[ladberg]

Then you can just sell your house and buy another one in a less expensive area and make insane profits. The people who support prop 13 are literally lottery winners who are complaining about paying taxes on their winnings.

If you don't want to move then you can get a reverse mortgage and still profit, you just won't get to pass the house to your children. Still, you'll make way more from the property value increases than anything you would have paid in taxes and can pass those gains on to your children.

[nullc]

> Then you can just sell your house and buy another one in a less expensive area and make insane profits.

That is extremely presumptive. Your friends, family, and support infrastructure is all in the place you've been over the last 40 years.

Purchasing another home and moving to it have huge transactional costs.

It would have been completely reasonable to include plans for the reverse mortgage as part of your finical planning already: Americans often have a significant fraction of their net worth tied up in their homes. So that money may well be spoken for. It also may be just unavailable: The city's assessment of your home's value may not match with a lender's assessment.

Think of it this way, if I show up at your town council's office and offer to pay 2x the property taxes you currently pay, should I be able to bid you out of your home? If that wouldn't be ethical, why is it ethical to do it in a distributed way?

I think Prop13 is nuts, but the opposite idea of continually subjecting people's homes to volatile and unpredictable market price based taxes is also nuts.

[majormajor]

"Congrats, you have won the lottery, now you have to move somewhere way cheaper - probably because it doesn't have many of the features that drew you here in the first place!"

"All because a bunch of people with more money than you are now willing to pay a bunch of money for your neighbors' places."

I think laws and policy should exactly be focused on protecting those who have less from the impact of those who have more. Not because they're morally superior or anything, but just to try to keep things balanced because the people with the money already enjoy so many other advantages.

Moving is hugely disruptive to people's life, so the ability to plan expenses - both for property tax and in terms of rent control - has a lot of non-financial appeal as a policy. "Make people move when folks with more cash want to come in" is at best a somewhat heartless position, and at worse a major driver of homelessness.

[cheriot]

> "All because a bunch of people with more money than you are now willing to pay a bunch of money for your neighbors' places."

You're missing the part where city policy creates the housing shortage. It's the city that approves zoning for a huge number of offices and then refuses to allow more homes. The homeowners reaping these massive rewards are who vote in favor of the housing shortage.

There's easy ways to deal with the down sides of increasing property values. Delay the payment to sale or even tax the value from some number of years ago.

> Moving is hugely disruptive to people's life

The housing shortages in CA are doing this to renters and anyone else that's forced to move. Older couple that can't handle stairs, growing family, etc.

Prop 13 is a horrible way to address any of these problems.