Hacker News Reader

Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

> Why should someone who lives within their means and bought an affordable house be punished just because a bunch of other people swoop in and drive up prices around them

Indeed one of the huge stories around Prop 13 was an elderly woman with a paid-off house, about to be evicted because she couldn't pay the ridiculous uncapped property tax. She went to city hall with Howard Jarvis to ask for help and when turned away, had a heart attack and died right there in city hall.

http://www.hjta.org/propositions/proposition-13/proposition-...

View on HN

From the article (which note is published on the Howard Jarvis Tax Association website): "Howard Jarvis told the story of watching an elderly lady suffering a heart attack while visiting the Los Angeles assessor's office when she couldn't convince the authorities to change her tax bill." Doesn't mention the woman dying, just that she had a heart attack.

Also, the anecdote comes from Howard Jarvis himself. Was he lying to further his agenda? This source casts doubt on his story: http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blog/happy-birthday... - from that source: "White notes that “even though the age of the deceased woman varied as Jarvis repeatedly told this story, the feelings it generated resonated with the public.”" Smells fishy to me...

That's, like, the firstest of first world problems:

- My land value has skyrocketed.

- Now I can't afford the property taxes and have to sell the land and retire several times over.

If you can afford to retire several times over, it would by definition have to involve living in a less expensive place (otherwise you'd have the same tax issue). Being forced to downgrade housing quality and/or location is not an obvious win.

Oh, definitely. But when it comes to "problems we should all have to bear a burden to prevent" -- the target of public policy -- it just doesn't seem like that particular problem should be very high on the list.

It's not that being priced out is a pure good; it's that it naturally comes with effects that very much soften the blow (at least for homeowners). It's not the sort of extreme personal catastrophe that social policy tries to mitigate in general.

Don't forget how things used to be -- a single earner working at a factory could buy a house comfortably. Those were the folks impacted.

I mostly agree, however I find moving house is a complete PITA, and I'm fairly young. For someone in their later years, the stress, their physical limitations etc make it very difficult. I don't think its possible to over estimate the difficulty an elderly person could face when forced to move.

"Stories used to sell political positions" ⊄ "Facts"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com