What if someone’s on vacation or has mail being delivered there etc. or comes in once in a while or Airbnb’s it’s much harder to impliment I think than it sounds.
Well, what you do is get rid of prop 13 and do yearly appraisals. Then you just tax the property on what it's worth, and if a landlord refuses to rent, then the tax is now a vacancy tax.
The real problem is we're not taxing these properties at the true value they could provide to society, so a massive market inefficiency exists.
Repeal prop13 and landlords will just pass the additional taxes on to their tenants. You'll only succeed in displacing a different group of people. And you won't be the one buying those homes at a sweet discount. Assuming some real estate mogul, rich kid, tech bro doesn't out bid you, you'll be paying all those mega property taxes every year too.
The real issue is that there is no central authority at the CA State or even Bay Area level planning growth holistically.
A company can hire 5,000 people tomorrow and they'll all just move here and look for a place to live, regardless of whether the city their employer is based in has any housing or not. That drives up rent. It creates the absurd traffic that we now get to enjoy every day of the week. It drives up the costs of goods and services.
Bay Area leadership and California leadership need to sit down and have a discussion with employers and cities about how to effectively and responsibly grow, and then move towards developing new infrastructure to support the plan that comes out of those discussions.
I know that was a typo but CA Prop 14 is maybe the only thing worse than Prop 13 that CA voters ever passed.
If the fact that allowing landlords race-based leasing won the vote isn't enough to convince you that direct democracy is a stupid idea I don't know what is.
My landlord's building is worth $5 million ($5,000k) and he pays $3k a year in property taxes. He can evict all tenants and wait for someone to pay him $10 million for the property. He can wait for generations and never pay more than $4k a year because of how prop 13 is structured.
Who said eviction? I said to charge to the property tax as it's valued today. Put a lien on the property and collect at time of transfer. There's no reason to evict people based on property taxes. Texas handles this just fine.
I'm trying to understand: are you saying landlords should be able to not pay property taxes on the current value, not get their property seized by the state if they don't pay property taxes, collect market rate rents from tenants, and also keep all of the profit from property value gains once they sell?
But ignoring that absurdity - property taxes are usually 2% of the property value. So you'd need to what... Not pay any property tax at all for 100+ years for that scenario to play out?
But let's say we allowed that to happen, and we're somehow sympathetic to that owner. You still don't evict anyone over property taxes. The next buyer will just have to work it out. See Detroit and its $1 homes with $20k in back taxes.
I guess the problem here is I don't see housing as something anyone should expect a guaranteed profit from. I view it just like anything else - there's real risk, and if you're going to privatize the profit, you damn sure better privatize the risk, too.
I'm very much for private ownership of property, not sure why you would think otherwise. All I've said is to do what just about every other state does: if your property is worth $200k, you pay $2k that year in property taxes. If it's worth $2 million, you pay $20k. This isn't hard, and it isn't controversial.
Edit: just to appeal to authority: every single legitimate economist agrees with me on this as well.
What if someone’s on vacation or has mail being delivered there etc. or comes in once in a while or Airbnb’s it’s much harder to impliment I think than it sounds.
If you're putting the place up on AirBnB more often than not, the unit is not your primary residence and shouldn't be afforded benefits as such. If the goal of a vacancy tax is to increase rental supply, AirBnB does pretty much the opposite.
In California, and most of the US, property assessments are done by elected officials on an annual basis. In California the rate of increase is severely capped, but you're free to apply for a reduction if the value of your property decreases. If you're legitimately on vacation (or whatever), apply for an exemption. It's not that complex.
What if someone’s on vacation or has mail being delivered there etc. or comes in once in a while or Airbnb’s it’s much harder to impliment I think than it sounds.