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
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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 .
