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Comment by arrosenberg | Hacker News Reader

That may have been the case when Prop 13 was sold to the public, but at this point it's mostly being used to accumulate wealth, not keep people on fixed incomes in their lifelong homes. If that was the goal, there is a much better solution - let the elderly accumulate the tax bill against the value of the house, and collect from the estate when they pass.

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When houses get sold, capital gains need to be paid. This is nothing new.

Meanwhile, in many neighborhoods, the older, wealthy, established residents are paying 1/3rd the taxes needed to support infrastructure and services, compared to newer, younger residents who are trying to establish a nest-egg and raise families without the benefits the older generations had. There is no one solution that will work for every neighborhood, but prop 13 is economic warfare on the young. Portraying it as young tech millionaires against poor, old retirees is not true for a large portion of those affected here in the present.

Citation otherwise this is just your biased anecdote.

There’s plenty of turnover in California on par with other states. If prop 13 were somehow so powerful a factor not to sell, you would see a lot less house sales which you don’t.

In my city, half the houses were sold in the last 20 years which sounds pretty good to me. The idea that property taxes are frozen to 30 years ago and governments are starving for money is fiction.

In places like Toronto where property taxes get assessed every year, the property taxes 1/3 for an equivalent house price.

California could have increased their property tax revenue by 12 billion if they had passed the partial repeal last year: https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/Updated_2019_...

Not if the house gets sold by a kid after their parents died. At that point, the capital gains tax basis gets reset.

In the current tax climate, we will never sell our houses. It's an amazing way to transfer wealth while avoid capital gains.

And if they don't want to sell, the kids keep the original prop 13 tax limitations as well. The current housing policies and tax system is a disaster.

I think this is something that is really under appreciated. When there is inherited property, the cost-basis is reset to when the parents died and the Prop 13 basis is also inherited now if it becomes their primary residence. This is a huge advantage for those people who happen into this sort of situation.

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