91–100 of 133 posts
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> Ending Prop. 13 will not solve anything. If more people want to live here they need to build more housing. You instead proposing to kick out people who already live here just because they cannot afford to pay much higher taxes. Sounds pretty close to genocide to me. Uh, no, that's nowhere close to genocide.
Gentricide then :)
Very interesting read. When we discuss inequality, I think there are a lot of assumptions made that make it hard to really judge. For example, TFA trots out the high number of people on minimum wage, and the high percentage of people below the poverty line. This is misleading, because it misses out on some key ways that "capitalism raises all boats," which are tricky to measure. Off the top of my head... The first is…
The color television - yes, but washing machines and fridges are older mass market appliances than most people think (75+ years) - and before that they had effective but sometimes inferior counterparts like root cellars and hard ice deliveries.
"It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simultaneously the site of severe inequality and failing public policies and infrastructure." No contradiction there. Inequality was always both a feature and a bug of capitalism. Inequality is kind of the whole motivation for participating in capitalism. People s…
You've identified a want and delivered a product to a million people. What is the proper compensation for that? Should people not be allowed to identify wants and address them for profit?
I think the error in your view is that any sale is predatory, when in reality both the consumer and seller can profit. One gains something they need or want and the other gets money. Sure, buying consumer crap isn't going to lift you out of poverty, but you're still getting a benefit from the transaction.
"It illuminates the basic crisis and contradiction of the San Francisco Bay Area, which is an example of capitalism at its most innovative and dynamic, and simultaneously the site of severe inequality and failing public policies and infrastructure." No contradiction there. Inequality was always both a feature and a bug of capitalism. Inequality is kind of the whole motivation for participating in capitalism. People s…
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It's not just SV that has similiar stuff to Prop 13, most places do so. If not, the locals will simply have to pack up and move just because their property value went up which can be quite disruptive. I personally think it's fair. You shouldn't be forced to move out of a city you are rooted in where you have family and friends. Imagine getting old and deciding you wish to downsize to a smaller house because all the k…
But this also means that without prop 13 or something like it local homeowners would have every reason to try to keep housing prices at sane levels rather than trying to get them as high as possible, would it not?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/17/opinion/housing-boom-goes...
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It's not just SV that has similiar stuff to Prop 13, most places do so. If not, the locals will simply have to pack up and move just because their property value went up which can be quite disruptive. I personally think it's fair. You shouldn't be forced to move out of a city you are rooted in where you have family and friends. Imagine getting old and deciding you wish to downsize to a smaller house because all the k…
But this also means that without prop 13 or something like it local homeowners would have every reason to try to keep housing prices at sane levels rather than trying to get them as high as possible, would it not?
If Bay Area governments had simply gotten out of the way developers would have build more than a million new units of housing over the past 40-50 years. Real home prices would have only have increased slightly due to the increased costs of building up.
Instead we got only a tiny fraction of the housing needed to meet demand and huge rent/price increases resulting the highest cost of living in the world. This is a mad-made problem.
True story: 2 mid-level engineers both working at a FANG, and we can barely afford a 3bdr/2.5bath in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara without burning thru 30-40% of our monthly income (including RSUs). Having bid on a few houses, I'm amazed by how opaque the market is here. Houses will be listed 30% less than expected selling price and when you do make an offer, the seller will come back with a higher price to all those who mad…
Things have changed in SV. I don't know if it is the higher interest rates or something else, but the market has cooled off quite a bit in the last 2-3 months. I bet you can find houses very near their asking price now. Days on market is going up.
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Please don't take HN threads on political flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So we can't talk on here about how we have a President now that sees fit to strip away people's citizenship? https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/uscis-starting-denaturaliz... We can't talk about how he's rolling back promises to soldiers to score political points? https://apnews.com/amp/38334c4d061e493fb108bd975b5a1a5d How his DHS is conveniently losing documentation on children they've forcibly separated from their pa…
What initial conditions make for good discussion? Two things: first, a substantive article that contains information rather than just rhetoric. Flamey rhetoric is a sugar high and our minds need something to chew on. Second, initial comments that earnestly engage with the information in the article (as opposed to potshots or pre-existing talking points). When those things are present, politicized topics can be ok for Hacker News. They can still degenerate into flamewars, though, in which case they become off topic again.
Edit: dismayingly, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle, which violates the site guidelines, and gotten nasty in the process, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17323529 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17323169, which I probably would have banned you for had I seen it. We ban accounts that do these things, for the same reason: it degrades the site well below the level needed for not going up in flames. Would you please stop using HN this way?
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I think the transferring of the low tax basis is bogus but Prop 13 does protect blue collar families. I personally know someone who works for a low hourly wage and now owns his home he bought in the 1970s. If he did not have those tax protections he would lose the home he raised his family in and have to move immediately. I understand it's frustrating to outsiders who are new to the city and are trying to "make it" b…
How would your friend feel about property taxes that scale with market value, but can be deferred until the moment the home is sold, at which point the deferred taxes are paid from the home's appreciation? We could even add a provision capping the maximum tax bill to the actual amount of appreciation since the home was bought. That way nobody is priced out of their home, but the taxes to pay for services that everybo…