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Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

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Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#231

Post by newguy1234 »

scarface74 wrote: post #117
TulliusCicero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem with housing prices in California is that property taxes are too low. Prop 13 means existing homeowners are shielded from higher property taxes, so growing property values are only good for them, no matter how high. Thus, there's no incentive to increase housing supply, which could lower prices.

So if we want to tax illiquid assets and wealth instead of income, why stop at houses? Why not tax equity held in companies? Why don’t we tax employees based on the amount and value of equity they have in a company? Every time there is a new round of funding that increases the value of equity, impose a higher tax.

It is because of the unintended consequences if companies decide to relocate. You start with wanting to tax wealth and then suddenly you find your area in an unemployment crisis because the employers packed up and left.

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#232

Post by justinzollars »

ethbro wrote: post #104
justinzollars wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with housing in California is that we do not build it because regulations prohibit new housing. Look at a zoning map in San Francisco. Housing is illegal.

I believe the full reasoning is that (1) if property owners paid property taxes on the full market value of their property, then (2) they would lobby for (or at least cease opposition against) upzoning for density, and (3) more dense housing would be legalized and built.

It would be a lot less painful and a lot less expensive for us if we just increased the density. But people have to have their beautiful bay views.

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#233

Post by newguy1234 »

aphextron wrote: post #43
nthomas wrote: post #7

Welcome to the Lone Star State! Cheap real estate and friendly folks. And BBQ, metric tons of BBQ...

>"Cheap real estate" And the highest property tax rate in the nation.

That's all relative because there is no state income tax so if you are a high-income person then Texas is paradise, even with high property taxes. Also guess who makes all the executive decisions in terms of where to put the jobs? Executives aka rich people.

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#235

Post by dang »

cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #217
jimmaswell wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly if you're the right political party and orientation, I hear.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment was flamebait, but this comment is the bursting into flames that we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#236

Post by celdon25 »

jdavis703 wrote: post #199
blackflame wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When will the people of SF learn you cannot tax yourself to prosperity

The City & County of SF has the seventh highest median income of all U.S. counties [0]. The GDP of the Bay Area ranks ahead of all but 16 countries [1]. If taxes are correlated with prosperity it'd seem as though SF had found a way to tax itself to prosperity. (Of course in reality economics and tax policy are far more complicated than this). 0: https://bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/lapi/lapi_newsrelease.... 1: https…

Your argument assumes the correlation, but you're arguing that the causation exists without even establishing the correlation.

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#237

Post by pascalxus »

skybrian wrote: post #58

This is better both for San Francisco and Texas, from a load-balancing perspective. Unless housing can catch up, large companies shouldn't be expanding in San Francisco.

I agree. With the way thins are here, I'm often surprised we don't see more companies leaving SF.

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#238

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

dang wrote: post #235
cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment was flamebait, but this comment is the bursting into flames that we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough. You can delete my original post if you so wish.

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#239

Post by scarface74 »

petronio wrote: post #220
scarface74 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you can’t just “ship land” elsewhere. But, there is nothing stopping people and companies from moving where land is cheaper. The land is only valuable because people want to live in California instead of places where it cheaper. Its not just the supplier who is being “obstinate” the consumer is also refusing to look other places.

You have to remember that companies compete with others for human labor. If your company moves to a city nobody wants to move to, you'll lose labor resources to another company (in the case of SF companies, highly skilled labor that's not easily replaceable and has high training costs). While I also think companies should spread out more, the very fact that so many companies are paying the significantly inflated prop…

Do you really think that companies like Amazon, Google and Apple couldn’t move to any major metro area and convince enough people to move there if they paid them enough where they could offer potential employees enough to live well, pay then less and benefit from a much lower cost of living?

Anecdotally, I would never move from where I live - Atlanta - to the west coast. There is nothing appealing about the area or the cost of living vs salary. I’m not saying I wouldn’t move to another major metro area if the jobs somehow dried up here.

That limits my salary (not really the COL vs salary is very attractive to me here) except I’ve seen a few local jobs for MS pop up here and jobs at Amazon (AWS) for Solutions Architects, Professional Services, etc. that I may be interested in in a couple of years.

I could also argue that a lot of companies that think they need to hire “rockstar ninja developers” to write their yet another software as a service CRUD app are mistaken and if they had to actually worry about silly things like profits instead of being subsidized by venture capital they could find a way to either relocate to a cheaper area or allow more remote work.

Re: Schwab Leaves San Francisco for Texas

#240

Post by pascalxus »

gilbetron wrote: post #91
TulliusCicero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem with housing prices in California is that property taxes are too low. Prop 13 means existing homeowners are shielded from higher property taxes, so growing property values are only good for them, no matter how high. Thus, there's no incentive to increase housing supply, which could lower prices.

Whoa! Didn't even know about Prop 13 - that basically means no house can currently have a higher taxable value than basically double what it was worth in 1978. Insane!

It's worse than that. Those people with the very most equity gains, are paying the least taxes relative to their house value. Those with the least equity gain (like recent buyers), are paying the very highest taxes relative to their house. It's basically like saying the person who earned over 1 million dollars in equity gain pays far less taxes than the one who earned 10k in equity gain. It's extremely regressive.

And, since home owners are incentivized to stay in the houses that they bought a long time ago (whether or not it's convenient for them or not), it means there's far less housing turnover, less supply and less opportunities for everyone, and longer commutes which is terrible for the environment. It's a disaster.

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