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Comment by NtochkaNzvanova | Hacker News Reader

Then why do you think the tax-happy Democrats who control the legislature haven't repealed Prop 13 yet? After all, it is a relic of an era when anti-tax Republicans still had influence in California politics.

My theory is that if it were repealed, and people had to pay property tax on something approaching the actual current market value of their homes, home values would tank. Homeowners would then "lose" a significant fraction of their net worth, get pissed off, and immediately vote out anyone who had voted for the repeal.

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Every rational repeal proposal is a phase out with a few exceptions for seniors.

And the reason it hans't been phased out is that the state has significant issues with legislative process as well as economic management. i.e. passing constitutional amendments by popular vote instead of just regular laws which makes them borderline irreversible.

Propositions can’t be repealed, it would have to be put on the ballot, but doubt it will happen.

Few years ago there was a prop to strip prop 13 from commercial properties and fund schools. It was sponsored by the zuck foundation. Even that didn’t pass

Parent comment said "Repealing Prop 13 and removing local control of zoning decisions can be done via votes in the legislature". I don't know if that is true or not, I'm responding to that premise. Either one of you could help the discussion by providing a source backing up your conflicting claims.

Prop 13 is factually a CA Constitutional amendment, the reversal of which would require following the process to amend the state constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

https://www.dgs.ca.gov/Resources/SAM/TOC/6000/6920#:~:text=A....

Zoning control changes could (as far as I can tell) be done via legislative action alone (and probably fading some resulting lawsuits).

Local zoning decisions could probably be done given that they are not expressly enumerated in the California constitution today. Cities' current authority to do so is defined by Article XI Section 7, which just says "A county or city may make and enforce within its limits all local, police, sanitary, and other ordinances and regulations not in conflict with general laws.[1] ". Theoretically the state could just pass a general law that now conflicts with this and then localities have restrictions on zoning.

Prop 13 was passed in 1978 as a constitutional amendment, so the only way to repeal or reform that would be another amendment. The process for doing so via the legislature requires a two thirds supermajority in both houses, and then it goes to the ballot anyways. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Constitution#Amending_the...

They definitely cannot just repeal it outright, but they could give the housing marking a "soft landing" by just changing the max increase %. Let's say that we want to deal with the case of properties' real values being 5x the assessed tax value, assuming 0 future appreciation here's how long it would take for property taxes to catch up at 2%:

  log(5)/log(1.02) = 81 years

and at 8%:

  log(5)/log(1.08) = 21 years

Homeowner ownership rate in California is 43.5%. Change is possible.

Home owners vote at higher rates than renters.

they should split the state into regions (groups of counties) and put the repeal on a ballot at region granularity to see if the "fuck-you-I-got-mine" set would sink each other

There is no Constitutional provision for splitting the state based on counties for ballot propositions.

https://www.dgs.ca.gov/Resources/SAM/TOC/6000/6920

But the renters can still use their vote for change, no?

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