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I've lived in multiple states in cities that were at the top or near the top for annual population growth over multiple years- and it was fine.

Where I am now is #1 [0] and while property values are going up, there is plenty of housing being built, and since so much of Texas taxes comes via property taxes, there is an incentive for capping top end housing costs.

The city council has been approving higher density housing than the area has had historically, despite some grumbling from the SFH owners. The master plan is oriented around mass transit in an area historically devoid of it.

People complain about regulatory capture, but California has been captured by incumbent property owners and is now drowning in perverse incentives of their own invention. For a state that owes its success to innovation, there is zero innovation, let alone basic competence, coming out of the state/local government.

[0]: https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2020/07/26/austin-ar...

Austin as a larger metro area has an order of magnitude the amount of land that all of the peninsula has, with no water in the way.

Supporting housing growth through suburban sprawl is a story of most cities in the midwest & south in the US, and has completely different problems. I don't think the comparison will hold up.

The amount of livable land in a city like Mountain View is 12 square miles in city limits, Palo Alto is a massive 26! Austin is 271 square miles.

I agree the tax situation for private housing is nuts in the bay, but we should not pretend the bay and Austin face the same housing problems.

Reading through the 2 above parents, I was having similar thoughts. Problems are evident and if not addressed effectively, they become pretty serious. The solutions are not effective. Why not? The region is chock full of many of the world's greatest problem solvers.

It seems that the 'root cause analysis' is many times simply superficial. Too many homeless people? Give them homes. Too many addicts shoplifting to fund their habit? Decriminalize shoplifting. Cost of rental housing too high? Impose rent control.

This may be a consequence of the amount of time a politician is in office vs. the amount of time it really takes to solve these intractable problems. If a politician's term is 4 years, and it takes 12 years to solve a problem, actually identifying the root cause and devising a solution would be the end of their career in politics.

I'm pretty sure that if San Franciscans could elucidate what kind of a city they want San Francisco to be, no one would say they want it to be a haven for drug addicts and have the world's highest rents. And there are enough neighborhoods that just about all environs they'd list could be implemented somewhere within the city limits.

Given that San Francisco is not the kind of city that San Franciscans want it to be, I can only chalk it up to ineffective leadership by the persons setting and enforcing the rules. That's not solely the politicians. I'd guess it starts with leadership trying to satisfy everyone's issues without triage for practicality or an investigation of possible unintended consequences of their solutions.

Too many homeless people? Give them homes.

Has this actually been attempted?

Yes Salt Lake City has done it to much more success than SF. Of course, Utah and SLCers in general tend to also be more charitable than SFers, so it's hard to say what would happen in SF if they were to do this, given that the population is full of seeming misers.

Thanks for the information. Your version seems very plausible to me; that's why I questioned GP's trivial dismissal.

Curious - where are you now in TX that has this?

"The city council has been approving higher density housing than the area has had historically, despite some grumbling from the SFH owners. The master plan is oriented around mass transit in an area historically devoid of it." ?

Austin?

See link in my OP.

IMO Prop 13 is at the root of nearly all of California's woes. It stifles housing development, causing high housing prices, homelessness, and property crime. It drives up the costs of offering government services. It increases inequality by disproportionately enriching a small group of landowners who had the good fortune to buy in the Bay Area or LA county 20-30 years ago, and impoverishes everyone else.

The inequality may not be as widespread as it appears to be. On HN earlier this year someone posted a link [1] which allows one to peruse property taxes anywhere in the state.

For this reply I picked a location in Daly City [2] to have a look. The black represent the highest property taxes and the green the lowest - there are few green bubbles. Take a look around, I'm sure there are areas like Huntington Beach [3] with absurdly low taxes, but I've not seen the actual analysis that favors the claims made either way.

Proposition 19 effectively eliminates the Parent to Child reassessment exemption, but it wasn't done for altruistic purposes. It was done to put more houses on the market for the real estate profession who funded the campaign to pass the proposition. Yes, this will increase property taxes and limit generational wealth transfer in the form of low property taxes, but it won't fix all the problems listed.

If you'd like to examine some potential problem areas in California I'd encourage you to google things like "Prevailing Wage Law" and similar.

1. https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax

2. https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#37.69076107721...

3. https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#33.65955360268...

That map puts too many values in the "black" category. Check this one out:

https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#37.26178563229...

Notice how there are a few outliers in red, making almost all the rest black. But look at the black ones. It ranges from $3000 to $25,000. And if you look at a row of roughly equal houses, you will see most of them are around $10K, while a few are $20K. ALL of them should be $20K+, if not for prop 13.

I've seen black ones go up to $47k. It's a crazy-broad range. Looking at the distribution of these numbers on a graph would be way more helpful than this type of visualization.

In addition to jedberg's comment about the "black"-range being far too broad, the problem is that the mere existence of Prop 13 incentivizes landowners to block new development. New landowners who are paying higher taxes compared to their neighbors would prefer even more appreciation to make up for it. Old landowners are happy to block new stuff because a) it's not like their taxes are going up anyway and b) scarcity makes their property values go up. In any rational market, large numbers of SFHs in Palo Alto, Menlo Park or Mountain View would have been built over with apartment buildings already.

Prop 19 is a decent start (I wasn't aware of it, so thanks) but it only passed last year so we'll have to wait and see what its effects are. More importantly, rental and commercial property is mostly not inherited so it's not covered.

What's "prevailing wage law"?

This is what I wrote about Prop 19 back in October. It was both an expansion and partial repeal of Prop 13. It was supposed to work in tandem with Prop 15 (the other partial repeal of Prop 13):

Prop 19 (Allow people 55+ to take their Prop 13 tax breaks to new homes): Yes. You may ask why someone like me, who is strongly against Prop 13, would support a bill that seemingly expands Prop 13. This bill will encourage older people to vacate their large (and mostly empty) single family homes by allowing them to keep their low taxes and move to smaller single family homes or even fancy downtown condos. That alone would be a good thing, as it would free up needed housing for younger families that are growing and have kids. As long as Prop 13 exists, this will actually make things better by making it financially smart to leave your large unused home (which right now it is not).

But is also does more than that! There is also a partial repeal of Prop 13 hidden in this bill. It would force a tax reassessment when you inherit a property if you don’t move into it. This would mean a huge boost to local tax funding which goes towards schools, police, fire, etc. and closes a loophole that wealthy people use to help their kids stay rich by giving them rental properties that are only profitable because of their tax breaks. Also this prop is opposed by the Howard Jarvis association, which is usually an automatic yes for me, because Howard Jarvis is always wrong.

> It would force a tax reassessment when you inherit a property if you don’t move into it

So...a tax reassessment every 30-40 years? Don't get me wrong, it's better than the status quo. But let's not get carried away and think it's good. And the kids can still move into the place, keep the low taxes, and profit from the massive rise in value by using a HELoC to invest in relatively safe, stable index funds. It's free money.

Oh agree. It’s another shitty workaround. Just better than nothing.

San Francisco's housing prices have risen the same percentages for the last 100 years straight.

People blame whatever recently changed in any city everywhere.

In one city it's wealthy people from China, in another city its tech, in another city its finance while the tech people earn the exact same amount as in the prior city and fly completely under the radar.

It's just scarcity, no matter how it is sliced.

I do believe there is an effect from zoning and resistance to rezoning. Though people who think abolishing zoning is the answer should be forced to live for a time in any number of cities that have done this.

Little secret, it doesn't produce places most people want to live. Endless, monotonous grid, no community center, school next to a paper mill, etc

There is a midpoint between "no zoning" and "neighbors can block my toolshed repaint".

Definitely agree. We just haven't found the right mechanism that can balance creating beautiful communities for people to live without enabling NIMBY abuse.