[quote=no_such_reality]While I think long term ownership is more beneficial than long term renting for building financial stability and wealth, that’s not what we’re talking about in this thread.
This is about whether gutting prop thirteen for any non-primary residence and removing the ability to protect the tax basis in family transfers will be better or not for the majority.
The proposal will make it harder for people to buy, harder to move up, harder to save to buy because it will increase rents and push more to corporation run housing which will churn them.
The anti-13 crowd has a lot of wishful thinking on what they want, but no basic economic connection to what will happen in their proposal.[/quote]
NSR, your post above assumes that current landlords who are most benefiting from the existence of Props 13, 58 and 193 are somehow “benevolent” and thus renting their affected propertie(s) below market due to the generous property tax subsidy attached to them.
In the absence of rent control, nothing could be further from the truth. LL’s charge (and get) as much rent as their local market will bear (to still be able to retain longer-term tenants). I will repeat again here that the amount of their annual property tax has nothing to do with this.
The end result of these propositions is that one set of property owners is unjustly enriched over the set who is paying closer to market-rate property taxes, plain and simple. The “unjustly-enriched” set can also afford to be more selective on tenants because they can hold a vacancy longer due to much lesser carrying costs than the “market-rate set” has, since many (most?) of these properties have been in the same family for ~40 years and are likely now free and clear. The latest “owner” (child or grandchild) is no more “deserving” (than the “market-rate set” of owners) of a generous tax subsidy than they are. The child/grandchild owner was simply born to people who were not necessarily even well off themselves, educated or even contributed anything to their communities but owned (or inherited) CA property at the “right time” and often situated in the “right place.”
These props (esp the last 2) are a gross example of unjust enrichment to one group (consisting of many thousands of younger, able-bodied individuals of working age) to the detriment of all the “near market-rate taxpayers” and our state and local governments.
