Actually, one of the years in my house in Texas I ended up taking the standard deduction because I could not get my total itemized deductions to exceed $5000. This was my first year, so I was only in the house for 7 months and property taxes weren’t due until the following year (in retrospect I should have paid the property taxes in December). The starting mortgage balance was $125,000.

Certainly this would never happen in CA given how much higher prices are; you’d definitely be paying tremedous amounts of interest here. But it was a real eye-opener for me at the time; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing after everything I had been told about the supposed “tax-advantage”. Even the following year, my itemized deductions weren’t significantly more than $5000.