And then you what, die in the appreciated property? If you want to make money, it's already very profitable for you to sell the house for condo development but no one is doing that. Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then.

>Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then.

I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majority Southern Californian neighborhood all their life in the same homes they've always been in. Imagine ripping on them for trying to preserve their neighborhood and therefore their culture. And for what? To make it possible for more people to move in and potentially make things worse for the people already there? If it's a minority-majority neighborhood, making it possible for more whites to move in is gentrification. How do you argue for that?

I'm not saying I agree with any of this by the way, just playing devil's advocate.

Btw, the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person and not about SoCal neighborhood.

Regardless, these people are not "natives" who got SF entirely in its current state from God, it was growing up, as prosperous cities do, and neighborhoods were changing. So why should it stop its development in 1976, why are people who moved in to SF back then entitled to this? If you ask me, this is becoming uncannily feudal.

Personally, I am with you and don't believe they are entitled anything.

But essentially this basically comes down to gentrification vs preserving culture. Do we value cities as money-making assembly lines where all the workers are replaceable or do we value cities as a living thing, with the culture(s) as their bloodline that makes those cities what they are and gives them their appeal? Do I want to keep my neighborhood as it is, for my children to grow up as I did, or should I just let anyone come and change it, for better or worse?

  the letter I used as an example was definitely not from a minority person

You didn't give a single example, let alone one where you know the ethnicity of the author.

Fortune?

The problem is recognizing that appreciation without weathering the crushing taxes. Proposition 5 (portability of Jarvis Gann property tax bases) would have helped, but it was voted down.

Take a single person with $1 million in appreciation. $750K gets hit with (unindexed!) Federal capital gains, full CA income taxes with surtaxes "for the rich" (likewise unindexed), and you'd be starting over with respect to property tax basis (with a few exceptions in 9 counties).

You could eventually do a 1031, but you'd have to move somewhere in the meantime... probably out of state.