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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> California real estate is such a tragedy, as huge portions of the population are suffering from a housing shortage caused almost exclusively by not building enough homes.

The real issue with CA real estate is prop 13. It directly disincentivizes selling your home as you would be paying significantly higher taxes on the same house (same value etc) somewhere else.

So if you do own a home, you’re much better off keeping it and renting it out rather than putting it on the market. The only thing stopping one from doing that is needing the home value itself as the down payment for their next residence. But even that can be avoided by getting a line of credit on your original house.

If you want to fix CA real estate, scrap prop 13, force granny to sell and move to the boonies (to avoid the massively ratcheted property tax she will now be paying), and you’ll have a massive supply of homes for sale.

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No amount of tax adjustments can fix not having enough homes for the population. Focusing on those is a red herring

> No amount of tax adjustments can fix not having enough homes for the population.

If you raise property taxes then people will leave because it’s not affordable. Not just leave their homes, they will leave CA. That will both lower demand and raise supply.

"We don't have to build enough homes for people if we just force the poorest people to leave the state"

Yikes

> "We don't have to build enough homes for people if we just force the poorest people to leave the state"

That’s literally what every other state with property taxes assessed on the current value of the home are doing. It’s why retirees move out of their larger homes when they no longer have children occupying the other bed rooms. It’s why you have actual turnover of housing to (generally younger) people that not only want to live there, but are gainfully employed and can afford to do so.

It’s not some evil scheme to evict granny. It’s efficient allocation of a finite resource.

It's a financially sensible, totally rational scheme to evict granny.

Why not just build more homes so she can live close to family?

Build where exactly when the entire neighborhood is already built out (probably double so with the ADU rule)?

Or should we tear down some grannies houses to build multi floor apartment buildings?

Prop 13 massively distorts the market and creates large disparities in what two neighbors may be paying. It essentially ensures that you cannot live where you were born, breaking up families and hurting communities.

> It essentially ensures that you cannot live where you were born, breaking up families and hurting communities.

Oh you can live where you were born if you never move out and eventually inherit your parents home. You just won’t be able to buy a place nearby (at least without some serious down payment assistance and two high paying jobs).

Do you have any hope that either what you are suggesting, or an increase in housing supply, will ever actually happen?

It's clearly interesting to speculate the ideal solution on the Internet, but after having been here 10+ years I worry that it's just never going to get better.

I wouldn’t even be interested in a house. Just give affordable cookie cutter apartments in a 50-floor building somewhere.

> The real issue with CA real estate is prop 13

I don't want to be forced out of my home because the neighbors paid too much for theirs raising my "property value" and tax assessment.

They paid too much? The invisible hand my friend...

"Just force people to move out of the region", what a great plan.

> If you want to fix CA real estate, scrap prop 13, force granny to sell and move to the boonies (to avoid the massively ratcheted property tax she will now be paying), and you’ll have a massive supply of homes for sale.

Sounds callous.

I would focus first on banning the use of homes as investment and permitting mixed-use, medium- to high- density construction (with something like 15 min city as a point of reference) before we reach for the big hammer and start coercing the poors out of their homes.

By "banning the use of homes as investment" I assume you mean renting them out.

You realize people live in those rental homes, correct?

Also, why is it desirable to force all renters to live in an apartment (assuming those are not banned, and people who are unwilling or unable to own their residence are not forced to wander the streets)?

Think systematically. Why are so many renting?

I was talking about private equity/institutional and foreign investors, specifically. An average young family cannot compete against them, especially in a housing shortage.

Don't hide behind the "freedom" defense. Being priced out of housing isn't freedom. Housing is a place to live and to build a life, not an investment.

Not being able to buy a SFH isn't being priced out of a place to live.

Home ownership is higher in the US than many other countries, and banning certain groups from participating in a sector will not increase supply.

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