On the Unfairness of California Proposition 13
nymag.com
nymag.com
The bigger problem is that prop 13 is structured in a way that screws up neighborhoods. On my street in Palo Alto is a widow in her 90s who can still afford to stay in her home, which I think is great. There's also an older couple in a different home who would like to move out of their largish/multistory home but couldn't afford to pay the rent or property taxes on a small one-bedroom. As a result there's only one family with kids on the block.
As for prop 58...well if you are the sort of person who considers inheritance at all legitimate I'm not sure you have grounds to complain.
Their property taxes (you can look them all up online) are about $1500/year. Mine are about $2K/month. The young couple across the street pay about $5K/month in property taxes alone.
Indeed they could sell at a large profit but probably their house is worth 2.5-3M; any small house would cost a lot too -- there isn't much choice so house prices are compressed. There's very little rental property -- my real estate friend thinks my house would rent out for at least $25K/month. It's a large house, but there was an apartment in the paper the other day that rents for significantly more!
They could move out of Palo Alto of course, but who wants to do that when you've lived here 40+ years? And the retirement place ("V") next to Stanford (neighbor is a retired Stanford prof) has a minimum buy in of something like $3M.