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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

>I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible.

You can also do this with combinations of renter protections + owner-occupier protections.

Currently the latter (whether the recent trend of red states lower property taxes, or Prop 13 in CA) is much more broadly-popular in the US than the former.

Property owners generally show pretty little empathy for anyone else wanting that security.

I go the other way: nobody should be forced out of their home because other people who have more money than them decide to increase the paper-value of their home. Something has to give between "I have a lot of money, I want this place" and "I was already here, I want to stay" and I think incumbency and stability is a better tiebreaker than "money wins."

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The way they ought to do is is by having the government set not the mill rate but the amount of government revenue to be collected per capita, and then have the mill rate calculated from (revenue per capita x total number of residents) / (total value of all property in the jurisdiction) every year.

The premise being that if property values change city-wide, property taxes don't, because property tax revenue only changes if the city's population does -- and if population increases then it's usually associated with new construction, so as long as the newly constructed units have a similar value per-bedroom to the existing ones, the amount you pay in property taxes doesn't change then either.

I believe this already happens in some places. There was a very wealthy island near where I used to live and the owner-occupied homes had some of the lowest property taxes in the area. All of the vacation homes, which paid a much larger tax bill, covered government revenue required. This led to those who actually lived on the island to pay very little in property taxes.

"Forced out" meaning they choose to sell rather than spend their unearned windfall.

They could always borrow against their massively appreciated property, after all.

How do you expect to borrow against that property for the rest of your life?

And why is being a Google Programmer "earning" that money, but a construction worker who spent 30 years paying off their house is an "unearned" windfall?

Do you really have to ask why someone working earns their returns, while someone whose property appreciates through no effort of their own -- and yes, it's just the land appreciating the vast majority of the time -- did not earn the windfall?

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