In most places, if your $200,000 house now has a value of $1 million, you cannot stay since property taxes will increase. So, you can sell and leave, but staying is often not an option particularly for people on a fixed income.
// it is a bit off-putting to down vote everyone not up on CA law.
So, given the prop 13 maximum tax rate of 1% and maximum increase in tax basis value of 2% per annum, a property that was fully taxed at a basis value of $200,000 in 1985($2,000 annual tax) that increases in value to $1 million -- or even $10 million -- in 2015 would have a tax basis value of $362,272 and a total annual property tax bill of about $3,623.
It's just another thing that creates artificial scarcity.
Note this also affects commercial real estate!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978...
The problem is not with Prop 13. It's with property taxes at all. I'm not fundamentally against a wealth tax of some kind, or against cities raising income, but if you base this on assessed values of real-estate, a highly illiquid asset for most people, you are guaranteed to generate these problems, not to mention undermining the very notion of property.
The problem is not prop 13. It is that something else should be taxed instead of property.
Property taxes in the US typically vary between 0.5% and 1% of market value; even in the absence of Prop 13 style limits on increases, that means an increase of property tax of between $4,000 ($1,000 to $5,000) and $8,000 ($2,000 to $10,000) per annum, and, regardless of rate, represents about a 5.5% annual increase in value (and, thus, tax costs for ad valorem taxes.)
With the posited increase having increased over ~30 years (GP's scenario had a house purchased in the 1980s), that's only about double the rate of inflation, so even with no increase in real income over the time, you'd have to have been fairly tight initially to be priced out of the home by tax increases.
That said, the 5x increase in property taxes from 200k to 1 mill may really mean going from 2k a year to 10k a year.
That is probably not at the "can't stay" level for most people, not to mention it being tax-deductible
Tax-duductible doesn't cover it for fixed income folks.
The median income California resident (even a dual-income household of such residents) is unlikely to have had a $200,000 home in the 1980s, or, if they managed it, to have its property value increase to $1 million in the intervening 30 years while remaining a median income California resident.
Heck, by a common guideline (reasonable house price = 2.5 times annual household income), a dual-median-income family at the current median level can't afford a $200,000 house today.
In many places property tax can increase after you purchase a property without California-style Constitutionally-imposed limits; there's very little evidence that this actually makes it reasonably likely for anyone to actually be priced out of property due to value increases in other-than-highly-unusual circumstances.