451–460 of 691 posts
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If you don't want to pay property tax then just rent. Texas rent is nowhere near CA
As a renter, you're paying 100% of your landlord's property taxes.
The idea that property tax is passed down to renters 1:1 is just something you made up.
The concept you need to look into is called tax incidence: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/uploadedFiles/cpr/efap/Notes%20o...
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> High earners pay an effective tax rate of > 50% How so? I put a salary of $300k in SF here, and came up with 38%: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#c0piT... . Obviously Fremont workers do not need to live in SF.
I payed >50% for two years but I was above 400k. Honestly, coming from a third world country where I got taxed more and having had to work in Austin and Atlanta before on previous jobs, taxes are the least of my complains for California. Yeah they should fix property taxes... but my main complaint is that even though all politicians like speaking a mouthful about helping the poor and how broken healthcare is, every s…
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To clarify a bit: The monthly cost of renting a house is way higher in California, not because it costs more to rent the house, but because it costs more to rent the land the house sits on. Property tax taxes two things -- the house, and the land. The portion of the tax that taxes the land is capitalized into the selling/renting price of the land, which is to say that causes it to cost less to buy the land and less t…
This doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that adding a cost (taxes) makes the total cost lower. The opposite is true. If you live in California and rent, there is no reason to expect that raising property taxes would make rent go down. Any portion of any cost structure can be passed to any participant in a transaction. All dollars are completely fungible. There is no reason to expect that additional land taxes would no…
When you tax land however, something different happens: underdeveloped land becomes a bad investment. If the taxes are the same on a single family house and a small apartment building, you're losing out on a sizable amount of money by not building the apartments (and the folks hodling vacant land are really losing out). So essentially the idea is that land taxes encourage landowners to extract as much value as they can from the land (and punish those who don't). In the Bay Area this most likely means building more housing, increasing competition, and driving down rents.
Of course, this is assuming that housing is legal to build in the Bay area, so this is most likely unrealistic
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I feel for everyone as the prices are getting stupid everywhere.... BUTTTT I just looked on Redfin - I could buy a 3300 square foot house in Austin for under $900k with a huge pool and that was a 5 second search. No offense all you Austin folk, but you literally have no clue.
I'd be careful about directly comparing prices, real estate taxes (by rate) in Texas are significantly higher than in California. They might be overall lower given that the real estate prices are cheaper, but Texas is #6 in the country for real estate taxes while California is #34[1]. [1] https://taxfoundation.org/high-state-property-taxes-2021/
My mom has a million dollar home in California and pays around 1.5k/year in property taxes because she's owned it since the 70s.
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I think the exodus from California to Texas is overblown. The choice is between Earn above average salary and enjoy good weather, politics, and outdoors. Earn a median salary and enjoy okay weather and lower taxes.
To back this up, CA and TX tax people differently, but CA is more fair: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/11/taxes-are-sur... By More fair, I mean, CA has a similar tax rate across incomes, but does place more burden on top earners than TX does. TX on the other hand, is unfairly taxing people more at lower incomes, and less for people at higher incomes. TX policies don't align with my moral beliefs–I would…
WA at least doesn't have a prop 13.
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As someone who just bought a house in Austin this year, if the reason is "affordable housing", they're in for a world of hurt.
It's not even close - a crappy house on the peninsula is 1.7M, with the median closer to 2.5-3M. I mean, look at this: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom... I think Austin is better about building too, meanwhile in the Bay Area they just rejected units desperately needed in the tenderloin because they might become a "tech dorm".
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I don't think we really need to localize this conversation as nowhere can economically manage a large exodus of people from California's 40,000,000 population. The only thing to remember is that Californians can afford the new area's current housing prices and a decade's worth of price increases.
There is no "large exodus" of people moving out of California. The number of people moving from San Francisco to Austin in a year is something like 240 households. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...
California's tax regime is really backward. I suspect Tesla's departure is just the tip of the iceberg and that the repeal of the SALT deduction in 2017 really hastened this trend. High earners pay an effective tax rate of > 50%. They are partially picking up the slack from Prop 13, which artificially distorts the housing market by allowing longtime homeowners to pay property taxes based on decades-old assessed value…
Resource driven economies like Texas can maintain a low income tax by deriving most of their tax revenue from property taxes and taxing oil and gas revenues. IMHO the high income tax regime found in California is actually a function of high density, high income, knowledge based earners moving in. If enough of them arrive, demands for services (schools, fire, police) and infrastructure (i.e. light rail, etc.) will inc…
California's tax regime is really backward. I suspect Tesla's departure is just the tip of the iceberg and that the repeal of the SALT deduction in 2017 really hastened this trend. High earners pay an effective tax rate of > 50%. They are partially picking up the slack from Prop 13, which artificially distorts the housing market by allowing longtime homeowners to pay property taxes based on decades-old assessed value…
The exodus has been soundly proven to be a myth. [1] But assuming it isn't, there aren't many better places to go. Texas is a joke. Traffic is worse than LA in the major cities and it is run by Christian zealots. Yeah maybe you pay fewer taxes but the other quality-of-life tradeoffs aren't worth it. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/California-exodus-is-ju...
Washington state is a good alternative. It has all of California’s grievance politics and collectivism but with none of the tax burden.
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Resource driven economies like Texas can maintain a low income tax by deriving most of their tax revenue from property taxes and taxing oil and gas revenues. IMHO the high income tax regime found in California is actually a function of high density, high income, knowledge based earners moving in. If enough of them arrive, demands for services (schools, fire, police) and infrastructure (i.e. light rail, etc.) will inc…
California actually spends less per student on education than even many poor states. For all their virtue signaling about public transport, CA don't even have universal school bus service (which is table-stake in most states). Most parents drive individually and drop kids! Just compare the building/facilities of any top bay area public school with that of Texas. The former look like shack while the latter look like m…
Palo Alto High School is literally a mini university. Just do a google image search. You can't tell it apart from Stanford.