auros: Do you live in a building?

Auros (

auros) wrote,
@ 2008-04-04 11:57:00

Current mood:

geeky

Do you live in a building?
If so, you pay property tax, either directly as an owner or as part of your rent.

Property taxes, properly structured, could be an incredibly powerful tool for driving smart growth, "new urbanist" human-friendly communities, preservation of habitats, and so on. Property taxes as currently structured are a) incredibly unfair, b) create a substantial "tax on moving", and c) favor sprawl over dense "urban village" development. And yet, there were some pretty big problems with the system we had before, which drove the epochal Proposition 13 reform, which gave us the system we have today.

Want to learn more about this important issue? On April 10th, the Peninsula Democratic Coalition, San Mateo and Silicon Valley Chapters of Democracy for America, and the Palo Alto Branch of the American Association of University Women, are all co-hosting a panel discussion and Q/A session with four of our state's top experts on this issue -- an event that is the fruition of an idea I had early last year, and did a fair bit of work to organize.

Panelists include:
Assemblyman John Laird, Chair of the Committee on Budget
Lenny Goldberg, Executive Director of California Tax Reform Association
Larry Stone, Assessor of Santa Clara County

Moderated by Joseph Bankman, Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School

When: Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 7 p.m. (with light refreshments provided at 6:30 p.m.)

Where: Mountain View City Council Chambers, Mountain View City Hall (500 Castro Street)

Convenient parking is available free of charge in the Mountain View Civic Center garage located directly under the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The entrance to the garage is on Mercy Street. The "City Hall" elevator in the garage goes directly to the outer lobby of the Council Chambers on the second floor of City Hall. For those taking public transit, the 22 and 522 stop a couple blocks west at El Camino and Castro, and dozens of different buses, not to mention the CalTrain and VTA light rail, come through the downtown MtV CalTrain depot, which is about five blocks east of City Hall.

Come learn about abstract legal concepts, and why they have a major impact on the kind of town you live in! It'll be fun, and it'll make you a more informed voter when, some time in the next decade, we finally get a proposition on the ballot to reform our screwed-up property tax system.

(Post a new comment)

	urox 2008-04-04 07:25 pm UTC (link)
	I have always been amazed at people who rented who didn't realize they were paying property tax. (Reply to this)

	nightingale8472 2008-04-04 08:23 pm UTC (link)
	That sounds interesting! Wish I could go, but I'm in SoCal. Is there going to be a podcast or anything? (Reply to this)(Thread)

	auros 2008-04-05 04:10 am UTC (link)
	That's an excellent question. I know the MtV chamber is equipped to record, but I don't know if this event is being filmed. I'll check on that, and if so, will post info on getting it. Thanks! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	dragondawn420 2008-04-05 04:41 pm UTC (link)
	I also vote for a podcast! Since it's on a Thursday, I wouldn't be able to drive down in time for it, otherwise I'd be there. (Reply to this)(Parent)

tyedboyne
2008-04-04 08:44 pm UTC (link)

I'm also waay too far away to attend. Will the agenda be focused on issues local to CA, or addressing property tax inequities on a national scale? This is an issue that more people should be aware of, so thanks for your work on this.

Property taxes, sales taxes, and fees for public services are insanely regressive. I always hear right wing pols and pundits whining that the rich pay more in taxes, but if you look at it from the angle of who pays more taxes overall--local, state, and federal--the poor and middle class pay much, MUCH more in terms of percentage of their income than the wealthy, and that's before you examine the loopholes in tax law that are closed to all but the rich.

Class warfare aside, one thing I would love to see is property tax policy integrated into Green Building Codes. Property taxes should be structured to favor sustainable energy use, and, eventually, punish wastefulness.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

auros
2008-04-05 04:15 am UTC (link)

This is going to be mostly focused on California -- Prop 13 makes our property tax extra-special, in ways that I lack time to describe at this moment -- though if you google search using "site:auros.livejournal.com" and "property tax" or "prop 13", I'll bet you can find some of my past comments...

ETA: See here:
http://auros.livejournal.com/232777.html

Edited at 2008-04-05 04:17 am UTC

(Reply to this)(Parent)

jrtom
2008-04-04 08:53 pm UTC (link)

Just to make sure we're on the same page: can you expand just a little bit on (a) - (c) above? I know that's what the meeting is for, but it's a bit out of my reach, I'm afraid. :)

(If you've got a whitepaper or some other resources that you could direct people to--especially for basic stuff like this that attendees might want to be acquainted with prior to arriving--references to same would be great things to post.)

(Reply to this)(Thread)

auros
2008-04-05 04:28 am UTC (link)

Unfairness: How about: You buy a house. The house next door is identical, but the owner has lived there for 10 years. His taxes are a tiny fraction of yours. Meanwhile, the property on which there is a shopping mall, not far away from your home, is technically worth ten times what either of your houses is worth -- but the owner pays practically no taxes at all, because although the property has changed hands a few times since the '70s, they've always hired lawyers to structure the transfer as a series of minority-stake sales, which doesn't count as changing hands for the purposes of Prop 13 -- which was in fact the intent of Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, the right-wing loons who pushed it on us in the first place.

Tax on moving: If you've been living in a house for ten years, and then you want to move, you won't actually be able to move to an equivalent house, because the person moving in will be facing a higher property tax than you (so the house is worse less to them than it is to you), and even if you could extract the full value, when you go to purchase a new house, you will face a higher property tax there.

The sprawl thing has to do with the fact that we tax not just land, but structure, so building a high-quality building (to meet code requirements) and building upward (for density) both add to your tax burden. It's cheaper to go find some suburb or exurb to build in. (It's already cheaper because land is just inherently cheap further out, and building crappy one-story strip malls is cheaper than building upwards. But the tax code magnifies this effect. A Georgist Land Tax eliminates it.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	iridium 2008-04-04 10:04 pm UTC (link)
	I'm curious, but it's extremely unlikely that I'll make it down to Mountain View at 7pm on a Thursday. If you've got more thoughts & feel like posting, I'd be interested in reading. :) (Reply to this)

ertla
2008-04-09 01:34 pm UTC (link)

I'm way behind on LJ reading, and just noticed this - on the 9th. Moreover, I live in Sunnyvale, and don't have anything scheduled for Thursday evening. Maybe I'll actually get to this - even though I'm not a voter ;-) (Before someone lectures me on non-voting, I mean I'm not eligible to vote - anywhere - due to my residence and immigration status.)

As for taxing land but not structures on it - I get a bad feeling about that one, perhaps because I like living in a single family house and having a short commute. (Heh, I'm one of those who benefits from the current system, partly of course because of intentionally structuring my affairs to do so. But we've talked about that before.)

(Reply to this)

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