Final answer: Residential only, not commercial/business property.
Seniors aren't the only ones who need this.
I also want to add that what sucks so hard about businesses being protected by Prop 13 is that businesses can live much longer than people. Disney might keep its decades-old fixed property tax for more than a hundred years.
No one needs prop 13. Lots of people want and benefit from it, but no one needs it. You may need it to stay in your current home, but you don't need to stay in your current home. You can get another home elsewhere if the place where you live has outgrown you. Yes, it's possible for people to outgrow a place and also for a place to outgrow people.
It's not even like they are economic losers. They bought into a place and it appreciated in value and they got to upside from the increased housing value. When they sell the home, they'll be cash rich and be able to easily afford a new home in a place that was just like 1925 Livermore. If you want to live in 2016 Livermore, which is a wholly different place from 1925 Livermore, then you should pay property taxes commensurate with supporting a 2016 Livermore.
Yes, it's true, they may not be able to afford the property taxes there today under prop 13, but under some alternate universe without prop 13, the property taxes would be lower than they are today. The only reason they are as high as they are is because those that bought a home recently are paying way more in property taxes to make up for how little others pay in property taxes. Basically, if you're paying 1925 property taxes, you're freeloading while others that were born later make up the tax difference necessary for a community to function. Prop 13 is nothing more than a form of wealth transfer from the mostly young to the mostly old.
Furthermore, there are good paying jobs in and around Livermore that require people to live near Livermore. If people are subsidized so they can occupy space near those jobs at the expense of the people qualified for those jobs, you're doing economic harm to the city, county, state and country in which Livermore resides, especially when those jobs are of the variety that are valuable for economic prosperity at the national level.
I think the appreciating value in housing far outpaces inflation - and I wouldn't expect retirees on a fixed income to have planned for such increases 30 years ahead of time.
We need cheaper housing - desperately. Poor. fucking. city. planning. with mediocre transit systems is not doing enough for us. I hear talk all the time about how we should be moving out of the cities and building the needed infrastructure in more urban areas. I think the first way to make that attractive to younger generations or even retirees would be to improve on transit to get to those areas. Make "the country" easy to get to and from.
Anyway - I don't know the answer here. I don't know if it's justified whether prop 13 should exist for individuals. Ethically or logistically I don't know. I sure as hell know businesses don't need prop 13 - they don't retire.
To me "if we should have prop 13" sounds like an argument against people being able to retire.
I'd be happy to let it go entirely (business + residential) if property taxes were factored into social security. ;p
That was my argument back when they passed the thing (17 year old me argument). You can do either of two things. Either limit property tax increases on a retired persons primary residence. Or allow retired people accept a tax lien in lieu of taxes.
