How California Became America’s Housing Market Nightmare

Re:How California Became America’s Housing Market Nightmare by ericmay on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @09:51PM (#21469961)

The problem is that it’s a mismatch between wealth and income. Property taxes are taken from income, and if your income doesn’t increase in line with property taxes that may rise completely out of your control, you essentially may have to sell your house to pay property taxes. That doesn’t seem like a good solution to me.

I was thinking on the way home that maybe you lock property taxes in but then you have to lock your home price as well, but that probably wouldn’t work.

With respect to your last sentence, I think one of the issues is that we actually mix public policy into home prices. You can’t want a free market and also not want a free market. It seems like many home owners have chosen to not have a free market when it comes to home prices. It’s also not helpful because, like medicine, your home is a big deal. Uprooting you’re family is a big deal. Think about how a family feels if they buy a house, all of a sudden their neighborhood is “cool” and then they have to uproot their family because rich people push them out?

Not a lot of good solutions to a big problem here.

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Re:How California Became America’s Housing Market Nightmare by Gibbon1 on Thursday November 07, 2019 @05:48AM (#21472085)

There are two solutions to the property tax income mismatch issue. Which often effects old or disabled people. One I think some places do is allow people to freeze property taxes when they retire. The other is just to allow people to take a property tax lean against their property. When it's sold the state gets it's cut.

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Re:How California Became America’s Housing Market Nightmare by yonran on Thursday November 07, 2019 @04:55AM (#21471839)

> I was thinking on the way home that maybe you lock property taxes in but then you have to lock your home price as well, but that probably wouldn’t work.

I think this might be an interesting improvement on Proposition 13: you can choose to lock in your low assessed value, but then you have to sell at that assessed value or pay taxes on the difference. This would allow homeowners to opt out of the free market for property tax purposes, but without having their cake and eating it too. I believe cities or the state actually have the authority to impose price controls under the same constitutional authority that allows them to impose rent controls; see https://blog.yonathan.org/posts/2018-09-proposition-10-rent-... for details.

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