[IG_Semmelweiss]

Prop 13 was a direct result of a California court decision.

I forget the 1960s case, but the gist of it was it instituted equalization in school budgets out from property taxes in the name of equity.

In other words, high property taxes in 1 town were forced to be transfered to the neighboring town with a lower budget, so much so that the transfer had to be make payments by pupil within a $100 band.

That was instituted blind to school performance of course.

This actually took hold in many states not just California, however CA was the o ly one that forced transfer payments within a $100 band. There are different flavors of this all accross the country

Of course, homeowners are not idiots. They dont want their tax dollars wasted. So soon after this case forced these transfer payments, there was a swell of home owners pushing for prop 13.

Makes sense. Local taxes to local benefit. If my taxes are going elsewhere, why should i pay more?

And so here we are. Almost 50 years later. Prop 13 is here to stay and is the only restraint that communities have against out of control state spending.

[seanp2k2]

Prop 13 also has the great benefit of keeping anyone new out of the neighborhood, as they’ll be paying potentially an order of magnitude higher tax on the same property. Meanwhile, folks living on the edge of poverty already can stay in their 7-figure homes, unable to afford anything locally as everything else has moved on price-wise, so we get underfunded schools surrounded by de-facto millionaires. Businesses benefit even more, just look up what Disney’s Prop13 benefits are like. This is a great idea too, as it ensures that land owners who have owned in a place for decades are untouchable in terms of investment performance due to the massive tax benefit, so they can charge market-rate rent while paying a small fraction of the tax that anyone else trying to do the same today would. /s

[rcpt]

Worth noting is that this whole scam is arguably illegal under the Fair Housing Act.

Prop 13 rewards long time landowning families. Who's that? White people. Even if the law wasn't explicitly racist originally it's impact has been. And only impact matters in the law.

Here's a link to a good paper on it

https://twitter.com/jarosenthal/status/1328136286159261698

If the current court weren't a joke I think this would be worth pursuing.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

2/3 of California voted for prop13.

Focusing on the beneficiaries misses the whole issue. No one voting for the law at the time was looking To benefit "whit people". The court case Serrano v priest, which eventually led to prop13 getting momentum... That Serrano case simply enforced a law that , as usual, with good intentions, created unintended winners and losers. Its just this time the incentives ended up going the wrong way towards prop13.

People that passed the law, 2/3 of Californians, simply wanted to control how their money was spent. They wanted to do away with the Serrano vs priest decision.

Serrano vs Priest decision broke the link between housing taxes and local government. That court case was directly related to a law passed by the same proponents of aboliahing prop13 now.

In other words, it is the same people that created the perverse incentives of prop13 who now want to get rid of it

Why should they be trusted?

[rcpt]

Mob rule doesn't make for good laws. Especially in California, example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_...

Prop 13 is arguably illegal under federal law. Of course with the current court I wouldn't want to press it. After all Clarence Thomas loves Prop 13 so much that he refused to sign the majority opinion in Nordlinger v Hahn because it didn't go far enough in empowering landowners.

> No one voting for the law at the time was looking To benefit "whit people".

Again, the Fair Housing Act cares about "disparate impact". Intention is irrelevant.

(Though given that the 70s was the era of school bussing battles it's a bit of a stretch to say that people weren't thinking about race wrt Serrano and school funding)

[IG_Semmelweiss]

But let me play devils advocate here.

50%+ of california decided for this. Have you pondered why? First, are we really talking a massive tax benefit? Prop 13 is about tax increases to be limited ? Is that insane? Or is it maybe housing prices that are insane? Something does not add up.

I dont control the price of my home. Why should I pay ever incessant amounts over something I dont control and is effectively, paper gains?

But, I'll tell you what does control prices. Whose fault it is that there is no property being built in all the farmland along 280 between SF and Palo alto or Menlo Park.. Sure it looks nice, but its 40% of available land. Just farms.

Worse...some of farming is almonds... which take so much (subsidized) water. Again, why?

Why are there no municipalities created in those areas? Why is there no competition in the bay area's overpriced land ? Look into who controls the creation of new municipalities. Thats where a key problem for CA.

[rcpt]

65% of California voted to overturn the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, thereby allowing property sellers, landlords and their agents to openly discriminate on ethnic grounds when selling or letting accommodations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_14...

The supreme court had to overturn the law.

Direct democracy is an objectively horrible way to govern. The US realized this hundreds of years ago and The Federalist Papers explicitly called out the "problem of faction" which is why we have a representative democracy instead of US citizens voting on federal law directly.

Children, immigrants, future transplants and prisoners can't vote. Should we be okay to grind them into dirt if it'll enrich voting demographics?

[IG_Semmelweiss]

Yet switzerland has the oldest continuing government in the world.

Meanwhile, we had at least 1 close brush with failure (civil war). And counting.

You need to take care of factions and you need big, heated arguments at the local level. So they dont end up scaled up at the federal level.

Otherwise those scaled up "solutions" ends up massive problems, such as the sudden reversal of abortion, foreign interventions, and housing/ credit meltdowns due to federal subsidies of mortgage insurance.

[tzs]

> Prop 13 also has the great benefit of keeping anyone new out of the neighborhood, as they’ll be paying potentially an order of magnitude higher tax on the same property.

Prop 13 is around 45 years old, which is much longer than the median homeowner tenure in California. That suggests that new people are moving into neighborhoods.

[birdyrooster]

They mortgage their houses for huge sums and then buy cheaper homes elsewhere and then fill it with multifamily amounts of people who trash the area (bc it wasn’t engineered for this many people) all while blocking it’s redevelopment. This is why San Francisco is a disgusting mess.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

San Francisco is a disgusting mess because of govt policies that directly incentiviE and subsizide fentanyl outdoor homelessness, and act such programs are magnet for others in the same situation .

Renters are not taking dumps in the street.

Homeless people are

[thatfrenchguy]

> And so here we are. Almost 50 years later. Prop 13 is here to stay and is the only restraint that communities have against out of control state spending

Nope, prop 13 (and the resulting income taxes) is somewhere between feudalism and class warfare, transferring money from the young who work to old people who pay nothing and spend their days at city hall making sure nothing ever gets better.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

If you owned your home and someone made it easy for you to rent at high price, wouldn't you do the same?

Im a renter, not a homeowner.

But I didn't choose to move to SF as a settler when it was a polluted mess of a city with days you couldnt go out, and high crime.

I wanted to move to opportunity.. When incomes are high and the city was better (it is not anymore)

Id like for prices to go down but I dont blame those that benefitted from just being there. Instead I look at the enablers, there is plenty of blame to go around, and the homeowner is last in that list. Prices are not High due to just prop13.

Miami, NY, Boise, Nashville and a bunch of other cities have housing prices that are going for the moon relative to what its been. They have no prop 13

40% of land on 280, between SF and Palo Alto is undeveloped farmland.

Cows dont pay property taxes

[than3]

There's a difference, as an individual you wouldn't own a large percentage of the local real estate, just a small part.

Investors who buy up 40% of the market, blacklist tenants, and price fix to set a price floor or remove supply by taking rentals off the market. Those are the main issues.

The state governments need to re-implement taxes such that deductions and write-offs do not apply beyond a certain number of properties that are not owner occupied.

As for prices, Prices are high because the banking sector has not been held to account for their unlawful actions, and politician's can't balance their budget.

They have used that to enrich themselves through various frauds, and kickback schemes. The land on 280 has little to no natural water, that's largely why its undeveloped, and job centers are scarce.

Property taxes don't work because you inevitably price locals out of homes and setting a maximum on the tax simply ensures local government increases to that max every year. Long term residents are left in the lurch.

I have parents who have a home up there and their property tax has increased 2% of the value every year for at least the last 10 years. They are paying almost a full salary ($40,000) to keep the home. That's just in property taxes each year and that is just for a single modest home with both having to continue working just to get by.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

there is no reason why prop 13 should benefit corporate entities.

CA should amend the law to only apply to owners with a SSN and then thibgs make more sense

[klipklop]

That land you describe has “semi-hidden” enclaves of some of the richest households in the entire country. There is a reason why it’s underdeveloped.

They don’t want you living near them.

[istjohn]

It's truly incredible the mountains that are moved in politics to ensure poor families attend inferior public schools since Brown v. Board.

[HideousKojima]

Not sure what you mean by "inferior," funding levels have little if anything to do with school quality once basic needs are met:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

[rcpt]

Serrano v Priest

This is the paper https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/NTJ4178881...

[IG_Semmelweiss]

Found it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest

[treeman79]

There was also the whole issue of older people being forced out of their homes due to the rising property taxes. Turns out they vote in high numbers.

[seanp2k2]

It’s hard to have a ton of sympathy for people paying very little tax on their 7-figure property. Sell it and move anywhere else…but the real pro move is to just rent it out and live somewhere else. We have neighbors in our Silicon Valley suburb who live in RVs in their driveway so they can rent the entire house and still “live” there. Great retirement plan / grift that will never be available to younger generations.

[rcpt]

Lies.

Since 1977 (before Prop 13) we've had the California Tax Postponement Program. Low income seniors, the disabled and the blind can defer taxes indefinitely. They have zero pressure from the state to move.

[seanp2k2]

Also, the biggest winners from prop 13 are businesses like Disney: https://www.curbed.com/2020/10/prop-15-california-property-t...

Meanwhile, anyone who didn’t buy a house or property for a business 20+ years ago is priced out of the market, so we have tons of low-quality stores and businesses that are insulated from competition. It’s interesting how many free market advocates will throw their values out the window when it benefits them to do so.

[rcpt]

Right. And consumers get none of this benefit. When was the last time you scored cheap gas because of station's property tax?