201–210 of 272 posts
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If someone buys my neighbor’s house for 2X what I paid for mine, why should I pay more in taxes ?
because property tax is based on the value of the property, and your property is worth more too? a different way of phrasing the question: is it fair that your new neighbor pays twice as much as you to support city services, just because they bought their place more recently?
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Why would people want to live in relative expensive housing if there are no jobs in the city for them? Converted apartments are not going to be "affordable" (by say the likes of students, and people just out of college not in finance or tech. Once the white collar workers leave, there is less demand for service workers to live there. Sure maybe some salaried workers like in emergency services and policing might choos…
Housing remains expensive only if too many people want to live there. If the demand goes down, housing costs must eventually go down as well. Once the balance between supply and demand is similar, urban living should be cheaper than suburban living, because urban areas need less infrastructure for each resident.
For expensive housing you need both demand and lack of ability to create new housing.
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Name an unsustainable social policy to end
Corrupt DPW that accomplishes fuck-all, for one. Subsidizing car ownership and driving in general. Rent control is arguably unsustainable as well. Don’t forget paying people to be homeless and shoot up in the BART station. Allowing people to get on BART without paying. Anyone else who has lived in the area could probably think of half a dozen more.
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I mean if people can defer taxes until they die you’re not increasing turnover at all.
There's value to generational continuity, though--again, particularly for marginalized communities. One of the ways gentrification makes its way in is during these kinds of estate liquidations. I think it's reasonable to assert that there's value in not fracturing those communities any more than is necessary.
Honestly I have trouble summoning up much pity for people whose face a property tax burden because their homes have doubled or tripled in value.
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If the poll routinely says 40% will leave and only 6.7% do when a pandemic makes the benefits of being here moot for 2 years, you should throw the poll out the window. What's more, labor force data shows most of those have returned. What is your agenda? Why do you people care so much? I'm well aware of the city's problems but there's no nuance in these discussions and it's tiring. I'm happy we'll have a new DA and ho…
There's no _actual_ mental health help in this system. We just have prisons and quasi-prisons that drug their inmates and bill their insurance. Short of that, the healthiest thing we can do for people is to connect them with support, only move them from situations they want to be removed from, and otherwise let them continue to live their current lives.
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> BART says that fare evaders are costing the agency as much as $25 million a year https://www.kron4.com/news/thousands-cited-for-evading-bart-... To say that it’s the least important problem ignores a pretty wide swath of ostensibly less significant problems (cigarette misuse near buildings, litter, speeding, unlicensed drivers, unlicensed panhandlers, take your pick). I’m going to need a citation on that claim.
BART collected half a billion dollars in fares in 2019 so again, it has way higher compliance with the user fee scheme than other competing services like street parking and bridge tolls and vehicle license fees.
The real solution to take the edge of these sort of impacts is some kind of regional 'Bay Area' or 'NorCal' planning and funding, somewhere between the state and the cities. America is a little unique in the developed world for lacking decision bodies at this level as well as having very local ('city' based) taxation decisions [n.b. I generally think this is good].
They've been at it for a while now, and the main result has been intentionally crippling the road system at great expense (without fixing public transit). So, I'm not convinced allowing a regional authority more power to sabotage transportation networks is a good idea.
There are also mandates to add affordable housing, but those are either ignored or lead to boondoggles. (Construction is ridiculously overpriced in California. They may as well be mandating affordable dollar bills.)
One way to fix it would be to streamline permitting, etc for new housing (they did this for ADUs, but that's explicitly limited to housing that's inappropriate for families).
Typical permitting delays in south bay are something like 3 years for new construction (enjoy those double mortgage payments!), and nonsensical requirements add at least 50% to construction costs on top of that.
This could be solved in a few months by Sacramento outlawing such practices, then closing and replacing any non-compliant planning departments.
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Prop 13 is one of the legs of the stool of most dysfunction in California. Some of these are gonna spark controversy but term limits, the recall and ease of passing propositions are some of the other ones. The legislature is no longer professional enough to govern, so the people do it at the ballot box, at the behest of whom ever has the most money to spend. The fact that California is a single party state because of…
Per-student spending in most California counties is comparable to that of Alabama and Mississippi: https://flowingdata.com/2016/04/21/school-district-spending-... Money can't fix everything but spending 33% below the median probably is a sign of underinvestment.
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Genuine question: How much of this caused Prop 13? We bought a home in the Bay Area a few years ago. We considered the pros/cons of moving out of state and one pro of staying here was Prop 13 in California. We plan to retire in this home and figured Prop 13 will help make our post-retirement living expenses negligible. I only recently had the realization that Prop 13 could cause some serious problems like cities bein…
Prop 13 ensures that once you’ve bought in you feel no more pain from the housing crisis, and thus most Californian voters would have to vote against their own individual self-interest to do anything positive on housing, which just won’t happen. By contrast, in Texas there is no income tax but high property tax, and as prices have shot up recently most homeowners have reason to be worried about it and to vote to take…
When housing drops 10% in a year, my property tax bill, like most people who bought a few years go, goes up 2%.
Yes, my property tax bill also goes up 2% when property value jump 10%. But, the cost of govt services didn't jump 10% that year, so why should property tax go up that much?
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Prop 13 is one of the legs of the stool of most dysfunction in California. Some of these are gonna spark controversy but term limits, the recall and ease of passing propositions are some of the other ones. The legislature is no longer professional enough to govern, so the people do it at the ballot box, at the behest of whom ever has the most money to spend. The fact that California is a single party state because of…
> Prop 13 is one of the legs of the stool of most dysfunction in California. Are Prop 13 benefits for businesses still in place ? That would be a good start - if the company is sold all its underlying California holdings get re- appraised