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Comment by plank_time | Hacker News Reader

Some of my neighbors are seniors who are on social security. Their houses were bought for about $160k in the 1970s. Which is expensive back then. Now they are worth $2M but they have no intention to move. Where would they live? And how can they afford the $30k/yr property tax?

What stops people from selling their homes isn’t prop 13, it’s the ridiculous rise in house prices in the last 15 years. It creates no mobility. Stop bitching about Prop 13, that is a lazy and short sighted and wrong explanation for house prices. Look at the inventory these days. It’s low because no one wants to sell their homes because where are they going to move to?

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You misunderstand - the whole point of the scheme is they don't have to pay the property tax. It gets (partially or entirely) accumulated in a lien against the house, and the seniors stay as long as they want.

When they choose to sell, or their estate sells, the property tax is settled first from the proceeds of the sale.

I'm saying this scheme is in place in other locations to address the same problem you describe, and seems to be working better than prop 13 (at solving that).

Where would they live? With a budget of 2 million dollars- they could own an extravagant home practically anywhere in the US while pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I have no idea why people who are living off of social security should be in the most desirable housing in the entire country

Why should they be forced to sell a house that they earned and paid for?

Why should they get services, that are paid by people with no money?

Also - they wouldn't be paying $30k per year. If you had a rational government cost distribution among people in the area, you wouldn't need to charge people $30k just in property taxes.

And then - they also haven't paid their fair share of taxes in decades, so why do they get to be in a highly privileged position?

Imagine if I didn't pay any income tax for 50 years - would you excuse me, if I turned 60?

Nobody is forced to do anything. They can certainly leverage their significant equity in the home to pay those taxes, they can take a lien like many other states allow for in these situations, etc.

But frankly I don't understand why a retiree who is living off of social security would sit on a multi million dollar asset, rather than cashing out and increasing their standard of living many times over by moving. And I don't think they are a victim by having generated 10-20x returns on their home

> Where would they live? And how can they afford the $30k/yr property tax?

With proposition 19, approved in last election, seniors can move to a different place and carry their original property taxes with them.

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_19,_Property_...

The law should take into consideration those cases and not charge them $30k/yr in cash for property taxes if they don't have the money in cash to pay it. One solution mentioned elsewhere is a lien against the inflation-adjusted value appreciation of the house.

The solution isn't to let wealthy older homeowners get away with not paying proper property taxes though, which is how it is now.

> And how can they afford the $30k/yr property tax?

The suggestion is to make them no pay that annually in cash, but rather on the future gains of the house.

Their house (or rather, the land) is going up in value far more than that per year. Asking them to forgo a fraction of their speculative real estate gains, when they never even plan to access it (according to you), does not make sense.

So what it seems like you are really saying is that they deserve to have full speculative real estate gains accessible to them, just because they are wealthier than younger people and were able to get into the capitalism game earlier. That due to their unearned wealth, that they did nothing to create, that comes purely at the expense of others being able to live in the area because land is zero sum. They should have to pay less just because they have greater power? Absolutely not.

Saying "I'm so wealthy that I can't pay taxes, and I'm not willing to even delay paying taxes until sale" is fundamental wrong-headed.

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