I think Prop79 will be good long term but it will take decades for the changes to be felt. I hope that something with a bit more immediate shows up this year as well. Relooking at prop 13 seems to be one option.
I think Prop79 will be good long term but it will take decades for the changes to be felt. I hope that something with a bit more immediate shows up this year as well. Relooking at prop 13 seems to be one option.
I agree with the sentiment, but sadly even in its watered down form, SB79 was the result of a brutal legislative battle over the course of years, and even then it barely passed.
Getting Prop 13 overturned is about as likely as California seceding from the US.
Actually, it might even be less likely than that.
I think getting Prop 13 repealed along the lines of Prop 15 (basically for investment property) may actually happen. I think the pro group is much more organized today than they were in 2020 and so it will stand a much better chance of succeeding.
That said, I fully agree with you that Prop 13 repeal for homeowners will "never" happen. The backlash would obviously be massive. But if they could keep it for homeowners and repeal it for all other types of property, including land, then that could be a major improvement because property owners would have to improve their properties to a "highest and best use" or sell it to pay the taxes.
Prop 13 is getting repealed practically speaking through time, as the main beneficiaries of the low taxes die; and the taxes they dynastically transfer to their kids get capped; and as those kids choose to sell those homes and move to New York.
There is no one simple solution to e.g. poor performance of US public schools. Repealing Prop 13 isn’t going to close the achievement gap, it’s not even going to slow the fall of performance since 1993, let alone the pandemic.
So not only is Prop 13 sort of being phased out naturally, the repeal would simply put a bunch of renters against rising costs from landlords in the places that actually matter like LA and SF, and you know, as much as I hate Prop 13 in principle, everything has settled on a delicate homeostasis where the people who want to get it repealed fully - which will never happen - will get way more than they bargained for.
> Prop 13 sort of being phased out naturally
I'm not sure how you're coming to this conclusion. When the property is transferred it is reassessed and the new buyer pays the full tax, but after that the taxes effectively decrease annually (increase at a rate lower than inflation). Everyone who owns a property more than a year or two in California benefits from Prop 13.
Nothing is phasing out and it has no sunset clause.
Okay… even if things worked exactly as you say. Is the repeal going to fix education? Is it going to result in home prices going down or up? Will the change in home prices that you predict cause more or fewer homes to be built? I hate Prop 13 but I hate it for reasons of justice and equity, not because I think it will have effects that it will not.
What do you mean "if" ? Do the reading before trying to have this conversation.
Prop 13 is a religious document in California.
You'd have more luck persuading the Catholic Church to repeal the Bible.
> Prop 13 is a religious document in California.
Residential real estate isn't causing the big issue. It's been under Prop 13 long enough that people have died off and the properties are now sufficiently staggered that residential real estate reassesses even if it does so slowly. Consequently, it's not really religious to remove commercial real estate from Prop 13.
The problem is that Prop 13 is worth sooooo much money to entrenched California commercial real estate owners (like The Irvine Company) that you have to be prepared for a MASSIVE money firefight if you really want to go after commercial real estate on it.
The vote was a bit closer than you might think for Prop 15, which was the last attempt, I think, to repeal Prop 13 for investment property. And in 2020 when that ballot measure was voted on the pro-repeal folks were nowhere near as organized as they are today. As I said in another comment I think there's a good chance that if they take another run at it they will succeed in repealing it for investment property because they will message aggressively that they're not after homeowners, which is what the investors convinced the electorate the last time they tried to repeal it for investment property.
And on the topic of residential, up until a few years ago if you died your heirs were allowed to inherit your tax basis, no strings attached, and so the "staggering" you're talking about has never really "staggered" en masse (if I'm understanding the way you're using that word). On top of that, even people who purchased property as late as 2020 are already massively benefiting from Prop 13. Each day home prices appreciate the new homeowner population just keeps replacing the dead in the anti-repeal camp for residential.
Edit: I was trying to put a footnote but it turned into italics so I just dropped the footnote
Houses built from advantage of SB79 are encumbered by the fact virtually every typical piece of pipe used to build a house is made a controlled material requiring a background check, under SB704.
Please stop repeating this intentionally ridiculous misinterpretation all over this thread.
Please read it. I'm 100% right.
Put compressed air (or maybe some capped off black powder) in tube, it will expel a projectile. PVC pipes are readily convertible into a tube through which a projectile is fired.Have you read the bill? It literally outlaws (without background check) any piece of pipe which you can readily fire a projectile from. You can do that with pretty much any pipe, just by adjusting the charge and projectile size/type.
Even the process used to make PVC pipes is explicitly called out, which is extrusion.
Your farcical take is predicated on an interpretation of the above paragraph in which the bill claims anything from which a projectile may be expelled is a firearm barrel.
That is clearly not what the bill says, nor can it even be tortuously misconstrued as such.
I am sympathetic to the guy’s crank interpretation, because that’s exactly how lawsuits against development that drag on for ages work.
It's also the way prosecutors constantly charge people with other laws.
They can drag in a potato cannon, maybe light it with some black powder if compressed air doesn't "count", and show that the PVC pipe readily expelled the projectile and thus the pipe by itself is a "firearm barrel" if it can readily be placed into such a potato gun. It would be no problem to prosecute someone for selling the PVC pipe to a plumber and 100% meet the letter of the law.
I don't see that as farcical but rather a straightforward application of the law. Maybe you find the law farcical/cranky but my interpretation isn't.
That's a bug of the judicial system's speed rather than the interpretation of law. A groundless lawsuit still needs to be heard through a glacial system before the result can be determined.
When time is money, such delays are takings from the applicant, and work like mafia protection money.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tS2jKYbzsnA