It’s one of the initiative’s ironies that business people, who opposed the measure in 1978, have become its biggest beneficiaries. In Los Angeles County, where a quarter of the state’s $4.38 trillion in assessed property value is located, commercial and apartment buildings represented 60 percent of the tax rolls in 1975, while single-family homes accounted for 40 percent. Today that ratio is almost reversed.
In the late 1970s, tax-strapped homeowners were the driving force behind Proposition 13. Jarvis led five attempts to gather enough signatures to put the measure on the statewide ballot and finally succeeded, over the objections of Democrat Jerry Brown, 73, the governor then and now.
In the year after the measure passed, property-levy collections dropped 52 percent to $4.9 billion from $10.3 billion, according to the Board of Equalization, the state’s tax administrator.
Shifting Tax Base
Proposition 13 “effectively shifted the financing of portions of local government services and education from the property-tax base to the more volatile income- and sales-tax bases,” Standard & Poor’s said in a Sept. 8 report.
