> giant ladder pulling mechanisms against current residents.

Wouldn’t metaphorically they’d be already on top of wherever they were climbing using ladder?

Also even with readjusted taxes they’d still be in a significantly better position because instead being “kicked to the curb” (which is nonsense) they be able to buy a house somewhere else with the significant payout they’d get after selling to those gazzilionaries.

At the end of the day in situations you’re describing you’d want more/higher density housing which prop 13 (amongst other things) directly discourages.

If real estate values in a given area increase significantly while it wouldn’t be fair from the perspective of the individual for the society as the whole it would be optimal for the inhabitants to sell their low-density homes and later rebuy apartments/etc. built on top of the same land.

> they be able to buy a house somewhere else

Yes, after being forced out by the increased taxes they can move somewhere else and buy there.

That's the debate right there. Should we as a society favor the rich newcomer and push out the long-term resident who now has to move somewhere else? Maybe they didn't want to move.

Or should we favor the long-term resident to stay even that means the rich newcomer maybe can't find a place?

Who is more important?

It is disingenuous to simply rant against Prop 13 without acknowledging that there will be winners and losers both with and without Prop 13. It's just different people who get favored.

> Yes, after being forced out by the increased taxes they can move somewhere else and buy there

I’d focus on the high vs low density part of the argument which you entirely ignored.

> rant

I’m not

>This is too simplistic, in order to criticize Prop 13 it is important to understand why it came to be.

It's that a bunch of middle class people in the post-war auto-boom bought up extremely valuable property adjacent to the ocean, and then when everyone could afford a car, they didn't want to redevelop their own land.

There's no reason that justifies Prop 13 beyond NIMBYism. America decided it wanted suburbia instead of incremental development, so it banned multifamily housing. Then California realized that doing that would (obviously) force people out of their homes when property taxes started skyrocketing... so they just voted in a fucking seniority system. It was selfish, bad policy then, and it's selfish, bad policy today.

> It's that a bunch of middle class people in the post-war auto-boom bought up extremely valuable property

No, not at all. This is what I mean about misunderstanding where it came from.

It was middle class and lower middle class people who bought up cheap property in undesirable (at the time) places. Only later the area becomes desirable and rich people move in driving the prices sky high and consequently the property taxes sky high.

Those low/middle class people who have been living there for a long time are mostly still low/middle class and can't afford those taxes. People tend to be protective of their homes so this makes a lot of people very angry and those people vote.

> There's no reason that justifies Prop 13 beyond NIMBYism.

Of course there is a reason, I just explained it above.

You may not agree it is a reason you like, perhaps you feel the free market should simply allow prices and taxes to fluctuate wherever they go. That's a valid take as well, one that produces different outcomes: worse for some, better for some.

> Those low/middle class people who have been living there for a long time are mostly still low/middle class and can't afford those taxes.

Property taxes are the one tax that anyone by definition can pay. My point, the point that you seem to be ignoring or just ignorant of, is what a low-to-middle class person who owns a $1.5M property isn’t lower or middle class. They have a net worth in the top percentiles of wealth in the US.

> In 2023, $192,084 was the median household net worth in the United States.

Don’t tell me lower class folks are being forced from their homes when the are wealthier than I am.

> Property taxes are the one tax that anyone by definition can pay.

This is clearly and obviously not true, why would you say that?

If your property tax rises to a level that your income is not enough to pay it (along with other basic necessities like food), then you can't afford to pay it. This can and does happen in areas where property taxes can rise without any limit.

> a low-to-middle class person who owns a $1.5M property isn’t lower or middle class

I'm guessing (maybe I guess wrong) that your argument is that this low-to-middle class person should just sell the property and use those proceeds to pay the property tax. Is that what you mean by "by definition can pay"?

Sure, they can pay it that way. Of course then they don't have a home anymore, they got forced to sell it! Now what do you expect them to do? Someone else upthread said they just need to go and move somewhere else (specifically, somewhere else that is cheaper).

So, we circle back to the original premise. If property taxes are allowed to grow without limitations, it forces long-term low-to-middle class residents out of their homes because they can't afford to pay the property taxes. So they must sell and uproot their life by moving somewhere else that is cheaper.

This isn't debatable, it is simple math.

What is debatable is whether this is overall a good or a bad thing. Should society favor keeping long-term residents in their homes, or should society favor the richer newcomer to take over the place? That's the argument that leads to Prop 13.

They aren’t low-to-middle class when their homes are worth millions of dollars, period.

The way they can stay in their homes is to use their equity to add revenue generating additions to their home and take on a renter.

This is how it has worked for hundreds of years until the exact same folks who passed prop 13 passed anti-density zoning legislation a few years before hand.

Pretending people are being “forced from their homes” in exchange for literally millions of dollars is and absurd framing of a huge windfall.

> Pretending people are being “forced from their homes” in exchange for literally millions of dollars is and absurd framing of a huge windfall.

There's no need to put “forced from their homes” in scare quotes, that is literally what happens when property taxes are allowed rise uncontrollably.

Not everything in the world is a financial transaction. It is wrong to look at homes as a share of investment to be sold to the highest bidder. The people who bought homes very cheap who are now worth a lot are necessarily very old (because it takes a long time). These people may have been poor when they bought it because it was a cheap house in an undesirable area back then. They may have had low-income jobs all their lives so they are still poor in terms of income.

It is not by any stretch a windfall for people in their 80s/90s to be forced to sell the home of a lifetime and have to move to some faraway cheap city.

Arguments against Prop 13 are in the end about classism. The idea is that as soon as an area becomes wealthy, poor people need to be removed (through rising property taxes) and sent off to live in some cheap area, so that more rich people can take their place. This does not sound fair. Rich people already have all the benefits, so Prop 13 provides a small counterbalance by allowing lower income people to stay in their lifelong homes even as the area gentrifies.

Look, we are obviously on opposite sides of this intellectual argument, so I don't have any intention of changing your mind, I just want to articulate my thoughts, because, to me, this is genuinely about providing the best world for the greatest number. I can assure it does not come from classism, frankly the opposite.

>Not everything in the world is a financial transaction. It is wrong to look at homes as a share of investment to be sold to the highest bidder.

I can't disagree with you more. Whether we like it or not, value will effect the greater populace. I'm fine with some delay to taxable on value, because these thing really do have value, but effectively eliminating it has terrible repercussions.

>and have to move to some faraway cheap city.

This is literally only something that exists in California because of Prop 13. People in other states just move to a cheaper neighborhood or downsize. The reason is because property taxes really force a balance between value and utilized property.

>Arguments against Prop 13 are in the end about classism.

Arguments against Prop 13 are about sustainability. If cities were in amber and never grew, then it wouldn't be a problem. Currently the children of the folks that passed this law have nowhere to live in their parents' cities... the reason why is because they've built cities where nobody is forced to increase density, because there is no sensible property taxes.

>The idea is that as soon as an area becomes wealthy, poor people need to be removed (through rising property taxes) and sent off to live in some cheap area, so that more rich people can take their place.

Again, for the last time... the people "sent off" have become literal millionaires in some of the highest percentiles of net worth in the nation.

>Rich people already have all the benefits, so Prop 13 provides a small counterbalance

Prop 13 is literally designed to help rich people... not poor people.

Indeed, I'm not changing your mind and won't try. Whether the effects are good or bad are a matter of opinion and debatable.

The basic math of who pays or doesn't pay or can't pay is just numbers though, I'm confused why that can be seen as debatable. They are what they are. If a low-income person can't pay their property taxes because the cash flow does not exist for them, they're out of their house. You think that's good, I think that's cruel. But either way, it is a fact.

> Again, for the last time... the people "sent off" have become literal millionaires in some of the highest percentiles of net worth in the nation.

It does not matter. Uprooting old people from their lifelong homes and sending them off to some other cheap city is very traumatic. There is research on the mental health problems caused by having to move in old age. Let alone having to move forcibly due to taxes.

Note that it is only old people who would get hurt, since it takes many decades of growth under same ownership for the Prop 13 valuation to become significantly different from market valuation, so any people in that circumstance are going to be pretty old.

> Prop 13 is literally designed to help rich people... not poor people.

This is again factually false. If Prop 13 were to disappear overnight, rich people whould whine but they can absorb the increase and keep living in their house so they'll be fine.

It's only the poor people who would get displaced. This is basic math (if taxes > income --> displaced) so it's not debatable.

> If Prop 13 were to disappear overnight, rich people whould whine but they can absorb the increase and keep living in their house so they'll be fine.

I disagree with you on many points, but this one the most. I don’t think you realize how much wealth is hoarded in CA via property, especially property tied up in corporations.

Los Angeles Country Club, for example, sits on some of the most valuable real estate in the world. They pay a pittance every year in taxes mostly because of prop 13. It would likely be infeasible to exist without its tax breaks.

I would be fine with prop 13 if it only applied to retirees. It doesn’t. It mostly effects commercial properties and inherited properties. The reason someone would have to move to another town (which pretty much would happen anywhere else in the country) is that the only way you can be priced out of an entire region is if you completely detach value from the tax rate for decades. In an area with normal property taxes, you’d really only have to move to a different neighborhood.

Los Angeles Country Club is not a rich person living in their home though. It's not a person and the property is not a home.

Sounds like we agree that Prop 13 must not apply to corporations. That never made any sense and should not be. The idea of Prop 13 is to protect poor people from being pushed out of their lifelong home by taxes. It's insane to allow corporations to benefit from Prop 13.

> I would be fine with prop 13 if it only applied to retirees.

In the realm of actual humans (not corporations), in practice the main beneficiary is only retirees. Sure, applies to everyone, but it takes a very very long time for the tax delta to become meaningful.

I've owned my home for ~25 years and the delta between property taxes under prop 13 and if I bought the property today is less than 2K so basically nothing so I don't much care.

But give it 30 more years of growth and I suspect the delta will be substantial and by then I'll be scraping along trying to survive on a fixed social security income, so the delta will, I suspect, be absolutely key in being able to stay home instead of trying to scramble at that age to find some cheap property in some faraway place I've never been to.