Hacker News Reader

Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate? Which part is 'wild'?

That a person doesn't have a right to live where they'd like? This gets trotted out every time some might've been Californian complains about high housing costs.

Or is it that inheritance should be taxed? Debatable I suppose but hardly 'wild'.

The only problem I can see with the scenario is that the value on a 'fixer-upper 1950s ranch' is so high that the tax on it is beyond what an 'average working class' fellow or fellowette can reasonably expect to afford.

View on HN

> The only problem I can see with the scenario is that the value on a 'fixer-upper 1950s ranch' is so high that the tax on it is beyond what an 'average working class' fellow or fellowette can reasonably expect to afford.

And even that is pretty hard to find. Even if you assume a worst-case scenario, where a small tract house is now worth $3mil, the standard California property tax on that would be $37,500/yr, or 3,125/mo. That's well below market rent for such a property in any area where a home like that would sell for $3mil. Either live in it, and be happy that you get a below-market Single-Family Home, or rent it out, and easily cover the property taxes and maintenance from the rental income, creating a robust passive income stream. Or sell it! In all these situations, the inheritor is better off, even well off. :D

An individual doesn’t stand to inherit the equivalent of a life time or labor because “their parents happened to live in California”.

They stand to inherit it because their parents worked hard their entire lives and invested an obscene amount in a desirable market. They probably made significant sacrifices to do this. Many of our families were here long before real estate started getting out of hand and contributed to building the economic machine that makes California so desirable today.

Newcomers absolutely deserve to pay higher rent and mortgage rates to live in the same place. They always had the freedom to invest in their own state or country.

It's probably easier to say that your family already owns land in CA than to try to defend this moralistically.

How many generations before it becomes wild? Even the brutal militaristic conquest of the Native American population recognized the importance of hereditary land in the form of reservations. This discussion brings to mind a darkly funny scenario where settlers peaceably force natives off their land because the increase in settlement has caused the land value to rise, and the natives haven’t been able to trade for enough currency to hold onto it.

I think bringing up native Californians as a defense for modern feudalism is even crazier than the original article.

Native Californians were victims of genocide and are a completely different and special case than people who bought houses in California in the 70s and 80s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com