In Defense of Prop 13

Scott reposts commenter Mariana:

I genuinely don’t want you to take this personally. When you or someone over on Slow Boring starts speculating about how I, a young boomer, should be forced out of my nice house that I bought with my own money, it truly makes me want to get a gun and shoot you. Scott, I’m not going to do that, so please don’t ban me. I’m explaining how murderously angry it makes me feel. So every other age group gets to have whatever goods and services are available at a market rate, but old people have to move to shitty apartments because we’re worth so much less than young people?

I will take every legal means at my disposal to prevent you from doing this. I will block you in the courts, I will vote for evil totalitarian bastards if they support my property rights, I will seriously do anything to keep you from patting me on the head and telling me to move on because I suddenly don’t have a right to my own house, because some younger person suddenly wants it.

And replies:

Several people made something like this argument, but I think it’s based on a (understandable) misunderstanding.

The policy that most people in James’ camp are proposing is to repeal California Proposition 13 (or other jurisdictions’ local variants) which lock property taxes to the value of a house when it was bought (rather than the value now). This benefits old people, who might have bought their houses 30 years ago when prices were much lower. Repealing it, and making everyone pay property taxes based on the current price of their house, would incentivize (in some cases, force) old people to move to cheaper houses.

If you treat the Proposition 13 regime as natural, then this is an attack on old people’s rights. But Proposition 13 was only passed in 1978, and plenty of states have no local equivalent. If you treat the pre-13 state of affairs as natural, then 13 is an attack on young people’s rights, and repealing it merely restores the proper fair state of the universe. This is another of those marked vs. unmarked things.

I agree that a lot of the talk around this sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent, but nobody has the right to artificially-depressed property taxes.

As he notes elsewhere, Scott is conflicted about Prop 13, so these paragraphs should be treated as an exercise in "steelmanning".

Full disclosure: I support Prop 13 without reservation, or if you prefer, I would support it were I a Californian; my jurisdiction has nothing like it. My support isn't just because I'm an older Gen-X with above-average real-estate holdings (though I am surely that, too); I liked the idea of Prop 13 when I first heard about it in the 1980s. I was in my libertarian phase back then and favorably disposed towards other pro-housing policies like upzoning.

The part of this discussion that "sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent" is that very few among Scott's commenters are claiming that California government needs more money for essential services. The framing is that biasing taxes in favor of long-time residents is distorting the distribution of housing resources; the subtext is: you have a house I want, so I will use tax policy to take it from you.

It's a very weird position for a Progressive. To the extent that new residents can afford the inflated house prices to begin with, they will on average be more wealthy. To the extent that they are working age, they have higher incomes on average than those past working age. So Prop 13 is net-effect shifting taxes to more wealthy residents away from less wealthy residents.

Generally, my preferred was of dealing with high housing prices is to lower demand by 50M immigrants. Get back to me after we've tried that.