Post about Berkeley, CA found on X (Twitter): “Fun fact. The 1,874 single-family homes highlighted collectively pay less property taxes than the 135-unit apartment building.”
by Not-A-Seagull
Post about Berkeley, CA found on X (Twitter): “Fun fact. The 1,874 single-family homes highlighted collectively pay less property taxes than the 135-unit apartment building.”
by Not-A-Seagull
4 comments
The downside of Prop 13
Where I am at, new developers are able to get tax deals from the city so that a 100 unit new apartment project pays less property tax than a 9 unit historic building that I own. They literally only have to get it past the school board. And the chumps on the board are like “ $20000 in the hand beats zero” while they collect 80 million from the single family homes and small landlords.
A couple things
First, California gets most of its wealth from income taxes, not property taxes.
Second, this is a problem with how the US builds cities.
The long and skinny is that our car dependence makes building wide fiscally insolvent. Grids like this wouldn’t be a problem if we used mixed zoning to encourage more walk-able neighborhoods. Not Just Bikes has a whole piece on why this is the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
I’m so glad I moved out of California. Shit like this use to make me so angry. I stopped fighting it and my quality of life is at least 2x improved in the southeast.
My roommates from college still live in Bay Area and bitch about it but unless you make a change there isn’t a point in complaining.