The tax discrimination is ridiculous. You are forcing future families away from living in the city which means less, students, and less per student funding – this is why schools are shrinking.

Existing homeowners will rent out rooms or buy additonal property to leverage their cheap tax situation and basically become landlords (probably mostly illegal).
New homeowners are forced to rent out rooms to just make homeownership poosible (also illegally)

So we just overcrowd our city without investing in the necessary infrastructure to support it. We simply encourage behavior that continues to milk the system rather than investing in the community we call home.

Meanwhile, this puts stress on public resources as single family homes are shadow apartments.

I’m sorry to have to say this but just because you have lived here a long time doesn’t entitle you to stay if you can’t afford it. Realize some of the gain in your net worth and move somewhere affordable. Make a rentable space to cover your costs.

jennifer,

i sent a note to arnold about this. let’s see what he or his office has to say.

just b/c the state gets more tax money does not mean that they will use it wisely-in fact they have proven the opposite.

I just got my in-laws to check out Santa Clara County, where they live. There, it began at 50-50 in 1978 and has dropped to 68-32 … even with all that new development in the Silicon Valley. (Heck, it was ORCHARDS when I worked for Apple in the ’80′s!)

Incidentally, I meant San Mateo had fallen to 60-40, not 60-50, by 2003. Though, since Santa Clara has fallen another 5 since then, no reason to think San Mateo isn’t down to 35 … by now.

Anyhow, PLEASE take a look at your county’s number … and if you care about kids, the elderly, the poor … WRITE your state reps. THANKS!!!!

In 1978, the year Prop 13 passed and the market-based rates froze, single-family homeowners paid 40% of all property tax, while commercial/industrial/etc. paid 60%. Now, the proportions are reversed. We, the homeowners — even with retirees paying less than the newbie next door — are paying 60% of 30B, while businesses and landlords are paying 40%. Do the math — if our $18B represented 40% of the pie, the whole pie would be $45B … and they’d be paying $27B … instead of $12B.

Wow.

Why don’t politicians talk about this? Because it’s political suicide. The Jarvis PAC goes after them with double full-page ads. Who’s paying for those ads? We are — with the $15B that commercial interests have quietly pocketed.

How can they do this? Property is not revalued until it’s sold under Prop 13. And every clever commercial property holder has carefully ensured that this property is held by a company/partnership/etc. that can be sold … without the underlying property technically changing hands!

Still with me? Email the SF County assessor’s office and ask what the deal is in San Francisco County — do the math for yourself. I did it for San Mateo County (where I live) and discovered that we’re “lucky” — due to all the new building, our percentages only went from 50-50 to 60-50 … leaving landlords and businesses a mere $200M richer in our neck of the woods … Or more, since the new stuff is just covering up for the old … for a while.

Anyway, the fight shouldn’t be between retirees and new prop owners. It should be all of us asking why commercial property can’t be brought up to market value if it hasn’t been through an arm’s-length transaction every 25 years. The small, retired landlords who are sure to bleat could be allowed to defer their increased tax — with a lien created against their property when it does change hands for the deferred tax at a reasonable rate of interest.

Done. Fairness. Prop 13 intact for the folks it was supposed to protect — elderly homeowners. California budget balanced. Schools funded enough to maintain our status as 45th out of 50 instead of dropping to last.

Any chance that we, the people, have more political will than the politicians?