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Comment by Leherenn | Hacker News Reader

Is property taxes control (similar to rent control) a thing? It seems it would avoid some of the issues of rent control (lack of maintenance for instance), since they actually own and live in the house, so they have an incentive to keep it nice.

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That's what California's Prop 13 is. It works as originally intended to prevent people being priced out by rapidly rising property taxes but has other, necessarily linked negative effects. Lots of reading and analysis available by googling California Prop 13.

Those negative effects were not necessarily linked. Prop 13 was written by a lobbyist for commercial landlords, and corporations have always benefited the most from it.

https://www.pbs.org/video/the-first-angry-man-lnpy07/

There are other ways to provide relief for rising property taxes. For example, Washington has a property tax deferral program, so seniors don’t have to pay the increased property tax until they or their heirs sell the house; the capital gains that increased the property tax will pay for the deferred property tax.

That's interesting. It seems like it runs the risk of making a long-held house extremely hard (or money-losing) to sell. If a $1M property has $900K in deferred property taxes against it (which would be possible to accrue in a 50+-year timespan). That house would never get sold, because the holding costs are based on 1970's tax rates (maybe with some annual escalator), so I can hold a $1M house for $5K/year and keep adding $20K/yr to the deferred balance or I can give up the house and put $60K in a real estate agent's pocket, $900K in the city's pocket, and $40K in my own pocket. I'm never doing that.

Texas has a limit of I believe a 10% increase in tax assessment per year, so this prevents the worst outcomes but only slows down the rest. If you think of property tax as crudely analogous to rent (from a budget perspective), most families would not be able to endure 10% rising rent every year for an extended period. Yet this future sure seems to be baked into the market here in Austin right now.

As a sibling comment mentions, California Prop 13 is property-tax control, and it did solve the issue where astronomical increases in property taxes ran families out of their homes. But the side effects and unintended consequences are terrible.

It is hard to tell the poison from the cure with these things.

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