Every person I know who's left California did it because of housing costs (except for one, who did it to get away from "the damn liberal government that wants to take my guns").
We have a major housing cost crisis in this state, as well as a big NIMBY problem. There have been good solutions run up through the state house, that either fail to pass or get so watered down they are no longer effective, in large part because the most liberal parts of the state happen the also be the wealthiest, so they vote against it.
It's one of the few areas in California where the GOP and the Dems agree.
They only want to help poor people if it doesn't affect their property value.
I was one of those who moved from the SFBay to Texas. Knowing that for what i'd need to save up for a down payment for a home in the bay is enough to buy a house in Texas cash was an extremely strong motivating factor.
I moved to Texas, because it actually has weather.
I hated the way SoCal was always sunny, always the same weather, mostly the same temperature, and no interesting weather events. I hated how whenever it rained it made the evening news. I found that days blended into each other, weeks, blended into each other... the monotonousness made me bizarrely depressed.
There is a saying that the weather in California is either magnificent, or unusual.
In LA, summer really kicks in end of June and sticks around well into October, with plenty of interesting weather patterns throughout like marine layer events by the coast that just burn off over the course of the day. Then there are six months of perfect fall weather—no hotter than 70 no cooler than 50—rain about once per week, and atmospheric river events keep things interesting. The local mountains snowcap.
Very soon we will be entering the rainy season, if not already, and the hills will turn into emeralds.
I felt the same way about the weather in SoCal. Lived there for 6 years. When I look back and imagine the weather: I walk out of my apartment at 9am and bam, the sun is beaming down on me. Walk out of the office for lunch, same thing. Every single day. Every season. Same thing. So predictable. The monotonousness was indeed depressing.
I missed weather and seasons. I eventually moved to the Pacific Northwest.
> I felt the same way about the weather in SoCal. Lived there for 6 years. ... the sun is beaming down on me. Walk out of the office for lunch, same thing. Every single day.
I moved from NYC to SoCal for 3 years. There's nothing worse than going out drinking until 4AM, waking up with a horrible hangover, and then looking outside to see a beautiful cloudless 70 degree day. I moved back to NYC and now my hangovers are greeted with freezing rain, sloppy sleet, and sub-zero temperatures. Down the Tylenol, order some Chinese food, and sit in bed: the world is at peace.
My dash melted when I spent a summer in Austin. I would spend a million on a house if I had to just to experience good weather year round, though Austin really isn’t that bad off summer.
NY has not been putting up housing at an insane rate. Housing in NY is actually being constructed at one of the lowest rates in the last century. Adjusted for business cycles (we're in a peak now), NY is building less housing than they have build in ~100 years, and Manhattan is at its lowest density since the 1890s. The current period is only a "boom" relative to 2009-2012 when basically no new housing was constructed.
Commercial real estate has gone up a lot as well and has led to a ton of vacant retail space. My father had a carpentry shop in bushwick and just had his land lord triple their rent.
They have seen a "boom" relative to 2009-2012 when literally zero new housing was built, they have not seen a boom relative to 1900 - 2009, especially when accounting for business cycle. I understand that you are seeing what you perceive to be a lot of housing construction, but relative to historical trends and population/household size trends, there is very little housing construction happening in NYC.
The "boom" is relative to all of 2000s. Look at the number of permits in 2015 [1], especially in the outer boroughs.
My argument, as someone who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, is that building new housing doesn't really drive the prices down. I have a lot of friends who had to move or shut down their small businesses because of the rising costs.
"building new housing doesn't really drive the prices down" there is a lot of empirical evidence against this claim, and almost no evidence for it. Rising costs in cities are due to a few factors: (1) lack of new housing, (2) changing economic conditions in which high paying jobs are moving from the suburbs to the cities (to be fair, there is a small factor in very few cities of super rich people buying housing and not living in it, but that is largely confined to Manhattan, London, and suburban Vancouver, but is not broadly an issue in housing affordability) From after WWII through the 80s, American cities were largely in this strange largely racism induced recession (white flight to the suburbs) which caused a historical aberration of cheap housing and commercial space in cities. That trend was a very short counter trend blip in the 5000 year history of real estate in cities. The way forward is to build a lot more housing in cities, as its eminently clear that lots of people want to live in them, that living in cities is better for the environment than the alternative, and that our economy would be doing much better if the desired urbanization was actually allowed.
I love cities, think they are great, and live in the Bay Area myself. I don't know how old you are, but much of the flight to suburbs was due to the building of freeways and the fear of nuclear attack on cities. Younger people did not grow up with bomb shelters and duck and cover drills at schools, so living in a big city is not something they fear. If we have a nuke or two blow up a few cities today, there might be flight out of the cities once again. I sure hope that doesn't happen.
White people didn't leave cities because of the threat of nuclear attacks, they left because there was an incredible amount of racial unrest, violence, and rioting. There is a lot of research on the issue [0].
Climate change is a much larger threat to anyone under 30 than nuclear annihilation is, and the balance of evidence we have says that urban lifestyles (car free/car light, living in a multi family home) has a smaller carbon footprint than traditional suburban living.
How would you possibly be able to estimate the probability of nuclear annihilation? There are 13,000 nuclear warheads ready to launch on a minutes notice.
I agree with you that on aggregate across most cities all of this holds, but it's not alway the case for top cities like SF and NYC, where the true demand is way higher than potential supply.
I'm not a NIMBY type and am not complaining about gentrification but am speaking to the fact that building new housing in Williamsburg and LIC helped double average housing prices in the surrounding areas [1]. I used to hang out in williamsburg in the late 90s and early 2000s, when it was an industrial area and bushwick when it was a complete dump. All of the yuppies who live here now would have never stepped a foot in brooklyn/queens if these areas weren't rezoned. I live in Greenpoint now and pay over 3x more than my grandmother used to pay for a similar apartment 2 blocks away from the early 90s till late 2000s.
We should definitely build more housing, but we also need to admit that rising income inequality is the real problem here. A large portion of our country has not seen their wages grow and are a medical emergency away from living on the streets. SV is home to worlds most valuable companies, it might be time for them to start paying their taxes so we can provide a safety net for people who need it like every other developed nation.
It doesn't help when there are insane regulations like dedicating double digit percentage of new units to be "affordable"/subsidized/section 8. Anyone with a full time minimum wage job would not qualify for "affordable" housing, you literally have to not work at all, it's such a scam.
Don't get me started on this. I helped an friend get into below market rate (BMR) housing in SF. She paid approximately $330k with almost no money down for a 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo in the center of Hayes Valley. Today, equivalent market rate units in her building sell for $1.5k to $2m.
Basically, there is a supply of homes that are available to you at three points: 70%, 90% and 110% of the median income. How these three points are chosen I don't know. Very few are at 110% of median income. Most are available to those that make 70% or 90% of the median income.
The reason this is bullshit is because it's estimated that you need to earn about 400% of the median income to be able to afford a market-rate home in SF. This pretty much leaves everyone between 110% and 400% of the median income without any real options.
Worse yet, by making a policy that covers the just above the center of the income distribution to the bottom, you basically disincentivize those voters from becoming active and involved in supporting solutions that help the entire distribution. Basically those between 110% and 400% end up a permanent minority unable to achieve support for policies that will help their cohort.
Needless to say, I don't live in California anymore, despite earning almost 3x what she earns because I can't really afford to buy into the market. California is fundamentally broken.
> She paid approximately $330k with almost no money down for a 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo in the center of Hayes Valley. Today, equivalent market rate units in her building sell for $1.5k to $2m.
How does that work if/when she wants to sell the place? Is there some sort of cap on what she can sell it for?
She can only sell it for the purchase price adjusted for changes in the median income. If the median income in the city goes up (which it does over time because lower income renters are eventually forced out of the city), then she can sell it for more. It obviously won't increase as fast as market rates, but it will go for more than she purchased it. The house needs to be sold back through the BMR program. It can only be willed if her heir(s) also qualify for the BMR program at the time of death.
At the end of the day, she gets the benefit of not having to tie up cash in home equity. While other people are paying $6000 or more a month in a lease, she's paying a little over $2000 a month in a lease and gets to put all the excess she has into more liquid assets like an index fund.
There are several ways to handle this, but a common one is to have a deed restriction that sets a maximum resale price and requires the buyer to meet income eligibility criteria.
The entire idea is preposterous. The solution to affordable housing is oversupply of housing. Gov should incentivize new construction to reduce prices and let the market fix it.
Strong disagree, the solution to affordable housing includes a very large amount of private/free market housing, but the free market won't really address the needs of people below 30% of the median income. Additionally, good affordable housing is one of the best anti poverty tools that we have. IMO the long term solution is robust private market housing construction for the middle class, and a robust public housing construction system for those who truly need it.
Anyone using Japan as an example of housing prices does not understand Japanese housing.
Zoning in Japan is done at a national level, not local. Once an area is designated for housing, housing goes there. Because of this there is a constant flow of new housing, which drives the price of old houses down.
This is not possible anywhere zoning is done at a local level. Anytime one person has the ability to stop another from building you immediately create NIMBYdom and where the NIMBY exists, more housing does not because the NIMBY cares about nothing but their own property value. But that also feeds into the insane American idea of housing as an investment rather than a place to keep birds from crapping on you.
Until the NIMBY is eliminated, and housing is no longer sold as an investment, housing costs will not go down.
> the free market won't really address the needs of people below 30% of the median income.
Why? Do you think a poor person's vote is worth more to the government than their wallet would be to a house builder?
Is it impossible to make an acceptable house at 30% the cost of a median earner's house?
Your reasoning is valid for people whose productivity approaches zero, in which case welfare can indeed be needed. But the current housing problem is systematic and touches a far bigger percent of the population, and thus shouldn't be solved with charity.
Imagine you are a property developer. You borrow money to buy land and want to build as many housing units on that land as you are allowed to and sell them for as much as you can. Buying granite counter tops in bulk and selling the housing units as luxury is going to make you a lot more than trying to cater to the bottom of the market, so nobody does, unless forced.
Do it enough times and there will be an oversupply of such housing, pushing price down to the cost of land + construction. With no profit margin at that price developers will target higher and lower price points. The solution is always just more construction.
The problem is that in most areas the government is primarily voted in by existing landowners, who don't want more housing, and don't care if lower-income renters are being forced out.
The non-landowners are either not abundant enough, or only plan to live here for a short enough period of time that they don't bother to get involved in local politics.
While this is the whole "NIMBY" thing... is that really a problem? No one complains that Americans can't vote in Britains elections, to set their laws. The whole point of voting is that the people who actively live there get to decide what happens to their city.
Yes, that's a problem. Nobody that bought a home on the vague notion that they HAVE to make money off of it when they sell it will ever vote to have a homeless shelter built across the road.
I think the cause and effect is intertwined. Many of the people who now plan to only stay for a few years have that attitude because they feel disenfranchised and locked out of the planning process, while at the same time being priced out of the ability to put down roots.
Here in New York, at least, the eligibility for those units is based on the median income in the neighborhood where the building is. In some cases these affordable units end up with requirements that are pretty substantial, e.g. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/housi...
I don't see anything in your link about NYC putting up housing at an insane rate, and my understanding had been that NYC housing growth was at historically low levels?
The rezoning and redevelopment of the queens and brooklyn waterfronts brought a ton of new high rise condos with it. I live in northern brooklyn and there's a new condo building being built on almost every block. At the same time there's more vacant storefronts than I've ever seen and the only businesses getting by are coffee shops, hair salons and trendy modern american restaurants that charge $18 for burgers and fries.
Your article talks about 16k condos over 6y, which is ~3k/y. That's not zero, but that's really not very much housing compared to the ~8M population of NYC. I know this isn't the total of New York housing construction, but it's so little you wouldn't expect it to help much.
For example, during the 1920s NYC was building housing at about 7%/y! Housing was much cheaper then, and through the period of low demand, but when demand picked up again we didn't let people resume building at anywhere near historical rates.
The storefronts are only there because of significant state tax credits for including them.
Like all things real estate, there’s some other tax angle where the owners make more money demanding commercial rents above what the market can afford than actually renting it. They probably securitize the losses somehow.
Is it housing cost or housing risk? Is one thing to put a million dollars into a home and sell it for $1.4m five years later. It’s another thing to owe s million on a place that’s now worth $400k.
Unless you live in the most fashionable areas of Manhattan, the rents are tolerable. If you live outside the most fashionable parts of Brooklyn, Queens, LIC, the rents are quite okay, provided that you work for a decent wage.
If you choose to live close enough to a train station, almost everything of interest is within 20-40 mins by train. Subway is not exactly great, but it's safe and works around the clock in most places. (To say nothing of the fact that in most places the daily necessities are within walking distance, even in not-so-dense Brooklyn.)
Swaths of Brooklyn and Queens. The thing with NYC compared to the Bay is that their public transit makes living in the relative sprawl much more reasonable than Bay commute traffic
- Cost of living
- Housing
- I am self employed (no state taxes)
- Attitude, entitlement, hypocrisy
- Petty crime rampant (drug use, break ins, theft, defecation)
- Extreme political climate in SF/CA
I moved from SFBA (tried Mountain View, and SF in SOMA and Inner Richmond) because IMO it's not such a great place in every respect except tech jobs and maybe (compared to some places, to various degrees) weather.
The only way prices figure into the equation is the quality. It's not that I couldn't afford a house in Mountain View, it's that, jobs and prices aside, I'd need to be convinced to move to Mountain View from, say, San Antonio. And I wouldn't move there, or to SF, from Seattle or Denver if the prices were the same - based strictly on the quality of life the way I see it... On top of that, of course, the prices are not the same.
I'll chime in and say that I just moved from California to Washington in September of last year. While its not a huge change, its enough to make a difference.
Factors on why I did it:
- Housing costs #1. I got into a rent controlled 2 bedroom 1100 sqft duplex unit. It was ok, but the landlord sucked and the place was very unmaintained, and i was paying $2800 a month. No yard, no garage, tons of homeless around digging through my trash in the outskirts of Berkeley near trains and noise
- For the same price, I now live in a 2200 sq ft home with a yard, garages, in a nice area called Sammamish. In an area with lots trees, quiet, and a bit of occasional wildlife.
- Political climate was getting intense. Things were being taken to extremes, and I was honestly afraid for my safety if I accidentally interacted incorrectly with the wrong parties. Being in Berkeley didn't help, but it was most of the bay area.
- Washington is fairly liberal, but its balanced, and not extremist.
- Cost of Living in california is off the charts at this point. Between insurances, food, services, etc. things were going up and up.
- Washington has no State tax [Edit: I meant state income ta], while my pay was adjusted accordingly (i moved internally within my company as they have washington offices). I actually have more money at the end of the month. Quite a bit more. I paid down tons of debt just in the few months Ive been here. My grocery bill went down by 25%, my insurances were cut in half, Utilities are cheaper. I feel i have so much more breathing room. I have money to save, I am not living paycheck to paycheck anymore.
And to give context. I am a well paid senior software developer. I made and still make GOOD money. But my dollar goes sooooo much further up here, I am actually getting benefit from that good salary, instead of wondering where its all disappearing too and my debts not going down.
And I actually love everything else up here. I love the weather, I like rain, and the bit of snow we got just recently made me so happy. I see wildlife in my yard (deer and bobcats, and owls). Life is calmer, drivers are calmer. People actually seem like they care about their communities. My neighbors came out and said hi when we moved in and were friendly and welcoming. I didn't even know my neighbors in California.
And traffic, people are unhappy about traffic up here, and it can get almost as bad as California, but taking 30 mins to get 17 miles for work during rush hour, compared to 1-1.5hrs to go 10 miles across the bay bridge for work is vastly better.
California seems to be just unlivable if I want to work there. While I am lucky to be in a company that has good remote work culture, and so on now, most tech companies require you to live near the city the offices are in. And that affects things.
I am lucky I found a path out, and it still burned a lot of savings and bonuses to pay for the move. Even escaping was expensive.
Surely you mean income tax. Oregon is the state that lacks sales tax and makes up for it with an income tax.
Also, I'm not sure why your grocery bill would go down compared to California. Moving from LA to Bellevue, I noticed groceries cost more up here. Both states don't apply sales tax to groceries, at least.
It also costs a bit more to eat out here vs. LA, at least at the low end. Probably prices are cheaper in LA than the Bay Area, however.
Eating out compared to the bay area is cheaper, but not by a lot, i say about $10-15 for similar quality food and service. For a similar place in California that I pay $75 plus tip and tax and all that, i pay about $65 here in washington. Not cheap, but cheaper bit a little.
Groceries were very expensive for me, and I tried to shop smart with Trader Joe's and Luckys (cheaper than Safeway/Sprouts/Whole foods). I would go to others for small things, but majority shopping there.
Here I live near a Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Safeway, and a local chain call Metropolitan Market, which is like Whole foods 1000x better, but also very expensie.
My grocery budget is the same, but i spend less. For a $150 in groceries in California, I am paying about $110ish for the same things.
So maybe its a Bay Area thing, but I am just paying less somehow.
I think LA in general is cheaper than the Bay Area, so we aren't comparing apples to apples here. The nice thing about LA is that fresh produce is much easier to come by, there is more diversity in vegetables and the quality is higher. Seattle and the East side are just so so in this department.
Likewise, I was living in Westwood LA (near UCLA), food for students is priced cheaper (and also has a bit more diversity). If I could live in the U District with a kid, I would totally go for that since eating out would be much cheaper.
Food is cheap all over LA. You can get a proper meal for like $12 or less in every neighborhood but maybe pasadena. Certain grocery stores are cheap and some are suprisingly expensive. All the international grocery stores are cheap, but even trader joes is cheaper than vons for my typical grocery run (~$50/wk), surprisingly.
> Political climate was getting intense. Things were being taken to extremes, and I was honestly afraid for my safety if I accidentally interacted incorrectly with the wrong parties.
Can you explain this point a bit more? Are you talking about political tensions, e.g. Antifa beating you up if you dared wear a MAGA hat, or am I misunderstanding you.
This sort of political flamebait is unwelcome on HN, so please don't post it here. Also, personal attacks are a bannable offence, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
> There have been good solutions run up through the state house
What are the best solutions you've seen?
> They only want to help poor people if it doesn't affect their property value.
I'm sure there are some unsavory high net worth individuals who are happy to support policies keeping housing expensive just to keep assets inflated even if it means access to housing is harder for everyone.
But I'd guess for a lot of people it's more practical: when most of your net worth has become accidentally tied up in your home, some changes may mean you risk becoming one of the poor or homeless. Or visceral: you perceive risk, even though it isn't there (some folks fear a neighborhood light rail stop only to find their property values jump). Or just seeing your community change can be uncomfortable
And while I don't know if the solutions you're thinking of are of the "bring more supply online" kind... there's something weird with the issues in California if the story of net outflow is true. The fact that rents can jump over 60% in a decade while the demand pool is stable or shrinking means that this isn't an ordinary supply problem. Either the existing supply is being manipulated in some way, or some portions of the demand pool can offer a lot more than others pricing the rest out of the market. Solutions that are entirely focused on MOAR SUPPLY may be just as likely allow present dynamics to happen at a somewhat larger scale as they are to fix a macro problem.
The article says that California still saw a net inflow due to births and incoming foreign migrants.
> Either the existing supply is being manipulated in some way,
It is, via rent control, which has shown time and again to only help people who already have housing at the expense of those who don't already have it when it's enacted. It also helps wealthy people more than poor people by constraining rent raises even though they could afford market rates.
It is also manipulated by prop 13, which allows people to rent out properties they've owned for a long time at a profit when similar properties can not be. The natural market rate of rent is all inclusive of current costs including tax. But if your tax rate is artificially low, then that difference is increased profit for you, which encourages people not to sell their properties.
For example, I'd had my home for 10 years, and if I were to rent it out, my profit would be about $1,200 a month at current market rates. My property tax is artificially low by about $1,100 a month. So my entire profit would come from Prop 13. Why would I sell my house if I can rent it for profit only because of the lower tax rate?
> or some portions of the demand pool can offer a lot more than others pricing the rest out of the market.
Yes, there is a lot of foreign investment in California real estate which just sits empty. I get ads from agents that "specialize in finding Chinese buyers" which is code for "people who will pay more than asking and not care what condition the house is in".
> Yes, there is a lot of foreign investment in California real estate which just sits empty. I get ads from agents that "specialize in finding Chinese buyers" which is code for "people who will pay more than asking and not care what condition the house is in".
Well not exactly. A lot of it is that China only allows their citizens to hold so much private wealth, so the wealthy find ways to get their money out and hold it elsewhere.
California real estate (and western real estate in general) is a good place to hold it because of our stable economy, solid legal system, and you get something tangible (the land and building).
So as a rich Chinese person, you invest in western real property as a vehicle to make it appear that you don’t control money that you are not entitled to by law, or move it out the reach of the banking or taxing authority.
That is not money laundering. If you want money laundering go have a look at what goes on with Trump properties. Real estate changing hands with massive variances in value, well out of step with market influence.
The entire concept of money laundering requires the money be illegally obtained. Simply moving money that you legally acquired around is not money laundering. Stop using words you do not know the meaning of.
Did the laws have protections for the current home owners?
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that people would want to protect themselves if they don't have any assurances that developers won't just build ugly tower blocks.
On the other hand, if people are opposing development that involves real architects developing aesthetically pleasing designs that respect the existing community, then it seems reasonable to me to criticize NIMBYism.
> It seems perfectly reasonable to me that people would want to protect themselves if they don't have any assurances that developers won't just build ugly tower blocks.
If developers want to build ugly tower blocks, and people would actually buy those blocks, why stop them? Just because I bought my house ten years ago doesn't give me the right to stop someone from building something "ugly". At least, it shouldn't.
It's important to remember that just because the law says, "you can now build a thing", that doesn't mean the thing will get built. First, the current property owner has to sell, and sell at a price that it makes sense to build the ugly thing. Then a developer has to want to take the risk of building the thing.
It turns out, making it legal to build things doesn't really mean they spring up instantly. It's a slow process that takes decades to play out.
In the 70s, a section of San Francisco that was zone single family only was rezoned to dual/triple/quads-allowed. Since the 70s, only a few of the single family have been torn down and replaced with quads.
What gets built next to someone's home can affect their quality of life (e.g. due to noise, pollution, increased traffic, blocking sunlight, blocking views, etc.). So I don't see why they shouldn't have a say. It's no different than any other negative externality.
Their say is their ability to move away. Neighborhoods change. The irony is that when they moved in, their neighbors were complaining about all the change happening.
Here in Cupertino, everyone says, "this should all be single family homes!". If you look at the old newspapers from the 30s and 40s, everyone was saying, "We should remain farmland!".
Why is it that the people who built the single family homes happen to be right? Maybe it should have been farmland. Or maybe it will be even better as a mixed community of single family and multi-unit dwellings.
It's called progress. For some reason people think that when they bought the house everything was perfect. The progress until then was good, and any progress afterwards is bad.
Being priced out of one's home is a red herring that the low tax zealots want you to believe to keep prop 13 in place.
Somehow in the 49 other states that don't have Prop 13, people aren't priced out of their homes from taxes.
There are other options. There are home equity lines, reverse mortgages, or even freezing tax payments and adding them as liens on the property at time of transfer.
But even if you're worried about that, you should still support repealing prop 13 on anything that isn't an owner occupied single family home.
There is no reason a rental property should have tax protection, or a commercial property.
>Somehow in the 49 other states that don't have Prop 13, people aren't priced out of their homes from taxes.
Allow me to introduce you to the great state of New Jersey. People here are absolutely priced out because of the property taxes, especially older retired couples and low earners who may have a house but hit hard financial times. A $400k house will probably have property taxes over $10k.
It’s a tax to try and equalize resources for all schools, and is very progressive in sense. Other states let poor areas have poor funding for schools, whereas NJ requires richer areas to send funding to poorer areas to try to give the poor children a chance. I actually think this is an admirable goal of NJ.
NJ also has one of the worst unfunded defined benefit pension problems, which is obviously not so admirable, and will continue to contribute to rising taxes of all kinds and decrease in government services in NJ for the next 30 years.
As a former resident of New Jersey, I'm aware of Abbott districts, and trying to place the blame them for NJ's high property taxes is absurd. It's not a separate tax, it's simply redistributing school funds from existing tax income. As for the amounts of funding the districts get, here's what it says in the wiki article:
Abbott district students received 22% more per pupil (at $20,859) vs. non-Abbott districts (at $17,051) in 2011.
That is a HUGE amount of money being spent regardless of district classification. As for the pension problem, please do not underestimate the ability of the NJ government to kick that can down the road as hard as they can. I firmly believe that they will do anything they can to not solve it until it's too late.
I really think this line of argument is going nowhere; you seem to have fundamental opinions on taxation that others here don't share, and I don't think further discussion is going to be all that productive.
That’s because others seem to have opinions about taxation and no understanding of how taxes work while I am trying to point out that property taxes are Ad Valorem.
High density isn’t the answer either. I don’t know one high density city in the entire world where housing became affordable and available for all as density increased.
Medium density and spreading out is the right solution. The example that comes to mind is the snail shell structure/concentric circle design of Paris, France.
That never comes up..the same tech sector working population want to pass their fortunes to their children through trusts and tax planning. I have seen them bristle when I suggested that their kids should pay taxes on their inheritance. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so hypocritical
Property taxes are paid on the sale price. It is not a punitive tax to fund new entrants.
An example:
Consider a 75 year old senior couple on fixed retirement income living in their fully paid 40 year old home. They paid the 300k mortgage and the house is worth 1 million.They raised their kids who attended public schools for 12 years each.
Property taxes are used for public school education. 45% of California budget is for schools. Property taxes go into a common pot and distributed to different school districts. It averages between 10-15k per student.
Schools have taken over nannying and provide more than basic education. They take on services that are generally the area of social services and social workers.
For example, if there are more non native English speaking families with children in school, the district gets extra funding. But more often than not, the children who know English as second language don’t come from high income areas..that is..their homes don’t contribute a lot of property taxes to the pot. Renters get the best deal because they don’t have to pay property taxes in the best school districts and often these are older properties that enjoy low taxes.
The problem here is that homes are roofs over our heads. It’s not speculative investments. They are not funding sources for the waves of new migrants and their children.
To ask 75 year old retirees to pay more taxes on property they haven’t profited from is heartless. That you need senior citizens to educate this working generation’s children’s education is shameful. It just means that the current generation doesn’t know how to manage their finances. It’s like someone living off their ageing parents pensions even when they are earning fat pay checks because they think their parents don’t need the money.
In my observation..those who ask for prop 13 to be repealed are usually : 1. First time house owners or renters 2. Transplants to California from other states that are usually economically depressed..almost always suffering from CA sticker shock 3. In their first high paying jobs 4. Don’t have parents living in California 5. Don’t have parents who were home owners in California 6. Really bad at financial management.
It boggles my mind when I see 25-30 year old Silicon Valley tech workers crying for prop 13 repeal and want you make seniors on fixed pensions homeless. They are people who are looking into other people’s homes and coveting what they think they are entitled to...
Most of the property taxes are going to fund public schools. If you want affordable housing, turn your ire towards parents who have kids and are not willing to pay for their own kids education...Instead of demanding from seniors who have paid their dues and have built the public schools and roads and infrastructure of California with their taxes when most of us weren’t even born.
I am deeply ashamed to be part of Silicon Valley that is disrespectful to the senior citizenry. On one hand, they want homeless people from all the states and undocumented immigrants to get free services and be taken care of..just when you think that such charity is laudable...on the other hand they are demanding to repeal prop 13 which will create more homeless seniors and retirees will end up without a nest egg for their safety net making them more vulnerable and even dependent on the state for services. How is this in any way logical or rational..even setting aside the fact that it’s definitely not ethical or moral.
Senior citizens in the other 49 states are doing just fine.
There are problems with increasing property taxes on elderly folks on fixed incomes, the solution isn't to say "you never own any tax on the appreciated value" the solution is to say "you can pay the tax on the appreciated value when you sell your home" which is an insane liberal tax and spend policy practiced in the hippie haven of the... state of Texas.
Additionally, the lions gain of the benefits of prop 13 don't accumulate to the working class elderly living in appreciated homes, it goes to giant corporations like Walt Disney (yes, Disney Land is protected by prop 13), golf courses, extremely wealthy property investors, and the heirs of people who have owned nice homes and then died who then bequeath both their house AND their insane tax rate on to their children.
maybe because young people in other 49 streets are not trying to make their senior citizenry homeless by increasing their taxes to educate their children for free.
Inheritance should be taxed at assessed value as should rental properties as well as commercial properties. Primary homes should not have prop 13 protections repealed. It’s not an investment to many..it’s their home.
In California, public money is spent on things like gender reassignment surgeries for govt/public sector employees and prison inmates..we have student loan forgiveness schemes if you work for 3-5 years for the county...retirement at 50 for most law enforcement and Fire Dept employees. Billions of dollars in pension funds and unfunded pension liabilities. Mayor Newsom just increased funds homelessness by another one billion. Yes, one billion in services like counseling. Not actual homes for the homeless. We offer services and education for all undocumented immigrants. First two years of community college free.
That’s why so many flock to California. Because life in the golden state is golden. And then they try to change prop 13 to punitively tax the senior citizenry and retirees on fixed income. Because. As someone spat out earlier ..”low taxation zealots” are the bad guys.
And then they try to change prop 13 to punitively tax the senior citizenry and retirees on fixed income.
I'm not going to bother digging into most of the rest of your claims but this is particularly disingenuous. Most of the recent attempts at changing Prop 13 have focused on a split roll that would keep the tax limits on primary residences. Putting grannie out on the street is exactly what the anti-tax zealots (Jarvis and co) used to sell the state on Prop 13 and 8 in the first place. What's being proposed now would raise taxes on things like vacation homes and commercial property.
That’s not what repealing prop 13 means..do you know the wording of prop 13?
Yes. In addition to following the flurry of news articles every time some politician dares to bring up Prop 13, I grew up in the Bay Area, and in fact I studied Prop 13 along with its consequences and potential changes while at university. If you'd like to be pedantic, your words were "And then they try to change prop 13".
Nobody (at least nobody with any sort of visibility) has proposed repealing Prop 13 wholesale.
They used repeal and partial repeal interchangeably.
Prop 13 also pushes undue costs onto new property development. Lower development costs equals fewer luxury condos. Were California to both build more and repeal Prop 13 fully it's unlikely that retired tech bros would be priced out of their houses.
Even so one of the primary roles of a county assessor is to determine where tax breaks are suitable. Allowing the (typically elected) assessor more discretion via a Prop 13 repeal almost certainly guarantees you won't be putting grannies (or retired tech bros) out on the street.
No, property taxes are paid on the assessed value, and assessments don't just happen at sale time. Only CA has this weird freeze-taxes-at-time-of-sale thing.
> It is not a punitive tax to fund new entrants.
No one is claiming it is. Hell, it isn't great even for homeowners who are "protected" by Prop 13, because if they want to move (say a widow/widower whose kids have moved out, living alone in a 3000 sq ft house who wants to downsize), they often can't, because their new property -- even if it's smaller! -- will destroy them with higher property taxes.
All this protects are people who never want to move, and, worse, it protects wealthy families who can pass their property down to their descendants without a market-rate tax.
> because their new property -- even if it's smaller! -- will destroy them with higher property taxes.
Nope. Prop 13 allows transferring assessed value of the old house to the new house if it's in the same county. Even inter-county if the new county allows it. The assessed value is also preserved when the property is inherited by children and grandchildren. The number of carve-outs it has to favor incumbent landowners is pure insanity.[1]
EDIT: These were allowed to die in December, 2018.
> Only CA has this weird freeze-taxes-at-time-of-sale thing.
Not even California has that, strictly speaking. California just sharply limits the rate of value assessment increase without qualifying events (mostly transfer outside of close family and new construction).
What’s wrong with never wanting to move? Out of homes people paid off after 30 years of mortgage? Why should we promote the notion that tax paying citizens should become transients due to tax burden?
So tax the descendents. Property rights are one of the reasons why this country was founded..primary homes need to be protected from predatory taxes and redistribution of wealth.
If those who had lived in their house for 30 years sold their property, they will have made more in capital gains from that sale alone than the average American has made in their entire life. I'm not exactly awash in sympathy here.
So you are saying people who invested earlier should be penalized because they were..I don’t know..alive before you and had a life and build a home that happened to appreciate in value even though it’s a perceived value with no real liquid gains.
Maybe they don’t want to profit out of capital gains. Maybe some people love their home of 30 years and would like to spend the reminder of their lives debt free after planning their retirement.
Seniors and retirees are such low impact on society. They have savings. They pay for services they don’t use. Their pensions and ssi is based on pre inflation valuations. They don’t use schools. Probably drive less and consume less and have a smaller carbon footprint. Most importantly they have already paid for themselves and probably paid their dues to society and several batches of public school kids.
To be envious of them and trying predatory taxation techniques on them is a breach and violation of social contract.
On the flip side, there is a finite supply of housing. A retired senior citizen living in a house prevents a young professional from living in that house. Given that the former is going to provide far less benefit to society than the latter, there is an opportunity cost that needs to be accounted for somehow. A property tax is not a bad way to account for the opportunity cost.
> Seniors and retirees are such low impact on society.
IIRC, medical care accounts for more government spending than all other discretionary spending combined. And most of medical care is going to be caring for seniors.
I never said there's anything wrong with never wanting to move. I just said that Prop 13 mainly protects incumbents who never want to move, and creates a really bad situation for everyone else.
Normally property taxes are paid based on assessed value. Assessed value is a function of market value that is determined recent neighborhood/comparable sales. The problem with Prop 13 is that it doesn't allow for the taxes to capture increased market value.
Why should taxes capture market value? That’s surrender to the state to keep taxing us.
To ask for higher taxation is asking for the state to take care of individual expenses through redistribution of wealth. Other states don’t offer as many services as California which is practically a nanny state.
The young people are expecting the state to do the grabbing so they can be taken care by the state. This is mostly due to public schools brainwashing kids with extreme progressive liberalism.
All these seniors that paid their dues paid how much in UC fees/"tuition"? And now they want to tell this generation to pay when they didn't? Isn't that called pulling up the ladder behind them?
No. The seniors paid for subsequent generations of public schools. Even when their children were all grown up and no longer in the school system.
It’s time for those kids who were educated with public funds and tax money to pay back. Not ask for more money from retired seniors.
So fix the university system. Don’t ask retired people to shoulder the burden of grown ass employed and able bodied younger generation and their children.
Most people have rental properties as investment properties.
Example: a 1 million dollar home rents for about 3500-4000/month in my Bay Area city. 10% goes to management company. And insurance is another expense, it’s not a lot.
Assessed value of a million dollar at current rates would be around $12k without parcel taxes or special special taxes added which can be another 3-6k extra.
It leaves about 2000-2500 as income. Assuming the home is completely paid off. If there is a mortgage or if it’s refinanced, there won’t be much of an income.
Rental income is considered income and subject to income tax.
Rents will RISE making housing even more affordable if people 13 is repealed. Any form of taxation is only designed so the house..aka the govt...wins. The house always wins.
Lobbies with housing interests are simply making home owners the villains...while the problem is lack of public transport, infrastructure and proper city planning and commercial zoning.
It’s easy to make seniors(who have no PR companies or lobbies) the villains or hard working people who have one or two rental properties as income nest eggs because they don’t have pension funds or stock options.
The Silicon Valley tech workers act like they are sharing and passing around a single brain cell amidst themselves when it comes to housing issues in the Bay Area. It’s mind boggling how easy it is to manipulate people into a mob when a nameless faceless villain who can’t be identified is painted to be the victimizer.
That’s not really true. Market values are based on total cost of ownership, and higher taxes reduce the value or value growth.
Your taxes go up, but so does your debt service. I live in a secondary market of a very high tax state (NY). My effective property tax rate is about 1.8%, almost double what you see in NYC. But... my housing value is much lower. My home in NYC would be well over $1.5M, and is a fraction of that. It’s better to pay the tax.
In terms of old people, the answer depends. Usually people sell because they cannot maintain the home, want to be near family, or have medical issues. I’ve never heard of anyone (other than a farmer) who moved because of property tax.
Property in CA is speculative and fluctuating. One cannot accept paying taxes based on assessed value. Property market is a volatile market.
It is the equivalent of gambling. Would it make sense if our taxes on the roof over our heads are pegged to Wall Street or stock exchange indices?
When property taxes have to be imposed based on fluctuating speculative assessed value, how would people on fixed income and pensions plan to pay their property taxes at the end of the year?
The assessed values already increase every year. Social security payments are capped. Salaries are based on employment contracts and is capped.
The habit of paying tech workers with stock options that are essentially speculative financial instruments have taken away all realistic financial intelligence one would assume amongst the current generation.
A good economy relies on stability. How does pegging fixed incomes to volatile speculative property value make any sense? It is entirely irrational and illogical. It’s financial illiteracy. You can’t plan for anything and especially not retirement. Such short term thinking.
Your hypothetical old people utilize their stored equity via a loan, just like you draw from your pension. Reverse mortgages are a common way to do that. Or, you sell and downsize into a property or place that you can afford.
Real estate markets are fairly liquid, and assessors always have a process to grieve your assessment based on market or other conditions.
California is way too protective of the property owner. Carrying costs in terms of taxes are frozen in time and anyone can walk away from a mortgage. Stock options are what keep the machine going.
Why are you making financial decisions for strangers? Esp in a way that benefits you and has no value to them?
What is the sense in extending their lines of credit to PAY TAXES?
Are you suggesting that they should go into debt to pay taxes? It is equivalent of highway robbery. Akin to saying.. mortgage your home again to give us the money?
Real estate markets are not liquid. Liquidity is exchange of monetary and financial instruments for an asset. A home is an immovable fixed asset. As long as it’s owner occupied, it’s domicile and not an asset. When it’s rented out, it accrues rental income which is taxed.
Right to property is a fundamental right. This is not a feudal economy and it’s not the Middle Ages. Stock options are speculative financial instruments and relying on them is akin to gambling.
Your understanding of finances ..if representative of the wider California working population..sheds light on why the current generation has no financial management skills. I am beginning to suspect it’s by design starting at public schools where children are taught to suckle at the govt teat and think taxes are nourishing food.
Moving where? Why should people leave their homes that they built and paid for ..Human beings like their community and neighborhood where they have a support system. When you know your neighbour is just a phone call away next door, you don’t have to rely on doctors or nurses or ambulances or fire departments. As you get older, community is a great source of comfort and moral support.
People won’t realize this until they get older or have lived with older family members/friends. Older family members are also a great source of support and mentorship for the younger generation. It is not always about money.
A million dollar check won’t speak to you or hold your hand. Most of the million dollars will go to taxes and then barely paying for the next roof in a not well serviced and strange new zipcode. It’s a downgrade. Why would anyone want to downgrade their lives and walk into uncertainty when they are old and vulnerable?
They could literally move anywhere with that money and live like proverbial kings. But I’m not for or against prop 13, I was just saying. My friends parents retired and moved to Portugal. Best move they could ever make, they’re happy, well settled, etc..
maybe they dont want to move. i am genuinely flabbergasted by the number of people who think seniors should just pick up and 'move elsewhere'.
how is this different from someone telling an accented immigrant to 'go back home'?
many retired folks want to stay with their families and grandchildren. finally enjoy their communities after decades of working and paying off bills and mortgages. perhaps some would want to cash out, but many simply do not because they have been fairly successful in the bay area and dont need the extra money, but they are not literal millionaires with liquidity.
30 something year olds after less than a couple of years in a stable job and having another thirty years of earning potential asking people who have a couple of decades left in their lives to uproot themselves.
it is even more bizzare when the suggestion is to take reverse morgages to pay more taxes and supporting the repealing of prop 13. thats like saying that having a $5000 credit card limit is like having $5000 in the bank. reverse mortgages are literally betting on the fact that the person holding it would die eventually. that's someone's inheritance..legacy...a house they built and memories. most importantly, its their property.
there is a vulture like quality to young people in silicon valley's tech sector..those who hover around retiree's homes hoping they'd either sell and leave or find taxes unbearable and sell.
if someone cant afford housing, it means they have to take it up with their employer. if there isnt enough housing, move. take another job. convince your employee to build better cities. its not coveting someone's properties or wishing that they will 'move away'.
this is not an emotional appeal to be 'nice' to seniors. its just absolute shock at the helplessness of a workforce that is supposed to define bay area to come up with creative solutions and their impotence when it comes to creating change with their local governments.
what this shows is that the current working class generation has no influence, no clout, no real wealth, no creativity, no grit to challenge government or authority. most shocking of all, they are cutting off their noses to spite the face by asking for more taxes to be collected and to be delivered to a bloated state govt that has a terrible record with managing public funds, delivering results, being transparent and accountable.
Guaranteed almost 40-50% of these are jobs are going to disappear in the next decade. Guaranteed. what then? what would happen when automation displaces workers/employees and incomes dry up? this is how ghost town are born. while sf bay area is not there yet, it will be a whole different world.
Not saying they should move, just pointing that theres a great opportuniy many don’t see or are aware it exists where moving can buy you a whole lot more in terms of quality of life, healthcare, property.. For that money they could move together with family and still have plenty of resources left. Cali is no longer worth it with everything that is going on right now. Just saying not imposing anything...
I hear you. But that’s like suggesting defeat. The problem here is bad city planning and Sacramento shenanigans. A very cunning move of turning people against people so the govt can get away with doing nothing while pocketing all the cash.
They are literally pitting us against each other instead of fixing infrastructure, public transport, homelessness, community services and tax reform so its less taxes, not more.
Imagine you are a household and you want to maintain a standard of living. As family size grows, it makes sense to cut down the budget, eat out less and making the money and resources stretch more over more heads.
What the govt is doing is essentially vying for free money by taxing people more and creating more cash rich people. And pocketing the cash for the care and feeding of big Gov. they are making out like bandits. This is what Kings and feudal lords did...just tax working class more.
Just follow the money. I did it with just one thing. Prop 47. They don’t even charge people anymore for crimes that involve goods valued less than $950.
Why? Because it costs money to maintain prisons, police force and courts etc. waste of time and resources to petty crime.
This has resulted in more petty crime. Car break ins, property theft, chain snatching, lap top snatching, shopping mall robberies etc. the police won’t even take a report so there is a record of it. Who knows what that number is..
So you’d think they’d save oodles of money, right? Where is it going? It goes back to unfunded pension liabilities. It costs $70k per prisoner. Prison guard unions are the most influential unions. It’s going back to fill the hole that is unfundwd pension liabilities. It’s the same with teachers union, police officers unions, Fire Dept unions. These departments keep shrinking as density increases but they become more and more expensive and have larger budgets. Where is the money going? Pensions negotiated by unions.
Look at homelessness reforms. Where is all the millions going? Half the budget is for salaries and employees. It’s all coming from our taxes. Take every expense and scratch the surface. Beneath all the goop and gunk obscuring transparency, there is the govt playing with our money. With no accountability. We don’t ask questions because we are fighting amongst ourselves. Turning tech workers against seniors. Homeless against working class. Teachers against parents. And indoctrination begins at public schools where kids walk out to ‘support teachers unions’.
This has to end. Let’s not be suckers. This is the oldest game in the book. This is how the British colonized my people for 250 years. They called it Divide and Conquer.
The issue that I would see is a situation where the new construction causes property value to drop and therefore the original residents cannot afford to sell their homes and move to a neighborhood similar to the one before the construction. If they cannot afford to move away then its really not a meaningful say.
I think it's reasonable that you don't get an actual nuclear waste facility next door, but people in California have gone so far beyond any kind of "reasonable".
It's not clear to me from that article: Did the plan that they were opposing provide any assurances that the houses built would be good quality? The people quoted state that their concern is that overcrowded or low quality public housing[1] would be built. If the law addresses their stated concerns and they still oppose it then I think that it's fair to criticize them. However, I don't think it's fair to just assume that they are lying about the reason for their opposition.
[1] I could see criticizing public housing being code for "we don't want anyone who isn't upper middle class"; which of course is unreasonable. However, on the other hand I've lived in places where the public housing took the form of a massive tower block that was like something out of Judge Dredd; so I think its understandable that people would be concerned about it if they aren't given any assurances.
In that case, then I think it would be reasonable to criticize them. Although, it still seems to me that it wouldn't hurt to put something in the law that specifically says that they won't build giant tower blocks.
The more you read about this stuff, you realize that there's some real ugliness there - now and in the past. Maybe not everyone, but it goes well beyond the original intent of zoning to keep housing away from factories and tanneries and such.
Of course, in places like San Francisco and Portland, people are mostly smart enough to not "say the quiet part out loud", so they come up with other excuses.
Of course, in places like San Francisco and Portland, people are mostly smart enough to not "say the quiet part out loud", so they come up with other excuses.
No we fucking said the quiet part out loud quite proudly in San Francisco. Take a look at the covenants in the Forest Hill neighborhood. It's still fairly bad as those folks recently successfully fought an attempt at building a low income retirement home.
And we certainly weren't that offended by the Chinese Exclusion Act.
If you want to preserve your sun, traffic, views, whatever, you are free to buy it. Nothing is stopping you from buying your entire neighborhood and leasing to your neighbors, other than your lack of capital. Why should you get something for free that has nothing to do with what you paid for, the parcel and the air 30 feet above it?
It sure does, but you haven't bought the private environment around your property and therefore should have no right to dictate its use by its actual owners.
If someone is doing you legitimate harm, like dumping toxic waste into your drinking water, then you have the public government than can dictate the rights in regard to private use on the toxic waste dumper on behalf of the public. Increasing housing supply in an area with high demand is not doing legitimate harm, it keeps housing affordable and is good for the environment vs. infinite sprawl.
Now that I live in Houston which does not have zoning in the typical sense I prefer that things get done ASAP instead of people arguing for years for the right to build more housing on a lot that they already own. This contributes to the obscenely high cost of living in certain parts of the country.
In my experience (granted I only lived in Houston for about three months during an internship), the lack of planning makes the city a nightmare to get around. I always considered Houston an example of what not to do.
No, it's reasonable to criticize them no matter what because they're preventing other people from having the same opportunities that they were afforded.
I'm not advocating that more housing shouldn't be built. What I am saying is that there is a middle ground between allowing existing homeowners to veto any proposals and not giving them any say or protection.
Sure, there probably is. But if we imagine that this is a spectrum where 0 means "no say" and 10 means "absolute veto power", CA is at 9, and most functioning communities with healthy housing growth are probably at 5 or below.
I don't think it's fair to assume without evidence that existing homeowner are "crotchety neighbors". It's quite possible that they have legitimate concerns that, and would support new construction if their concerns were addressed.
Go to public hearings. Their demands are almost never reasonable. New housing should never add any traffic ever, and it should look fantastic (with different people differing on what this means) and it shouldn't have children because there's no way the schools could cope with the "massive increase", and it should have enough parking to handle the entire extended family at Thanksgiving (in a severely land-constrained area) and by the way it should also be actually "affordable" (far below market rates).
I think you're starting to (unintentionally) argue a straw man, or at least are making assumptions that just aren't true.
No one is saying that developers should just be able to build whatever they want, whenever they want, with no oversight. No one is saying that the community should completely shut up and have no input into the process.
But the actual objections brought up at actual planning meetings that happen in SF are universally bonkers. It literally actually is people opposing change just for the sake of opposing change. If there is anyone at these meetings making reasonable objections, they're completely drowned out by the other 20 people shouting that the sky is falling.
It's protectionism, and the "I got mine, so fuck you" mentality, plain and simple.
You’re assuming the process we have resolves their feelings when it does not. If anything, we’ve normalized the idea that new development is bad and as a community member you should be fighting it, leading to more resistance than there would be otherwise.
We have a major housing cost crisis in this state, as well as a big NIMBY problem. There have been good solutions run up through the state house, that either fail to pass or get so watered down they are no longer effective, in large part because the most liberal parts of the state happen the also be the wealthiest, so they vote against it.
It's one of the few areas in California where the GOP and the Dems agree.
They only want to help poor people if it doesn't affect their property value.