This may or may not be true, but that is the idea.
But I don't think it's fair to say that expensive housing, full stop, is a product of regulation.
There are desirably places to live that have housing that goes up at a good enough rate to be considered an investment. As long as there are people of sufficient means, some of them will add property to their portfolio of assets. A home that sits unused on prime real estate is, frankly, more of a drain on that community than $100,000 in cash sitting under a mattress going unused.
It's not perfect, and it IS a regulation, but penalizing people for hoovering up housing stock and then not using it, can benefit society.
What if someone’s on vacation or has mail being delivered there etc. or comes in once in a while or Airbnb’s it’s much harder to impliment I think than it sounds.
The real problem is we're not taxing these properties at the true value they could provide to society, so a massive market inefficiency exists.
You hint at the easier solution: repeal prop 14 and increase property taxes. A lot. Problem solved.
(If you want to be a bit more sophisticated, look into land value taxes.)
The real issue is that there is no central authority at the CA State or even Bay Area level planning growth holistically.
A company can hire 5,000 people tomorrow and they'll all just move here and look for a place to live, regardless of whether the city their employer is based in has any housing or not. That drives up rent. It creates the absurd traffic that we now get to enjoy every day of the week. It drives up the costs of goods and services.
Bay Area leadership and California leadership need to sit down and have a discussion with employers and cities about how to effectively and responsibly grow, and then move towards developing new infrastructure to support the plan that comes out of those discussions.
If the fact that allowing landlords race-based leasing won the vote isn't enough to convince you that direct democracy is a stupid idea I don't know what is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_...
But you do you.
If you're putting the place up on AirBnB more often than not, the unit is not your primary residence and shouldn't be afforded benefits as such. If the goal of a vacancy tax is to increase rental supply, AirBnB does pretty much the opposite.
In California, and most of the US, property assessments are done by elected officials on an annual basis. In California the rate of increase is severely capped, but you're free to apply for a reduction if the value of your property decreases. If you're legitimately on vacation (or whatever), apply for an exemption. It's not that complex.
