The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281...</a><p>Good thoughts. You failed to mention Prop 13 which was put into place a long time ago and simply doesn't make sense anymore. It'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're rich enough and the cost to maintain is so low that they don't even need or want to rent those units out. We'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'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'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's coffers.