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Comment by Schnitz | Hacker News Reader

> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?"

Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic! Truly solving the housing crisis would mean for housing costs to go down a lot, which means house values would go down and the 55% will keep fighting that. If you want to stay long term in California and disconnect yourself from the madness that is California housing costs, you have to buy at some point and accept it as the price of entry.

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Worth noting that according to [0], this is one of the lowest rates in the country, which would suggest to me this has less of an effect than you are selling here.

[0] https://blog.stewart.com/stewart/2019/11/05/u-s-homeownershi...

* I didn’t vet this source much but it apparently pulls from UC Census data.

Unlike other states, California property tax rates don’t increase with market value.

Can you clarify this? Property taxes are what are holding me back from making a bid for a more expensive home. If I buy a home for $1 million, won't I have to pay property taxes based on that price even if it was previously tax assessed at $100k.

There’s a cap on increases on the previously assessed value, value is re-assessed when ownership changes (except in certain cases like parents to kids). Look up Prop 13.

Back in the 70s California passed a proposition that limits how much property taxes can increase. [0] As a result of this, if you buy a home and the price goes up afterwards, you won't be paying property taxes on the market price of the house.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

How is house value estimated?

If it’s based on square feet and some sort of local average square foot price from the last 12 months then fine.

If it’s based on individual assessors deciding your blossoming cherry grove and a charming mid-century atmosphere likely to appeal to young professional couples then… I’d rather the tax be based of the actual price for which the house last changed hands.

The assessed value is based on recent sales of similar comps.

If you bought your house for $50k in 1979, of course you want it to be based on the original price. In CA, the assessed value can only go up by 2% a year. But if I buy your house today for $1.2m, then I am going to be paying $1,000/month in property taxes. And if you want to move across town, or even downsize a little to that $800k condo, well, then you are going to lose that low low property tax rate.

Which is one of the reason there is a housing shortage. People don't want to upgrade or downgrade or otherwise sell. They just figure out ways to give it to their children or rent it out and keep the low tax rate locked in.

California caps how much property tax can increase each year unless there is a change in ownership. My mom pays $4k/yr in property tax for the house I grew up in, which is currently worth $2M.

The other comments are all correct, but they didn't address your last point. Yes, you will indeed pay taxes on the $1M value, and yeah, high property taxes is definitely something to plan for when buying property in California. The kicker is, as others mentioned, when your home's value is $2M in five years, you're still paying taxes on essentialy a $1M property.

You already answered your own question.

If property taxes were higher you wouldn't have to pay $1 million for the home because nobody can afford those property taxes and subsequently nobody would actually bid $1 million.

Meanwhile if you make property taxes negative then you could afford the same house for $2 million.

Edit: How can property taxes be negative? The government can use income taxes to build infrastructure to raise the value of your land.

55% is one of the lowest home ownership rates in the country. If high levels of home ownership drive policies that prohibit new construction and drive up prices, how is it that places like Minnesota, with a home ownership rate in the mid-70s, are so cheap to live in?

The problem isn't that 55% is "high" (or not). The problem is that, currently, there is a housing problem that is significantly profitable for 55% of a population. This means that 55% of people have conflicting interests with fixing this problem.

Yes, and those 55% wield extremely disproportionate political power. This is why I’m pessimistic that NIMBYs will always rule.

> Yes, and those 55% wield extremely disproportionate political power.

House owners don't have any additional political power than renters. Still one vote per person and politicians don't consult homeowners any more often than anyone else.

No one say they do, point is they benefit from not solving housing and has SOME power simply by being a large group. I you believe solving housing is public interest then that's a problem.

Of course you can say when 55% of people are against affordable housing then affordable housing is not public interest.

Those homeowners get richer and richer every year. Their borrowing power increases and even as renters are getting gouged by rising rents, homeowners don't even have to worry about their property tax going up. This leads to disproportionate political power.

One Czech ex-minister of health owns 67 properties. So he probably has a lot of acquintances and relatives among the political elite of my country. To me it seems he has more political power than me, a dude sitting in underwear and ranting on Hackernews.

No doubt high level (ex)politicians are very privileged and operate above most limitations imposed on regular people. But that's moving the goalposts of the discussion pretty far indeed.

The original premise was that the entire "55% [of homeowners] wield extremely disproportionate political power". Sure, a few of those homeowners are also politicians with disproportionate political power. But nearly everyone is just regular people with one vote and no other influence, whether homeowner or renter.

Someone: wield extremely disproportionate political power.

You: House owners don't have any additional political power than renters.

Me: one dude has 67 properties and connections to political elite, so he probably has more political power than renters. Implicitly: chances are the entire political system amassed a huge amount of properties, and are in one bed with prominent businessmen, who have the capital to acquire even more properties than said politicians.

You: u R M0v1nG tHe gO4lPoStS. You are a clown xD

I have friends more invested in housing issues than I am. But they generally agree with my assessment that without fixing transportation issues there is only downsides for homeowners and even renters to new development. It definitely seems like developers don't want to to pay a cent for mass transit. The just want to build lux houses and lofts in some neighborhood and then run away with the money.

I think Scott Wiener is right. Build mass transit and allow developers build housing close in.

Picking a couple specific issues, to me, seems like a naive hope in counting a majority of over-privileged under-taxed folk whose land-value goes up the more they suppress change or growth. Trying to argue this or that specific issue, get them to come around each time, seems unlikely to provide real progress.

They're not a voting block and their financial well being doesn't revolve around their home prices remaining high.

If you buy a $1M 1400 ft^2 in CA, and the price goes down, you're going to be deeply underwater in your mortgage. If home prices stay high enough long enough than it "embeds" itself into politics.

It's worth noting that property taxes in California are only re-assessed on ownership change or new construction. There's no downside to having the value of your home balloon as much as possible.

Sure there is. Your property tax still goes up 2% a year if home prices rise. That's more than inflation has been.

Rising prices also traps people -- they can't afford to move anywhere unless they go far away.

As a CA homeowner (nortgage paid up!) I'd be much happier if house prices were half off what they are.

Yes, if you actually want to stay in California, rising house prices only actually benefit you if you never want to buy a larger house - but the weird tax laws also disincentivize downsizing. If the smaller house costs more than your current house did when you bought it, you’ll see a significant property tax rise.

I believe that, to counter this, There are some counties where if you move to a smaller house, you get to keep a tax rate akin to what it would’ve cost you at the time you purchased your old house!

Then argue in favor of land value taxes instead of regressive taxes on work.

They can increase when home values increase.

But, that increase is capped at a percent per year, which practically speaking means taxes lag behind home values when they increase.

> But, that increase is capped at a percent per year

Property taxes in CA (Prop 13) go up by 2% every year.

Prop 13 takes away the normal downside to rising home prices.

If there is empirical evidence in favor of land value taxes then it would be the entirety of California.

Come on, taxes on land are glorious. Hongkong charges 17% income taxes on the rich and <7% on people who earn less than the median.

https://youtu.be/XL3n59wC8kk?t=1917

> For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic!

Is this appreciation consistent with the rest of the country, or areas with comparable quality of life? If you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to other houses you’d actually want to live in, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead.

So yeah, that starter house you bought for $300k 25 years ago that’s worth over a million now? Unless you’re willing to move to a much lower cost of living part of the country, you could sell that house and buy…another million dollar starter house.

> you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to others, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead.

Equity can be leveraged meaningfully without selling, so that's not true.

Besides HELOCs, what are you referring to? A HELOC is just a tool for getting lower interest rates on another loan, which only would make you wealthier if you happened to invest it in some other appreciating asset with an extremely high ROI.

A HELOC is, literally, a line of credit. You can do anything you want with that money: start a business, go to college, buy bitcoin, buy another property, etc.

... anything you want, but you have to repay what you borrowed? It's true the interest rate is likely better than many other kinds of credit, but it's still a loan.

I'm sort of at a loss for understanding the misunderstanding here. Someone without equity in their home probably cannot get a loan of any sort. Access to capital, as a loan or any other form, is a huge thing. So if your home gives you access to that loan, this is important.

There is no misunderstanding.

Most people don't have a use for a line of credit other than to spend it on things that don't make them any money. Everyone I know that did this used it to say, pay off a bunch of credit card debt, or build a new kitchen that will be worthless by the time they sell their house anyways.

Paying off credit card debt should be beneficial here, right? I would assume that trading a 15%-25% rate to something lower is good thing.

> Most people don't have a use for a line of credit other than to spend it on things that don't make them any money.

Even if that were true (it's really not—it may be at any one moment but over a substantial period of years people tend to have emergent needs and opportunities that not having access to capital, or higher cost access to capital, either misses with real costs or pays more with, quite obvious, real costs) people tend to borrow and spend money on things that don't make money fro time to time; if you have a lower financing costs for such frivolous purchases, you are richer than someone who has the same spending pattern with higher financing costs.

just because you cannot think of a use for such a line of credit, doesn't mean that having the option is useless. And even if most people mis-use this line of credit, it is still an option that's not available. Availability of options is in itself valuable.

And i really dont think people are dumb and cannot think of productive uses for such a line of credit.

> A HELOC is just a tool for getting lower interest rates on another loan

Yes, paying less money if you have to borrow to meet the same emergent need or opportunity as another person makes you richer than the one who pays more.

For the most part this is an important point.

But there is a minor perk that a greatly appreciating house gives you considerably more equity to act as a large rainy day battery via a home equity line of credit or traditional loans backed by home equity.

My home appreciated 20% last two years and while I hate the condition of the housing market, this unlocked a lot of equity years earlier than I expected it to.

A HELOC just lets you unlock lower interest rates for accruing additional debt. It’s very different from actually having that additional money in your pocket.

Yep. But it’s still a valuable tool and the tool is made more powerful with this ridiculous market.

Unless you are taking that equity out via home equity loans, it doesn’t really matter until you sell. My home went up 18% this year but…so what? It’s not like we are leaving anytime soon. It’s just a paper gain that could be gone next year.

Salaries go up to match cost of living increases for the area, but your actual cost of living is locked in to a prior rate, so you profit in that way.

> your actual cost of living is locked in

your own imputed rent, if you owned your own place is not "locked in".

By living in the property, you are giving up receiving the rent that could've been generated. This means a general rental increase also affects property owners - it's just invisible and often not counted since no money changes hand.

Which you received through your increased salary. You don’t get to double count it.

but that same renter also received the same increased salary. So cost of living increases have the same effect on both a renter and a home owner.

That makes no sense. If the land was cheaper you could buy a more expensive house that is of higher quality. You don't need to fill the bags of the old land owner.

You are assuming that having low income housing somehow impacts the price of higher end housing, and I am not sure that this is true. Would a person with a million dollar house be hurt if we built 100,000 more million dollar houses? Yes. Would that same homeowner be hurt if we built 100,000 cheap rental apartments? It certainly doesn't seem like it. However much property values fall due to less people looking for low-end housing, you would think they would go up due to not being surrounded by homeless camps.

I would say the people who are incentivized to oppose cheap housing are the lower-end landlords.

> Would that same homeowner be hurt if we built 100,000 cheap rental apartments?

Of course they would. Million dollar houses in many parts of the country are so insanely expensive not because they’re luxury goods; they’re expensive because supply is so constrained that even mediocre houses are extremely scarce relative to demand. People buying million dollar houses in e.g. the Bay Area know that their house is not particularly fancy, relative to other houses (that often sell for much less in other parts of the country).

As an analogy, consider cars in communist countries. Russian Ladas and East German Trabants were objectively horrible cars, but they cost several years’ average salary because supply was so scarce.

Introduce millions of even cheaper cars into the aforementioned communist countries and the prices of Ladas/Trabants would plummet. Likewise, introduce thousands of low income units into the Bay Area and the price of what used to be starter homes that now go for a million dollars would plummet.

I still think you are underappreciating the difference between people who buy homes and people who rent. To buy a house, you need a certain income, a down payment etc. The people who live in low income housing have none of those things and were never potential buyers anyway.

I don’t think that’s fair. Plenty of people rent because it’s the only option they can afford right now, even at high salaries. If you don’t yet own a home, making a meaningful down payment will take years and years of savings. To afford a mortgage on a $500k house in a west coast city, you’re looking at $100k of savings.

The point is that loads of people would love to own a house or upgrade their living situation, but are priced out of it. These people are all competing for rentals, driving rent up. As a result, it’s not hard to simply not be able to afford rent, and end up on the street.

This would be fixed by drastically increasing supply, so that housing at the low end of the market is more affordable, both rentals and ownership.

The general point of this thread, though, is that everyone who already bought a house cannot afford to loose that value, as it’s likely the biggest financial risk and investment they have. This means there is essentially no pressure for the market to decrease prices. (I imagine developers wouldn’t want to ever make less rent either.)

So long as housing is treated as an investment for the property owners, there is only pressure for prices to go up.

I'm still not convinced of this. At least not among people who live in their houses. If you're not planning on moving, an underwater mortgage isn't a "problem" unless you lose your job, or have an other emergency. I don't think these people have a strong political view on housing prices one way or the other. People with INVESTMENT properties though...that's a different story.

Please don't compare Ladas with Trabants. Ladas are real cars. Simple, crude even, but robust. Trabants are shitty 4 weel mopeds.

This seems naive. I'm sure the people looking for SROs or other low income choices are not the people buying $1M houses, but they probably have a good deal of overlap with people who are buying houses that are at the lowest rung on the ladder, who themselves have overlap with the next cohort, etc.

It's a market. Changing it in a major way at the bottom will have knock-on effects through the whole market.

Of course, more directly, people with $1M houses might also be highly motivated to avoid "the wrong kind of person" being able to afford housing any where near them, their schools, etc.

The market isn't so segmented. If there's a massive availability of cheap rental apartments, there will be less demand for cheap or far away houses, which in turn will reduce their prices, which will in turn reduce demand for million dollar houses. Additionally, land can be divided/merged to turn cheap/expensive houses into expensive/cheap houses.

what good is your house doubling in value if all the other houses have also doubled in value?

If your house you purchased for $200,000 20 years ago is now worth $1.4M, say, that's $1.2M in profit.

You could live in a smaller house worth $1M and still get $400k of profit you didn't have before.

ah, I see the light now

The young people working for that profit don't see it.

Or what happens in reality. You sell your $1.4mm house and move to a bigger house that costs about $400k in one of the sunbelt states.

That’s why the sunbelt states are seeing population growth. Cheap housing.

Never mind that it’s states like California, New York and Connecticut that are paying for those states’s ability to attract people with cheap housing.

> therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going

This is a too-frequent HN meme but it doesn't really work that way. There is no special club of homeowners that have more say in what politicians do. Just one vote per person, same as non-homeowners.

And turns out homeowners don't spend time thinking about this, let alone scheming to somehow "keep the housing crisis going". A house is a place to live, that's all.

Technically true but, and this is what makes democracy such a joke, poor people don't vote.

They vote for parties that bribe them with cheap crap and screw them behind the scenes.

That doesn't change that they are the source of the problem and that they get paid to cause the problem and be against its solutions. They also throw money into the throats of large corporations that own a huge amount of land.

You have described why the housing "crisis" will never be solved in CA. The homeowners will vote down every new apartment complex, every new developer plan, every rezone. It will never end, ever. Current home owners will never vote for less money, ever. The only way CA can fix this is by a state wide vote - demanding housing to be allowed. Home owners in CA love new Panera Breads and new Chipotles - tie any new commercial properties to new housing. New 1brdm condos will never be built ever. This cannot be fought at a county NIMBY level: this must be statewide. %46 of CA do not own homes - the vote count is almost there. I await my downvotes.

I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds:

> San Francisco and the East Bay should see 7,872 new apartments open in 2021, an increase of 36% from the previous year. It's the highest number of apartments — 13,497 units — added to the region in the last five years.

Surprised?

We can’t solve mental illness with more quarter million dollar condos. I don’t know why this is still being peddled.

A lot of folks enter into mental health crisis from the stress, sleep deprivation and other issues caused by being homeless. Certainly not all. But having gone through a time period dealing with stress and sleep deprivation from the comfort of my home, I can empathize.

“Unhoused” — esp families — are rapidly rehoused in SF. Those experiencing “chronic homelessness” (the ‘visible’ humans, who deserve the same amount of love and respect) are more often tied to mental health…just different things are helpful for the different groups.

Even the chronically homeless with mental health issues benefit greatly from having housing. The key is to make it housing they actually can use, let them have their belongings, their pets foe support, let people come and go as they please so they are not prisoners, and don't force people out of the housing everyday.

A lot of the existing housing solutions for the chronically homeless have terrible terrible restrictions that make the housing not work for people, sadly.

Yeah, you know it's almost like those SROs that basically don't exist anymore actually served a purpose. That type of housing is perfect for getting people off the street and into a warm bed at night, while not imposing very many restrictions on them.

You are assuming they were born homeless.

Housing First policies are a huge boon to helping people out of homelessness who are dealing with mental illness.

What you derisively call "quarter million dollar condos" are of course helpful for this. It is either from directly housing the currently homeless with mental illness in these homes.

And if these homes do not directly house the homeless, new additional homes, where people's rent goes towards construction and labor rather than merely the pockets of a rentier landlord that just sees their rents ever increase is a huge help. Productive creation of new housing, especially if it increases the vacancy rate, is crucial to reigning in the housing market, a market which is failing our people, and in which landlords and homeowners are profiting from people's misery through perpetual shortages.

And if vacancy rates are not increasing, then we haven't built enough of those "quarter million dollar condos." Keep on building them until there's a surplus and they government can buy them on the cheap and provide housing as a human right.

Anybody who says that we do not need more housing is the very source of our homelessness problem. More housing makes everything easier, and the only cost is that some busybodies don't want to see it. Why pay attention to those people at the cost of helping everybody else?

No but you can prevent people from being evicted and forced onto the street. If the faucet of mental illness is closed then the burden of those who are still there is greatly diminished.

You are both kind of right.

Parts of California, like SF and the East Bay, have started building a lot of housing. Late, and still not enough to make up for the shortfall, but building nonetheless.

The problem is that places like Silicon Valley that have seen the lion's share of job growth haven't built commensurate levels of housing.

lol. Hilarious. 7,872 new apartments open in 2021. That should cover the bay area housing crisis. I am sure we will see a sharp drop in prices next year - due to those nice apartments in Avalon at Mission Bay. lol. Was this a joke? The bay area has a population of 7.7 million. Ill let you get back to your lazy detective work. You are sarcastic right? Hahaha.

Lol that's nothing. Try 100,000. California is more than 1,000,000 units short of what is being demanded.

^ This! The California population is 39 million. The bay area population is 7.7 million. With the 7,000 new apartments coming online we should see a sharp housing price decrease. Problem solved. lol.

This could be rewritten without any loss of impact.

>^ This! The California population is 39 million. The bay area population is 7.7 million. With the 7,000 new apartments coming online we should see a sharp housing price decrease. Problem solved!

The sarcasm is implied and doesn't need a "lol" which just looks immature.

Insulting the poster decreases the quality of discourse and encourages indecency. It increases the chance that the next person who finds you to be in the wrong will likewise be indecent.

Furthermore it drives away people who despite merely being incorrect in one case may have other useful information to share.

Your manner of speaking is a larger negative than someone merely being wrong and it will end up getting you booted from the site because it violates hacker news rules.

"I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds"

Are you kidding? That was their opening sentence to me. I am insulting? What a joke. I have never been treated like that on HN in 8 years. Spare me the lecture.

I’m glad GP posted that because I certainly benefitted from it. Somehow I’d been lulled into thinking people agree to assume good faith here so I got a little lackadaisical. Looking at your tone here I clearly need to change something.

> The homeowners will vote down every new apartment complex, every new developer plan, every rezone.

Homeowners don't get to vote or have any say on such things. The city planning commission will approve, or not, whatever they will.

In the rare case where a vote is relevant, every resident gets one vote regardless of housing owner or renter status.

Bonus points if those politicians own land. That's how you get corruption. Each home owner is basically a tiny bit corrupt.

Precisely! I've linked a great article from Vox about how home ownership changes people. In a nutshell, most peoples' largest asset is their home, so they have strong incentives to protect its value. Because the housing crisis is fundamentally a supply crisis, it also causes them to take on a scarcity mindset. This leads to your classic NIMBY behavior, wherein homeowners show up at city council meetings to oppose literally anything going up in their neighborhoods. The end result is that NIMBYism does prop up home values, but, mostly because existing homeowners oppose the building of any more homes in their neighborhoods, thus perpetuating the crisis that caused them to behave this way.

You can read about this, plus some background on relevant research here: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22597947/homeowner-nimby-affor...

At this point the only economically rational thing for the other 45% to do is leave. Yes California is awesome in lots of ways, but it's someone else's house (literally) and you don't really live there.

If enough people do this, the NIMBYs will get what they deserve as home values crash.

If enough people leave because housing is too expensive, then eventually housing stops being too expensive and people stop leaving. Eventually an equilibrium is reached, but that we might be at that equilibrium already if California’s population isn’t crashing.

California has a huge economy with a lot of network effects that draw and hold people there. Going remote and geographic diversification of industries will help people escape the California rent trap.

SpaceX is leaving. VCs increasingly fund startups anywhere or fully remote. Software companies are going remote. It’s happening. COVID has accelerated some of these trends a lot, especially remote.

What is your suggestion? That only 5% become homeowners/property owners and we're basically back to feudalism?

Land value taxes reduce the value of land and increase the value of work.

I don't think housing prices are an issue. one part of the homeless are mentally ill. This is a very hard problem and I don't think anyone has the answers for yet, but its not home prices.

Another major group of the homeless is drug addicts. Again, home prices isn't going to change that.

I think its very rare someone goes homeless because their rent went up. if they can't afford it, they usually move.

I'll get down-voted before this but that's how I feel, and I think this 'more affordable homes will solve homelessness' is a waste of time.

The answer to mental illness is quality mental healthcare available to those in need, along with housing first policies to create stability for those seeking care. This has costs of course.

California is the fifth largest economy in the world (Between Germany and the United Kingdom) and yet can’t prioritize this spending (and the spending that is taking place is not very effective or efficient).

The people who become homeless because their rent went up certainly exist. These people tend to be homeless for a short amount of time because they are able to eventually find new housing. Maybe they live in their car for awhile. Maybe they couch surf. But it's a good point that there are people with mental health / drug problems that have issues beyond housing cost. Both can be true at the same time.

Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...

The 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count¹ reported 32% for substance use and 26% for long-term mental health issues.

It's also worth keeping in mind that drug addictions and mental health issues can arise from homelessness rather than cause it.

¹https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-ange...

Mentally ill people also sometimes live in houses, believe it or not. Some are barely getting by. When housing prices go up, they become homeless. When housing prices drop, some can keep it together well enough to pay rent.

Where are they gunna move to, and how are homes being $1m not a problem in your mind? Most people will never be able to pay for that, nevermind afford it. Delusional.

Nobody talks about the harder truth: even with its exclusionary housing policies, California is increasingly not capable of supporting the population it has.

The 2021 fires and worsening drought conditions are just a taste of things to come.

California is extremely capable of supporting its current population, and easily 50% more. The only thing stopping this is proper distribution of land and water. We let wealthy people hoard land and water (Prop 13 and our land rights system), rather than allocating them based on market systems or even more fair systems. We have feudalism baked too deeply into our laws.

California was a semi desert before we built the canals and aqueducts -which is why it was a backwater with few people till that was done and its fertile soil was able to sustain life.

People (city dwellers) came _after_ the farmers.

So, it might be in need of an update, but I think you're mischaracterizing how this happened.

Giving people rights to water simply because they took it from the Spanish first is the definition of feudal. We don't allocate resources logically or helpfully, we give people rights because their ancestors got their first, and it is preposterous economically and morally.

Extensive canals and water rights and riparian water rights were not developed till the demand by the Gold Rush, and then after its admission into the Union additional laws and provisions were passed and levees and canals built, and then in the early 1900s water from the Colorado was diverted into Calif. then much later aqueducts to channel water into semi-desert cities.

The Spanish may have had a few little channels here and there (for their missions along the el camino), but it wasn't till the Gold Rush people built large elaborate systems for water distribution (for their claims). Then appropriative and riparian rights attracted many farmers into fertile lands.

Does it deserve a revisit, sure. It will be fraught and messy, but sure.

This really depends on where in California you are looking. SoCal? Sure, desert. But the San Joaquin valley was full of freshwater lakes and marshes before the invaders started using it for farming.

https://eccentricculinary.com/californias-vanishing-lakes-an...

Even if, for argument's sake, one accepts your claim, it's quite clear that the policies are not going to change.

I'm a native Californian who left and now lives overseas, and every visit back has not only provided a stark demonstration of California's decline, but also taught me that many Californians refuse to believe their lying eyes.

I have friends and family who in the past 5 years have lost homes to fire, seen their wells run dry, had to flee from toxic wildfire air, etc. and yet all but one of them has stayed. It's insanity in my humble opinion and I think if more Californians had an opportunity to spend some time away from the state, more of them would realize that the state is in great peril. It literally and figuratively is a case of the frog in boiling water.

Things are changing, as the entrenched interests die from old age.

Last year, Prop 15 nearly eliminated the Prop 13 for commercial properties. That this was even within 10% points of passing is such a huge change as to be unthinkable. 15 years ago I would rant about Prop 13 and get nothing but hate from others for my position. These days I'm as likely to find somebody ranting about the evils of Prop 13 as I am to initiate the rants. And the only people I see really arguing for Prop 13 are in the dying our demographics of newspaper comment sections and NextDoor, and nearly no one I meet in person.

We have a huge problem with Boomers and their heirs, but immigration is rapidly changing eh demographics to allow for more sound governance.

Hope springs eternal in California, but unfortunately water does not.

Consumer water needs are just fine. The coastal areas where most people live are building desalinization plants and will keep doing so until consumer water needs are met.

When you talk about California water crisis, you are talking about California Agribusiness water crisis. Yes, the farms in the Central Valley will eventually eat themselves like Easter Island once they drain the aquifer completely.

Desalination is not a magic panacea. It requires significant amounts of energy and has significant environmental impacts.

As for the Central Valley, when the farms "eat themselves", have you considered that growing numbers of Americans will have to do the same? The Central Valley produces a quarter of the nation's food even though it represents 1% of the nation's farmland.

> the only people I see really arguing for Prop 13 are in the dying our demographics of newspaper comment sections and NextDoor, and nearly no one I meet in person.

I like Prop 13. I'd be more than happy to meet you in person.

California has the highest sales tax and income tax in the nation. The amount of revenue it gets from property tax is near the median for the U.S. I think they get enough money and don't need more.

Repealing prop 13 doesn't have to mean taxes go up. Housing can be kept in check by adequate property taxes while lowering income taxes at the same time.

It can. To me, this is the usual debate between taxing income and taxing wealth. They each have their positives and negatives.

There aren't any meaningful negatives to taxing land because it doesn't disappear when you tax it. Sure, if you tax factories and housing those will "move" to a different location.

Do you really think CA will lower income taxes?

Land and water is mostly hoarded by farmers. The wealthy only hoard a bit of land in urban areas.

> California is extremely capable of supporting its current population, and easily 50% more.

So is the Moon, with enough effort and cost, but that's not the point.

In way you have a point: from an airplane it is easy to see that the Bay Area and LA are as flat and uniform as the moon. Real cities have variations in building density that reflect the demand for different areas.

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