Just so you're aware, the phrase "sent to a quiet farm upstate" is a euphemism for "killed", usually applied to animals like family pets.
(Serious question - how do you justify sending retirees away from their homes, rather than simply working somewhere else?)
My impression, as a person under 60, is that the older land-owning generation largely had things much, much easier, and have been blissfully unaware of the changes society has undergone. Or else perfectly aware, but unwilling to recognize their debts to society and circumstance and pay it forward.
Those low property taxes translate directly into booming tuition, as the state funding for higher education has been systematically gutted. The higher tuitions, in turn, imply massive student debt. Simply get a summer job, rite?
As for me? I work where it makes most sense for me to work. Not-working can happen anywhere.
So for retirees, my advice is this: Sell the house, take the millions of dollars in windfall, and go to Bali or Florida or something already. I'm sorry if you have to make new friends; please consider this outcome the next time you settle for a societal structure without robust community. But in getting out, you'll reduce the demand pressure slightly, improve the depressed tax base, and have enough money for a long, long vacation.
In California they are linked, in that property tax rollback and the procedural impediments to raising other taxes at either state or local levels were part of the same initiative constitutional amendment.
What makes a particular property owner into a ‘squatter’?
Prop 13 is a blunt instrument that rewards speculators more than it protects homeowners. What would be a much better system is some sort of forbearance, that the owner does not have to pay the full property tax until the property is sold, and then the back taxes are paid from the profits.
Immortal entities like corporations should not have Prop 13 protection.
Unless you take seriously the idea that most homeowners in California are squatters and NIMBYs.
More importantly who do you think should decide what the ‘potential’ is for what you own?
It's hard for me to have much sympathy for the dream of keeping your home forever when the great majority of people I know have basically no hope of ever owning a home in the area.