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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

>you don't want old people on fixed income forced to sell their homes because property values are going up rapidly

Why not? Regular turnover is healthy for both markets and neighborhoods. These beneficiaries of rapidly appreciated properties could sell their home to a new family, and take their profits to downsize to more age-appropriate housing.

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This line of thinking makes me fearful for the future.

Exactly. When old people have no incentive to move out of their giant homes, there's less housing for young families, less reason to build senior housing, and home prices soar.

They do have incentives, though. Maintenance costs are higher on larger houses and tend to increase with the age of a structure. You have to clean out all those extra bedrooms that are never used or end up with a bunch of cobwebs everywhere. That second story becomes much less practical when your knees start to go.

If you want more housing, the solution is just... build more housing.

Why not build more giant homes instead of taking from others ?

We have run out of land where people want to live.

Despite being the largest state there's not a ton of room in the biggest metro areas for new housing - people are already packed like sardines between foothills, and going up into them is just begging for destruction due to wildfire.

That is just not true at all - plenty of opportunities to build up denser

And lots of land outside metro areas - that’s how cities become metros, people buy on the outskirts then they’re in the metro area connected by transit

Well they always have that option. Prop 13 is about not forcing them out.

Lol "age-appropriate housing". We used to force people to live in "appropriate housing" determined by the gov't all the time. That didn't work out too well.

Old people with no family using up 5 bedroom houses is wasteful. They should be allowed to of course, but we shouldn't be subsidizing it as prop 13 does.

But thats the neat part, you can move somewhere prop 13 doesn't exist.

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