Comment by sephamorr
7 hours ago
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.
7 hours ago
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.
Well she doesn't have the 500k. This is akin to saying we should force people out if market conditions make their house more expensive. That seems like a really strange consequence to all this, idk
It isn't because the comment had a second sentence suggesting tax deferrals were fair.
Either housing is an economic asset subject to market forces, or it's not.
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.
So people that keep buying low (because that's what they can afford) are constantly being forced to move.
Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
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.
> Houses are not the same thing as cash or other fungible assets.
> 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.
How can someone be so out of touch? A person buys a house, spend a whole life there, and through no action of her own happens to live in an area that drastically appreciates in value over the decades, all she wants is to spend her last few years in the same house that she loves and would never consider selling, and now we ask them to kindly pay all their income or more in property taxes, otherwise fuck off??
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.
13 replies →
It’s not a bullshit idea, it is realistic and the problem in California is that it includes commercial and second homes.
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.
To actually realize this value she would have to sell it.
So your solution is to force her to sell her home and move? Move where? I've seen this in so many areas of the country where property taxes on your property are tied to market value rather than purchase price. It drives retired and lower income people out of neighborhoods that they have lived in for decades, forcing them to move down the scale of home ownership.
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?
Reverse mortgage.
> 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?
Of course, let's let yet another corporate land grab take even more residential property off the market for profit-based motives. This can't possibly do any more harm than locking property taxes at the time of sale.
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.
5 replies →
They don’t, they move to the ghetto like she did and start the gentrification cycle again
Why should this person take up a family home in a desirable area? It is inefficient. The pressure she is feeling to leave is the system working as intended.
We shouldn’t prioritize efficiency when it comes to moral matters. That’s a bad idea for the government.
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.
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