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I Have Read Prop F

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Re: I Have Read Prop F

#161

Post by skuhn »

eru wrote: post #158
skuhn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make all of your money from a property tax that does not increase as your costs to provide services increase. There are options besides property tax for raising tax revenue. City-level local income tax is the first thing that comes to mind.

Property taxes are awesome: they do not distort economic activity (if done right), and they are hard to evade (since you can't hide your land).

OK. So then I take it we can agree that they shouldn't be artificially capped for some people because they got here first.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#162

Post by fredkbloggs »

tmuir wrote: post #138
fredkbloggs wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me that your complaint is about a lack of noise ordinances (which does not apply to SF, the subject of this article), a matter that should be fairly easy to correct and much less controversial than this whole airbnb kerfuffle. I don't think short-term tenants are any more likely than long-term tenants or owners to be terrible neighbors; I've seen some awful examples of both. Unfortunately, people who are inc…

No contortion of logic allows you to escape the fact that Airbnb has vastly increased the number of people renting out homes and apartments. The demand for short term vacation rentals certainly existed previously. Airbnb lowered the barriers to entry for a huge volume of new supply, private primary residences. The short term residential rental market simply did not exist at anything close to the current volume before…

I'm not contorting anything. I'm saying that whether there are 50 or 5 million short-term rentals is irrelevant, and you should stop looking for a convenient corporation to attack and start solving a problem that existed long before it was founded... and will exist long after it perishes.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#163

Post by douche »

ScottBurson wrote: post #118
narrator wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how many people who've owned their homes for years would be forced to sell and move elsewhere in San Francisco if prop 13 were repealed.

Prop. 13 could be fixed without forcing people out of their homes. Instead of capping the tax , we should cap the amount of the tax that actually has to be paid in a year in which the property does not change hands. That number could be limited according to the Prop. 13 formula; the city or county would receive a lien for the difference, that lien not becoming due until the property does change hands. This wouldn't c…

If I am reading this idea correctly, this would create some perverse incentives to hold onto property that has appreciated in value, particularly the longer the property has been held. If the "missing" tax amount gets tacked onto the lien every year, but only comes due when the property is sold, why would you ever sell? You'd keep locked into your pre-existing low tax rates, and lease out the property for income, or use it as an asset, or whatever, but you wouldn't sell it. You would go through elaborate legal gyrations to find loopholes that would allow you to pass on the property to your descendants without it being a sale, so that the lump-sum back-taxes collection isn't triggered. So the housing supply largely freezes, and prices go up higher.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#164

Post by tmuir »

fredkbloggs wrote: post #162
tmuir wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No contortion of logic allows you to escape the fact that Airbnb has vastly increased the number of people renting out homes and apartments. The demand for short term vacation rentals certainly existed previously. Airbnb lowered the barriers to entry for a huge volume of new supply, private primary residences. The short term residential rental market simply did not exist at anything close to the current volume before…

I'm not contorting anything. I'm saying that whether there are 50 or 5 million short-term rentals is irrelevant, and you should stop looking for a convenient corporation to attack and start solving a problem that existed long before it was founded... and will exist long after it perishes.

You are being willfully ignorant of basic logic. The high number of short term residential rentals _is the problem_. Airbnb exclusively facilitated the overwhelming majority of these short term rentals. Ergo, Airbnb created this problem. Due to the nature of cause and effect, the problem did not exist before it was created by Airbnb. Being the creator of the problem makes them the correct entity to attack.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#165

Post by douche »

bsder wrote: post #130
mrgordon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear how it is Airbnb's fault if they don't have much availability in Kittanning, PA (population 4000). I found two places for rent there which honestly seems pretty decent. The median age is 40 in that area so it doesn't surprise me that Airbnb didn't catch on as quickly there as Brooklyn. You also underestimate the degree to which word of mouth helps two-sided marketplaces spread in urban areas. As for the…

> I'm not clear how it is Airbnb's fault if they don't have much availability in Kittanning, PA (population 4000). It's not their fault. However, AirBnB, Uber and all the other serfitude economy ilk would get a lot less static if the at least tried to incentivize people in order to serve these kinds of underserved areas. Instead, they're trying to elbow their way into the already well-served markets--often while igno…

What's AirBnB going to do, go into every small town in the country and try to recruit people into their service? How would that be successful without prior successes in larger, more fluid markets, to grow a reputation, and, just as importantly, raise the money from investors to support those operations.

I think its a simple numbers thing. Lets say one household in Kittanning is interested in working with AirBnB. For the sake of argument and easy numbers, let's say a household is the platonic 4 people, that's 0.1% of the population. In New York, assuming the same percentage of people that would be willing to be AirBnB rentals and the same household size, that's almost 8500 possible units available for rent.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#166

Post by steven2012 »

skuhn wrote: post #155
steven2012 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is fixed to 1970s levels. Property taxes get reassessed when there's a sale on the property. How many properties in CA have not changed hands since 1970, ie more than 40 years? Probably none, since that's almost 2 generations of families.

I think you might be surprised. There are a ton of exceptions to reassessment [1]. A notable one is that transfers from parent to child are typically excluded, meaning that you can indeed pass down low property taxes from generation to generation. Commercial property is also covered under the same rules, and there are ways to keep it from being reassessed [2][3]. Improvements to the property will trigger reassessment…

Prop 13 is across California, not just San Francisco. You're saying that home sales in CA have been suppressed because of Prop 13? You would be wrong.

There are about 6M housing units available in CA, and about 500k sales per year. That's an entire turnover of inventory in 12 years. Your anecdotal evidence is interesting but wrong.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#167

Post by Dylan16807 »

rl3 wrote: post #111

Serious question: has subterranean housing ever been considered for SF? If you can't build out or up, may as well build under. Feasibility aside, the only problem I see is it'd create a literal underclass—as opposed to the proverbial one that exists now as a result of absurd rent prices.

Going down more than a floor gets stupidly expensive. The underclass would be the ones on the surface.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#168

Post by Dylan16807 »

bsder wrote: post #130
mrgordon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear how it is Airbnb's fault if they don't have much availability in Kittanning, PA (population 4000). I found two places for rent there which honestly seems pretty decent. The median age is 40 in that area so it doesn't surprise me that Airbnb didn't catch on as quickly there as Brooklyn. You also underestimate the degree to which word of mouth helps two-sided marketplaces spread in urban areas. As for the…

> I'm not clear how it is Airbnb's fault if they don't have much availability in Kittanning, PA (population 4000). It's not their fault. However, AirBnB, Uber and all the other serfitude economy ilk would get a lot less static if the at least tried to incentivize people in order to serve these kinds of underserved areas. Instead, they're trying to elbow their way into the already well-served markets--often while igno…

Going from 0 hotels to 2 AirBnBs sounds like a massive improvement to me.

>serfitude economy

Really? That's a fine description for the terrible 'contractor' jobs, but it doesn't fit renting a room at all. AirBnB makes their hosts less serf-y, with a completely different set of externalities.

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#169

Post by Dylan16807 »

bsder wrote: post #78
selectodude wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The density of Brooklyn is almost double San Francisco, and I wouldn't consider Brooklyn a very high rise city.

> The density of Brooklyn is almost double San Francisco, and I wouldn't consider Brooklyn a very high rise city. What are you smoking? I want some of that. Brooklyn has a density of 35,369.1 people per square mile. That would make it the 5th most dense city in the US. Behind only other New York areas. It would even put it in the top 10 in density for Europe. What the hell DO you consider a dense city?

"dense" and "high-rise" are not the same thing.

And "not very high rise" is more like "medium-rise", not "low-rise".

Re: I Have Read Prop F

#170

Post by skuhn »

steven2012 wrote: post #166
skuhn wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be surprised. There are a ton of exceptions to reassessment [1]. A notable one is that transfers from parent to child are typically excluded, meaning that you can indeed pass down low property taxes from generation to generation. Commercial property is also covered under the same rules, and there are ways to keep it from being reassessed [2][3]. Improvements to the property will trigger reassessment…

Prop 13 is across California, not just San Francisco. You're saying that home sales in CA have been suppressed because of Prop 13? You would be wrong. There are about 6M housing units available in CA, and about 500k sales per year. That's an entire turnover of inventory in 12 years. Your anecdotal evidence is interesting but wrong.

I did not state that property sales have been suppressed, I said that property tax revenue has been suppressed. My particular anecdote was around property improvement, not sales. And once again, a property sale does not mean that reassessment definitely occurred.

However it is hardly groundbreaking to state that prop 13 has created a "lock in" effect [1][2][3][4].

[1] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~miwhite/wasi-white-final.pdf

[2] http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/files/2008-19151-1.p...

[3] http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/prop-13-california-housin...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/realestate/07california.ht...

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