[2] Who would have thought macroeconomics is complicated?
This is a fundamentally dishonest objection. New housing is "luxury" housing because the housing market is so expensive that even 1 bedroom apartments rent for $3-4K. Blocking "luxury housing" is blocking all housing, because the market is so expensive that even the smallest units are expensive enough to be considered luxury. Seriously, even 300 sq foot studios rent for 2.5K: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/d/san-francisco-immacul...
Of course "luxury housing" is correlated with rising rents. When rents rise, newly constructed units get more expensive too and get pushed into the "luxury" price bracket. This is essentially a tautology, and it is not at all indicative that building more housing increases rents.
Whose fault is it?
Though I live in SF, I really hope they do implement some of these asinine punitive taxes and finally kill the tech industry here. Then all these Nimbys can enjoy an empty city devoid of activity.
In a word, we get what we vote for.
As a VC in San Francisco, I've recently given up my residence here, and am increasingly looking outward for tech and culture. I see many of my peers doing the same, moving east, south, or out of the country entirely.
It's bittersweet. I used to love San Francisco, but have recently entirely lost faith in it ever getting better. I've given up. And honestly, I feel a weight lifted from not having to care and constantly deal with the frustration anymore. There's so much tech & entrepreneurship worth promoting outside of SF, and it's so often overlooked.
I think my point, other than boosting my hometown, is that there's a lot of really affordable talent out there if startups and VCs would just dare to look elsewhere a little harder.
original HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16799107
Often highest leverage in our own lives and in reflecting on our own successes.
And CA voters like to pay for things. Red-state voters do not; they like to pretend that people will do things for free (i.e., teachers) until things break and they accept the reality that nice things cost money.
>And CA voters like to pay for things. Red-state voters do not; they like to pretend that people will do things for free (i.e., teachers) until things break and they accept the reality that nice things cost money.
I think this point is also way off the mark. I should not have to shell out thousands a year for pre-school if I want my kids to be competitive. This is the reality for friends I have in SF. Not so for friends in Houston or Austin.
I don't live in SF, but I turned down a job there entirely because of the cost of living and that, at least from where I'm standing, the city is run by idiots that are completely disconnected from reality. You might think I'm conflating state and city government, and to an extent you're right, I am. But as city leadership is so often a launch pad for state (and then national) government I'm not particularly bullish on California's future.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/California-s-public...
Yes, CA is one of the better states in the United States, but it is by no means half of the things you say.
No, it is not the #1 economy in the world (hello, the rest of the US exists, as does China and Japan and Germany)[1].
Neither was CA the first to pioneer recreational marijuana or decriminalize drugs. Other states like WA and CO did it first, not to mention other countries like the Netherlands or Portugal.
Nor was CA the shining beacon of LGTB rights. Do you not remember Prop 8?
Nor did we do a bang-up job of protecting our environment, or do you not remember the drought and wildfires of recent years, exacerbated by our unchecked agriculture which is pumping our aquifers dry for some of the most water-hungry crops (like almonds).
I'll stop here because I have to board a flight and you get the point. Surely you know half the things you said aren't true.
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/05/05/ca...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essenti...
To put that into perspective, California's annual budget is over $200 billion, so you can run the state for about two weeks on that.
Honestly, I’d have trouble moving back to a large city. It doesn’t have much more to offer, and what I’d have to give up is significant.
It's kind of insane to me that we all think that because it's super expensive to live in SF that that's some sort of measure of success.
They pulled eminent domain no us to put up the new transbay terminal and infrastructure down town.
We tried to find a decent replacement but couldn't. Eventually we gave up working and converted the entire company to remote work.
Everyone preferred working from home. Some even bailed (like myself) and left SF. Some even went to Europe.
SF is dead.. it's bittersweet like you said of course... but it's died and has been reborn many times.
At least I don't have to smell shit and piss on the walk to work every day.
This... it's absolutely astounding how difficult it is to build housing in SF, then everyone complains about the lack of affordable housing and proposes all kinds of pretzel-twist solutions instead of adjusting supply towards meeting demand.
When employees increasingly leave the SF Bay Area or refuse to relocate to the SF Bay Area, driving up the cost of acquiring talent, the companies most certainly are bearing the burden.
But to pass an IPO tax after hard-working employees have put in literally years of longer/more-stressful hours at reduced compensation levels (relative to working at established companies) to get to this payoff is unfair and unjust. Those employees have entered this arena (the startup game) with certain expectations and rules in mind, which made taking on risk and deferring gratification worthy to them. Pulling the rug out last minute to shore up the city's own finances is punitive and unreasonable, especially when the law is targeted so narrowly. And no, the fact that some of those employees will get large sums of money out of this does not make it less unfair or less unjust.
Congress actually did something similar in 1980 when they passed a Windfall Profit Tax on oil to capture "unfair" profits in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
The startup/IPO game is already incredibly unfair. How many people put in that same hard work only to be left broke at the end of it because their startup failed? Someone losing out on 1.12% of their IPO riches is pretty irrelevant by comparison.
So rephrasing the question, "what exactly stops a city from enacting a 100 year retroactive income tax on those in the 1%?"
Those with the most to lose are the least likely to burn down city hall.
They will have no funds for their re-election campaign. In an extreme case they may die of a mysterious stroke or have an affair suddenly made public.
The idea that something can be passed retroactively in any form is insane.
If the government accuses you of j-walking or speeding, you need to go to court to prove your innocence otherwise they assume you're guilty.
I've heard that civil forfeiture is the same way. These are all unfortunate.
And asset forfeiture is more insidious. The case is made against the forfeited property, not it's owner. Hopefully the ruling in Timbs v Indiana will help reign that in.
No, it's not the one domain. “Innocent until proven guilty” applies only in criminal law (neither “innocent” nor “guilty” even applies outside of the domain of criminal law, much less that maxim about the relation between them.)
In the US this would be a suit for declaratort judgement in which formally you asked the court to declare you did not owe money, but functionally it seems generally similar.
The only time taxes become a criminal matter is if you lie on the paperwork.
The lack of affordable housing is the reason I moved from SF, since my wife and I wanted to start a family. I just wish more companies would do the same.
It's very clearly targetting Uber's IPO by retroactively applying the tax to May 7th. Though even the legislation seems uncertain that's legal.
It has a provision that if retroactive taxation is "held to be invalid or unconstitutional by a decision of a court of competent jurisdiction" then it will apply as soon as the new law is introduced...which seems the more usual way of doing things.
(Was a pain to find...none of the news coverage linked to it.)
Banning electric scooters, taxing IPOs, soda taxes are all distractions that prevent the voters to focus on the problems that really matter: the needles, the drug abuse, the human feces, the absolute lack of enforcement of the most basic, essential, rules of society.
San Francisco must enforce the "Broken window policy", and it needs to start from the broken politicians and local administrators that are betraying their fiduciary duty and, by doing so, hurting the community.
But changing it retroactively - dated to a few days before a particular company's IPO - is banana republic shit.
Also, under the new federal tax law, many lawyers are classifying their income as qualified business income so they pay much less than ordinary income. This is something that a software engineer working for a company couldn’t do.
[1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/12/21/18151762/square-uptown-stat...
This may not be a bad thing. And not from a cynical, anti-capitalist, “keep SF shitty so poor people can live here” point of view. The country would really benefit if tech companies were more spread out.