But if you bought your $2 million house for $200k a few decades ago, you're still paying taxes on it like it's $200k (plus some tiny increases that fall well below inflation). Thanks Prop 13!

Exactly, sheltered wealth for the rich! :)

That is true is some cases, but not for everyone.

yes, thanks to the prop 13 a teacher or retired couple are able to keep the house the’ve lived in for a huge part of their lives. And even with prop 13 the taxes are increasing every year (by~2% I think)

IIRC from these conversations in the past, Texas solves this problem by allowing delinquent property taxes to accrue as a lien against the property rather than seizing/evicting the owner. Seniors and those on low incomes can continue to live in their houses without paying full property taxes, but they can’t sell it or leave it to their heirs without settling up first.

This seems like a better way to address the problem without creating the havoc that prop 13 has in the CA housing market.

Tax income instead of wealth so much, then you don't need such high property taxes.

No. That's still regressive.

You have to try hard to make a regressive income tax. And, by “try hard,” I mean literally impose higher rates on lower income earners. That would never fly politically anywhere.

Isn't that what has effectively happened given the massive cost of living increases in CA? 100-150k income only affords a middle class lifestyle in many areas, yet the tax brackets did not necessarily keep up with the times. If costs of living had instead gone down, you can bet that the state would have at least tried to make adjustments in their favor if they could get away with it (likely so given the long history of tax increases).

Anyone who buys property now subsidizes (through higher property taxes) EVERYONE who bought properties in the past. Some of those previous owners might be teachers or retired couples. But many other are movie stars and tech millionaires or billionaires.

New home owners in California are subsidizing everyone else who bought property in the past. It creates a disincentive to sell as people want to be locked in to below market rates. It might help some people that we hope to help, but it also helps lots of people who should be paying their fair share that they're instead pushing off to new home buyers.

Prop 13 is essentially the old stealing from the young. It’s disgusting.

Fascinating how the attitude shifts to/away from it being good to force out old residents depending on the emotions around the topic

That's completely disingenuous, and deceptive. What does Prop 13 have to do with keeping at-risk people in their homes?

That's not what Prop 13 is about, it treats golf courses and property speculation the same as people on disability or pensions. It treats vacation homes and investment property the same way.

If it was about keeping at-risk people in their homes, there would be some mention of that. If it were about that, Prop 13's effect would be mostly to keep at-risk people in their homes. But the majority of what Prop 13 does is reward the super wealthy and jack up the incentives for speculation on real estate. Compare the tax incentives handed out to the wealthy compared to those tax incentives given to those in need, is there any chance that Prop 13 is meant for those at need?

Be honest here, does a Howard Jarvis tax bill sound like something aiming at helping those in need, or is the "help" just a cover for a scheme to hugely increase wealth inequality, and force larger tax burdens away from the wealthy to the less wealthy?

So don't give us those false accusations that wanting to fix the horribleness of Prop 13 means wanting to kick people out of their homes, those two concepts are not connected.

It's not very bad to force old residents out and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.

Right. It's hard to argue that new home buyers should subsidize people who bought properties decades ago and have made hundreds of thousands of dollars on the appreciation.

Why should taxes be disproportionally higher for new buyers and housing options more limited for everyone else? Not everyone in the world can live in California, and I'm not convinced that living there decades ago entitles you to live there forever if you can't afford the current prices. As a society we've decided to allocate scarce resources by price. If someone bought property in California decades ago and can't afford to pay their fair share of taxes on that property now, they can sell it at a huge increase in price and can afford to buy a luxury property in most other areas of the country.

like social security and medicare?

prop 13 is worse. Social security and Medicare have gotten to where we have obvious structural problems we need to resolve long term, but they at least were founded in hopes of fairness. Prop 13 was theft generational theft from day 1.

Does that loophole still exist where you can transfer the property to an LLC and then sell the LLC without triggering a tax assessment?

Yes, that loophole still exists.

Can't think of any other way we'd still have golf courses in city centers

You're drawing a disproportionately weighted link between high property values and the low taxes of past property owners, it's just not there.

This is a problem in the especially desirable pockets of California, and people don't want to give up a good thing once they've got it, especially when it's increasingly scarce due to the low rates of residential development.

You wouldn't have fixed the housing shortage by raising taxes, you'd just have accelerated the concentration of wealth displacing people who luckily got to live out their lives in a place they could no longer really afford to compete in.

It would still be exorbitantly expensive IMHO.

It would be expensive but the tax burden would be fair if based on your property value. Now it’s more based on how long you’ve owned it, which is just the people who got there first stealing from those who happened to come later. Whatever happened to equal opportunity?

And then we hear the sob story of how their own children can’t buy a house nearby and have to move far far away. Can’t have it both ways.

My theory is that this will remain the status quo in CA until the last of the baby boomers is finally eradicated. Only then can the political will to make real change be strong enough to succeed.

I hope so, but everyone I know who is under 40 and owns property also loves Prop 13.

Texas also has a law about that for retired people. But they only defer the taxes until death.

I’m not sure what about 1% being a third of 3% isn’t self-evident...

In Texas a “typical” house for about $350k would come with an annual tax bill of $10,500. And it goes up if housing gets more expensive.

Around me in SF an entry level home at $1M would have a tax bill of $10,000. But it’s locked forever.

The same bill for a property 3x more valuable... it makes an enormous difference in the monthly payment which also has a meaningful impact on the ability for prices to shoot up in the first place.

> Around me in SF an entry level home at $1M would have a tax bill of $10,000. But it’s locked forever.

Property tax in CA goes up 2% every year. So,

year 0: $10,000 year 1: $10,200 year 2: $10,404

And so on... maybe it doesn't go up as fast as you'd like (until you own a place) but it is by no means locked in.

That's less than inflation! It doesn't count as going up.

(It will peak over inflation in some years, but it's still effectively a freeze. Even a modest property appreciation like 50% will stay out of reach of an annual 2%-minus-inflation effectively forever.)