hello!

just a guy who really likes housing abundance and women's hockey

[definitelyforsurenotbees]

Müller has to stay in Boston. You cannot separate Müller and Frankel they are a bonded pair!!!!

[uboat53]

Man, this took me way too long to realize but, guys, Trump is manipulating the stock market.

Think about it, every single day he goes out and says something about how we're really close to an Iran deal, even when that is explicitly contradicted by evidence or all the other statements from his administration. Obviously, there are concerns that he's losing touch with reality for various reasons, but someone who's losing touch would not generally be this consistent.

There's another factor to consider, though, the TACO trade. Over the last year or so, Wall Street has gotten used to the idea that they can influence presidential policy by trading en masse, specifically by selling and dropping the market in response to really stupid moves. And not just the stock market, bonds and commodities as well. Pretty consistently, Trump has chickened out of some of his more extreme moves when this happens.

At this point, the very clear expressed desire of the markets is for the Strait of Hormuz to open again. Given the current military and political realities, that is only going to happen with a negotiated deal. If Trump gives up on making a deal quickly or if he proves incapable, markets will fall and oil prices will rise. On the other hand, pretty much the only political support that Trump has left is from Iran hawks and any deal that is within reach at the moment would be unacceptable to them.

So Trump can't make a deal because it would cost him some of his last political support and he can't admit this because the stock market, probably one of the last remaining bright spots in the economy, would likely crash and oil prices, already painful, would soar.

Daily remarks untethered from reality are the solution because, let's face it, Trump has never been one for long-term planning. We saw that in full force in his covid response; had he done a quick shut down in the spring and gotten things under control in the summer, he could have run his fall campaign on the economic bounce of reopening, but he was only capable of understanding unpopularity in the moment.

Keeping the stock market elevated beyond what economic fundamentals will support only makes the eventual correction more painful but, as long as traders are more focused on rewarding or punishing what Trump says, he can keep the scam going for one more day.

And that's what we're seeing. Trump isn't spouting nonsense about Iran negotiations because he's losing it (at least, not just because he's losing it) but because he's figured out how he can manipulate the market and I'm still working out how terrifying this is that the people who move huge sums of money in our economy have let this happen.

[tomtheboy]

Are you familiar with the influence of the Power of Positive Thinking on Trump?

How Trump Turned The Power of Positive Thinking Into Delusion

Trump’s unbridled confidence is a product of the self-help author Norman Vincent Peale’s decades-long influence on him. It’s only gotten wor

I do agree that Trump hasn't fully lost touch with reality. I also agree that he knows his delusional affirmations have a positive effect on the stock market, and likely profits from that whenever it's convenient.

But I don't think that explains the fundamentals of why he behaves like that. He behaves like that because he doesn't believe in consequences, and believes that his positive claims are the things that shape reality to work out for him.

"Nothing bad can happen- it can only good happen"

"Just sit back and relax, it will all work out in the end. It always does."

Etc etc

These quotes aren't just Trump being blasé. This is how he engaged with *everything*. Literally the only way he knows how to approach a problem is to stubbornly declare what he *wants* to be true, and then expects the whole world to reorient itself around his personal wishes.

It's how he treats Tariff negotiations with fake "investments" from other nations. It's how he treats solving the war in Ukraine. It's how he treats drug prices. It's how he treats the Big Lie. And it's how he treats the current Iran negotiations too.

The stock market isn't the reason he's acting the way he's acting. It's just a pleasant side effect.

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[sacrebleuth]

to add to this, it's actually an issue when the property tax for little old ladies like that is frozen, because it means she can afford to stay in her house. but if it no longer suits her, she can never move. and it makes everything more expensive for everyone around her.

this is a known issue in california (where property taxes are effectively frozen, they can only increase by 2% each year). Boomers who bought their single family homes for a raspberry on a librarian's salary and have seen its value skyrocket to millions are still paying this graduated property tax increase, to the tune of maybe a thousand dollars. meanwhile the young family that scraped enough money together to move next door is paying tens of thousands in property taxes. both houses are valued the same.

capping doesn't make the tax burden go away, it just shifts it to people who more recently bought their homes.

which is where this becomes a problem for the little old lady. let's say she does want to downsize, because she can't get up the stairs any more and doesn't need five bedrooms. even though her value has appreciated, and she could technically afford another home, she cannot afford the property taxes on that home, because they are so much higher than what she's currently paying.

another issue this causes is all the awful NIMBYism we've seen. because when your property tax is completely untethered from your home's value, why wouldn't you do everything in your power to make that home value go up?? but you know what won't make it go up? construction. new housing. apartments or mixed use zoning. social services nearby. maybe little old lady starts showing up at the city council opposing a women's shelter being built in her neighborhood because it would drop property values. or she leads an effort to use environmental studies that drag on for years as a way to block new construction, reduce stock, and keep home prices (and her net worth) high.

keeping property taxes at pace with property values incentivizes our little old lady to downsize when she's ready, keeps the tax burden even in neighborhoods, and most critically, removes a major incentive that people have to block new housing, public works, and social programs.

also as an aside, i really hate the conflation of age with poverty. the boomer generation has the most wealth. it's not evenly split (there are many poor boomers), but if you want to address poverty, you have to name it. don't use proxies like age or location. name the problem so you can appropriately address it. the struggling 20 year old deserves just as much help as the struggling 60 year old.

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[irradiate-space]

The nearest place she can afford to purchase with this $100k is two hours thataways, which means it's two hours from her doctors, two hours from her support networks, two hours from anyone who knows her and can check in on her when she doesn't show up to church on Sunday. Her car might be able to drive to church, but anymore, the nice girl down the street picks her up and drives her. She gets Meals on Wheels so she doesn't need to drive to the grocery store. Her car has not been started in three months. She can't see that it has two flat tires.

She would be better served by moving to a nursing home. She cannot afford a nursing home that matches her care needs.

If she loses her house to a tax sale, she will become homeless.

The $100k in value that she has received paradoxically makes her poorer, analogously to a welfare trap.

[phaeton-flier]

Hmmm. I do not think that is true. I do not think there are many areas in the United States where someone with a fixed income but also $140k in the bank cannot afford to live anywhere in a 2 hour radius. I think maybe you should meet some more homeless people

[uboat53]

I mean, what part of the logic are you missing? If the old lady's house has increased in price to the point where she can no longer afford to live there, unless this was some very unique circumstance to her specific house or her specific neighborhood, then it's because the entire region's housing prices have increased.

Maybe she lives in the richest part of the region and can still afford to buy something in the poorest part, but those kinds of people don't tend to live in the situation described, i.e. dependent on friends, family, and neighbors.

I bought my house in 2020 and, since then, it's appreciated in value by over 30% which, on paper, has made me a whole lot richer but, if I were forced to sell my house because I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be able to buy another one in my area because they'd all be unaffordable. There are poorer areas in my region I could move to but, if I already lived in one of them, I'd have to move a long way away in order to find something I could afford.

Ultimately, whatever your net worth, you need a place to live and that place to live has to relate to your overall support network, whether that's your family, your church, social workers, meals on wheels, or even your place of employment. The wealth in your home is only truly accessible if you have another housing option available. If you don't, then you're going to blow their any gains trying to get housing again and, at best, be no better off than you started.

[tomtheboy]

So I am pretty firmly in agreement with @phaeton-flier that little old grandma's who are "suffering" from high property values isn't an actual problem: this framing completely ignores renting. If an older person living off social security can't afford property taxes, just sell the home! The proceeds of a $1M home will pay $5k rent for 17 years, which can afford you a place to live in literally any city in America.

Or, in Mississippi numbers (which better matches the above example of a $150,000 home), a home sale will easily pay $1k rent for over a dozen years.

And that's assuming you never spend your actual income on rent! As someone else in this post mentioned, seniors living on "fixed incomes" is pretty much a myth anyway: whether they're primarily living off their 401k or their social security checks, both of those payments appreciate year over year.

That being said, for those who still believe Little Old Grandmas have a right to live in their exact same home until they die... That's a solved problem for the most part. Every state, as well as the federal gov, has a plethora of tax benefits for seniors. Many states (including MA and CA) specifically have a tax deferral program for seniors where seniors pretty much never pay property taxes until they die, and then their tax payments are recovered via the sale of their home when they die.

[uboat53]

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the people with houses worth $1 million aren't the ones being impacted by this. As an example, I'm going to use Anderson County, Kentucky, the place with the fastest growing home prices in the country as of 2026.

Looking at a lower-end house in Lawrenceburg, the largest (and really only) town in the county, I found one currently listed for about $190k but, if you look at the price history, you can see that, as recently as 5 years ago, you could buy this house for about $45k.

Let's assume a little 65 year old lady bought this house 40 years ago. It was probably about half the 2020 price then (maybe less, but let's go with it), so let's say she bought it for $22.5k and paid off the 30 year mortgage 10 years ago. Now she's retired, she gets social security but she's one of the 42% of people who have neither a pension nor a 401k, so that's her primary income.

I found a property tax estimator for the county, it doesn't go down to $45k or $22.5k, but it seems to scale linearly, so we can estimate. At $22.5k, she paid about $190 a year in property taxes. At $45k in 2020, that increased to $380. At $190k in 2026, though, that increased to almost $1,600. Now maybe she has that in her budget, but if she was already living at the edge of her means in 2020, it seems unlikely that she can absorb more than $1,000 per year in extra cost.

So now she sells her house and gets the $190k. After fees and everything, she'll net about $175k. That's a capital gain of ~$150k on the original price of the house, so she'll pay 15% on the gain over about $50k, which is about $15k, reducing her net to $160k. Then she'll pay Kentucky's flat 3.5% income tax on the original net price, reducing by a further $6k, making her final net about $155k (I'm using round numbers for ease here).

Average rent in the county looks like it's about $1k per month, so she can afford 155 months of rent or just under 13 years.

Now, you might say that's not too bad, that gets her almost to the age of 78! Except, of course, life expectancy for a woman in America is 81.5...

Also, unlike fixed rate mortgages, rent doesn't just stay the same year after year. Looking at the data going back to 2000, rent has increased by between 3% and 4% per year. Factoring that in, her 13 years of rent goes down to 11.

And, again, this assumes everything else runs pretty smoothly and she doesn't have to dip into that chunk of money for any medical emergencies or help out her kids or other family. Literally in the best case scenario, she won't be immediately homeless, she'll be homeless a decade from now.

When we talk about people getting priced out of their homes by property taxes, these are the situations we're talking about. You're absolutely right that the person who bought the San Francisco Bay Area house in the 70s for a fraction of its current price is probably fine, but the people who bought Bay Area houses in the 30s and 40s and then were in danger of getting priced out in the 70s, thus triggering Prop 13, looked a lot like the person I just described.

Prop 13 may not be great public policy, but it was a response to a very real situation that the people who oppose Prop 13 don't seem to have a very good answer to. I get the focus on the poorest, I think that's the right place to focus, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time and figuring out ways to get people out of the deepest poverty without addressing the next layers up so that they don't slip right back into it seems somewhat self-defeating.

[tomtheboy]

I think a lot of your premises are wrong. You especially underestimate how much US tax codes are already rigged in favor of homeowners and old folks.

1) The tax rate in Anderson county is 0.796%. Combine this with KY's $49k property tax exemptions for seniors, and this lady would be paying less than $100 per month on property taxes. This is easily affordable even for people earning half of KY's average monthly social security payment of $1,900.

I honestly this is kinda the end of the story of this hypothetical old lady's "struggles". But just to continue...

2) this Little Old Lady is entirely exempt from both income tax and any capital gains tax on the sale of her primary residence. Let's bump her cash from the home sale back up to $175,000

3) there's no reason to assume $175,000 is being kept in a checking account; by any reasonable measure, interest on this large chunk of wealth should easily cancel out inflation.

4) this gets us to 15 years of rent payments from the sale of her house... And this is without spending a single penny of her monthly retirement income on housing! This is still a huge chunk of inflation-adjusted income that we are ignoring, which could easily last her until she dies.

But back to the original point of this whole thread... There is very little reason to treat this old homeowner's situation as a crisis when there are so many renters and homeless folks who are dealing with *real* housing issues.

And Prop 13 is the perfect example of the active danger of excessively focusing on the concerns of little old retirees who just want low property taxes... by addressing their (unserious) concerns, CA has agressively fucked over younger folks and renters who are actually at risk of housing instability and homelessness. Prop 13 didn't address real issues. It addressed the fake issues of anti-tax homeowners and in the process worsened real issues.

Broad based property taxes are a great way to fund governments, and ameliorating them in service of retirees who want low taxes is bad.

[uboat53]

My goodness, you seem to think this 65 year old retiree in rural Kentucky is a lot more financially savvy than most Americans. Ultimately, though, I want to focus on one particular thing you said because I think it's the crux of the issue here:

"There is very little reason to treat this old homeowner's situation as a crisis when there are so many renters and homeless folks who are dealing with *real* housing issues."

That, I think, is where your argument really breaks down for me because I think that, as soon as you start justifying ignoring one group of people to help another, you've started on the slippery slope to just not caring about them at all.

To me this is all starting to sound like Republican arguments for increased documentation and work requirements and so forth on welfare programs. Sure, if you just follow the process and do all the steps the way you're supposed to then it won't be a problem, but this ignores the fact that each additional step you put in place represents a failure point and will result in more people slipping through the cracks of the process. In this case, slipping through the cracks means becoming homeless, creating more of the problem we're trying to solve!

Given this, I really have to ask what your plan is. Do you really think your best chance to address home affordability issues and homelessness is to antagonize 2/3 of the country? Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that the concerns of the very poor are more dire than the concerns of the middle class, but do you really think you're going to win people over by simply shouting at them that their concerns aren't worth considering at all?

And look, what really gets to me is when this is framed as a resource issue, that we don't have enough to address everyone's problems. Because that all comes back to the biggest problem in our society which is that we do actually have the resources to do these things and, by our continued refusal to tax the extraordinary wealth that's been gathered at the very top of our society, we instead pit the middle and lower classes against each other in a brutal competition that nobody is actually winning.

[tomtheboy]

The solution is liberalism! The solution is broad-based taxes which fund a robust welfare state to meet all people's needs!

Cuz if I may take this back a few steps... this is a discussion about tax cuts. This is a discussion about whether it is wise to be cutting the taxes of elderly homeowners to an even greater degree than they already are.

This hypothetical 65 year old Kentuckian has already received so many tax cuts that they are only paying $100 a month in property taxes on a $200k house. This is *very* affordable. It is also, I would like to point out, very different from what you initially assumed and calculated (more on that at the end).

These very affordable taxes for seniors, counted up across all of Kentucky ($240k avg home value, $50k deduction, 400k homeowning seniors in the state) contribute about $600 million dollars a year to local governments, equal to roughly 10% of the state's spending at the municipal level.

Slashing 10% of municipal budgets in order to give tax cuts to elderly homeowners is not progressive nor fiscally sustainable. $100/mo. is a reasonable amount for this hypothetical 65 year old to contribute to their community in exchange for living in a functional society.

I apologize for the pithy term, but I feel what you're advocating for is slopulism: the knee-jerk reaction of many folks to entirely ignore tradeoffs and advocate for tax cuts and increased government spending all at once, resulting in inevitable broken promises and broken governments.

I really like government spending and government programs which help *all* Americans! But such a government can only exist if we're all willing to pay to be a part of it. Significantly increasing taxes on the rich is of course a part of that solution, but it is not all of the solution. There is no such thing as a society where the richest 1% can be taxed to pay for the government of the remaining 99%. A functional liberal democracy with a robust welfare state will always and should always require everyone except the very poorest contributing at least a little bit to make it work.

I highly recommend reading this article by Ned Reskinoff titled Adventures in Slopulism. You cannot build a Nordic social insurance system on a Norquist-style tax base. Everyone should pay at least some taxes. And in my personal opinion, everyone should be happy doing it! Taxes are good. Taxes are the foundation of a free and stable society which ensures everyone is provided for.

Lastly, regarding the fact that you vastly overestimated the financial burden of a senior homeowner in Kentucky... I do a lot of housing advocacy in my free time. 99% of my effort is spent correcting misinformation and bad assumptions. Very little of my time is spent having actual value differences with the folks I'm chatting with. The same is true here. Yes, I agree that senior homeowners shouldn't be unfairly burdened via property taxes! But... we've already reached that point in almost all corners of America. Our local, state, and federal tax regimes are all *heavily* weighted in favor of retired homeowners. When I say tax-cuts-for-old-homeonwers isn't a problem, it isn't because I don't think old homeowners matter. It's because, as it relates to property taxes, the problem is already solved! If anything, many states and cities have overcompensated, and shifted the tax burden in unfair and horribly destructive ways onto younger families and renters (*couch cough prop 13).

I'm not arguing against your values. I'm arguing against the misinformation and false assumptions that drive your values to (imo) misguided conclusions. Like tax cuts for taxes which have already been cut to the bone.

Adventures in Slopulism

You can't build a Nordic social insurance system on a Norquist-style tax base

[uboat53]

So here's the thing. I think if you're arguing that, in a perfect world, there would be no need for cuts to property taxes and that, in fact, they could be a lot higher in many cases, I would agree with you. If you're arguing that we should raise taxes across the board on the majority of Americans (which removing assessment limits would do) here in the real world, then I don't think I'm with you anymore. My analysis of the old woman's financial situation deliberately didn't include the tax exemptions you described because my assumption was that you favored eliminating them, let me know if I'm wrong on that front. For my part, I'm certainly not arguing that we need more tax reduction than we already have, only that we should be careful in removing or redesigning those existing reductions to ensure that we don't cause more problems than we started with in doing so.

As you said, we seem to agree on values and disagree on tactics. You argue that the problem of the elderly being priced out of their homes by increasing property taxes is already largely solved, but then seem to advocate for removing the kinds of legislation that we put in place to solve that problem. I don't disagree that Prop 13 has had all kinds of unintended consequences in my home state, but it has definitely solved the problem it was intended to solve! Maybe even too well!

I had an exchange with someone else that brought another relevant thought to mind, though, which is that I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea that property taxes are necessary to provide services mainly because of how we implement them. Essentially, we've implemented them at the municipality level and the way that works out is that, while they can be reasonably progressive on the tax side, they're extremely regressive on the spend side, with rich areas getting tons of money through property taxes and poor areas pretty much staying poor in that regard. The devastated tax base of places like Detroit and other former industrial hubs demonstrates many of the weaknesses inherent in the system. I can see ways you could fix that (i.e., taxing them at a higher level of government that could distribute the funds more progressively), but we generally don't do that and so property tax revenue more often goes to areas that don't need it than areas that really do. It makes it difficult for me to see it as a tax that needs defending.

That said, I can see its usefulness for encouraging productive use, though even there it seems like land value taxes would be more effective. Overall, like many of our policies related to housing, it's a kludge that doesn't really do what we would want it to do all that effectively, and so I place a higher priority on harm reduction than on revenue maximization. That's just where I come at it, though.

All that said, I think one thing that's been missing from the conversation (and fair enough, I've only referenced it obliquely so I should be more explicit) is the value of stability. How much is it worth to keep someone in the home they are currently in? I mean, someone with a stable home isn't just someone who we're not worried about becoming homeless, they can serve as a pillar that prevents other people from becoming unsheltered homeless as well. I don't know exactly how much that's worth, but I know the answer isn't $0.

I should probably also note that, in cases where a simple solution and a complex solution compete, my preference is for the simpler one. Targeted tax breaks and assistance are great, but many of the people who would need such assistance are missed because they don't have the resources or knowledge to access it. Broad-based assistance often ends up going to a lot of people who don't need it, but it's far more likely to get to those who do.

I'm open to a discussion about the balance there, but I do feel that, too often we try to gatekeep resources rather than make more resources available. I agree with the piece you linked, we're never going to fund a proper society on the taxes Norquist would allow, but then answer, then, can't be to simply accept his limits.

Anyways, I've covered a lot of ground here, probably more than is reasonable for a single thread. Let me know what you think, particularly on the assumptions at the beginning, I'll be interested to know if I'm arguing with a scarecrow there.

[uboat53]

So, been thinking about this for a bit (thank you and Sybaritic for putting up with me while I try to figure myself out) and I think my core issue with the original premise is actually the stability thing.

Like, the idea that being forced to move, for any reason, not just financial, is a minor thing such that people who made money shouldn't be allowed to complain about it is, honestly, a bit offensive, as if everything in life were just a financial transaction and people's feelings are irrelevant.

(Since I can already see the bad take coming, yes, I think being forced to move is terrible for renters too! In fact, I'd say it's worse because there's pretty much no chance of them making money in the process, but it's a fallacy to think that something can't be bad for one group just because it's worse for another.)

I do certainly have other thoughts on the issue, and I'm happy to discuss them, but I think that's the real crux of my disagreement. A system can't just be economically efficient, it has to work for the people in it. While that often does mean being economically efficient, the cases where it's not are where technocratic governance starts to come apart.

After all, an economically efficient system that doesn't provide what people actually want will quickly become either an economically inefficient system, a politically dysfunctional one, or both.

[fictionyoubelieve]

As other branches of this post have already pointed out, there are ways for the person in this hypothetical situation to stay in their home without giving them tax breaks (that come at the expense of people who need them more). If their property tax is increasing due to their home value appreciating, that is value they can leverage by renting out a spare room or taking out a home equity loan. It’s not purely hypothetical dollars they can only access by moving.

And if we stop handing out tax breaks that incentivize homeowners to sit on the same property until they die, it’s that much easier to develop the nearby land so that there are more affordable units to move to. Then, anyone in this situation is more likely to have the option to downsize while remaining in the same area.

But even in the hypothetical situation where the person might be forced to move—by enabling them to stay, you’re just forcing out the person who would have taken their place instead! The point isn’t that it’s unsympathetic, it’s that they are no MORE deserving of sympathy than the person (or, likely, multiple people) who are pushed out of housing because there aren’t enough units available.

Even if you want to privilege the rights of people who have already lived in the area awhile over people moving there, because you value “stability” (though note that there is obviously value in growth and change, too!), there are renters looking to buy, growing families, and adult children trying to move out who all need that housing as well.

[uboat53]

I find it interesting that you specifically reblogged this off of the comment least conducive to what you seem to be arguing. In my earlier commentary there are plausible interpretations of what I said that add up to this, but responding to this one in this way kind of makes you sound like a caricature of exactly what I described.

I guess I could do a better job being clear that effectively saying "these people aren't allowed to complain about anything because there are people worse off" makes you sound like like a communist apparatchik carrying out the dictates of the party regardless of the consequences on the ground, a fauxgressive who's just looking for a group they're allowed to hate on, a disconnected technocrat who sees everything in the world as a economic transaction, or some combination of the three.

Yes, renters and especially the homeless have it worse and, yes, there are absolutely going to be times when people have to be priced out of their homes, but none of that is going to be made better by pretending that stability isn't something of value.

Ultimately, to most homeowners, a house isn't primarily a financial asset. If you can't understand that, you're not going to be able to address housing policy in a way that actually meets the needs of real people.

After all, those renters and homeless people you're trying to help aren't just 80s caricatures of business guys trying to build assets, they're trying to find a place they can call their own too.

[tomtheboy]

Sorry for the delay! Had dnd last night and it's also been an exciting 24 hours for women's hockey.

So I do think that tax breaks are generally a bad way of dealing with the issues you are describing, including the issue of homeowner stability. Harkening back to the $100/mo. property tax that a retired KY homeowner owes the government... if you take away the $49k homestead exemption for seniors, that homeowner would still only have a property tax burden of about $130/mo. for their $200k house! This is incredibly cheap. While the senior tax credit is definitely a statement of values and priorities, if a senior is actively in danger of losing their home I don't think a $30/mo. discount is a particularly effective way to remedy that situation. Hell, I don't even think a $130/mo. total abolition of property taxes would be particularly helpful. For senior citizens, property taxes are a rounding error compared to utility bills and other basic living expenses.

But if we were to abolish property taxes for seniors, $600M (10% of KY's municipal budgets) is very much *not* a rounding error when it comes to paying for government services that make everyone else's lives better. Such drastic tax cuts would dramatically make life worse for everyone living in Kentucky.

Broad based taxes are a *fantastic* way to fund a government & its associated functions. Broad based tax cuts are a *terrible* way to administer any sort of government, but especially a welfare state.

And this is, what I hope I am conveying properly, the danger of slopulism. Tradeoffs do exist. Broad based tax cuts directly harm the ability of governments to administer a welfare state that are meant to help those in need of assistance. Which is why we have Jeff Bezos currently arguing in favor of zero federal taxes for the poorest half of Americans. He hasn't progressive. He just understands that broad-based taxes are essential to functional liberal governance, and is using economic populism as a vehicle for destroying it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay above the break was essentially my response to the original discussion why tax cuts for senior homeowners (and slopulism more broadly) is bad. Below this break I'm just going to chat about my views on which property tax deduction schemes for seniors are good or bad. Partially because you identified it as a point of confusion. Partially because I just to chat about them.

Property tax circuit breaker. Very good and progressive. This is an income-based limit to how much someone pays annually for property taxes. Because it is means-tested, it benefits those who need it and is not broad-based enough to destroy government tax revenues.

Property tax deferrals. Very good and progressive. Cities still eventually receive property tax revenues proportional to the unrealized wealth of landowners, and retired low-income homeowners get to pay nothing. I personally do not think it's a problem that will disrupts inheritance by forcing low-income inheritors to sell the house to pay the tax bill, but I understand that others may be much more fond of inheritance than I am. (viva la Estate tax)

Homestead exemptions. Essentially a tax deduction for a certain value of your primary residence. I personally consider this a net neutral. I don't think it's particularly progressive- retired homeowners are by and large a privileged class and I think the stability issues you present (where a property tax cut would make or break their ability to afford to live) are extremely fringe. But a simple tax deduction is relatively mild in its effects: a 20% avg tax cut for seniors can easily be canceled out by a modest 2-3% property tax increase on everyone else. So y'know, I'm fine with it. As you say, stability is worth something and I think a 2-3% property tax increase on the general populace is a totally acceptable price to pay for that.

Assessment freezes/ price controls/ Prop 13. Incredibly destructive and regressive, but slow and subtle enough that it doesn't lead to remarkable service cuts. Instead, municipal expenditures stay the same, and this is paid for by the property tax burden shifting away from incumbents and towards newcomers. The 50 year old townie who's house has been in their family since 1978 pays one-sixth of the taxes of a first-generation homebuyer who's family has never owned anything. Immigrant homeowners- whether from Texas or Thailand- pay thousands of more dollars a year to own the same home and receive the same city services that a native Californian receives for a fraction of the price. Building costs are inflated and the housing shortage from worsened because a 900 sq ft apartment built in 2025 is taxed at SIX TIMES the rate of a 900 sq ft apartment built in 1978 (and owned by the same landlord since then). What in a fair system might be $180/mo. in property taxes, one person is paying $60 and the other is paying $300!

This is why Prop 13 and other price controls are so uniquely bad. It's not just that they have bad side effects. Its primary purpose- to under-assess properties owned and inherited by incumbents- is itself bad! It is so broad-based that it fundamentally distorts markets and punishes anyone who wishes to experience any change whatsoever- whether its something as small as moving down the street or as large as building a low-income apartment building for seniors (something that actively targets those in need).

This also means removing Prop 13 wouldn't increase taxes across the board. Just as many people would enjoy tax cuts as they would endure tax hikes. Total taxes would still be net-zero (municipalities generally don't run surpluses and just levy the amount of taxes they need to balance the budget). We'd simply move from an inequitable system to an balanced one, where we can instead rely wholly on actually equitable tax benefits like the circuit breaker or deferral.

FWIW, this is not me saying there's a chance in hell California would repeal prop 13. Incumbents dominate local politics and I'm sure their interests will outweigh that of immigrants and renters every year for a million years. This isn't a statement of what is feasible- just of what is right, and what other cities should most definitely avoid.

[uboat53]

All right, I've gone from not being sure that I was understanding what you were trying to get across to being completely sure you're not understanding what I'm trying to get across.

First off, though, congrats on the D&D game. I miss the days when my group didn't all have small children, hopefully we'll get that going again as the little ones get older. Keep that going as long as you can!

Turning to what we've been discussing, I'll admit, my specific interest in property taxes is limited, especially compared to the interest you seem to have. I have opinions, but nothing all that deeply held and nothing that's probably worth discussing. I can see how that wasn't clear from my first couple of entries when I was still sorting out my thoughts, but I would have thought my last two entries would have clarified that a bit.

My issue is... let me explain a bit.

Homeowners worry quite a bit about finances. Don't get me wrong, they have huge advantages in this regard over renters from the tax benefits of mortgage interest to the fact that a fixed rate mortgage doesn't increase over time the way rent does, but the biggest concern of homeowners is that they may be forced by finances to sell their home.

There's a valid point to be made that they can benefit from the increased price of their house, but that mistakes the relationship between the homeowner and the house. Ultimately, it's not just an asset with a monetary value, it's a home, and losing it, even if that loss comes with a gain, is a big concern and carries costs that go way beyond just money.

Now, there are also decent points to be made about the kinds of things that cause that loss or the actual effects of that kind of loss and the resources that can be committed to mitigating it or the comparison with renters who do not gain from being forced to move for financial reasons among many others but, over and beyond any of the specifics of the situation... is the correct response to someone expressing a concern to simply dismiss it out of hand?

I mean that seriously, read the original post again. A person expresses concern and the response is a blasé dismissal or open disdain?

That's what I'm really getting at here. Homeowners do have concerns about affordable housing policy, they do want to make sure that others' gain does not come at their loss or at least not at unacceptable cost. When that concern is expressed, the response cannot be "well get over it, you're a rich person."

If this is the pitch that homeowners (who, and I cannot stress this enough, make up about 2/3 of the voting population) are being given about affordable housing and pro-renter policies, I can see why it's been so difficult to implement any of them.

[tomtheboy]

I appreciate the clarification of what your issue is! I (conditionally) agree with your critique of OP.

At the risk of dragging this out just a little bit longer, I'd like to add a bit of nuance with an annoying cliche: the internet isn't real life. Or at least, the virtual and physical worlds have distinctly different roles and rules.

Like don't get me wrong; in the physical world, when I'm doing housing advocacy, I'm framing literally *everything* in terms of how it will impact the homeowners who control everything. Building this apartment building will reduce your tax burden, implementing price controls will increase your tax burden, living next to an apartment will not reduce your home's resale value, building new housing close to job centers will decrease traffic through your neighborhood, etc etc etc. You pointing out homeowners being 2/3 of the voting population understates their level of control at the local level: my city is over 50% renter, but our city government is literally 100% run by homeowners.

And because of this, y'know, I have never called someone a NIMBY to their face or told someone they should vote for X because it will shift economic & political power away from homeowners and towards renters. Your critique of OP is perfectly legitimate for the purposes of "real life": walk on eggshells! Don't be dismissive towards homeowner interests!

But this is the internet, and it is so so so incredibly valuable to have folks name-calling NIMBYs or saying "stop whining about traffic/property values/taxes because we have real issues to deal with". Is it nuanced? No. Has name-calling an effective persuasion tactic? Also no. But it has nevertheless helped to create a *hugely influential* pro-housing movement across the US, cuz it spread this idea far and wide that hey, maybe we should start making moves to undermine homeowner interest because they're actively strangling both the fiscal stability of municipalities and the basic ability of renters to find a home.

I'm a wanna-be policy wonk. I'm always happy to write a novel's worth of text explaining why tax cuts in response to rising property values is bad, backtracking and double-checking calculations to make sure we're existing in the same reality of tax burdens and in what circumstances homeowner stability is at risk.

OP is just a guy who thinks tax cuts for homeowners is stupid, and when someone makes the (almost certainly incorrect) claim that "$100k of profit in a market where homes cost $150k won't buy you anything within a 2 hour drive", instead of having a nuanced policy discussion he responds with what you describe as "blasé dismissal" and "open disdain".

Only 3 accounts have engaged with my detailed policy arguments, whereas hundreds have engaged with OP's original pithy statement of values. I may be a more effective ambassador for housing activism in the real world. But OP, with all his dismissiveness and disdain, is a *far* more effective ambassador on the internet. We wouldn't even be having this discussion if it weren't for OP!

I fully understand your dislike of OP's tone, but I most definitely disagree with your conclusion that his Tumblr post spells doom for affordable housing and pro-renter policies. OP is doing a far better job of creating dialogue & engagement online than I am!

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[irradiate-space]

The nearest place she can afford to purchase with this $100k is two hours thataways, which means it's two hours from her doctors, two hours from her support networks, two hours from anyone who knows her and can check in on her when she doesn't show up to church on Sunday. Her car might be able to drive to church, but anymore, the nice girl down the street picks her up and drives her. She gets Meals on Wheels so she doesn't need to drive to the grocery store. Her car has not been started in three months. She can't see that it has two flat tires.

She would be better served by moving to a nursing home. She cannot afford a nursing home that matches her care needs.

If she loses her house to a tax sale, she will become homeless.

The $100k in value that she has received paradoxically makes her poorer, analogously to a welfare trap.

[phaeton-flier]

Hmmm. I do not think that is true. I do not think there are many areas in the United States where someone with a fixed income but also $140k in the bank cannot afford to live anywhere in a 2 hour radius. I think maybe you should meet some more homeless people

[uboat53]

I mean, what part of the logic are you missing? If the old lady's house has increased in price to the point where she can no longer afford to live there, unless this was some very unique circumstance to her specific house or her specific neighborhood, then it's because the entire region's housing prices have increased.

Maybe she lives in the richest part of the region and can still afford to buy something in the poorest part, but those kinds of people don't tend to live in the situation described, i.e. dependent on friends, family, and neighbors.

I bought my house in 2020 and, since then, it's appreciated in value by over 30% which, on paper, has made me a whole lot richer but, if I were forced to sell my house because I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be able to buy another one in my area because they'd all be unaffordable. There are poorer areas in my region I could move to but, if I already lived in one of them, I'd have to move a long way away in order to find something I could afford.

Ultimately, whatever your net worth, you need a place to live and that place to live has to relate to your overall support network, whether that's your family, your church, social workers, meals on wheels, or even your place of employment. The wealth in your home is only truly accessible if you have another housing option available. If you don't, then you're going to blow their any gains trying to get housing again and, at best, be no better off than you started.

[tomtheboy]

So I am pretty firmly in agreement with @phaeton-flier that little old grandma's who are "suffering" from high property values isn't an actual problem: this framing completely ignores renting. If an older person living off social security can't afford property taxes, just sell the home! The proceeds of a $1M home will pay $5k rent for 17 years, which can afford you a place to live in literally any city in America.

Or, in Mississippi numbers (which better matches the above example of a $150,000 home), a home sale will easily pay $1k rent for over a dozen years.

And that's assuming you never spend your actual income on rent! As someone else in this post mentioned, seniors living on "fixed incomes" is pretty much a myth anyway: whether they're primarily living off their 401k or their social security checks, both of those payments appreciate year over year.

That being said, for those who still believe Little Old Grandmas have a right to live in their exact same home until they die... That's a solved problem for the most part. Every state, as well as the federal gov, has a plethora of tax benefits for seniors. Many states (including MA and CA) specifically have a tax deferral program for seniors where seniors pretty much never pay property taxes until they die, and then their tax payments are recovered via the sale of their home when they die.

[jogothy]

Why are you arguing in favor of forcing people to sell to private equity and then rent? A boomer refusing to sell, dying in their home, and then their kids or grandkids inheriting it, is like the only way any young person could possibly own a home.

[tomtheboy]

Inheritance is the least equitable way to run a society. Estate taxes are the most progressive form of taxation, ensuring that the wealth of previous generations are distributed amongst all of society rather than wealth just passing to the kids of those with wealth.

Also, what private equity? Less than 1% of single family homes are owned by institutional landlords. 99% of the time, this hypothetical Little Old Grandma is just selling to a younger family.

[jogothy]

What younger family has the requisite $3 million to buy a home? I'm aware it's not all corporate landlords but random upper middle class people with savings they're investing in a second or third house to rent, resell, or sit on until housing goes up an even more absurd amount represent a significantly stronger proportion of buyers than a hypothetical young family looking for a permanent home that somehow both has multiple millions of dollars and needed people to be forced to sell just so they can get a place to live.

Also it's only "equitable" because you are counting a boomer with less actual money than you but a house that's theoretically worth millions as part of the rich, who it would be equitable to take the "wealth" from. Under the system you're describing, it's totally reasonable to pass around multimillion dollar home between a bunch of otherwise destitute people and then charge all of them more money than any of them have, until they sell to someone rich (or someone middle class who went into extreme debt, which is also bad), and somehow this is more "equitable" despite an already wealthy person ending up with a home that could've gone to people that have no other way to afford one, purely because mathematically, the point at which they owned the homecaused them to become defined as rich despite their actual money not increasing, which definitionally made it "equitable" to take money from them that they theoretically but not actually have.

[tomtheboy]

I think your concerns are well intentioned but miss the basic economics of it all.

Private equity & other landlords are not buying up $3M homes to rent. A home that expensive costs like $20,000 a month to finance, and it is damn near impossible to find a renter willing to pay that much. Rich people who buy $3M homes are generally people who want to own that home for their own purposes! Whether it's as practical as a primary residence (the vast majority of cases) or as ludicrous/vain as a vacation home (Hawaii and Miami housing markets are fucked up because this is common there).

Private equity and other institutional investors generally follow the buy-low-sell-high logic. Or I suppose it would be more apt to say buy-low-rent-high. This is why private equity is really active buying single family homes in the rapidly expanding suburbs and poor places like trailer parks, but can't be found in extremely high-cost regions like Boston (where I live). It would be insane for them to be competing with families for high-cost single family homes when they could instead be building and investing in massive multifamily rentals where the land-cost-to-sale-price ratio is much lower.

So anyway, TLDR; if someone's being priced out by rapidly increasing property values, they aren't the kind of person private equity would be interested in for the purpose of just renting out their home. They're either living in a single family neighborhood (in which case their home is definitely just going to a wealthier young family) or they're living in a single family home zoned for apartments (in which case their home *is* prolly getting bought by an investor, but for the purpose of building a very large number of units which individually will be more affordable than what the homeowner cashed out for.)

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[irradiate-space]

The nearest place she can afford to purchase with this $100k is two hours thataways, which means it's two hours from her doctors, two hours from her support networks, two hours from anyone who knows her and can check in on her when she doesn't show up to church on Sunday. Her car might be able to drive to church, but anymore, the nice girl down the street picks her up and drives her. She gets Meals on Wheels so she doesn't need to drive to the grocery store. Her car has not been started in three months. She can't see that it has two flat tires.

She would be better served by moving to a nursing home. She cannot afford a nursing home that matches her care needs.

If she loses her house to a tax sale, she will become homeless.

The $100k in value that she has received paradoxically makes her poorer, analogously to a welfare trap.

[phaeton-flier]

Hmmm. I do not think that is true. I do not think there are many areas in the United States where someone with a fixed income but also $140k in the bank cannot afford to live anywhere in a 2 hour radius. I think maybe you should meet some more homeless people

[uboat53]

I mean, what part of the logic are you missing? If the old lady's house has increased in price to the point where she can no longer afford to live there, unless this was some very unique circumstance to her specific house or her specific neighborhood, then it's because the entire region's housing prices have increased.

Maybe she lives in the richest part of the region and can still afford to buy something in the poorest part, but those kinds of people don't tend to live in the situation described, i.e. dependent on friends, family, and neighbors.

I bought my house in 2020 and, since then, it's appreciated in value by over 30% which, on paper, has made me a whole lot richer but, if I were forced to sell my house because I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be able to buy another one in my area because they'd all be unaffordable. There are poorer areas in my region I could move to but, if I already lived in one of them, I'd have to move a long way away in order to find something I could afford.

Ultimately, whatever your net worth, you need a place to live and that place to live has to relate to your overall support network, whether that's your family, your church, social workers, meals on wheels, or even your place of employment. The wealth in your home is only truly accessible if you have another housing option available. If you don't, then you're going to blow their any gains trying to get housing again and, at best, be no better off than you started.

[tomtheboy]

So I am pretty firmly in agreement with @phaeton-flier that little old grandma's who are "suffering" from high property values isn't an actual problem: this framing completely ignores renting. If an older person living off social security can't afford property taxes, just sell the home! The proceeds of a $1M home will pay $5k rent for 17 years, which can afford you a place to live in literally any city in America.

Or, in Mississippi numbers (which better matches the above example of a $150,000 home), a home sale will easily pay $1k rent for over a dozen years.

And that's assuming you never spend your actual income on rent! As someone else in this post mentioned, seniors living on "fixed incomes" is pretty much a myth anyway: whether they're primarily living off their 401k or their social security checks, both of those payments appreciate year over year.

That being said, for those who still believe Little Old Grandmas have a right to live in their exact same home until they die... That's a solved problem for the most part. Every state, as well as the federal gov, has a plethora of tax benefits for seniors. Many states (including MA and CA) specifically have a tax deferral program for seniors where seniors pretty much never pay property taxes until they die, and then their tax payments are recovered via the sale of their home when they die.

[uboat53]

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the people with houses worth $1 million aren't the ones being impacted by this. As an example, I'm going to use Anderson County, Kentucky, the place with the fastest growing home prices in the country as of 2026.

Looking at a lower-end house in Lawrenceburg, the largest (and really only) town in the county, I found one currently listed for about $190k but, if you look at the price history, you can see that, as recently as 5 years ago, you could buy this house for about $45k.

Let's assume a little 65 year old lady bought this house 40 years ago. It was probably about half the 2020 price then (maybe less, but let's go with it), so let's say she bought it for $22.5k and paid off the 30 year mortgage 10 years ago. Now she's retired, she gets social security but she's one of the 42% of people who have neither a pension nor a 401k, so that's her primary income.

I found a property tax estimator for the county, it doesn't go down to $45k or $22.5k, but it seems to scale linearly, so we can estimate. At $22.5k, she paid about $190 a year in property taxes. At $45k in 2020, that increased to $380. At $190k in 2026, though, that increased to almost $1,600. Now maybe she has that in her budget, but if she was already living at the edge of her means in 2020, it seems unlikely that she can absorb more than $1,000 per year in extra cost.

So now she sells her house and gets the $190k. After fees and everything, she'll net about $175k. That's a capital gain of ~$150k on the original price of the house, so she'll pay 15% on the gain over about $50k, which is about $15k, reducing her net to $160k. Then she'll pay Kentucky's flat 3.5% income tax on the original net price, reducing by a further $6k, making her final net about $155k (I'm using round numbers for ease here).

Average rent in the county looks like it's about $1k per month, so she can afford 155 months of rent or just under 13 years.

Now, you might say that's not too bad, that gets her almost to the age of 78! Except, of course, life expectancy for a woman in America is 81.5...

Also, unlike fixed rate mortgages, rent doesn't just stay the same year after year. Looking at the data going back to 2000, rent has increased by between 3% and 4% per year. Factoring that in, her 13 years of rent goes down to 11.

And, again, this assumes everything else runs pretty smoothly and she doesn't have to dip into that chunk of money for any medical emergencies or help out her kids or other family. Literally in the best case scenario, she won't be immediately homeless, she'll be homeless a decade from now.

When we talk about people getting priced out of their homes by property taxes, these are the situations we're talking about. You're absolutely right that the person who bought the San Francisco Bay Area house in the 70s for a fraction of its current price is probably fine, but the people who bought Bay Area houses in the 30s and 40s and then were in danger of getting priced out in the 70s, thus triggering Prop 13, looked a lot like the person I just described.

Prop 13 may not be great public policy, but it was a response to a very real situation that the people who oppose Prop 13 don't seem to have a very good answer to. I get the focus on the poorest, I think that's the right place to focus, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time and figuring out ways to get people out of the deepest poverty without addressing the next layers up so that they don't slip right back into it seems somewhat self-defeating.

[tomtheboy]

I think a lot of your premises are wrong. You especially underestimate how much US tax codes are already rigged in favor of homeowners and old folks.

1) The tax rate in Anderson county is 0.796%. Combine this with KY's $49k property tax exemptions for seniors, and this lady would be paying less than $100 per month on property taxes. This is easily affordable even for people earning half of KY's average monthly social security payment of $1,900.

I honestly this is kinda the end of the story of this hypothetical old lady's "struggles". But just to continue...

2) this Little Old Lady is entirely exempt from both income tax and any capital gains tax on the sale of her primary residence. Let's bump her cash from the home sale back up to $175,000

3) there's no reason to assume $175,000 is being kept in a checking account; by any reasonable measure, interest on this large chunk of wealth should easily cancel out inflation.

4) this gets us to 15 years of rent payments from the sale of her house... And this is without spending a single penny of her monthly retirement income on housing! This is still a huge chunk of inflation-adjusted income that we are ignoring, which could easily last her until she dies.

But back to the original point of this whole thread... There is very little reason to treat this old homeowner's situation as a crisis when there are so many renters and homeless folks who are dealing with *real* housing issues.

And Prop 13 is the perfect example of the active danger of excessively focusing on the concerns of little old retirees who just want low property taxes... by addressing their (unserious) concerns, CA has agressively fucked over younger folks and renters who are actually at risk of housing instability and homelessness. Prop 13 didn't address real issues. It addressed the fake issues of anti-tax homeowners and in the process worsened real issues.

Broad based property taxes are a great way to fund governments, and ameliorating them in service of retirees who want low taxes is bad.

[uboat53]

My goodness, you seem to think this 65 year old retiree in rural Kentucky is a lot more financially savvy than most Americans. Ultimately, though, I want to focus on one particular thing you said because I think it's the crux of the issue here:

"There is very little reason to treat this old homeowner's situation as a crisis when there are so many renters and homeless folks who are dealing with *real* housing issues."

That, I think, is where your argument really breaks down for me because I think that, as soon as you start justifying ignoring one group of people to help another, you've started on the slippery slope to just not caring about them at all.

To me this is all starting to sound like Republican arguments for increased documentation and work requirements and so forth on welfare programs. Sure, if you just follow the process and do all the steps the way you're supposed to then it won't be a problem, but this ignores the fact that each additional step you put in place represents a failure point and will result in more people slipping through the cracks of the process. In this case, slipping through the cracks means becoming homeless, creating more of the problem we're trying to solve!

Given this, I really have to ask what your plan is. Do you really think your best chance to address home affordability issues and homelessness is to antagonize 2/3 of the country? Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that the concerns of the very poor are more dire than the concerns of the middle class, but do you really think you're going to win people over by simply shouting at them that their concerns aren't worth considering at all?

And look, what really gets to me is when this is framed as a resource issue, that we don't have enough to address everyone's problems. Because that all comes back to the biggest problem in our society which is that we do actually have the resources to do these things and, by our continued refusal to tax the extraordinary wealth that's been gathered at the very top of our society, we instead pit the middle and lower classes against each other in a brutal competition that nobody is actually winning.

[tomtheboy]

The solution is liberalism! The solution is broad-based taxes which fund a robust welfare state to meet all people's needs!

Cuz if I may take this back a few steps... this is a discussion about tax cuts. This is a discussion about whether it is wise to be cutting the taxes of elderly homeowners to an even greater degree than they already are.

This hypothetical 65 year old Kentuckian has already received so many tax cuts that they are only paying $100 a month in property taxes on a $200k house. This is *very* affordable. It is also, I would like to point out, very different from what you initially assumed and calculated (more on that at the end).

These very affordable taxes for seniors, counted up across all of Kentucky ($240k avg home value, $50k deduction, 400k homeowning seniors in the state) contribute about $600 million dollars a year to local governments, equal to roughly 10% of the state's spending at the municipal level.

Slashing 10% of municipal budgets in order to give tax cuts to elderly homeowners is not progressive nor fiscally sustainable. $100/mo. is a reasonable amount for this hypothetical 65 year old to contribute to their community in exchange for living in a functional society.

I apologize for the pithy term, but I feel what you're advocating for is slopulism: the knee-jerk reaction of many folks to entirely ignore tradeoffs and advocate for tax cuts and increased government spending all at once, resulting in inevitable broken promises and broken governments.

I really like government spending and government programs which help *all* Americans! But such a government can only exist if we're all willing to pay to be a part of it. Significantly increasing taxes on the rich is of course a part of that solution, but it is not all of the solution. There is no such thing as a society where the richest 1% can be taxed to pay for the government of the remaining 99%. A functional liberal democracy with a robust welfare state will always and should always require everyone except the very poorest contributing at least a little bit to make it work.

I highly recommend reading this article by Ned Reskinoff titled Adventures in Slopulism. You cannot build a Nordic social insurance system on a Norquist-style tax base. Everyone should pay at least some taxes. And in my personal opinion, everyone should be happy doing it! Taxes are good. Taxes are the foundation of a free and stable society which ensures everyone is provided for.

Lastly, regarding the fact that you vastly overestimated the financial burden of a senior homeowner in Kentucky... I do a lot of housing advocacy in my free time. 99% of my effort is spent correcting misinformation and bad assumptions. Very little of my time is spent having actual value differences with the folks I'm chatting with. The same is true here. Yes, I agree that senior homeowners shouldn't be unfairly burdened via property taxes! But... we've already reached that point in almost all corners of America. Our local, state, and federal tax regimes are all *heavily* weighted in favor of retired homeowners. When I say tax-cuts-for-old-homeonwers isn't a problem, it isn't because I don't think old homeowners matter. It's because, as it relates to property taxes, the problem is already solved! If anything, many states and cities have overcompensated, and shifted the tax burden in unfair and horribly destructive ways onto younger families and renters (*couch cough prop 13).

I'm not arguing against your values. I'm arguing against the misinformation and false assumptions that drive your values to (imo) misguided conclusions. Like tax cuts for taxes which have already been cut to the bone.

Adventures in Slopulism

You can't build a Nordic social insurance system on a Norquist-style tax base

[uboat53]

So here's the thing. I think if you're arguing that, in a perfect world, there would be no need for cuts to property taxes and that, in fact, they could be a lot higher in many cases, I would agree with you. If you're arguing that we should raise taxes across the board on the majority of Americans (which removing assessment limits would do) here in the real world, then I don't think I'm with you anymore. My analysis of the old woman's financial situation deliberately didn't include the tax exemptions you described because my assumption was that you favored eliminating them, let me know if I'm wrong on that front. For my part, I'm certainly not arguing that we need more tax reduction than we already have, only that we should be careful in removing or redesigning those existing reductions to ensure that we don't cause more problems than we started with in doing so.

As you said, we seem to agree on values and disagree on tactics. You argue that the problem of the elderly being priced out of their homes by increasing property taxes is already largely solved, but then seem to advocate for removing the kinds of legislation that we put in place to solve that problem. I don't disagree that Prop 13 has had all kinds of unintended consequences in my home state, but it has definitely solved the problem it was intended to solve! Maybe even too well!

I had an exchange with someone else that brought another relevant thought to mind, though, which is that I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea that property taxes are necessary to provide services mainly because of how we implement them. Essentially, we've implemented them at the municipality level and the way that works out is that, while they can be reasonably progressive on the tax side, they're extremely regressive on the spend side, with rich areas getting tons of money through property taxes and poor areas pretty much staying poor in that regard. The devastated tax base of places like Detroit and other former industrial hubs demonstrates many of the weaknesses inherent in the system. I can see ways you could fix that (i.e., taxing them at a higher level of government that could distribute the funds more progressively), but we generally don't do that and so property tax revenue more often goes to areas that don't need it than areas that really do. It makes it difficult for me to see it as a tax that needs defending.

That said, I can see its usefulness for encouraging productive use, though even there it seems like land value taxes would be more effective. Overall, like many of our policies related to housing, it's a kludge that doesn't really do what we would want it to do all that effectively, and so I place a higher priority on harm reduction than on revenue maximization. That's just where I come at it, though.

All that said, I think one thing that's been missing from the conversation (and fair enough, I've only referenced it obliquely so I should be more explicit) is the value of stability. How much is it worth to keep someone in the home they are currently in? I mean, someone with a stable home isn't just someone who we're not worried about becoming homeless, they can serve as a pillar that prevents other people from becoming unsheltered homeless as well. I don't know exactly how much that's worth, but I know the answer isn't $0.

I should probably also note that, in cases where a simple solution and a complex solution compete, my preference is for the simpler one. Targeted tax breaks and assistance are great, but many of the people who would need such assistance are missed because they don't have the resources or knowledge to access it. Broad-based assistance often ends up going to a lot of people who don't need it, but it's far more likely to get to those who do.

I'm open to a discussion about the balance there, but I do feel that, too often we try to gatekeep resources rather than make more resources available. I agree with the piece you linked, we're never going to fund a proper society on the taxes Norquist would allow, but then answer, then, can't be to simply accept his limits.

Anyways, I've covered a lot of ground here, probably more than is reasonable for a single thread. Let me know what you think, particularly on the assumptions at the beginning, I'll be interested to know if I'm arguing with a scarecrow there.

[uboat53]

So, been thinking about this for a bit (thank you and Sybaritic for putting up with me while I try to figure myself out) and I think my core issue with the original premise is actually the stability thing.

Like, the idea that being forced to move, for any reason, not just financial, is a minor thing such that people who made money shouldn't be allowed to complain about it is, honestly, a bit offensive, as if everything in life were just a financial transaction and people's feelings are irrelevant.

(Since I can already see the bad take coming, yes, I think being forced to move is terrible for renters too! In fact, I'd say it's worse because there's pretty much no chance of them making money in the process, but it's a fallacy to think that something can't be bad for one group just because it's worse for another.)

I do certainly have other thoughts on the issue, and I'm happy to discuss them, but I think that's the real crux of my disagreement. A system can't just be economically efficient, it has to work for the people in it. While that often does mean being economically efficient, the cases where it's not are where technocratic governance starts to come apart.

After all, an economically efficient system that doesn't provide what people actually want will quickly become either an economically inefficient system, a politically dysfunctional one, or both.

[fictionyoubelieve]

As other branches of this post have already pointed out, there are ways for the person in this hypothetical situation to stay in their home without giving them tax breaks (that come at the expense of people who need them more). If their property tax is increasing due to their home value appreciating, that is value they can leverage by renting out a spare room or taking out a home equity loan. It’s not purely hypothetical dollars they can only access by moving.

And if we stop handing out tax breaks that incentivize homeowners to sit on the same property until they die, it’s that much easier to develop the nearby land so that there are more affordable units to move to. Then, anyone in this situation is more likely to have the option to downsize while remaining in the same area.

But even in the hypothetical situation where the person might be forced to move—by enabling them to stay, you’re just forcing out the person who would have taken their place instead! The point isn’t that it’s unsympathetic, it’s that they are no MORE deserving of sympathy than the person (or, likely, multiple people) who are pushed out of housing because there aren’t enough units available.

Even if you want to privilege the rights of people who have already lived in the area awhile over people moving there, because you value “stability” (though note that there is obviously value in growth and change, too!), there are renters looking to buy, growing families, and adult children trying to move out who all need that housing as well.

[uboat53]

I find it interesting that you specifically reblogged this off of the comment least conducive to what you seem to be arguing. In my earlier commentary there are plausible interpretations of what I said that add up to this, but responding to this one in this way kind of makes you sound like a caricature of exactly what I described.

I guess I could do a better job being clear that effectively saying "these people aren't allowed to complain about anything because there are people worse off" makes you sound like like a communist apparatchik carrying out the dictates of the party regardless of the consequences on the ground, a fauxgressive who's just looking for a group they're allowed to hate on, a disconnected technocrat who sees everything in the world as a economic transaction, or some combination of the three.

Yes, renters and especially the homeless have it worse and, yes, there are absolutely going to be times when people have to be priced out of their homes, but none of that is going to be made better by pretending that stability isn't something of value.

Ultimately, to most homeowners, a house isn't primarily a financial asset. If you can't understand that, you're not going to be able to address housing policy in a way that actually meets the needs of real people.

After all, those renters and homeless people you're trying to help aren't just 80s caricatures of business guys trying to build assets, they're trying to find a place they can call their own too.

[tomtheboy]

Sorry for the delay! Had dnd last night and it's also been an exciting 24 hours for women's hockey.

So I do think that tax breaks are generally a bad way of dealing with the issues you are describing, including the issue of homeowner stability. Harkening back to the $100/mo. property tax that a retired KY homeowner owes the government... if you take away the $49k homestead exemption for seniors, that homeowner would still only have a property tax burden of about $130/mo. for their $200k house! This is incredibly cheap. While the senior tax credit is definitely a statement of values and priorities, if a senior is actively in danger of losing their home I don't think a $30/mo. discount is a particularly effective way to remedy that situation. Hell, I don't even think a $130/mo. total abolition of property taxes would be particularly helpful. For senior citizens, property taxes are a rounding error compared to utility bills and other basic living expenses.

But if we were to abolish property taxes for seniors, $600M (10% of KY's municipal budgets) is very much *not* a rounding error when it comes to paying for government services that make everyone else's lives better. Such drastic tax cuts would dramatically make life worse for everyone living in Kentucky.

Broad based taxes are a *fantastic* way to fund a government & its associated functions. Broad based tax cuts are a *terrible* way to administer any sort of government, but especially a welfare state.

And this is, what I hope I am conveying properly, the danger of slopulism. Tradeoffs do exist. Broad based tax cuts directly harm the ability of governments to administer a welfare state that are meant to help those in need of assistance. Which is why we have Jeff Bezos currently arguing in favor of zero federal taxes for the poorest half of Americans. He hasn't progressive. He just understands that broad-based taxes are essential to functional liberal governance, and is using economic populism as a vehicle for destroying it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay above the break was essentially my response to the original discussion why tax cuts for senior homeowners (and slopulism more broadly) is bad. Below this break I'm just going to chat about my views on which property tax deduction schemes for seniors are good or bad. Partially because you identified it as a point of confusion. Partially because I just to chat about them.

Property tax circuit breaker. Very good and progressive. This is an income-based limit to how much someone pays annually for property taxes. Because it is means-tested, it benefits those who need it and is not broad-based enough to destroy government tax revenues.

Property tax deferrals. Very good and progressive. Cities still eventually receive property tax revenues proportional to the unrealized wealth of landowners, and retired low-income homeowners get to pay nothing. I personally do not think it's a problem that will disrupts inheritance by forcing low-income inheritors to sell the house to pay the tax bill, but I understand that others may be much more fond of inheritance than I am. (viva la Estate tax)

Homestead exemptions. Essentially a tax deduction for a certain value of your primary residence. I personally consider this a net neutral. I don't think it's particularly progressive- retired homeowners are by and large a privileged class and I think the stability issues you present (where a property tax cut would make or break their ability to afford to live) are extremely fringe. But a simple tax deduction is relatively mild in its effects: a 20% avg tax cut for seniors can easily be canceled out by a modest 2-3% property tax increase on everyone else. So y'know, I'm fine with it. As you say, stability is worth something and I think a 2-3% property tax increase on the general populace is a totally acceptable price to pay for that.

Assessment freezes/ price controls/ Prop 13. Incredibly destructive and regressive, but slow and subtle enough that it doesn't lead to remarkable service cuts. Instead, municipal expenditures stay the same, and this is paid for by the property tax burden shifting away from incumbents and towards newcomers. The 50 year old townie who's house has been in their family since 1978 pays one-sixth of the taxes of a first-generation homebuyer who's family has never owned anything. Immigrant homeowners- whether from Texas or Thailand- pay thousands of more dollars a year to own the same home and receive the same city services that a native Californian receives for a fraction of the price. Building costs are inflated and the housing shortage from worsened because a 900 sq ft apartment built in 2025 is taxed at SIX TIMES the rate of a 900 sq ft apartment built in 1978 (and owned by the same landlord since then). What in a fair system might be $180/mo. in property taxes, one person is paying $60 and the other is paying $300!

This is why Prop 13 and other price controls are so uniquely bad. It's not just that they have bad side effects. Its primary purpose- to under-assess properties owned and inherited by incumbents- is itself bad! It is so broad-based that it fundamentally distorts markets and punishes anyone who wishes to experience any change whatsoever- whether its something as small as moving down the street or as large as building a low-income apartment building for seniors (something that actively targets those in need).

This also means removing Prop 13 wouldn't increase taxes across the board. Just as many people would enjoy tax cuts as they would endure tax hikes. Total taxes would still be net-zero (municipalities generally don't run surpluses and just levy the amount of taxes they need to balance the budget). We'd simply move from an inequitable system to an balanced one, where we can instead rely wholly on actually equitable tax benefits like the circuit breaker or deferral.

FWIW, this is not me saying there's a chance in hell California would repeal prop 13. Incumbents dominate local politics and I'm sure their interests will outweigh that of immigrants and renters every year for a million years. This isn't a statement of what is feasible- just of what is right, and what other cities should most definitely avoid.

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[irradiate-space]

The nearest place she can afford to purchase with this $100k is two hours thataways, which means it's two hours from her doctors, two hours from her support networks, two hours from anyone who knows her and can check in on her when she doesn't show up to church on Sunday. Her car might be able to drive to church, but anymore, the nice girl down the street picks her up and drives her. She gets Meals on Wheels so she doesn't need to drive to the grocery store. Her car has not been started in three months. She can't see that it has two flat tires.

She would be better served by moving to a nursing home. She cannot afford a nursing home that matches her care needs.

If she loses her house to a tax sale, she will become homeless.

The $100k in value that she has received paradoxically makes her poorer, analogously to a welfare trap.

[phaeton-flier]

Hmmm. I do not think that is true. I do not think there are many areas in the United States where someone with a fixed income but also $140k in the bank cannot afford to live anywhere in a 2 hour radius. I think maybe you should meet some more homeless people

[uboat53]

I mean, what part of the logic are you missing? If the old lady's house has increased in price to the point where she can no longer afford to live there, unless this was some very unique circumstance to her specific house or her specific neighborhood, then it's because the entire region's housing prices have increased.

Maybe she lives in the richest part of the region and can still afford to buy something in the poorest part, but those kinds of people don't tend to live in the situation described, i.e. dependent on friends, family, and neighbors.

I bought my house in 2020 and, since then, it's appreciated in value by over 30% which, on paper, has made me a whole lot richer but, if I were forced to sell my house because I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be able to buy another one in my area because they'd all be unaffordable. There are poorer areas in my region I could move to but, if I already lived in one of them, I'd have to move a long way away in order to find something I could afford.

Ultimately, whatever your net worth, you need a place to live and that place to live has to relate to your overall support network, whether that's your family, your church, social workers, meals on wheels, or even your place of employment. The wealth in your home is only truly accessible if you have another housing option available. If you don't, then you're going to blow their any gains trying to get housing again and, at best, be no better off than you started.

[tomtheboy]

So I am pretty firmly in agreement with @phaeton-flier that little old grandma's who are "suffering" from high property values isn't an actual problem: this framing completely ignores renting. If an older person living off social security can't afford property taxes, just sell the home! The proceeds of a $1M home will pay $5k rent for 17 years, which can afford you a place to live in literally any city in America.

Or, in Mississippi numbers (which better matches the above example of a $150,000 home), a home sale will easily pay $1k rent for over a dozen years.

And that's assuming you never spend your actual income on rent! As someone else in this post mentioned, seniors living on "fixed incomes" is pretty much a myth anyway: whether they're primarily living off their 401k or their social security checks, both of those payments appreciate year over year.

That being said, for those who still believe Little Old Grandmas have a right to live in their exact same home until they die... That's a solved problem for the most part. Every state, as well as the federal gov, has a plethora of tax benefits for seniors. Many states (including MA and CA) specifically have a tax deferral program for seniors where seniors pretty much never pay property taxes until they die, and then their tax payments are recovered via the sale of their home when they die.

[uboat53]

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the people with houses worth $1 million aren't the ones being impacted by this. As an example, I'm going to use Anderson County, Kentucky, the place with the fastest growing home prices in the country as of 2026.

Looking at a lower-end house in Lawrenceburg, the largest (and really only) town in the county, I found one currently listed for about $190k but, if you look at the price history, you can see that, as recently as 5 years ago, you could buy this house for about $45k.

Let's assume a little 65 year old lady bought this house 40 years ago. It was probably about half the 2020 price then (maybe less, but let's go with it), so let's say she bought it for $22.5k and paid off the 30 year mortgage 10 years ago. Now she's retired, she gets social security but she's one of the 42% of people who have neither a pension nor a 401k, so that's her primary income.

I found a property tax estimator for the county, it doesn't go down to $45k or $22.5k, but it seems to scale linearly, so we can estimate. At $22.5k, she paid about $190 a year in property taxes. At $45k in 2020, that increased to $380. At $190k in 2026, though, that increased to almost $1,600. Now maybe she has that in her budget, but if she was already living at the edge of her means in 2020, it seems unlikely that she can absorb more than $1,000 per year in extra cost.

So now she sells her house and gets the $190k. After fees and everything, she'll net about $175k. That's a capital gain of ~$150k on the original price of the house, so she'll pay 15% on the gain over about $50k, which is about $15k, reducing her net to $160k. Then she'll pay Kentucky's flat 3.5% income tax on the original net price, reducing by a further $6k, making her final net about $155k (I'm using round numbers for ease here).

Average rent in the county looks like it's about $1k per month, so she can afford 155 months of rent or just under 13 years.

Now, you might say that's not too bad, that gets her almost to the age of 78! Except, of course, life expectancy for a woman in America is 81.5...

Also, unlike fixed rate mortgages, rent doesn't just stay the same year after year. Looking at the data going back to 2000, rent has increased by between 3% and 4% per year. Factoring that in, her 13 years of rent goes down to 11.

And, again, this assumes everything else runs pretty smoothly and she doesn't have to dip into that chunk of money for any medical emergencies or help out her kids or other family. Literally in the best case scenario, she won't be immediately homeless, she'll be homeless a decade from now.

When we talk about people getting priced out of their homes by property taxes, these are the situations we're talking about. You're absolutely right that the person who bought the San Francisco Bay Area house in the 70s for a fraction of its current price is probably fine, but the people who bought Bay Area houses in the 30s and 40s and then were in danger of getting priced out in the 70s, thus triggering Prop 13, looked a lot like the person I just described.

Prop 13 may not be great public policy, but it was a response to a very real situation that the people who oppose Prop 13 don't seem to have a very good answer to. I get the focus on the poorest, I think that's the right place to focus, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time and figuring out ways to get people out of the deepest poverty without addressing the next layers up so that they don't slip right back into it seems somewhat self-defeating.

[tomtheboy]

I think a lot of your premises are wrong. You especially underestimate how much US tax codes are already rigged in favor of homeowners and old folks.

1) The tax rate in Anderson county is 0.796%. Combine this with KY's $49k property tax exemptions for seniors, and this lady would be paying less than $100 per month on property taxes. This is easily affordable even for people earning half of KY's average monthly social security payment of $1,900.

I honestly this is kinda the end of the story of this hypothetical old lady's "struggles". But just to continue...

2) this Little Old Lady is entirely exempt from both income tax and any capital gains tax on the sale of her primary residence. Let's bump her cash from the home sale back up to $175,000

3) there's no reason to assume $175,000 is being kept in a checking account; by any reasonable measure, interest on this large chunk of wealth should easily cancel out inflation.

4) this gets us to 15 years of rent payments from the sale of her house... And this is without spending a single penny of her monthly retirement income on housing! This is still a huge chunk of inflation-adjusted income that we are ignoring, which could easily last her until she dies.

But back to the original point of this whole thread... There is very little reason to treat this old homeowner's situation as a crisis when there are so many renters and homeless folks who are dealing with *real* housing issues.

And Prop 13 is the perfect example of the active danger of excessively focusing on the concerns of little old retirees who just want low property taxes... by addressing their (unserious) concerns, CA has agressively fucked over younger folks and renters who are actually at risk of housing instability and homelessness. Prop 13 didn't address real issues. It addressed the fake issues of anti-tax homeowners and in the process worsened real issues.

Broad based property taxes are a great way to fund governments, and ameliorating them in service of retirees who want low taxes is bad.

[uboat53]

My goodness, you seem to think this 65 year old retiree in rural Kentucky is a lot more financially savvy than most Americans. Ultimately, though, I want to focus on one particular thing you said because I think it's the crux of the issue here:

"There is very little reason to treat this old homeowner's situation as a crisis when there are so many renters and homeless folks who are dealing with *real* housing issues."

That, I think, is where your argument really breaks down for me because I think that, as soon as you start justifying ignoring one group of people to help another, you've started on the slippery slope to just not caring about them at all.

To me this is all starting to sound like Republican arguments for increased documentation and work requirements and so forth on welfare programs. Sure, if you just follow the process and do all the steps the way you're supposed to then it won't be a problem, but this ignores the fact that each additional step you put in place represents a failure point and will result in more people slipping through the cracks of the process. In this case, slipping through the cracks means becoming homeless, creating more of the problem we're trying to solve!

Given this, I really have to ask what your plan is. Do you really think your best chance to address home affordability issues and homelessness is to antagonize 2/3 of the country? Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that the concerns of the very poor are more dire than the concerns of the middle class, but do you really think you're going to win people over by simply shouting at them that their concerns aren't worth considering at all?

And look, what really gets to me is when this is framed as a resource issue, that we don't have enough to address everyone's problems. Because that all comes back to the biggest problem in our society which is that we do actually have the resources to do these things and, by our continued refusal to tax the extraordinary wealth that's been gathered at the very top of our society, we instead pit the middle and lower classes against each other in a brutal competition that nobody is actually winning.

[tomtheboy]

The solution is liberalism! The solution is broad-based taxes which fund a robust welfare state to meet all people's needs!

Cuz if I may take this back a few steps... this is a discussion about tax cuts. This is a discussion about whether it is wise to be cutting the taxes of elderly homeowners to an even greater degree than they already are.

This hypothetical 65 year old Kentuckian has already received so many tax cuts that they are only paying $100 a month in property taxes on a $200k house. This is *very* affordable. It is also, I would like to point out, very different from what you initially assumed and calculated (more on that at the end).

These very affordable taxes for seniors, counted up across all of Kentucky ($240k avg home value, $50k deduction, 400k homeowning seniors in the state) contribute about $600 million dollars a year to local governments, equal to roughly 10% of the state's spending at the municipal level.

Slashing 10% of municipal budgets in order to give tax cuts to elderly homeowners is not progressive nor fiscally sustainable. $100/mo. is a reasonable amount for this hypothetical 65 year old to contribute to their community in exchange for living in a functional society.

I apologize for the pithy term, but I feel what you're advocating for is slopulism: the knee-jerk reaction of many folks to entirely ignore tradeoffs and advocate for tax cuts and increased government spending all at once, resulting in inevitable broken promises and broken governments.

I really like government spending and government programs which help *all* Americans! But such a government can only exist if we're all willing to pay to be a part of it. Significantly increasing taxes on the rich is of course a part of that solution, but it is not all of the solution. There is no such thing as a society where the richest 1% can be taxed to pay for the government of the remaining 99%. A functional liberal democracy with a robust welfare state will always and should always require everyone except the very poorest contributing at least a little bit to make it work.

I highly recommend reading this article by Ned Reskinoff titled Adventures in Slopulism. You cannot build a Nordic social insurance system on a Norquist-style tax base. Everyone should pay at least some taxes. And in my personal opinion, everyone should be happy doing it! Taxes are good. Taxes are the foundation of a free and stable society which ensures everyone is provided for.

Lastly, regarding the fact that you vastly overestimated the financial burden of a senior homeowner in Kentucky... I do a lot of housing advocacy in my free time. 99% of my effort is spent correcting misinformation and bad assumptions. Very little of my time is spent having actual value differences with the folks I'm chatting with. The same is true here. Yes, I agree that senior homeowners shouldn't be unfairly burdened via property taxes! But... we've already reached that point in almost all corners of America. Our local, state, and federal tax regimes are all *heavily* weighted in favor of retired homeowners. When I say tax-cuts-for-old-homeonwers isn't a problem, it isn't because I don't think old homeowners matter. It's because, as it relates to property taxes, the problem is already solved! If anything, many states and cities have overcompensated, and shifted the tax burden in unfair and horribly destructive ways onto younger families and renters (*couch cough prop 13).

I'm not arguing against your values. I'm arguing against the misinformation and false assumptions that drive your values to (imo) misguided conclusions. Like tax cuts for taxes which have already been cut to the bone.

Adventures in Slopulism

You can't build a Nordic social insurance system on a Norquist-style tax base

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[irradiate-space]

The nearest place she can afford to purchase with this $100k is two hours thataways, which means it's two hours from her doctors, two hours from her support networks, two hours from anyone who knows her and can check in on her when she doesn't show up to church on Sunday. Her car might be able to drive to church, but anymore, the nice girl down the street picks her up and drives her. She gets Meals on Wheels so she doesn't need to drive to the grocery store. Her car has not been started in three months. She can't see that it has two flat tires.

She would be better served by moving to a nursing home. She cannot afford a nursing home that matches her care needs.

If she loses her house to a tax sale, she will become homeless.

The $100k in value that she has received paradoxically makes her poorer, analogously to a welfare trap.

[phaeton-flier]

Hmmm. I do not think that is true. I do not think there are many areas in the United States where someone with a fixed income but also $140k in the bank cannot afford to live anywhere in a 2 hour radius. I think maybe you should meet some more homeless people

[uboat53]

I mean, what part of the logic are you missing? If the old lady's house has increased in price to the point where she can no longer afford to live there, unless this was some very unique circumstance to her specific house or her specific neighborhood, then it's because the entire region's housing prices have increased.

Maybe she lives in the richest part of the region and can still afford to buy something in the poorest part, but those kinds of people don't tend to live in the situation described, i.e. dependent on friends, family, and neighbors.

I bought my house in 2020 and, since then, it's appreciated in value by over 30% which, on paper, has made me a whole lot richer but, if I were forced to sell my house because I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be able to buy another one in my area because they'd all be unaffordable. There are poorer areas in my region I could move to but, if I already lived in one of them, I'd have to move a long way away in order to find something I could afford.

Ultimately, whatever your net worth, you need a place to live and that place to live has to relate to your overall support network, whether that's your family, your church, social workers, meals on wheels, or even your place of employment. The wealth in your home is only truly accessible if you have another housing option available. If you don't, then you're going to blow their any gains trying to get housing again and, at best, be no better off than you started.

[tomtheboy]

So I am pretty firmly in agreement with @phaeton-flier that little old grandma's who are "suffering" from high property values isn't an actual problem: this framing completely ignores renting. If an older person living off social security can't afford property taxes, just sell the home! The proceeds of a $1M home will pay $5k rent for 17 years, which can afford you a place to live in literally any city in America.

Or, in Mississippi numbers (which better matches the above example of a $150,000 home), a home sale will easily pay $1k rent for over a dozen years.

And that's assuming you never spend your actual income on rent! As someone else in this post mentioned, seniors living on "fixed incomes" is pretty much a myth anyway: whether they're primarily living off their 401k or their social security checks, both of those payments appreciate year over year.

That being said, for those who still believe Little Old Grandmas have a right to live in their exact same home until they die... That's a solved problem for the most part. Every state, as well as the federal gov, has a plethora of tax benefits for seniors. Many states (including MA and CA) specifically have a tax deferral program for seniors where seniors pretty much never pay property taxes until they die, and then their tax payments are recovered via the sale of their home when they die.

[uboat53]

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the people with houses worth $1 million aren't the ones being impacted by this. As an example, I'm going to use Anderson County, Kentucky, the place with the fastest growing home prices in the country as of 2026.

Looking at a lower-end house in Lawrenceburg, the largest (and really only) town in the county, I found one currently listed for about $190k but, if you look at the price history, you can see that, as recently as 5 years ago, you could buy this house for about $45k.

Let's assume a little 65 year old lady bought this house 40 years ago. It was probably about half the 2020 price then (maybe less, but let's go with it), so let's say she bought it for $22.5k and paid off the 30 year mortgage 10 years ago. Now she's retired, she gets social security but she's one of the 42% of people who have neither a pension nor a 401k, so that's her primary income.

I found a property tax estimator for the county, it doesn't go down to $45k or $22.5k, but it seems to scale linearly, so we can estimate. At $22.5k, she paid about $190 a year in property taxes. At $45k in 2020, that increased to $380. At $190k in 2026, though, that increased to almost $1,600. Now maybe she has that in her budget, but if she was already living at the edge of her means in 2020, it seems unlikely that she can absorb more than $1,000 per year in extra cost.

So now she sells her house and gets the $190k. After fees and everything, she'll net about $175k. That's a capital gain of ~$150k on the original price of the house, so she'll pay 15% on the gain over about $50k, which is about $15k, reducing her net to $160k. Then she'll pay Kentucky's flat 3.5% income tax on the original net price, reducing by a further $6k, making her final net about $155k (I'm using round numbers for ease here).

Average rent in the county looks like it's about $1k per month, so she can afford 155 months of rent or just under 13 years.

Now, you might say that's not too bad, that gets her almost to the age of 78! Except, of course, life expectancy for a woman in America is 81.5...

Also, unlike fixed rate mortgages, rent doesn't just stay the same year after year. Looking at the data going back to 2000, rent has increased by between 3% and 4% per year. Factoring that in, her 13 years of rent goes down to 11.

And, again, this assumes everything else runs pretty smoothly and she doesn't have to dip into that chunk of money for any medical emergencies or help out her kids or other family. Literally in the best case scenario, she won't be immediately homeless, she'll be homeless a decade from now.

When we talk about people getting priced out of their homes by property taxes, these are the situations we're talking about. You're absolutely right that the person who bought the San Francisco Bay Area house in the 70s for a fraction of its current price is probably fine, but the people who bought Bay Area houses in the 30s and 40s and then were in danger of getting priced out in the 70s, thus triggering Prop 13, looked a lot like the person I just described.

Prop 13 may not be great public policy, but it was a response to a very real situation that the people who oppose Prop 13 don't seem to have a very good answer to. I get the focus on the poorest, I think that's the right place to focus, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time and figuring out ways to get people out of the deepest poverty without addressing the next layers up so that they don't slip right back into it seems somewhat self-defeating.

[tomtheboy]

I think a lot of your premises are wrong. You especially underestimate how much US tax codes are already rigged in favor of homeowners and old folks.

1) The tax rate in Anderson county is 0.796%. Combine this with KY's $49k property tax exemptions for seniors, and this lady would be paying less than $100 per month on property taxes. This is easily affordable even for people earning half of KY's average monthly social security payment of $1,900.

I honestly this is kinda the end of the story of this hypothetical old lady's "struggles". But just to continue...

2) this Little Old Lady is entirely exempt from both income tax and any capital gains tax on the sale of her primary residence. Let's bump her cash from the home sale back up to $175,000

3) there's no reason to assume $175,000 is being kept in a checking account; by any reasonable measure, interest on this large chunk of wealth should easily cancel out inflation.

4) this gets us to 15 years of rent payments from the sale of her house... And this is without spending a single penny of her monthly retirement income on housing! This is still a huge chunk of inflation-adjusted income that we are ignoring, which could easily last her until she dies.

But back to the original point of this whole thread... There is very little reason to treat this old homeowner's situation as a crisis when there are so many renters and homeless folks who are dealing with *real* housing issues.

And Prop 13 is the perfect example of the active danger of excessively focusing on the concerns of little old retirees who just want low property taxes... by addressing their (unserious) concerns, CA has agressively fucked over younger folks and renters who are actually at risk of housing instability and homelessness. Prop 13 didn't address real issues. It addressed the fake issues of anti-tax homeowners and in the process worsened real issues.

Broad based property taxes are a great way to fund governments, and ameliorating them in service of retirees who want low taxes is bad.

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[irradiate-space]

The nearest place she can afford to purchase with this $100k is two hours thataways, which means it's two hours from her doctors, two hours from her support networks, two hours from anyone who knows her and can check in on her when she doesn't show up to church on Sunday. Her car might be able to drive to church, but anymore, the nice girl down the street picks her up and drives her. She gets Meals on Wheels so she doesn't need to drive to the grocery store. Her car has not been started in three months. She can't see that it has two flat tires.

She would be better served by moving to a nursing home. She cannot afford a nursing home that matches her care needs.

If she loses her house to a tax sale, she will become homeless.

The $100k in value that she has received paradoxically makes her poorer, analogously to a welfare trap.

[phaeton-flier]

Hmmm. I do not think that is true. I do not think there are many areas in the United States where someone with a fixed income but also $140k in the bank cannot afford to live anywhere in a 2 hour radius. I think maybe you should meet some more homeless people

[uboat53]

I mean, what part of the logic are you missing? If the old lady's house has increased in price to the point where she can no longer afford to live there, unless this was some very unique circumstance to her specific house or her specific neighborhood, then it's because the entire region's housing prices have increased.

Maybe she lives in the richest part of the region and can still afford to buy something in the poorest part, but those kinds of people don't tend to live in the situation described, i.e. dependent on friends, family, and neighbors.

I bought my house in 2020 and, since then, it's appreciated in value by over 30% which, on paper, has made me a whole lot richer but, if I were forced to sell my house because I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be able to buy another one in my area because they'd all be unaffordable. There are poorer areas in my region I could move to but, if I already lived in one of them, I'd have to move a long way away in order to find something I could afford.

Ultimately, whatever your net worth, you need a place to live and that place to live has to relate to your overall support network, whether that's your family, your church, social workers, meals on wheels, or even your place of employment. The wealth in your home is only truly accessible if you have another housing option available. If you don't, then you're going to blow their any gains trying to get housing again and, at best, be no better off than you started.

[tomtheboy]

So I am pretty firmly in agreement with @phaeton-flier that little old grandma's who are "suffering" from high property values isn't an actual problem: this framing completely ignores renting. If an older person living off social security can't afford property taxes, just sell the home! The proceeds of a $1M home will pay $5k rent for 17 years, which can afford you a place to live in literally any city in America.

Or, in Mississippi numbers (which better matches the above example of a $150,000 home), a home sale will easily pay $1k rent for over a dozen years.

And that's assuming you never spend your actual income on rent! As someone else in this post mentioned, seniors living on "fixed incomes" is pretty much a myth anyway: whether they're primarily living off their 401k or their social security checks, both of those payments appreciate year over year.

That being said, for those who still believe Little Old Grandmas have a right to live in their exact same home until they die... That's a solved problem for the most part. Every state, as well as the federal gov, has a plethora of tax benefits for seniors. Many states (including MA and CA) specifically have a tax deferral program for seniors where seniors pretty much never pay property taxes until they die, and then their tax payments are recovered via the sale of their home when they die.

[jogothy]

Why are you arguing in favor of forcing people to sell to private equity and then rent? A boomer refusing to sell, dying in their home, and then their kids or grandkids inheriting it, is like the only way any young person could possibly own a home.

[tomtheboy]

Inheritance is the least equitable way to run a society. Estate taxes are the most progressive form of taxation, ensuring that the wealth of previous generations are distributed amongst all of society rather than wealth just passing to the kids of those with wealth.

Also, what private equity? Less than 1% of single family homes are owned by institutional landlords. 99% of the time, this hypothetical Little Old Grandma is just selling to a younger family.

[phaeton-flier]

Of the people I have least sympathy towards are Little Old Grandmas who just Can't Pay the Property Tax and has to move out of her Sentimental Family Home with only several million dollars of appreciation to tide her over. Just the worst ratio of whining to suffering among the gentry. Spend a week sleeping on the streets and then explain why you need lower property taxes

[irradiate-space]

It is somewhat of an actual problem in my area that Little Old Grandmas on fixed incomes in houses that pre-pandemic would've sold for $40k are now being assessed at $150k, and their property tax bill has gone from $800/year to $2000/year. This increase is partly due to the increase in valuation of their home, and partly due to the property-tax levies that voters keep voting in to pay for things that the state and federal governments won't pay for, such as schools and road maintenance.

Of course, this could be solved with a graduated property tax, where value above $amount is taxed at a higher rate, but that is antithetical to the principle of flat taxes, which is sworn to by the party in power.

[phaeton-flier]

I really want to get through to you that I am not sympathetic to the old woman here. She has received over $100,000 that she did not work for and now has to pay taxes on that. She could solve the tax problem by moving. Real, actual problems with housing are the domain of people who might become homeless.

[irradiate-space]

The nearest place she can afford to purchase with this $100k is two hours thataways, which means it's two hours from her doctors, two hours from her support networks, two hours from anyone who knows her and can check in on her when she doesn't show up to church on Sunday. Her car might be able to drive to church, but anymore, the nice girl down the street picks her up and drives her. She gets Meals on Wheels so she doesn't need to drive to the grocery store. Her car has not been started in three months. She can't see that it has two flat tires.

She would be better served by moving to a nursing home. She cannot afford a nursing home that matches her care needs.

If she loses her house to a tax sale, she will become homeless.

The $100k in value that she has received paradoxically makes her poorer, analogously to a welfare trap.

[phaeton-flier]

Hmmm. I do not think that is true. I do not think there are many areas in the United States where someone with a fixed income but also $140k in the bank cannot afford to live anywhere in a 2 hour radius. I think maybe you should meet some more homeless people

[uboat53]

I mean, what part of the logic are you missing? If the old lady's house has increased in price to the point where she can no longer afford to live there, unless this was some very unique circumstance to her specific house or her specific neighborhood, then it's because the entire region's housing prices have increased.

Maybe she lives in the richest part of the region and can still afford to buy something in the poorest part, but those kinds of people don't tend to live in the situation described, i.e. dependent on friends, family, and neighbors.

I bought my house in 2020 and, since then, it's appreciated in value by over 30% which, on paper, has made me a whole lot richer but, if I were forced to sell my house because I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't be able to buy another one in my area because they'd all be unaffordable. There are poorer areas in my region I could move to but, if I already lived in one of them, I'd have to move a long way away in order to find something I could afford.

Ultimately, whatever your net worth, you need a place to live and that place to live has to relate to your overall support network, whether that's your family, your church, social workers, meals on wheels, or even your place of employment. The wealth in your home is only truly accessible if you have another housing option available. If you don't, then you're going to blow their any gains trying to get housing again and, at best, be no better off than you started.

[tomtheboy]

So I am pretty firmly in agreement with @phaeton-flier that little old grandma's who are "suffering" from high property values isn't an actual problem: this framing completely ignores renting. If an older person living off social security can't afford property taxes, just sell the home! The proceeds of a $1M home will pay $5k rent for 17 years, which can afford you a place to live in literally any city in America.

Or, in Mississippi numbers (which better matches the above example of a $150,000 home), a home sale will easily pay $1k rent for over a dozen years.

And that's assuming you never spend your actual income on rent! As someone else in this post mentioned, seniors living on "fixed incomes" is pretty much a myth anyway: whether they're primarily living off their 401k or their social security checks, both of those payments appreciate year over year.

That being said, for those who still believe Little Old Grandmas have a right to live in their exact same home until they die... That's a solved problem for the most part. Every state, as well as the federal gov, has a plethora of tax benefits for seniors. Many states (including MA and CA) specifically have a tax deferral program for seniors where seniors pretty much never pay property taxes until they die, and then their tax payments are recovered via the sale of their home when they die.

[tomtheboy]

I am going to need Phillips to shutout the Victoire at least once so that I feel less bad about the Fleet getting goalie'd

[tomtheboy]

C'mon Gwyneth it's today or never. Please

[untilbirdsflytothesun]

Shush I'm coping

[senatortedcruz]

Have you thanked god for making you a coastal elitist today?

[userfish]

[tomtheboy]

Can someone make and share a compilation of Kenzie LaLonde and Cheryl Pounder iconic moments? Cuz folks keep going crazy about them in the lb and I'd really love to see their funny & flirty commentator highlights!

[tomtheboy]

I am going to need Phillips to shutout the Victoire at least once so that I feel less bad about the Fleet getting goalie'd

[starrynet]

pwhl las vegas

[odd-birdie]

scams... they'll kill you, scams...

[hekkabecca]

This is so fucking funny, knowing that scams was the one flashcarding Philips so that she might actually learn the names of some of the guys playing for the men's team in Milan lmao