[hancholo]

Ridiculous. Pay property taxes and still told what to do with YOUR property? The code also says "to prevent amassing vehicles" but this is just ONE vehicle. I'm also pretty sure that there is a much bigger and more productive way to preserve neighborhood aesthetics like you know... those tents, fecal matter and needles on the streets of San Francisco?

[dang]

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jfk13]

> Pay property taxes and still told what to do with YOUR property?

Yes, of course. There are plenty of things I'm not allowed to do on my property; that's part of living in an orderly society.

Where I live, for example: it's fine for me to build a shed in my back yard, but I'd need special permission (and probably couldn't get it) to build one in the front. And that's fine, in my opinion.

So while the SF case here does seem unreasonable, so does your apparent expectation that "your property" should mean a complete absence of rules.

[nonameiguess]

Says they needed to provide a photo from 1938 to attempt to get grandfathered in from when the law was passed, so it's quite a bit older law than whenever tents, public crapping, and drug use became widespread problems. This seems to have been passed before it was common for people to even have cars.

This sounds like something that needs to just be repealed, but nobody bothered before because nobody even knew about it until some dickhead neighbor decided to comb through all the city codes to find something they could pin on a person they don't like.

[tadfisher]

Tents, public defecation and drug use were just as much of a problem in the 30s. They called tent cities "Hoovervilles" at the time [0].

The prevalence of poverty in the 1930s was the impetus for "aesthetics" laws like these. Like today, homeowners wanted to preserve property values and living standards in their immediate surroundings.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville

[medler]

Most places don’t let you park cars on your lawn. But more to the point, why should paying property taxes make you exempt from all laws?

[radlad]

Hard to call this a lawn: https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/sf-couple-fined-1500-parking...

[medler]

In this case it’s not a lawn but is still against city code. I was responding to parent’s comment by pointing out that it is standard to prohibit parking on one’s own property in many cases

[BeetleB]

> Most places don’t let you park cars on your lawn.

Which cities don't? The only regulations I've seen about this come from HOA's, not cities.

[exabrial]

Property taxes are some of the most aggressive/regressive wars on the poor.

[josephcsible]

How so? Don't rich people usually own more property than poor people?

[dvh]

How much is $1500 for a millionaire?

[josephcsible]

But property tax isn't a flat $1500. The more valuable the property you own, the higher the tax is, and richer people tend to own more valuable property.

[lkjlkasflkwrg]

uhhh, hate to break it to you bub but a $1M home in the bay area which does not buy you much is going to cost close to $15k a year in property taxes (source: owner of said property in the bay area)

[exabrial]

precisely. $1500 is a year's worth of food for someone at the poverty line. For a bajillonaire, it's a rounding error.

[humanistbot]

No, that's sales tax.