What poverty--she owns a house worth $500k.
I think deferral schemes where certain individuals can pay taxes upon sale of the home (with fair interest) should be fine to avoid forcing anyone into a reverse mortgage.
If it's not, then I would also like to live in a nice neighborhood for $100k and zero property tax, please.
On the other hand, if it is, then this person has a substantial economic asset that she could reverse mortgage, rent out, or sell.
Firstly, if housing wasn't treated as this appreciating asset to invest in (and NIMBY around), this wouldn't be a problem to begin with. So you can argue a part of this is the consequence of a generation's actions.
But in the context of a "single family" home, it's a question worth asking. Should an old couple who's long since had their children move out (and likely have their on children) still be able to sit on the property of a 3-4 bedroom household? Or should there be incentives for them to want to size down their house and free it up for next generation's families?
The population decline will already answer this question for us sooner than expected, but it's an interesting question to ponder on.
Especially not when you're getting older, have limited ability to manage a move for yourself, built a life and raised your kids in the building, and would have to consider unloading a lifetime's worth of objects and/or moving infeasibly far away from your friends and community to get into a living situation that's more financially tenable.
> Especially not when you're getting older
Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Why are we replaying the dishonest “think of the retirees” now? It was bullshit in California in 1978 to sell Prop 13, and its even bigger (and more transparent) bullshit now when, especially when it is used to sell the same basic idea.
And where would she move to? All decent areas probably also increased in price, her property went up 10x in value but so did all other properties she would contemplate to buy. That’s the fallacy of thinking property is wealth when talking about your only residence.
What a morally bankrupt viewpoint.
"And where would she move to?" -- Either the graveyard or the incinerator? She's dead... the bill doesn't come due until after her death and is settled from the value of the house.
Claiming that the retiree has a right to both the home value and the ability to live there is the friction point. It reads as hollow in the face of rising homelessness and the inability for young people and families to access housing.
> Houses are wealth. And the wealth in them can be accessed while retaining use of the house. Especially when you are getting older.
Simple example. I bought the house at $100k. It's now worth $500k. That means I owe $20k/yr in taxes, but it also means I have $400k of additional wealth. A bank will lend me money with that wealth as collateral. If you imagine that the interest on the loan is roughly equivalent to the rate of appreciation of the property going forward, that's 20 years of taxes paid for by the increase in home value. Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone!
I think if we had a totally different culture, with multigenerational families living in the same house, then this might work better. But this model where we build new family friendly neighborhoods with parks and schools, and then nearly everyone ages in place and all the family amenities become empty over time, and the families all end up in the next new neighborhood and then it repeats, this doesn't seem ideal to me.
It's OK that they don't last forever; they're schools, not irreplaceable shrines.
And speaking of things that also don't last forever: Homeowners. Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts, and then some new family buys it at market price and is free to breed a whole new fleet of kids to raise there.
There's still eventually churn in the marketplace, and in the neighborhood. The churn didn't disappear just because Grandma Sally was able to choose to keep living in the same place until she died quietly of an agonizingly painful heart attack as she stood in the kitchen making tomato sauce after church on a Sunday morning before the family dinner that afternoon.
People die all the time. It's often tragic, but it's natural and ultimately unavoidable.
People also get forced out their forever-homes all the time, too. That's also often tragic, but it happens for artificial reasons that could be avoided if we bothered with trying to do so.
That seems a bit ironic?
> Grandma Sally isn't going to live forever. The house winds up on the open market in order to seek satisfaction of Grandma's debts
Not always, grandma can pass the home down to whoever. IIRC there are ways to do it without triggering a reevaluation on the original purchase price.
Anyway, Grandma is as dead as that Sunday dinner. She won't care that the new occupants are being complete heathens about smoking dope and makin' babies on the sofa.
Perfectly encapsulates modern society's attitudes by generation.
And I feel a lot more reverence for the memories of the house that my grandma and grandpa always lived in for the entirety of the time that our lives overlapped than I do for the memories of the school buildings I attended that are now abandoned or demolished.
I spent more years with them around than I did attending school.
It has never left me in a particularly healthy-feeling state when outside forces beyond my control have made me pack up and move.
Was I doing it wrong? Should I learn to embrace the masochism, instead?
If you have a degree in mathematics from 1984, then you're still entitled to that degree today in 2026.
And if you bought a house and the land that it sits on in 1984, and paid for it wholly and own the title for it, then you're literally-entitled as the owner of that house and the property upon which it rests.
Words have meaning. Please do not disenfranchise them.
Pretty please.
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Anyway: Everyone else loves what you and others have done with the neighborhood since you moved there in 1984, and they decide they love it so much that they want to move there too. It's a pretty great place to live.
Value goes up. You may not have changed anything more on your property, but they love what you've done with the place so far and want to be near it.
You had the place paid off and were entitled to it in 2014 after you completed the terms of the 30-year mortgage you took out in '84.
But now: Value goes up. Property taxes increase. And, fuckin' hell: You can't afford to stay there anymore.
You own the place, there's no question about that at all. It's completely your entitlement, and you absolutely paid for that entitlement, and everyone agrees that this is true: This entitlement is even recorded at the courthouse!
But you have to move, anyway, because you just can't afford to stay in the house that you fucking absolutely own and are entitled to anymore because the cool kids (nearby, and also on on the other side of the state, and nationally/globally because of inflation) are pushing you out.
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So I guess that you aim to suggest that we shall own and keep nothing, and be happy about it? Fuck that! We're already fucking temporary! We're already run-limited by virtue of being human! We should be able to pay for decades of risk and eventually own a place, and then live the rest of our short fucking life in that same place without being forced to move around!
We all die. The property we were once entitled to will get recycled into the churn soon-enough no matter what our intention may have once been, after we check out.
Change that older lady to a 30 year old woman and the sentiment quickly shifts to "big deal, live in a house you can afford in. people need to move, get jobs, and work. Get hustling". And that is likely the story for a generation of renters.
Yes, it is morally bankrupt. But sympathy is a two way street and can quickly be lost when one side suffers pain.
I don’t want my country to force old people to either move from their home, or take out risky debt.
There are absolutely problems and prop 13 has been awful for California but it’s a red herring to worry about the primary residence exceptions.
Perhaps the retired person is living on a fixed income of $40k/year. Over time their proterty taxes on the home that they have lived in for decades can now be more than half of their total income? How is this fair at any level?
> How is this fair at any level?
How is it fair that working people have to pay 10x for housing than she did when she was young? How is it fair that the money goes to her inheritance while she made her working neighbors pay her share of taxes?
Where I live, we are looking at locking property taxes once you hit a specified age (65) and have under a specified income ($40k+/-). The current debates revolve around exactly what those numbers are and at what level the taxes get locked. The goal is to protect the elderly who have already contributed to the economy and society for 40+ years and not force them into a financial situation forcing them to sell their home just to pay even more property taxes that they have paid for the entire ownership.
Quite the opposite.
Telling people that the solution is to sell their home to an insurance company as a solution is most certainly a corporate land grab.
You seem to be arguing about people/corporations that own multiple homes or even entire portfolios of property. These are not the same argument.
If their asset is gaining in price so much that the tax burden is getting high, then tax deferement until a liquidity event both keeps them in their home, but also keeps them honest about how much they are taking away from the rest of society by taking that piece of land.
The premise does not warrant this conclusion.
Oregon has a deferral where the delayed property tax comes from the value of the house when it is sold or I guess when you die. https://grantsforseniors.org/property-tax-relief-for-seniors....
Washington has a similar thing.
"All Washington counties offer senior citizens and disabled households property tax exemptions. Eligibility is based on your age or disability status, home ownership, residency in Washington, and income level. Seniors who are at least age 61, or retired from regular gainful employment by reason of a disability, with an income of $64,000 or less are eligible."
The idea is to help people stay in their houses. This is really really important. And if you can afford it, you should be paying property taxes. I'm lucky I can afford mine, but I highly support this strategy.
In my state I occasionally see people in online discussions saying they can't afford their property taxes - I think a lot of people aren't aware of these programs, people are amazed when I post a few pointers and tell them about it.
People’s primary residences are more than just an economic asset. If you don’t understand that, it’s difficult to have a conversation as we have very different starting points about morality.
Housing is a fungible good. I have friends and family living in squalor because people have decided sentiment is a valid reason to keep people in these four walls instead of those four walls.
I think people’s primary residence should not be seen as assets in the way they are today at all. The only reason they are is substantial government intervention.
Housing is also set up in a particular way. A McMansion is nothing like a 1BR apartment. A condo is nothing like a ranch-style SFH. The aforementioned mobile homes could never serve a family of 12 or be attached to a swimming pool. These are not interchangeable things! They are unlike a barrel of oil or a $100 bill, my dude! Not to mention, illiquid. You tie up some money in real estate, and you can't simply trade one house for another. You want to sell houses, that's a chore. That's not a diamond in your pocket; that's the definition of non-fungible.
"Housing" as property is additionally two separate things in one package: the structures on the land, and the land itself. You can't usually sell one without the other, you see. So how is that fungible, when these two intrinsically linked commodities are clearly not.
It's true that nobody cares "who was there first", but property ownership confers real rights. The right to stay put, and the right to expel unwelcome people from your property. The right to defend it, or at least have the authorities defend your life and property within. Even renting tenants have rights, as long as their bills are current. It's not a matter of "who is here first" but God-given and gov-granted rights of occupation. In a less civilized place, your property rights would be defended with guns and violence, as against invasions.
Housing is, like, one of the least fungible commodities possible. I don't even know how you say that. How do you define fungible so that it includes housing? Pray tell! Inquiring minds want to know!
Would you define two apartment units next to each other, with the same floor plan as fungible?
What about the house next door?
For the purposes that people use them for, there is an immense allocation problem in the US. People are sitting on a 5b/5ba and living alone. Bizarre sets of incentives have culminated to make this possible. We have collectively decided that for some reason, it’s completely sane to live in a house that you don’t need. We should look at it the same way as owning a stretch hummer.