The equities of where the burden should fall are debatable, but the fact that different people on the same street or city block end up paying vastly different amounts of tax for the local same services is not.
Something else to bear in mind is that when commercial property is owned by a corporation which is a wholly owned subsidiary of another (eg BigCorp owns Big Property LLC, whose sole asset is the Big Tower building), the corporation can be sold without triggering the tax reassessment (ie BiggerCorp buys Big Property LLC, which remains the titleholder of Big Tower). This hurts new companies just as much as new homebuyers; here's a 2003 press release from Shoerenstein co. grumbling about how they pay $16/sqft in downtown San Francisco while most of Disneyland is taxed at 5c/sqft although the land is worth about 7x more than that figure suggests.
Property taxes are reassessed periodically, but prop 13 limits increases in tax to 2%/year, so for those who hold real estate it takes 36 years for the tax to double in value even if the price of the land goes up much faster or inflation is high. Back in 79 stagflation was a pressing economic problem, so the net effect of Prop 13 was to reduce property taxes for existing homeowners - inflation was ~8% then, so a 2% tax increase cap meant your property tax was going down by 6% in real terms.
