patrick.net

Santa Cruz is full of inheritors. It's been around for a long time. It's why you go through SC neighborhoods and see fall down homes with weed strewn yards. They are often only occupied part time, because the families just kept them, but don't visit often, and don't keep them up. Until an inheritor needs the windfall money, they won't get sold.

Ceffer says

Santa Cruz is full of inheritors. It's been around for a long time. It's why you go through SC neighborhoods and see fall down homes with weed strewn yards. They are often only occupied part time, because the families just kept them, but don't visit often, and don't keep them up. Until an inheritor needs the windfall money, they won't get sold.

Why not fix it up and put it on Air-fucking-B&B? Lazy fucks.

I'd rather have rich people here that pay taxes, instead of welfare Queens leeches that suck up taxes. If the Welfare Queens got booted out we wouldn't even have a housing shortage.

Agreed @strategist
Move the leeches out to the desert! Leave the good locations for the people who work here!
MCGA!

Ceffer says

Santa Cruz is full of inheritors. It's been around for a long time. It's why you go through SC neighborhoods and see fall down homes with weed strewn yards. They are often only occupied part time, because the families just kept them, but don't visit often, and don't keep them up. Until an inheritor needs the windfall money, they won't get sold.

This is the inevitable result of Prop 13.

Socialist policies and millions of illegals. I think that’s where problem stems from.

Socializing that much misery will sooner or later wipe out middle class.

Patrick says

This is the inevitable result of Prop 13.

Agreed. Prop 13 has to be on the chopping block or all of this will get worse.

Strategist says

I'd rather have rich people here that pay taxes,

The problem is that the rich people (at least land-wealthy) often really don't pay taxes when it comes to property tax.

That’s not the problem.

The problem is government providing services to millions of illegals who pay 0 taxes.

Their kids go to schools, they get food stamps, they use roads, they use all services. Yet they pay 0 taxes.

There will never be enough taxes to pay for that and union greed.

Evan F. says

Strategist says

I'd rather have rich people here that pay taxes,

The problem is that the rich people (at least land-wealthy) often really don't pay taxes when it comes to property tax.

Evan F. says

The problem is that the rich people (at least land-wealthy) often really don't pay taxes when it comes to property tax.

I'm pretty sure that lower property tax rates is the direct cause of California schools sliding from "first to worst" as they say. There is a movie by that name about the issue.

But in doing some reading about the origins of Prop13, I found out that the major impetus for Prop13 was the case Serrano vs Priest, in which poor Hispanic neighborhoods (including tons of illegals) argued in court that the educational system was unfairly underfunding their schools, while richer areas had great schools. The result of that was a decision to centralize all school funding, such that property taxes would go to Sacramento instead of being kept locally, and then the money would be apportioned out so that all schools would be equal.

The result of that was that all schools in California became equally bad. Turns out that people don't mind paying high property taxes for their local communities, but they really don't like paying high property taxes for people that they do not identify with, and who are very often not even legal citizens.

So... when Howard Jarvis got the evil idea that he could forever exempt business and the very rich from paying property tax, he hid that part of his plan in the fine print and instead promoted the idea of a cap on property taxes to "protect the poor and elderly" from rate increases. People went for it in droves because all they saw was that they would not have property tax increases above 2% per year forever more, and anyway they really didn't want their property taxes funding illegals whom they perceived as coming here to sponge off of the then-wealthy state of California. So FortWayne is correct too in a way.

And here we are, with shitty schools most places, the rich and businesses allowed to forever push their tax burden onto income taxes and sales taxes instead of property tax, and with rich neighborhoods holding private fundraisers to keep their schools good.

It was a disaster all around if you ask me.