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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people moved into the bay area for the good jobs, nice weather and nature. Once housing demand pushed above supply, prices started shooting up. Those locals whose incomes didn't grow were pushed out of their homes. The bay area is boxed in by the hills so hard to expand out. Also a lot of the land was already build up with single family homes and other low density housing a long time ago so upgrading the density is harder. The public transportation is also limited. BART didn't expand to south bay until a few years ago. And the stations are far apart. Undoing all this mess will be much more expensive now.

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Most houses I've seen there are $50k houses on $2M pieces of land. Something like 75% of the land is used for single family detached houses. Just remove the dumb restrictions and there is plenty of space and prices go down.

Actually California natives have one good thing going for them. Prop 13. So if you or your parents have lived in the house for 30+ years you're likely to pay $2K in property taxes on a $1M house (annually). The lack of middle-class jobs is a whole different story.

Not just natives. Anyone who moved here a decade back might benefit. I grew up here but it was still difficult to buy a house when young because the housing prices kept ahead of salaries. The drop in prices during the last recession is what gave me the chance.

And that is the flip side to Prop 13, which a bunch of people like to hate on. Absent Prop 13 (for residential properties) a lot of long-term residents would be forced out by rapidly rising property taxes. Which would-be residents may not like but is not at all clearly a bad thing.

Even if that's your angle, Prop 13 is bizarrely overbroad. If you just wanted to protect long-term residents from needing to move:

* Remove its application to commercial property

* Remove its application to second/vacation homes

* Remove its application to inherited property

* Only apply the restriction if the increase would be burdensome on the household's income

* Only apply the restriction once someone has lived in the house for a significant amount of time, e.g. 5+ years.

I started to nod in agreement but as I went down your list I vehemently disagree with where the continuation of that thought goes..

Why's that?

The way I look at it, if the purpose is to protect people from needing to move because they can't afford property taxes, restrictions should be narrowly tailored to only apply in that case.

You lost me when you bring up burdensome and household income. Who gets to decide what burdensome is? An owner occupied home should be protected - regardless of how long they have been there or how much money they earn. I do not believe in penalizing this group.

The other groups are all doing business and making money off others and I find that to be more justified for being taxed at market.

> Who gets to decide what burdensome is?

The same entity creating the regulations, I imagine. Who else would?

Set it at some threshold, if the property tax goes beyond some % of annual income then it gets capped.

> I do not believe in penalizing this group.

Letting people pay property taxes proportional to their property value is not "punishment", any more than people paying income taxes proportional to their income is "punishment".

The fact that proponents of Prop 13 oppose restricting it to primary residence or exempting commercial property from protection, etc. show that this is not the real truth for why people like Prop 13.

Besides, you can simply transfer-tax it anyway. For a primary residence, this being the system:

1. You pay Prop 13 tax

2. You accrue true prop tax

3. You may sell the home and buy a new home and net-cap-gains you get the accrued tax taken out of profit

So then you don't get "pushed out", you pay when you sell, and it only applies to your home not to your rental properties. But that's not what people want - they ultimately would prefer the "housing crisis" but that's politically unpopular so they'll say other things, though occasionally the truth will leak out.

> forced out by rapidly rising property taxes.

"Forced out" meaning sell their multimillion dollar property for a massive mostly tax-free profit. Alternatively, they can spend their windfall by using their property as collateral.

These people are in the top 5-10% of Americans by wealth, not some underprivileged underclass.

Not everyone bought the homes they lived in back then.

Prop 13 is terrible and has create a 'landed gentry'. It certainly hasn't lowered housing prices and forces those people to stay in a house that they may not want to live in but have to because moving removes their benefit. To fix housing crisis just remove zoning and stupid rules that delay housing. If all of sudden 75% of the land was available for building up there would be rapidly falling prices very quickly.

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