To the editor: I might have favored to see Mitchell Landsberg and Gale Holland write extra about Proposition 13 as a consider our metropolis’s housing disaster (“The real story of how L.A. became the epicenter of America’s homeless crisis,” July 10). It receives however a paragraph’s consideration, and is faulted just for ravenous native governments of funds to take care of homelessness. In reality, the gravest consequence of Proposition 13 has been to subsidize property homeowners, 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 homeowners 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 in any way that doesn’t contain denting homeowners’ treasured property values. Repealing Proposition 13 in favor of a heavy tax on the current worth of land, ideally with enhancements exempted, is the only most effective means to such an finish. If we aren’t prepared to tank California’s actual property market, then we aren’t prepared to unravel the issue.
Michael Raley, Los Angeles
