The main difference I see between Illinois and CA/NY is that the cost of housing is MUCH more reasonable so that the overall cost of living in the area is MUCH more reasonable.
It's not more reasonable when you consider the property taxes. A $350,000 house looks great until you factor in $10,000 annual property taxes.
Even when taking property taxes into account it is. look up how much comparable homes to that 350k home in illinois are in NY/CA and how much their property taxes are in addition to that significantly higher home prices.
So you want to create a upper middle class transient population that is mostly tech workers? Because if prop 13 is repealed..after 15-20 years of work, the retired tech employees can’t afford annual increase in taxes either. Or is this just to get seniors to leave Bay Area by making it unaffordable for them?
That’s not really true. Market values are based on total cost of ownership, and higher taxes reduce the value or value growth. Your taxes go up, but so does your debt service. I live in a secondary market of a very high tax state (NY). My effective property tax rate is about 1.8%, almost double what you see in NYC. But... my housing value is much lower. My home in NYC would be well over $1.5M, and is a fraction of th…
Farmers pay a different kind of tax.
If people 13 is repealed, older people will have to move because they can’t pay their taxes on their fixed retirement incomes.
The "boom" is relative to all of 2000s. Look at the number of permits in 2015 [1], especially in the outer boroughs. My argument, as someone who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, is that building new housing doesn't really drive the prices down. I have a lot of friends who had to move or shut down their small businesses because of the rising costs. [1]( https://www.buildingcongress.com/advocacy-and-reports/report... )…
"building new housing doesn't really drive the prices down" there is a lot of empirical evidence against this claim, and almost no evidence for it. Rising costs in cities are due to a few factors: (1) lack of new housing, (2) changing economic conditions in which high paying jobs are moving from the suburbs to the cities (to be fair, there is a small factor in very few cities of super rich people buying housing and n…
I love cities, think they are great, and live in the Bay Area myself. I don't know how old you are, but much of the flight to suburbs was due to the building of freeways and the fear of nuclear attack on cities. Younger people did not grow up with bomb shelters and duck and cover drills at schools, so living in a big city is not something they fear. If we have a nuke or two blow up a few cities today, there might be flight out of the cities once again. I sure hope that doesn't happen.
Being priced out of one's home is a red herring that the low tax zealots want you to believe to keep prop 13 in place. Somehow in the 49 other states that don't have Prop 13, people aren't priced out of their homes from taxes. There are other options. There are home equity lines, reverse mortgages, or even freezing tax payments and adding them as liens on the property at time of transfer. But even if you're worried a…
>Somehow in the 49 other states that don't have Prop 13, people aren't priced out of their homes from taxes. Allow me to introduce you to the great state of New Jersey. People here are absolutely priced out because of the property taxes, especially older retired couples and low earners who may have a house but hit hard financial times. A $400k house will probably have property taxes over $10k.
Taxation is tyranny. I have difficulty understanding the motivations of a working class that is demanding more taxation.
So you want to create a upper middle class transient population that is mostly tech workers? Because if prop 13 is repealed..after 15-20 years of work, the retired tech employees can’t afford annual increase in taxes either. Or is this just to get seniors to leave Bay Area by making it unaffordable for them?
Being priced out of one's home is a red herring that the low tax zealots want you to believe to keep prop 13 in place. Somehow in the 49 other states that don't have Prop 13, people aren't priced out of their homes from taxes. There are other options. There are home equity lines, reverse mortgages, or even freezing tax payments and adding them as liens on the property at time of transfer. But even if you're worried a…
Is it helpful to label older home owners who invested earlier as ‘zealots’?
Agreed but one of the major reasons why residents are opposed to building/zoning residential IS a natural result of Prop 13. It's impressive how much of the past/current problems California is facing can be traced back to Prop 13.
Agreed but one of the major reasons why residents are opposed to building/zoning residential IS a natural result of Prop 13. I live in Seattle, where the attitudes of residents and attitude to building are similar, but we have no Prop 13. How is it possible?
Most variations of NIMBY-ism arise from a desire to preserve the status quo. That's exactly the kind of rationale that went into enacting Prop 13. The more valuable the status quo is, the more people will fight to maintain it.
Even if there is a bright future ahead, people will limit change. This is in large part because the benefits and costs of change are not uniformly distributed, and when people have a valuable status quo, change represents significant risk.
I don't think it's fair to assume without evidence that existing homeowner are "crotchety neighbors". It's quite possible that they have legitimate concerns that, and would support new construction if their concerns were addressed.
I've been to plenty of neighborhood meetings. The "issue" most of the time is a personal anxiety over change. Why should society cater to that?
I don't necessarily disagree with you; however, strictly for sake of argument, a couple of potential reasons:
- Providing a sense of security strikes me as a core role of society.
- People who are afraid tend to be willing to resort to draconian measures like NIMBYism to protect themselves.
- Anxiety that things could change so much that one is unable to follow their chosen way of life strikes me as a reasonable fear.
Actually one of the things I miss the most in the Bay Area is conservatives. I don't know a single one that's out of the closet! To me, that's really really broken. I'd love to live somewhere "purple", where people of all opinions coexist peacefully. Do places like that still exist?
I worked one day a week in an office in San Jose and a guy wore his MAGA hat to work the day after Trump won in 2016, he got about 25% of the vote in Santa Clara county so plenty of them here. There are also a few Trump emblazoned trucks/houses if you happen to spend much time in rural areas outside of San Jose/San Francisco. Also, my local little town newspaper had a front page story about a couple that were GOP supporters that went to the Trump inauguration.
FYI - Austin is as blue as they come (and way less of the neoliberalism you see in SV). Houston from what I can tell has become much more liberal too (partly because a large influx of Katrina refugees). Hot take - with all of the migration to Texas, this state will be blue in the next 10 years. The only "conservative" things you find in those areas is (1) big trucks (2) guns (3) tobacco (4) sports. Not much different…
My takeaway from a visit to Austin a few years ago: "Everything seems so liberal, except for all of these massive pickup trucks that keep trying to run me over!"