To the editor: I might have preferred to see Mitchell Landsberg and Gale Holland write extra about Proposition 13 as a consider our metropolis’s housing disaster (“The true story of how L.A. turned the epicenter of America’s homeless disaster,” July 10). It receives however a paragraph’s consideration, and is faulted just for ravenous native governments of funds to take care of homelessness. Actually, the gravest consequence of Proposition 13 has been to subsidize property house owners, permitting them to so dearly cling to their holdings as to distort the market of their favor. By holding assessed worth for tax functions near the worth on the time of buy, Proposition 13 disincentivizes longtime house owners to promote, thereby perpetually constraining stock on the general public’s dime.
The housing disaster is essentially pushed by sky-high actual property costs, and there’s no resolution by any means that doesn’t contain denting house owners’ valuable property values. Repealing Proposition 13 in favor of a heavy tax on the current worth of land, ideally with enhancements exempted, is the one best means to such an finish. If we aren’t prepared to tank California’s actual property market, then we aren’t prepared to resolve the issue.
Michael Raley, Los Angeles
