Yeah prop 13 exists for a reason, and it's still a very good reason in 2025.

You play by all the rules, pay taxes and mortgage for decades and then the government seizes your home at age 75 because some arbirtary website like zillow posts a very large number associated your address?

I'm sure there are ways to rationalize taxes for local services without taking away retirees homes. But without prop 13 you literally could not plan for your financial future (other than planning to move to to Reno).

This is one of the reasons that I'm like "Eff Dave Ramsey" on paying off the house early... there's only two entities who can ever actually "own" your house, and you are not one them. They'll just let you live there as long as you keep paying your "rent" (mortgage & property tax).

The way to deal with prop 13 is when grandma sells her house or dies. The tax man collects all the latent property taxes that were never (under) paid upon sale or inheritance. This would help moderate the price of homes (surely), would enable grandma to not get kicked out of her house, but would also prevent the forever-arbitrage situation that we have now, wherein people are collecting massive premiums on a property tax bill that has not been paid. It's one of the main things slowing me down from moving there: I don't want to pay someone else's tax bill from 1985.

I get the original intent of prop 13, but it's now having crazy knock-on effects and unanticipated consequences. It has turned CA into a real-estate cartel, and it's become a modern feudal state.

sounds like a tough problem to pay taxes based on the size of your asset. i guess the “too bad, you should plan better” approach only applies to those born after existing homeowners.


instead, you take advantage of low tax rates on the backs of younger people while enjoying immense real estate wealth.

at first glance, i could get behind this.

I believe Oregon and I’m sure other states do this. Not bad but again there is downside. There would need to be some sort of transition phase. Not just make all houses equal tax burden based on value tomorrow. Removing the ability to pass along the tax burden to heirs would be a good place to start imo. That already happened with all but primary residence years ago.

It’s not based on age. At all. I thought the example I provided might help you understand this.

is this where we pretend that there is no correlation with age and home ownership, as if the natural cycle of a finite life doesn’t exist? there will always be exceptions, but in general, people born later will buy their first home later.

and at the same time pretend people born later are making the same $. I get today’s current snapshot home values in ca have outpaced wage gains. But that was not true at all in 2008-2015ish.

have you ever heard the phrase, “the exception that proves the rule?”

the fact that there was a short period in a down market in which wages weren’t outpaced by housing costs doesn’t negate the fact that since prop13, there’s been an insane divergence of wages and housing cost.

it sounds like you believe the high cost of housing in ca is solely due to prop 13? I’m not sure that’s necessarily the case. It’s a factor for sure but there’s other factors such as finite land on the coast, higher paying tech, biomedical, defense, film, music, ect…
This is true in the northeast as well and they don’t have a prop 13. I’m fairly confident that if prop 13 went away tomorrow and we kicked all the retirees to Reno it wouldn’t lower prices much. Maybe initially but in a short time they would be right back to higher than most states.