Someone has to pay the taxes. It is difficult to see a good argument that having been a landholder for a long time gives some sort of moral right to be supported by others.
I don't know what the answer is here; I see it as a tough policy challenge. There might very well not be a solution that's "fair" to everyone. If you think there's an easy "moral" solution and you can't think of decent arguments for both sides, I feel like you're only kidding yourself.
If you don't want to move then you can get a reverse mortgage and still profit, you just won't get to pass the house to your children. Still, you'll make way more from the property value increases than anything you would have paid in taxes and can pass those gains on to your children.
That is extremely presumptive. Your friends, family, and support infrastructure is all in the place you've been over the last 40 years.
Purchasing another home and moving to it have huge transactional costs.
It would have been completely reasonable to include plans for the reverse mortgage as part of your finical planning already: Americans often have a significant fraction of their net worth tied up in their homes. So that money may well be spoken for. It also may be just unavailable: The city's assessment of your home's value may not match with a lender's assessment.
Think of it this way, if I show up at your town council's office and offer to pay 2x the property taxes you currently pay, should I be able to bid you out of your home? If that wouldn't be ethical, why is it ethical to do it in a distributed way?
I think Prop13 is nuts, but the opposite idea of continually subjecting people's homes to volatile and unpredictable market price based taxes is also nuts.
"All because a bunch of people with more money than you are now willing to pay a bunch of money for your neighbors' places."
I think laws and policy should exactly be focused on protecting those who have less from the impact of those who have more. Not because they're morally superior or anything, but just to try to keep things balanced because the people with the money already enjoy so many other advantages.
Moving is hugely disruptive to people's life, so the ability to plan expenses - both for property tax and in terms of rent control - has a lot of non-financial appeal as a policy. "Make people move when folks with more cash want to come in" is at best a somewhat heartless position, and at worse a major driver of homelessness.
There isn't a solution that is fair, the major activity in the debate over California housing seems to be people turning themselves in knots to find solutions where long time residents enjoy a high-demand city without paying for its upkeep. The goal is for long time residents to reap rewards without doing anything - there is no fair way to do that. It drives inequality too. Rich people tend to own lots of land for long periods of time.
> ...the rest of the city forces you to "enjoy" higher taxes you never demanded [...] or wanted...
I do not hesitate in pointing out this part of your post applies to most taxpayers. I personally disagree with most of what my tax money is spent on, and distrust the people who spend it. That is why it is taxed from me.
We should go with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism - it is fairest over the long term. Moving homes is not so terrible that it has to be prevented at all costs.
Just because property values double doesn't mean the cost of pothole repair doubles?
The people with the greatest ability to pay are the ones getting the biggest tax break.
They don't necessarily have any ability to pay, which is the scenario that brought prop13 to life in the first place (low-income grandma kicked to the street by taxes).
Someone of modest income who bought a modest 100K house years ago isn't cash-flow rich today just because the paper value of their house went up. They are probably retired living on a small social security check and don't have much any ability to pay, let alone the "greatest ability".
It's fine to have different views on how society should handle this tricky scenario, but let's be intellectually honest with the core facts.
Not to mention that it's kind of a lot to force, idk, 80-year-olds to take out reverse mortgages just so they can keep living in homes they've already paid for and own. Though I guess it's not surprising if people half their age don't care about their burden.
It’s an easy policy challenge. Let the person carry the tax until a sale. Or they can carry it until death. It should not pass to kids and the tax assessment is taken at the final sale.
What the service costs depend on is how many houses are in an area, or how many people are in an area.
It's gotten so bad in SF that high housing prices actually are driving up the cost of services. Every worker from barista to bus driver has to be payed enough to afford living here or to commute in.
