There's resistance to change but economics are far more important and explain the consistent opposition across the state. It's not as simple as sell your house and make a profit, then find something nicer. If your neighbors sell first to the developer of the N-story apartment building it can drop the value of houses around it. Also, buying a house in California resets your property taxes to current property value (a legacy of Prop 13).

I suspect it will be hard to solving the housing problem without unwinding Prop 13 and some of the other issues that make it harder for people to sell homes.

How does Prop 13 make it hard to sell your home? It only affects the owners property taxes but not the property buyer's. At the time of purchase, there's no delta to the buyers taxes vs a property that was taxed at a full market rate assessment the whole time.

Affecting the seller's still creates a delta because the seller is also a buyer of wherever they're going to live next. Causing the new place to have much higher property tax than the existing place makes it harder to leave the existing place. And then fewer people do it, even if they e.g. don't need a place that big anymore.

That seems like a stretch, it doesn't increase the market price or the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, if anything it lets the owner save more money so they have more options to buy.

It does increase the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, because for a given level of government spending, if the government gets less tax revenue from long-term owners they have to get more from newer owners.

It also increases the minimum price the seller is willing to accept for the property, because they won't sell unless the buyer offers enough to compensate them for the higher tax rate they'll have to pay on the new property. It increases the bid/ask spread on long-held properties, so that more often no transaction takes place at all until e.g. the owner dies and the property is sold in an estate sale for less than the owner would have been willing to accept if they were still alive.

I don't think you understand property ownership in CA. This is most definitely not what happens.

Also to add to this discussion is the various props and "tax treaties" between counties that allow old homeowners the ability to transfer tax basis from their old property to the new one they're buying. But this is a once or twice in a lifetime deal.

No actually prop13 limits both the property tax percentage of market value as well as increase of the tax from year to year.

Lots of detail here: https://www.nber.org/digest/apr05/w11108.html

Not every NIMBY is motivated by greed. Some just want to stay put, pay property taxes like it's 30 years ago and drive to their favorite burger shack in under five minutes. That particular generation also holds on to the doctrine that density is bad for environment.

There's only a generational correlation because the 80 year old retiree is much more likely to own nice property with low property taxes (if you live in a state that only reassesses at sale) than the 28 year old with a young family. Young couples with money can be just as viciously NIMBY-esque as old couples with money.

If price goes up or down is complex. In an area that has a small amount of demand stopping building ensures that those who want to live there have to keep bidding higher. If those who want to live there have a lot of money only a few people who want to live there but don't can push prices up greatly. It may well be that the area only needs to build a small number of units to fill demand, and additional units will need to lower prices to get a buyer. Supply is limited of course, but so is demand - I wouldn't take a free house in the Bay Area as my job is several time zones away and so the free house is still a net cost to me (if only to replace the roof ever 30 years)

That's not universally true though. Many times new development will block a view, or it might run the risk of bringing in "undesirable" groups which would lower property values. There is definitely a long-run argument that values will go up if you increase the power of network effects...but it's always better if the locality next door does it, and not you.

Unfortunately the incentive problem here is real, and there isn't a super obvious solution to it. At least, not to me. Trying to shift the culture and convince people to vote against their own economic incentives is great and all, but I don't think it is destined for success at any significant scale.

Its pretty easy, your standard of living declines and sucks.

I grew up in a single family detached home in Queens, NY in the 80s as the shift to bigger condos and rentals started. The newer buildings are almost always shoddy and ugly, and dealing with landlords for property issues suck as compared to the homeowner.

The owner of your detached house would have been very happy though, wouldn't he? The issues you listed wouldn't affect him, but the opportunity to sell to an apartment developer would.