While the calculation isn't quite this simple (dividends on stock versus not paying rent, and interest deductions) it highlights that real estate appreciation isn't quite as crazy as it's made to sound.

Even so, the approximate return from the S&P 500 (reinvesting dividends) over the same period would be 11.468%[1].

[0] http://www.moneychimp.com/features/portfolio_performance_cal...

[1] http://dqydj.net/sp-500-return-calculator/

There’s a huge difference between 300% inflation the BLS claims vs. 2800% inflation you are suggesting.

On a practical level, inflation is always relative to what you're actually buying. If you're buying S&P 500 index funds, the inflation rate is the price appreciation of the S&P 500. If you're buying real-estate, the inflation rate is the rate of increase in housing prices.

(Perhaps this is a bad example because you typically wouldn't be buying stock index funds after 40 years of earning, but the point is to illustrate opportunity cost. If someone's goal is to pass wealth on to their children, for example, then the price of income-producing assets is a lot more relevant than the price of milk.)

The price of goods, services, salaries, etc. have all gone up by roughly 3–4x in the US (with some notable exceptions like housing in certain areas and college tuition). Someone who invested in the S&P 500 and has 29x as many nominal dollars as they did in 1976 can buy about 8 times as much of other people’s labor as they could before.

Some fixed percentage of the total size of the S&P 500 is a practically useless measuring stick. If we use that as a standard, 90%+ of the population in the USA is 8x poorer than they were in 1976.

I know in Chicago if you were old past a certain age you got some tax breaks (MAYBE at some point a tax freeze). Does SF have some kind of tax rate freeze?

But ya, live is too short to spend a million bucks on a 2 bedroom house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

It's almost a double whammy for someone who wants to buy a house, but can't afford the current prices or was outbid by a cash buyer going over asking price. Cheer up as we've incorporated the price increase into your rent.

Assuming we're talking free markets, then the rent should already be set at the maximum price the market will bear. (If not the landlord is leaving money on the table.) Increasing property taxes is to depress the price of real estate. A simple property tax could also discourage new investment, while a land value tax incentivizes owners to maximize the value of their holdings.

So, treat primary residences as primary residences, whether or not they are the primary residence of the property owner. For multi-unit rental properties, the total value of the property is divided among units proportionately to the rent charged for each unit to assess this.

While it's probably not a bad idea, I don't see it moving the needle much.

I'm discussing ways to achieve the goal upthread of insulating people from property tax uncertainty on their primary residence.

I would expect that the larger purpose of that is to allow full-value taxation on all other real property; of which non-primary-residence residential property is a subset (and a fairly small subset, at that.)

Remember that Prop 13 applies to all real property, not just residential property.

Prop 13 is a blatant wealth transfer between people who are new to the area (mostly the young) to the people who were originally here (mostly the old).

Taxes aren't governed by a market; the same rules don't apply. Arguments against government protectionism in markets don't also apply to protection against the actions of the government itself.

That said, proposition 13 doesn't seem like a good implementation of this. There's no good reason for a sudden increase upon sale; that breaks the ability to buy a home. There should be a hard cap on property taxes that doesn't change on sale.

Why should taxes get to increase without bound or control on existing property? Once you've paid off your home, you should not have an ever-growing expense to keep it.

(You shouldn't have an expense to keep it at all, but that's a separate argument.)

My view is that property taxes fund the very things that make a particular neighborhood desirable, like good schools, roads, parks, and other local services. Your property's value is what it is because of these things, and you shouldn't be able to reap these benefits without paying taxes proportional to the value you've captured.

In California, that's less true than it might otherwise be, given the prop 13 limits on both assessments and tax rates. Lots of those things are funded by sales tax revenue, income tax revenue (primarily state income tax funding local programs), development fees, and other revenue sources other than property tax.

I think you're arguing that richer neighborhoods should have nicer schools, roads and parks. Granted, SF is an exception here, but that's precisely how things work elsewhere in California.

And if richer neighborhoods don't get that, California made annexations pretty easy, which is why you see those tiny municipalities in the vicinity of Los Angeles, San Diego, Anaheim, etc.

One can't really arbitrage that effectively.

Municipalities can't run consistent deficits, so the new schools, roads and parks will be built after a wave of newcomers buys properties, locking in higher prices and higher tax base.

In case there are no such newcomers (i.e. everybody is maximizing their Prop 13 benefit by not selling), the municipality just sticks to the last year's budget with a 2% increase permitted by Prop 13. But in that case new schools, parks and roads that make the neighborhood better don't appear either.

That's a really good reason to stop funding those things through property taxes.

Does it apply to anything else you own? If 2004 Honda Civics suddenly got really popular and I already owned one, I wouldn't suddenly be priced out. Or if I own gold or stocks, and the price goes up, that doesn't affect me at all unless I sell.

In California, since the state has ad valorem taxation on vehicles (the vehicle license fee, which is 1.15% of the market value of the vehicle) which does not have prop. 13 style limits, you, in fact, could be priced out of your 2004 Honda Civic if the market price suddenly and radically increased.

That prevents people from being taxed out of their home, without creating a situation that makes it hard for people to buy new homes.

The Deschutes (Oregon) County Tax Assessor's office made a really good video explaining how three almost identical houses in the same location can have completely different tax bills:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo_hSySAC2A

In addition to what the video says, I wanted to point out that the 3% hard annual cap you mention is only on the property's Maximum Assessed Value, which is only one of the many inputs into the computation for a property's tax bill. For example, one thing that can cause taxes to go up more than 3% are general bonds approved by voter measure.

Portland Commissioner Steve Novick also wrote a really good article about all of the problems with Oregon's tax system and made some recommendations:

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/novick/article/428020

A lot of places I have lived capped property tax at 2% of market value. In Ohio are their taxes significantly higher than 2% of property value? I wonder if they have tax missing somewhere else, like no local income tax or something... Ohio doesn't strike me as a high tax zone.

Basically, it subsidizes keeping property and never selling it. This is because every year the owner's property taxes essentially go down, presuming any normal level of inflation. And because of follow-on propositions, you can transfer that advantage from parents to children. Yes, this does let existing residents stay somewhere indefinitely. Equivalently, we can say it strongly discourages mobility.

The crazy real estate prices you see are simply a result of the proposition-established cartel. This drives up prices for new arrivals, which California depends on to keep this going, which makes the people holding on to their property think two things: "I'm rich because my home is worth so much" and "I could never get by without Prop. 13 because my home is worth so much." This has made Prop. 13 untouchable — it would basically have to be overturned at the state Supreme Court level at the behest of broad popular opinion.

However, this is just another bubble. California as a state has done relatively quite well in the last thirty years, so it continues to inflate. However, California and local governments have also spent a huge amount of future revenue on state workers, so it has become harder to sustain. But for the huge amount of income tax receipts from the investment class of California, things would already be in rough shape.

Someday, the bubble will burst. If Prop. 13 was ruled unconstitutional tomorrow, it would cause a real estate crisis, followed by an economic crisis, that is hard to imagine. But that might be preferable to having Prop. 13 crumble in the middle of a statewide economic crisis, which is the most likely ending of this story. In the meantime, yes, it does keep grandma in her tidily-appreciating house instead of some filthy tech hipsters chasing the next gold rush.