Show HN: Bay Area property taxes

officialdata.org

7 points·typpo··5 comments

Hello HN, I scraped about 2 million property tax pages to create this map. It shows annual taxes paid on residential and commercial properties in 5 counties.

The reason why this map is interesting is because California has a unique property tax scheme created by Prop 13. A resident may be paying 2x-10x as much tax as their neighbor in an identical house, depending on when they bought. In extreme cases the difference can reach 100x. In the renters market, landlords may charge market rate rent but pay much less in property tax.

I wanted to see how common these disparities are and display them in a visual way.

The code is quite messy, but it's available here: https://github.com/typpo/ca-property-tax

This is not unique to California and happens in other places. If you have taxes based on valuation, retired senior citizens or low income workers that live in a neighborhood will be forced to move if prices go up. So by keeping tax low, they can stay there. Of course it has it's disadvantage, you could be paying so many multiple as another and the person will claim to have more rights than you because they have lived there much longer or as you mentioned, they can afford to rent out and make more profit. Do you have any solution you recommend?

I just looked at the map and that's quite depressing. I wish I could do the same for my city. I need to find source of data.

This is a good visual representation of why Texans hope all the Californians moving there don't bring their political beliefs with them.

This is pretty amazing. I just plugged in my address in San Francisco and I learned I am paying 5-10x the property taxes of basically all of my neighbors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com