Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elon Musk moves to Texas

ktvu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#711

Post by woah »

lwansbrough wrote: post #588
woah wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a massive windfall to people who have been homeowners for 40 years in California. High rents due to the fact that you're not allowed to build new housing, high property taxes paid by new residents, while old residents pay nothing, high income and sales taxes to paper over the gap in the budget left by the lack of property tax paid by longtime residents. The whole system has been optimized to milk as much mo…

If you don’t build luxury housing, affordable housing becomes luxury housing. San Francisco is a perfect example of NIMBY extremism and the damage it does to communities.

It's worse than that: The entire concept of "luxury housing" is a lie.

The words "luxury housing" are designed to make you think that it is taking up space that could be used by non luxury housing. Like the only reason a new apartment is so expensive is because it has a gold-plated toilet or something, and if only the developer had built an apartment without a gold plated toilet you could afford it. But in Minneapolis, for example, a 2 bedroom apartment in the nicest building in the city, with a built in pool, car wash, and cigar lounge, is $2000 per month. That barely gets you a spot in someone's living room in SF.

This proves that it is not luxuries that make "luxury apartments" expensive in SF. The only luxury is having a roof over your head.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#712

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

adrr wrote: post #693
omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both right. Property taxes can increase by up to 2% per year, and new owners frequently pay far more than old owners because property has appreciated significantly in coastal metros with limited space for new construction. This had been especially obvious because historically low interest rates have enabled a lot of asset appreciation, with real estate being one example. High real estate prices lead to high pr…

They do pay. Major developments get slapped with a mello-roos tax which leads to even larger disparity in taxes paid between long term resident and new residents. It’s huge, you could be paying $20k in taxes while the person down the street is paying $5k.

Mello Roos doesn't make the developer pay, they make the people in the special district pay. The developer gets to sell the units without any concern for what more people will do to local infrastructure.

I guess they could be $15k/year, but I've never seen an example that high. My mom lives in Yucca Valley and has two or three Mello Roos items (water district, local community college, and something else), and I think maybe pays about $600 total for them.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#713

Post by thih9 »

lwansbrough wrote: post #588
woah wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a massive windfall to people who have been homeowners for 40 years in California. High rents due to the fact that you're not allowed to build new housing, high property taxes paid by new residents, while old residents pay nothing, high income and sales taxes to paper over the gap in the budget left by the lack of property tax paid by longtime residents. The whole system has been optimized to milk as much mo…

If you don’t build luxury housing, affordable housing becomes luxury housing. San Francisco is a perfect example of NIMBY extremism and the damage it does to communities.

In case others are unfamiliar, NIMBY = "Not In My Back Yard", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY .

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#714

Post by blntechie »

fortran77 wrote: post #577
woah wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a massive windfall to people who have been homeowners for 40 years in California. High rents due to the fact that you're not allowed to build new housing, high property taxes paid by new residents, while old residents pay nothing, high income and sales taxes to paper over the gap in the budget left by the lack of property tax paid by longtime residents. The whole system has been optimized to milk as much mo…

> while old residents pay nothing This is patently false. Property taxes can and do raise 2%/year. California does need to build new housing.

It’s simply amazing how allowing to build 50 high rise condos would bring the entire bubble down but the CA (or most American) cities or the state won’t. It will obviously fail on the ballot due to NIMBYism but I’m not sure why would that even need to be on ballot.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#715

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

yxwvut wrote: post #439
beambot wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean abatements & subsidies required to push "clean" vehicle policies that are among the most aggressive in the world? Without Tesla & CA's policies, auto electrification would be at least a decade behind what it is today... Being at the forefront of environmental policy has real costs.

Perhaps the private beneficiaries of those subsidies should bear some responsibility for covering the costs?

No that should have been stated upfront. A deal is a deal.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#716

Post by muyuu »

dragonwriter wrote: post #710
muyuu wrote: post #705

Lots of denial in this thread. CA is the most negative State in net domestic migration and TX is second to FL only at the other end of the scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... CA is just terrible value for most people currently. I'm not American and neither is Musk, it's not like he's going to make such decision for ideological allegiances. He just gets better value for his money els…

> CA is the most negative State in net domestic migration Sure, but mostly that's actually good for the state economically since while there is net domestic outmigration, its more than made up for by international immigration, and the gross domestic outmigration is lower on the economic scale than the gross domestic inmigration.

not currently, no

international migration is shown in that like as well, in the bottom table

in any case it doesn't bode well for them economically as these immigrants are usually net welfare recipients

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#717

Post by gnopgnip »

jowday wrote: post #14

Isn't the actual listed location of residence more a formality for a billionaire like Musk? I presume he'll still rent residences in LA and the Bay Area considering he'll be back and forth for business related to Tesla and SpaceX. This seems like he's renting a place in Texas and making a big deal out of 'moving there' to make a point about California's regulatory environment.

It is more than just a formality. To no longer be considered a CA resident for tax purposes you need to abandon your CA domicile and establish a new one. The CA franchise tax board is more aggressive at pursuing taxes owed than most states. If you spend more than half of your nights in CA, it is very likely you will be a resident for tax purposes. Presumably he will hire experts and listen to their advice, and he sold all property in CA. But lots of people get caught trying to dodge these taxes unsuccessfully.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#719

Post by seppin »

Darmody wrote: post #425
chillwaves wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Democratic party is a center-right party. If you are further to the right of them, you are far-right.

I'm going to reply with a comment I made an hour ago. "The far-left managed to create an "amazing" (and terrifying) perspective. If you're a leftist but not as leftist as them, you're a centrist, maybe even center-right which makes everybody on the right to be automatically far-right."

Except for the fact that a mainstream democrat is a center-right politician anywhere else in the world. The "far-left" you reference doesn't exist outside Twitter and a small group of congresspeople, giving that small group an outsized image of power isn't very congruent with reality.

Re: Elon Musk moves to Texas

#720

Post by carleverett »

techsupporter wrote: post #220
S_A_P wrote: post #158

Pretty interesting to see this move makes people so salty. There does seem to be a trend of people fleeing California, I dont know enough about the situation out there to comment on whether or not its valid. I suspect something must be going on for several high profile folks moving out. And before you bash Texas, its not perfect. But its pretty diverse, and it seems that folks with opposing viewpoints can still coexi…

My birth certificate says "Texas" across the top and people have been "fleeing California" to Texas for as long as I've been alive. There's nothing special about Musk; he just happens to be high-profile about it and managed to extract more from California before decamping to a "cheap" state than several of those who came before him. I disagree with your assessment that Texas has wide acceptance for opposing viewpoint…

Fun anecdote:

A couple years ago I was at a bar in Marfa, Texas - a small art-centric town that gets a lot of tourism for things like it's fake Prada store (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prada_Marfa) - and overheard a few guys celebrating a birthday. They were all clearly gay, which isn't unusual in Marfa. I started talking with them and it turned out that one of them, who was black, had just bought a ranch a half hour north of Marfa outside the town of Fort Davis. Fort Davis also has a bit of a touristy feel with its exaggerated "old western town" look and because it's right outside Fort Davis State Park, but culturally it's no Marfa.

The fact that an openly gay black man felt comfortable buying farmland in a small Texas town was pretty awesome. I have a hard time believing that would've happened even 10 years ago. In fact, he might be the first.

I hope he still likes it there.

Post reply on HN