Repealing Prop 13 and removing local control of zoning decisions can be done via votes in the legislature, no new technologies required, so I beg to differ with the "no easy fix" tag.
The idea that Prop 13 is set in stone is just not the case anymore. I was changed in 2020 and nearly removed completely for corporations.
The legislature cannot, currently, legally override the constitution.
Folks are addicted to spending money, and the results don't really matter. It took national outrage to get us to value-engineer a $1.6M toilet down to $1.0M.
But for commercial real estate ? That seems totally ridiculous. There is so much tax that could be collected there!
California has, like most states, Constitutionally-mandated balanced operating budget (it does have a bit of reserve fund which can be used to avoid immediate cuts when revenue projected in the balanced budget falls short, so it can end up with some deficit from bad projection, but that is pretty limited); it cannot monetize spending since it doesn't issue its own currency, and borrowing (which it can do for capital projects) takes voter approval.
Jerry Brown didn't do anything that unusual in balancing budgets, but what he did do is risk political capital to take ending the supermajority requirement to pass a budget to the voters, succeed, and thereby end the annual (good times or bad) minority blockade budget crisis that made California effectively ungovernable.
(Unfortunately, the supermajority rule for tax increases—which applies to any tax pokicy shift that is includes any increase in any situation—remains, preventing most tax policy shifts in practice.)
> Notably, the current Gov started tenure with a substantial surplus, and mysteriously now has record deficits again.
Its not really a mystery—the sources of volatility are well known, the swing (though not the precise magnitude) was predicted, and why the Governor argued for changes that would allow greater transfers to reserves in years of predicted surplus, rather than returning as much projected surplus revenue directly as is currently required.
My theory is that if it were repealed, and people had to pay property tax on something approaching the actual current market value of their homes, home values would tank. Homeowners would then "lose" a significant fraction of their net worth, get pissed off, and immediately vote out anyone who had voted for the repeal.
Prop 13 was passed in 1978 as a constitutional amendment, so the only way to repeal or reform that would be another amendment. The process for doing so via the legislature requires a two thirds supermajority in both houses, and then it goes to the ballot anyways. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Constitution#Amending_the...
https://www.dgs.ca.gov/Resources/SAM/TOC/6000/6920#:~:text=A....
Zoning control changes could (as far as I can tell) be done via legislative action alone (and probably fading some resulting lawsuits).
And the reason it hans't been phased out is that the state has significant issues with legislative process as well as economic management. i.e. passing constitutional amendments by popular vote instead of just regular laws which makes them borderline irreversible.
log(5)/log(1.02) = 81 years
log(5)/log(1.08) = 21 yearsThe proposition was intended to prevent appreciation from pricing people out of their homes - in other words, to decrease the volume of transactions on the real estate market. This is government interference in the market - on top of the government interfering in the construction of new homes in the first place...
If they regularly re-assessed property values while lowering the applied rate, they could collect the same amount of money overall without distorting the market.
California does have high overall taxes, but not the highest. Part of the reason income taxes are so high is because property taxes have a very low effective rate.
In terms of "property tax as a percentage of personal income" it is only 24th.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/us-property-taxes-by-sta...
Por que no los dos? Put fiscally conservatives on the task of cutting, and put a progressive in charge of reform.
Repealing prop 13 would cause the single biggest increase in homelessness in the states history.
A huge percentage of California homeowners would be evicted as a consequence of their next 10x higher property tax bill...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/embattled-nonpro...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-city...
This analysis puts it at 24/50 in fact.
We had a proposition in Palo Alto that only local residents could use some of the parks. That was challenged and now doesn't exist as you can guess how police identified non-locals. Can we do the same for prop 13?