The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Proposition_13_(1978)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Proposition_13_(1...</a><p>Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn&#x27;t make sense anymore. It&#x27;s at least part of the reason it is so affordable (in relative terms) for rich people to keep second homes here when they bought them years ago.<p>We live in a building of 60 units where probably at least a third of those are absentee owners. They&#x27;re rich enough and the cost to maintain is so low that they don&#x27;t even need or want to rent those units out. We&#x27;ve seen our neighbors only 2-3 times in past 2 years... but if you look at the property tax bills of folks who bought 10-20+ years ago they are minuscule and are only adjusted upon sale of the property. In our case, we&#x27;re paying easily 4x what the previous owners were.<p>We moved from DC couple years back which is also very expensive but their tax valuations are re-assessed on a regular basis so you don&#x27;t have this huge disparity in what the rich old people are paying in prop tax vs the young not quite rich people are.<p>If values and property taxes were reassessed every 3 years or so this would put more pressure on these absentee owners to either sell or rent their units thus increasing existing inventory as well as adding to the city&#x27;s coffers.