Prop 13: Old People Suck

September 9th, 2009 • 1 comment California and Proposition 13

Imagine a world where you own your home outright, and have a stable property tax 1000 percent less than the taxes your next door neighbor pays for their carbon-copy house next door.

Imagine a world where your equity in that home of yours allows you to buy apartment buildings, large boats, and a vacation home in the mountains. Meanwhile, your neighbor can barely keep his head above water to make the huge house and tax payments each month.

Sounds great, right? Talk about not just keeping up with the Joneses, but totally fucking obliterating them. Well, that’s California for you. Old people in California suck. They’re greedy bastards sitting on the wealth of this state and making it damn near impossible for good young people to move up.

I see your smug smiles, as you collect rent from my generation- a generation locked out of buying thanks to the greed of your generation. And it pisses me off. The only reason you shits aren’t getting tarred and feathered is because the average person in California doesn’t understand how screwed they are by you.

So wake up, people!

Do some research. Check out exactly who owns those nice homes up in the hills of Sherman Oaks and Studio City. See who really holds the paper on the houses in Bel Air.

I checked out Blockshopper Los Angeles, and guess what? On my street there is exactly one house that’s owned by an actual family who bought it in the past decade. Every other house is owned by a trust or an old geezer who’s been in it since the 1980s.

That’s right: the best neighborhoods in Los Angeles are not neighborhoods. They are investment properties!

Why’s this so bad? Well, besides the obvious reality that this kind of living situation doesn’t allow normal families to feel a part of their community, and to grow with the community, there’s some rather unexpected nasty fallout. You know what I’m talking about.

The schools.

If you have a neighborhood where only 1 in 10 homeowners are paying anything close to fair in property taxes, it means there isn’t enough money to support schools and other services.

California schools used to rock. They used to be among the best in the nation. Now, they’re near the bottom of the barrel.

Ditto with our university system. And pretty much every service provided by government. We, as a State, suck. Thanks to the greedy old baby boomers who really, really had to have that porsche and those vacation properties.

Old people in California suck. And as usual, it’ll be up to us Generation X types to work and fix things, if they can be fixed after your orgy of greed.

You old greedy fucks better hope I’m not in charge of your DNR order when you’re in the nursing home soon.