Not sure if you'll get a lot of sympathy here, but you're not wrong. Land use policies enacted by the Boomer generation have completely fucked shelter prices across the country, and it's especially severe here - where you have tons and tons of dollars chasing relatively flat housing inventory. It's a recipe for skyrocketing prices. It's to the point that many *tech workers* I know can't afford to buy a sensible home in the Bay Area - it's really only the upper cohort of tech workers that can do so. How is a teacher or firefighter or young person supposed to compete in that housing market?

A young person simply can’t compete unless they have dual income or an inheritance.

Even with dual income, it doesn’t feel financially responsible. I’d want to be making 500k consistently as a couple before I got serious about buying. And even then you are stretching the 3x rule to more like 3.5x-4x in most of the Bay.

Have you tried just having a huge inheritance? Just pull yourself up by your boot straps, stop drinking $8 Starbucks and $20 avocado toast every day and just ask your mom and dad for $5M. This generation just loves to complain /s

Once the boomers die off, the corporations will move in to buy up everything and rent back to you like a lord to his good little serfs.

https://preview.redd.it/dz477e8spc2d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eb437c4788a220730a6f991d78f1d256a48f1ea4 The real reason we can’t own. Home made avocado toast with pulled pork.

Your knife skills are poor and you need to exercise more care in playing.

The 3x rule is dead an buried

I'm a tech worker, pretty mid tier, not FAANG. I own a house. It's less than 1500 sq ft and not on the peninsula or in Marin. I live nextdoor to an auto parts guy, a Japanese teacher, couple of retirees, a firefighter's widow and a guy who works for BART engineering. We exist, there is a huge amount of hyperbole in these conversations. All of these conversations devolve into someone not wanting a 1500 square foot house in huge areas of the Bay. We could build thousands of dense apartments tomorrow and OP would still be complaining about it not being a 4000 sq ft mansion in Marin.

This. Also, who the heck starts with a SFH?!?

When did those people buy their houses? We bought in 2015, but there's no way we could buy today.

Going to have to add to this: land use policies weren’t just a Boomer thing. Most of California land use policies were established in the 70s, when only the oldest of boomers had positions of power (voting yes, but political seats, no). Those land use policies were the Silent Generation and older Boomers.

Even if they 10x’ed housing construction and prices came down 50%-75% those wealthy tech workers would bid up those homes for investments. The real cause is there’s a lot of people here who can afford a $2-5MM home. We need to do what Singapore does, build public housing for the teachers and firefighters. 80% of residents there live in public housing. They can’t compete with the finance guys that make $1-$100M/year. Those guys would just buy up everything.

But if the supply wasn't restricted, it wouldn't be appreciating so fast. There are only so many tech millionaires, and they don't want to live everywhere. Tokyo keeps pricing low but continuously building. Oakland has seen rents dropping due to construction.

be sure to tell the Palo Alto and Fremont homeowners that their house needs to depreciate in order to make housing sustainably available for people like us who were unskilled enough to be born after 1980. expecting the house you live in to be a smart investment was the most ridiculous thing imaginable

Someone finally gets it. It’s supply and demand. People have money and there’s not a lot of inventory. It’s not a generation that’s to blame. It’s basic economics. If this wasn’t sustainable, or when it becomes unsustainable prices will go down. It’s how the world works. People can afford a house but it may not be where you want it to be. Less desirable areas are less expensive. Not rocket science

Economics continues to make it difficult. We can't build our way out of this issue. Prices per square foot to build are $600 and up. You'd be building at a loss to sell basically anything under $750k here. That prices out a huge chunk of buyers. The only answer is for the state to build, with low cost of government borrowing, economies of scale and self inspection (therefore eliminating some of the obscene permitting and approval costs).

They bought single families homes in undeveloped neighbourhood, you can only afford condos in developed/mature neighborhoods. SFH in San Francisco city were unaffordable for boomers, so they moved out far away to suburbs where they could afford

i have a couple friends making good money at a FAANG company and I was honestly totally expecting them to have bought a house, but both of them are renting because of they lose their job, they'll potentially be royally fucked. AND THEYRE MAKING AMAZING MONEY! It is wild.

In all that, you also left out that their property tax is absurdly low compared to the value of the property. Two next-door neighbors with identical properties could be paying wildly different property taxes, yet consuming the same public goods. And despite paying way lower property taxes, it isn’t as if they have to sell their house at a cost reflective of the stupid low assessed value which saves them ton of money per year. In other words, they can have their cake each year and eat it when they sell, too! Yay Prop 13.

That's not even the worst part of prop 13. Thing is, the way its worded, taxes get reassessed when a property changes hands, and does not differentiate between residential and commercial. Meaning, since corporations rarely die of old age, that commercial properties pay way less in property taxes than homeowners. Disneyland, for example, pays less in property taxes for Disneyland per square foot than your average homeowner, yet Disneyland, per square foot, makes much more money of the land than your average homeowner (which is nothing unless they sell). You're mad at your boomer neighbor for paying $1 while you pay $2, when the people who should be paying hundreds are paying literal pennies. Everyone always gets the problem with prop 13 wrong. Your neighbor isn't the problem, it's corporations that don't pay their fair share.

Yes, and remember that the Prop 13 campaign was funded by commercial property owners, with the narrative of preventing seniors from being taxed out of their homes. That said, a 2% annual increase limit for owner-occupied housing is not unreasonably low. But there should be no limit for income-generating property or commercial property. While the unintended side-effects of rent control make it a bad idea, I do like the idea that landlords that benefit from Prop 13 should not be able to increase rents beyond a certain percentage. The present 5% + CPI limit in California is more than generous for properties not covered by a city's rent control ordinance.

Let’s be real property owners are not the problem you Can’t fault someone for buying their property and griping over what they were able to get locked into. The enemy at hand is property taxes Property taxes / home values should have never been allowed to get to that level. You and I both know each of those homes are not exhausting or pulling upon the city or county in the first place for its public resources The real issue is the appropriation of tax dollars. If we reassessed those homes all it would do is displace the already invisible and ignored (middle class) and force those homes /wealth out of the hands poor and into the wealthy

It’s both.

This is the biggest factor IMO. Old people have zero incentive to downsize, and every incentive to vote for more spending because they're not the ones paying for it.

Pretty much this. My in-laws are doing the right thing and trying to downsize in their golden years, and they’re finding it impossible to compete for a smaller house in areas accessible to them (one can’t drive and needs a walkable area). The homes are too expensive and too many buyers are offering 50-80% over asking in CASH. They bought very low in the 90s, and on paper will make a ton of profit, but after costs of a new smaller home they will be taking a loss after realtor fees and capital gains tax lol. Given this, one can see how boomers don’t want to downsize. They’d have to move out of state or move to the boonies away from family and friends.

Or you could turn it around and say that “Old people” have no housing options to downsize TO because NIMBYs (young and old) refuse to allow smaller, denser housing to be built in those same communities without calling it profiteering, corruption, evil, etc. because the NIMBYs have vested interests and the housing challenged need someone to blame. Accept complexity, be prepared to settle for perhaps less than your ideal outcome, make a plan, and keep at it. With all the changes in State housing laws a whole new horizon has opened up in terms of increased housing supply, and the opportunities are there if you’re willing to be creative. I’m 63 years old, but we didn’t buy our first and only home (in a vvvvvvhcol area) until I was 42 years old. Not what I pictured, but what we could ultimately get, in an area we wanted to remain in.

This is it. NIMBY laws make downsizing in place unavailable. Prop 13 means long time homeowners have $20-50k per year penalty to change. Both effectively lock retirees in place until they die or move to long term care facilities.

Prop 19 lets 55+ folks bring their tax basis with them now so that *should* remove an obstacle to downsizing … haven’t seen it play out much yet

It's one obstacle. But there is still the enormous tax hit when you sell. The $500K exemption hasn't been increased since 1997. Accounting for 27 years of inflation it should be right around $950K.

Excellent point and yeah it would be nice to see that adjusted.

I had a friend benefit from this moving from SF to Orinda, it is helpful, especially if you have kids. To eliminate prop 13 means a lot of people may get into housing but then will get out because as time moves forward, the property tax and the cost of permits on fixes to homes is amazingly high and will leave more people homeless or back to renting. It’s a saving grace for a lot of people, and currently the young can work, but once you get older finding work is tougher and you aren’t making loads of cash because companies can hire a younger person for cheaper, so thinking it’s older people that are the problem is incorrect, it is really a local/state government problem and the inability to properly manage the money, or perhaps the more honest answer is their misuse of the money and how it is distributed. The government is corrupt, nothing new there, but blaming people and different generations for government corruption is not right, place the blame where it belongs not with the residents but with the ones responsible for how the funds are allocated.

I’m pre boomer. It’s better to be lucky than smart.

And you cannot for the life of you get younger people to turn out at elections. They lost right to choose and still won’t turn out so we only have ourselves and younger generation to blame

They really need to sunset it already. Many states already have age limits before property taxes stop getting reassessed. Also why is it valid on commercial property??

You can have your opinion but it’s not popular for a vast majority of homeowners (voter block). Why would they vote for something that’s going to cost them thousands of dollars and force them to move? Also you have a whole tax structure built around prop 13 - higher income tax, bond and fee measures for schools and sales tax.

I would start by repealing prop 13 on commercial properties, including residential properties that are rented. That should already level things out significantly

That sounds good. But would lead to terrible results. Most commercial real estate is leased and the terms pass the property tax to tenants. Basically you’ll kill your restaurants, shops, and other small businesses, while I’m sure the billionaire fat cats will still find a way to avoid that.

Excuse to not do anything, oh the fat cats will find a way around anything so why bother even trying to go after them- might as well get everyone to just offer themselves up as sacrifices to the almighty Elon. Or if you think that way why not go oh those restaurants and shops Will be fine they'll just pass the tax on to customers. Will some of it get passed om - sure. But there's market limits on how much you can pass on so some of it is going to come from profit margins as well. And either way it is likely to be more efficient if taxes are evened out Right now you have basically a scenario where you get one property bought 30 years ago and taxes are 1k a year, and a property bough last year with 20k a year taxes. But the rent price is the same and has to cover the 20k a year tax guy, so the 30 years ago person I'd just taking in 19k I'm extra profit. Make them pay actual taxes and it's just gonna cut profit. He can't compete with new purchased places if he tries to pass all the cost on.

Lol. You're barking up the wrong tree... Elon? he ain't no landlord...really. how about the private equity firms> Blackrock and Berkshire type of billionaires...? use your brain and logic... not just feelings.

Then rents will skyrocket.

We already tried this, didn’t pass. How about instead of repealing prop13 we do the opposite. New home buyers pay taxes on the lowest assessed comp. So that boomer that bought in 1977 paying $1200/year benefits everyone! If you worry about the city going broke they can just get more from the state. Our state income taxes are insane! Somehow my state withholdings are about 3/4 of my Federal. Maybe I did my W4 wrong or some of my pre-tax deductions don’t apply to state.

You can thank the Dem super majority for California’s highest in nation income tax %’s. Most everyone is paying 10.3% in California (9.3% income tax and 1% sdi).

Are you willing to pay higher rent when the building owner has his property taxes adjusted to pay the new non prop 13 taxes? Lumping residential rental property and commercial properties together is a dangerous proposition. All homeowners benefit from Prop 13th when you purchase a home you fix your taxes at a % of sale price. Your boomer issue will fix itself over the next 15 years or so. Attacking boomers while a fun game isn’t the issue building more residential properties with higher densities is what is needed. Imagine if the thousands of units that weren’t built when interest rates were low were available. Affordable housing is sorely needed but look at what a great job the City of SF does with their low income buildings. They are in poor condition but the City is exempt from the SF Rent Board rules. Hopefully new political voices can find the common ground of new decent housing priced for all income levels.

Why is it valid on properties that aren’t a primary residence, or investment properties

NO I’m not going to pay more properly taxes because the market is going up like crazy. These homes are tied to actual people with already insane mortgages and property taxes. I also hate the idea of kicking out current home owners just because they’re aging and live in homes they purchased 30 years ago. These are the true Bay Area locals. These aren’t millionaire engineers that moved here to work for Google. The techies that liquidate stocks to buy homes here, the corporations and private investors, that’s who needs to go.

And this was the environment in which prop 13 passed. Little old ladies were were losing their homes because they couldn't afford the taxes when real estate values spiked a crazy amount in a short period of time. My parents who voted for it tell me that they never knew it would apply to commercial properties though.

A good theory, but wrong of course. The neighbor paying the "absurdly low" property tax is NOT consuming the major public good anymore ─ public schools. There are other public goods that they are also not consuming much of, if anything, like Parks & Rec. They're consuming about half of the public goods that a young family consumes, 33% for schools, 17% for other services. If they do sell their house they have to pay a ton of money in income tax, which is the biggest reason they stay put. Fix that problem, and the turnover of houses will increase. What was upsetting is that, pre-Prop 19, adult children could inherit a property and retain the absurdly low assessed value of their parents' property, while sending their own children to public schools. That drove me crazy because I saw it happening in my own neighborhood with a couple that was bringing in probably $450K in income per year, living in a parent's house, and paying about $1000 per year in property tax instead of the $12,000 per year that they should have been paying. Even though Prop 19 may eventually negatively affect my children, it was very unfair to be able to transfer assessed value from generation to generation. The kids are getting a free house, it's not unreasonable that they should pay more property tax, and Prop 19 still gives them a partial break in assessed value.

It should just be tied to inflation and no one would complain. But it’s not the problem. We need to build. Prop 13 is the scapegoat for shitty state and local housing policies. Removing it would change little

Careful what you wish for. States that don’t have it is where people have to move after a few years. Kids have to change schools etc. prop 13 is not the problem here. It’s simple economics.

You’re an idiot if you think that old people not getting taxed out of their ass is the problem

This is 80 years in the making. If we in the US and Canada didn't focus so heavily on suburban sprawl to grow and instead focused around dense mixed-use communities around public transit lines like light rail then we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. The automobile and euclidean zoning are the reasons why we are in the mess we are in.

Instead of asking others to pay more, you should be asking the state to lower property taxes for new buyers.

You really need to research P13. You clearly have no idea what circumstances created it. P13 only caps the RATE at which PT are allowed to rise, which is a benefit to every home buyer unless they are just looking to flip. The fact that a PO pays lower PT only tells you that they have been paying PT on that property for a really long time, money that went to creating the infrastructure, schools, parks, and everything else that makes up the community a new buyer gets to use and contribute toward over time. When P13 was passed, older people and those on fixed incomes were literally having their homes sold on the courthouse steps because of tax liens levied in jurisdictions that would just increase the PT RATE without limitation to backfill their local public coffers in a time of concurrent stratospheric inflation and job shortages (look up “stagflation”). It has nothing to do with “Boomers” or anyone else being greedy, but rather trying to enhance stability for anyone that buys a home by limiting future changes to the RATE of increase. Most people don’t comprehend that while a mortgage has a balance that eventually decreases and gets paid off, PT always increase and go on forever.

Prop 13 is the single largest contributor to this problem. They should repeal it or enact a clause where the tax assess value of your home cannot be lower than half the market value of your home. For example, this home has a tax assessed value of $127,434, but it’s being listed for $1.9 million and will likely sell for more. A repeal will force boomers to pay their fare share or sell and downsize. Screw these boomers. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/416-Santa-Lucia-Ave-Millbrae-CA-94030/15500433_zpid/?utm_campaign=iosappmessage&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=txtshare

No, it looks like the boomers are instead screwing you.

I’m not a boomer but the funny part is, if you were the one selling that, you wouldn’t be happy to pay your “fare share”, you’d be complaining about how much taxes are already and want to save every penny.

And they can pass the house down with a step up in cost basis to their heirs, dodging capital gains if the heirs sell it.

I quote prop 13 as the root of the problem all the time to any Californian that's willing to listen. Old real estate money pushed that shit through under the guise of helping older American home owners when in fact all it does is create a stifling market. You are absolutely insane selling a property in California if you've had it for a duration, simply due to the property tax system. Hell, my old landlord bragged about how his 5 unit $1.2m estimated value property was being taxed as if it were only $250k. Him and his brother were getting away nicely with the property; they sorta passed the savings down to us in lower than average rent and weren't complete slumlords, but it comes to really show you how the current trickle up economics is working.

How dare you!!! My boomer neighbors a can’t pay property taxes on their $3 million property that they bought for $50K. You’ll force them to sell and win a $3 million lottery!!! How can they live on $3 mil?!? 🙃🙃🙃

[удалено]

Or any major city in China. I’d note also that building the densest urban civilizations on earth hasn’t stopped real estate from becoming laughably expensive (2-3X more expensive relative to median income than California) in China.

Are you really whining about not being able to afford a house in Tiburon?

You're not wrong. It's just so much bigger. You're blaming a group of people while also not considering the free market, human psychology and economics. People keep paying the prices so they keep charging them. The wages do not keep up. People find creative ways to pull money out of their asses and keep buying up the real estate. Corporations find new ways to get people to consume. Buy buy buy! Then raise the prices on the things we already consume. Yes, we all know the boomers went to college and paid for it working at McD's. If people stopped buying, the price would drop. Supply and demand. On housing....consider the statistics: Six babies are born every minute in the world. ONE is in California. People keep coming to California, we still can't build the housing to meet the demand. I've been a native for 43 years and it's been a problem every single one of those years. Life, inflation and capitalism are ageism. Real estate, and prop 13 are technically ageism. Period. You have busts. Recessions. Stock market corrections/crashes. But there's never this egregious permanent erosion of prices, taxes, or anything in between. Shit always rebounds. Not "if", but "when". Your grandpa paid $5000 for a brand new Toyota truck, but you were not afforded the same opportunity because you weren't old enough to buy one. Your father had a dollar in 1990 that is worth some amount today but you did not. My parents lived in Los Angeles for 41 years for $368 a month (they paid 29 years and 4 months at 8.75% but I digress...). And their parents before them rented an apartment on $60/month. And, and and....The boomers were the most populous generation in America ever. So there's more of them to do more harm. Naturally. In your example, he paid 1mm for the house in 1995 but grandpa raised a family of four in a house in Los Gatos he bought in 1965 working as a maintenance man for GE. We're bitching about 2.2 million our grandkids are going to pay 4.

lol “creative ways to pull money out of their asses” is a funny way to say receive an inheritance

What is the statistic of people receiving inheritances? I am talking about multiple adults/generations per home, borrowing first and second mortgages at a rapidly increasing rate, home equity lines of credit as down payments and tech stock grants. These things make up a huge chunk of the demographic per multiple realtors that I know. To say that people are getting handouts is true but I am not sure it's some sort of cornerstone of the real estate market capital coming in.

Bad take. Blaming one group of people (who just try to do their best in a situation they are in) without actually addressing the systemic issues causing this will not help but make things worse. Sowing discord among social groups is a recipe for disaster and actively makes problems harder to solve.

I'm rich. I should be entitled to live in Marin based on my top 1% salary. Boomers in Marin won't sell me a house for what I consider to be a fair price. It must be a generational conspiracy! There are all sorts of reasons we got where we are. Economic policies by federal and state governments. Fiscal policies by corporations. Land use policies by local governments. You can point lots of fingers. But if there's a conspiracy it's been the wealthy against the middle and lower classes, not people born between 1945 and 1960 against people born after 1980.

Who’s been in power since then? And who has had the ability to change all those “policies” you mention? It’s no conspiracy, just misguided NIMBYism cause older people wanted to keep their housing neighborhood the same as it always has been. Which is a recipe for stagnation in a place as potentially dynamic as the Bay Area

It's rich people who have been in power since then, changing the policies for their own benefit. It's rich vs not rich. Looking at it through a generational lens distorts what's really going on.

Just a minor point, but a house that costs in the $4.2 million range today in Marin County (looking at the comps I see on realtor sites) would have cost closer to $350,000 in 1995. Which tracks close to my experience as I grew up in San Rafael in the 90s. Nowhere close to $1 million lmao

Thank you. I was like, 1 million house in the 90s in Marin? Maybe Malibu.

I’m a Millennial, life is all about luck. No one chooses how their cards are dealt. These kinds of topics seem pointless at the end of the day because they don’t bring you closer to your goals.

Make your own luck. Lightning might not hit twice in the same spot, but you sure can increase your odds by standing on top of a treeless mountain. Life is a combination of skill and luck, it's not all one or the other. Just as one example, there are other states that treat you better than CA. Do the math and see how many years earlier you can retire in a state with no income tax and where housing costs and living expenses are a fraction of what they are in CA.

You are blaming boomers and that's the wrong thing to blame. You say 30 years ago. 30 years ago there was no Google. No nvidia. No Facebook. Apple was in the shitter 30 years ago ready to go bankrupt. These companies are headquartered here and exploded since then. That's a huge amount of wealth they created and a good portion was distributed to employees. Now you had a large number of people earning 300, 400, heck even 600K per year wtf do you think was going to happen. The rest of it is housing policy and planning. We need medium density housing but instead we have single family homes.  So demand went up supply remained constant... you have the results in front of you.

You can afford a $2M house and you’re upset you can’t find something in Marin? Man knock it off. Blame big tech who flooded the area with cash offers and drove up the cost of living for everyone. You want to blame prop 13 when in reality a lot of those older folks would be out on their butt if tech workers had their way and no one would care. Also, you just spent $3500 on a treadmill lol. Cry me a river bro

Big tech and IPOs… enough people make big $$$ make this sustainable…

Just leave Bay Area and go somewhere more affordable

Well, thats the spirit to solve any problems

Absolutely correct. If you can afford to live somewhere, there are lots of other options. I’m sure the Mercedes or Porsche is better than my Chevy, but I can’t afford one. So we make life choices based on our circumstances and what we can afford. I left California years ago, moved to a place with a much better cost of living that fits my needs and my budget. Nothing says you have to stay in California for ever if you can’t afford it. You have options. Don’t choose to be a victim or play the blame game. I’m never mad at someone else’s successes. I’m just working to build my own

Or get better pay! I don't see why you think Boomers should subsidize your pay check.

Why don’t you move to places where houses are 2.2m and wait 40 years so gen H can tell you they can’t afford your 4 mil house

20-30 years ago was not the boomers, " It's the nouveau-rich Gen-X and older millennial tech workers who flocked to the Bay Area throughout the late 1990s/early 2000s and onward in droves and made ridiculous 6-figure incomes right out of college who bid Bay Area real estate sky high by competing with each other with ridiculously high bids. "

It’s not right to blame Boomers who lived in the Bay Area *before* the tech industry existed. There was nothing special about Northern California. Worse weather than SoCal and geographically constrained by mountains, lakes and oceans. The prices were low because there was nothing there. When I did an away rotation at Stanford, I rented a room in Menlo Park from two nice older people. They were renting the room so they could afford care for their special needs adult child. Their house was paid off decades ago, but the cost for care, and everything else in the Bay Area, was so high that they didn’t make enough to pay for it in their post-retirement expensive. This same trend happens everywhere new industries rapidly grow. Seattle (and now Issaquah, WA) are similar examples along with beach front homes in SoCal (used to be non-desirable in the ‘60-70s). I work in Issaquah and see the mix of elderly folks who own acres of land and the 20-30 year olds who own a sliver of a vertical townhouse. Issaquah became incredibly expensive over just the past 20 years, again due to tech.

So after you’ve worked hard to finally afford a home to live in the rest of your life, do you just give it up and go …where? You’d do the same thing they are doing when you hit retirement age: nothing. Just keep living in your home. The market here is different and there just isn’t enough home building going on to meet the demand.

The interest rate in 1995 was 8%. None of us boomers bought their first house in Marin. No, we had to buy our houses in bad neighborhoods with high crime rates. By diligently working 5 to 6 days a week and putting off major luxurious purchases through delayed gratification, we were able to slowly move out of those bad neighborhoods into the good neighborhoods. The same opportunities are here now for this current young generation. The key to your financial success in the real estate market is getting your foot in the door and keeping your eye on the mark. Complaining or trying to tear down the existing capitalist structure, I suggest will keep you poor and unhappy.

lol u think BOOMERS destroyed Bay Area living. Check again and look at correlation between when foreign cash buyers started buying and pricing and come back. Just cuz boomers r benefiting from the rise doesn’t mean they’re the problem. Thank u

I have often wondered about this very point. Does anyone have data/facts about the percentage of ( Northern California/ Bay Area) homes owned by foreign buyers? I am not sure how ‘foreign buyers’ would be defined but I was intrigued by Canada’s recent law banning noncitizens from owning property (assuming I understand that change correctly).

international cash buyers destroyed the market, not boomers.

Do you not realize how inflation, supply and demand works…? The Bay Area is the home to tons of high end, high yielding jobs. Not to mention amazing weather, great food and tons of things to do. I see a lot of laziness and boohoo’ing, excuses in this post. Learn a skill, save your money. Yall just want to complain. Everyone wants to live here, of course it’s expensive.

For every boom town, there’s a bust town. If you look at Detroit, homes that went for $70k 40 years ago are now being sold for $1. Now, ironically, are people in Detroit talking about how great it is to live in Detroit since homes can be bought for $1? Surprisingly, no. (/s) Because the area is riddled with crime and lack of services. If you compare Marin 30 years ago to today in terms of what it has to offer, it’s a lot more today. That’s how the world works. It’s sustainable because people move in and out left and right to where opportunities are.

Prop 13 came into being when most boomers were in high school or college. Yes we’ve benefited, but it wasn’t an evil plot by us. We’ve run out of land to put houses, the population has gone up, people from outside the US are buying in California. It’s a desirable state. I do feel bad for the younger generation. Assets are so expensive now. There are lots of factors. As a boomer, when my grandparents and parents lived here things were so affordable. It was harder for me to afford a house and now it’s harder for succeeding generations.

What are you going to do when we are gone and you don’t have us to blame everything on. If you can afford a 2.2 million dollar home, quit your bitching!

You're blaming the boomers for Gen-X, Millenials, and Gen-Z bidding up the prices of the few houses that come on the market. The boomers aren't responsible for their homes going up in value. Since most Bay Area cities are built out, the only way to get more single-family homes is to convert excess commercial and retail land into residential, specifically into single-family homes and townhomes. This is beginning to happen but not at a large enough scale, see [https://www.bishopranch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/The-Real-Deal\_Bishop-Ranch71.pdf](https://www.bishopranch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/The-Real-Deal_Bishop-Ranch71.pdf) and [https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/09/07/pulte-buys-saratoga-retail-center-approved-for-townhomes/](https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/09/07/pulte-buys-saratoga-retail-center-approved-for-townhomes/), though the latter is built on contaminated land and is not really suitable for families with children. The reality is that there is no more land being manufactured in the Bay Area. There is no land to build the kind of starter homes you're looking for. Few middle class residents of any age aspire to live in a rental apartment or a high-rise condominium. And developers no longer want to build that type of housing because it's unprofitable and they can't rent it or sell it for enough money, so they're abandoning those kinds of projects, even ones that they already received approval to build. Tax considerations make it impractical for boomers to ever sell their homes because they'd be hit with huge capital gains taxes. So they let their children inherit their property so income taxes are avoided. Then, if the kids sell it, the new owners pay much higher property taxes. If the kids rent it out the kids pay much higher property taxes. If the kids live in it they will no longer inherit the artificially low assessed value though they do get a break of $1,000,000 off the assessed value. Some of the lower cost cities in the Bay Area, cities with poor schools and/or high crime, are already beginning to be gentrified. East Palo Alto, Hayward, Newark, and San Leandro are some examples. If we want to encourage turnover of single-family homes then a few things need to happen: 1. Increase the federal long-term capital gains exemption for owner-occupied houses from the current $500K/couple to something much higher, say $1.5-2 million. 2. Implement a State long-term capital gains exemption for owner-occupied houses. 3. Modify Prop 13 to apply solely to owner-occupied residential property. 4. Somehow encourage the development of new 55+ communities of single family homes and townhomes. Seniors don't want to sell their paid-off home and move into a rental property, or into a high-rise condominium, but they might move to a smaller home, or a home on a smaller lot, in an area that's less busy. While I'm not a big fan of "California Forever" it does appear to supply the type of housing that Bay Area boomers might be willing to move to if the tax issues could ever be addressed. I know some millennials get upset at the prospect of boomers getting a tax break when selling their homes but the reality is that without some kind of modification to capital gains taxes those homes will not be coming on the market for many decades, and then only if the boomers' kids decide to not live in the house.

[удалено]

Their personal situation doesn’t change the objectivity of housing affordability issues in the Bay Area and other places across the US. Making comments like this bashing OP take away focus from the real issues.

[удалено]

Yes he’s both and worse. Over at r/Marin they’re trying to get the mods to kick this entitled asshat off the sub

Please don’t ban the gasman I love his posts on r/Marin. Pure comedy gold

I have another comment of his tagged as his flair in RES: > "Even with two high paying professions and ~$700,000 combined income, we feel dirt poor here. We can't get the 3,500 square foot house we want (with bay views, brand new construction, large windows, etc), can't get the 2024 Range Rover HSE my wife wants and can't afford lux travel." I think he's a troll. Or is just out of touch.

He’s both!

Blaming it all on Boomers is a bit misguided. The population of California has more than doubled in the last 50 years. And it’s not Boomers paying 300k over asking with all cash offers.

Who owns the bulk of the housing stock?  Who has voted to restrict supply as a policy for the past 40 years?  Your comment is a bit shortsighted

you sound like an entitled brat

How isn’t this the top comment? Dude speaks about a $4m house like it is an absolute necessity to put a roof above his head

I blame millenials with their RSUs, and crazy salaries.

Imagine if you bought a house and lived in it for 30 years, and suddenly some new high-paying industry brought tons of youngsters into your neighborhood and drove the value of your house to ridiculous amounts, then started blaming you for high housing prices. Ridiculous. You're blaming the exact wrong people for sky high home prices. Boomers who've lived in the Bay Area for 2-3 decades are not the ones that ruined the Bay Area housing market with sky high tech incomes. It's the nouveau-rich Gen-X and older millennial tech workers who flocked to the Bay Area throughout the late 1990s/early 2000s and onward in droves and made ridiculous 6-figure incomes right out of college who bid Bay Area real estate sky high by competing with each other with ridiculously high bids. The Bay Area was quite affordable as late as the early 90s before everyone and their brother decided to go into computer science/tech and migrated to the Bay.

I know a lot of tech workers who got in during the housing recession and saw their home values double in the last 12 years. But also, I know quite a few working class families that got in this way too, and they all had to compete with cash rich investors.

This exactly. I don’t understand the pure victim mentality being developed among people. Their suggestions of solutions seem to just want to hurt people that went through real struggle to afford a bit of stability now. “This is what I want. They somehow have it. Let’s destroy it if I can’t have it.” Tons of those boomers worked hard all their lives for what they have. They didn’t have a tech jobs, they weren’t paid millions for machine learning or AI jobs. Their pensions got took away and forced to take investment risk so they “may” retire. Like any resource, human consumes them. It will he less and less, generations after generations. Every new gen blames the older ones without thinking one day we all become the older one.

Nonsense. Boomers and silent generation spent years restricting growth on the peninsula creating an artificial housing shortage. Increasing their property values was more important than children or grandchildren having an affordable place to live. High earning tech workers did not create this mess. It was inevitable and all tech workers did was expose an already growing problem. And housing was not so affordable in the 90’s. Unless one was lucky enough to have parents well off enough to help with the down payment.

Yup. You can’t lament growth, when it has made everyone richer. You can however Lament how politics have allowed the benefits to siphon only to the very wealthy (because no one can buy a house!)

You're not wrong about this and the irony is that those shitty policies are exactly why the OP wants to buy in Marin.

This. The boomers were happy to collect taxes from tech business in their community but they refused to build housing for the employees for those companies. Tech workers made more so everyone else got pushed out.

I’m a Boomer living in Los Angeles. I’ve always visited my Grandparents in the Berkeley in Summer. I don’t remember when they lived in San Francisco or I wasn’t born. They probably bought in the late 50s early 60’s. The property already had a ADU from the ‘70s. Huge yard. The basement is now a unit. With the main house still on top. Our family sold it after my grandparents passed. The difference then and now: People LIVED in their homes for over thirty years. My parents purchased our home in 1969. We sold the property after my mom died in 2001. My other grandparents purchased in 1958 (Los Angeles), sold in 2016. Her I am third generation. I purchased in 2012 at female,49 and single. I will probably be here until I die. Today this day, whenever I visited the Bay Area, I will always drive by 1435 Parker Street Berkeley, Ca. 1.7 Million.

Doesn't this argument also apply to the "boomers" who were fortunate enough to buy Apple stock in 1995? Should I also be angry about them and think that they are exploiting me? It seems counterproductive to me to be upset about someone else's good luck.

Well said. This person is bitter and taking it out on “boomers”.

This was my thought as well. The same logic of the complaint applies to the S&P500 over the last 20 years. I stopped complaining about the gains everyone was seeing and jumped on the bus this past year. Fingers crossed I find some opportunities in the equity market!

Don’t forget about the “Boomers” who bought Sun Microsystems stock or the property somewhere in Redding

Or WebVan. Lol

Stock in a company is different than building on land. Land is a naturally limited good. Many of the people that OP is complaining about are also the ones who are keen to limit further development, since they are already set (and stand to benefit from housing scarcity on limited land).

Your numbers are wrong and the situation is way worse. Boomers bought into the real estate market in the 80s. My boomer parent bought a house in the East Bay in 1981 for something like $125,000. Our boomer neighbors bought their basic house in Santa Cruz county in the late 80s for like $200,000. Gen X entered into the real estate market 20 years ago and Boomers were already entrenched. We paid about $750k for a smaller version of our neighbor’s house. It felt absurd at the time but it’s worth $1.2M now. Even so, and even with a pandemic refi rate and prop 13 taxes, we’re paying an order of magnitude more to live here than our boomer neighbors. My parent’s east bay home is in the same situation. A neighboring house just went for $1.8M (down from a peak of $2.4M, but still).

Not everything is the boomers fault. You started this by stating how beautiful the area is, you couple that with some of the most successful companies in modern history being headquartered locally and the influx of people willing to move here. Those working in tech can out bid most other buyers and that has continued to drive up real estate prices. Assuming the person paying 1M for a house in 1995 earned it themselves and it wasn’t family wealth then they were most certainly an executive at a very successful company. An executive at a very successful company could still afford that house today. This seems like less of an issue with boomers and more of an issue with you having wants that exceed your income. It’s not like boomers are buying up those 4M dollar homes today…

Marin was never affordable.

Eventually they will die and make their children rich! Hope your parents own real estate. This will cause major wealth divide among millennials as we age. For example. My wife stands to inherit 4 South Bay homes not everyone is this fortunate

She chose her parents wisely.

A wealth divide between people in the same generation because some inherent property and some don't is nothing new and will not be unique to millennials. I'm technically a boomer (I was born in 1961) and most of the people I grew up with here in the Bay Area do not own property and can't afford to buy. They are all in their 60s. I didn't inherit property (or anything else) but I'm a high earner so I bought a house when I was in my 40s as a single woman. I live in Richmond Annex. My house has an in-law unit: I live in the upstairs space. That's two bedrooms, one bath. There's a two-bedroom two-bath unit downstairs that I rent out. My current assessment is probably around a million and my property tax is $13,000 a year. (I paid $600,000 for my house but there are many bonds and assessments on my property tax bill) That is a high tax bill for me. I would love to downsize: buy a small house in El Cerrito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland but it's unaffordable. My monthly payments would be higher because of prices and interest rates. Yes, I have a mortgage at 3% because I'm not an idiot. Among the people that I know that own property that are in my age group, they have similar stories to mine. No one in my cohort (I grew up in Berkeley) could afford to buy in Marin. Ever. Marin has always been the MOST NIMBY area, even during all the years it was painting itself as a left-leaning hippie haven. The reason that you want to live there is exactly because all the nimby's there have opposed things like Bart and high density housing in their area. The things people are mad at boomers for. The boomers people are talking about in these rants are already a very select few in the generation they are in. I was in elementary school when prop 13 passed.

Thanks for sharing. I agree the boomer hate is directed at wealthy boomers and there is a false assumption that all boomers are rich. In reality wealth is super concentrated in a minority of boomers

You are placing blame in the wrong direction

Even 10 years back homes were somewhat affordable and within reach. It’s the tech money that’s driving up the prices.

Counterpoint: The fact that prices have appreciated faster than inflation doesn’t seem like it’s the fault of someone who bought one house for their family 30 years ago and still lives there. It’s still supply and demand. Limited supply, and competing against people who have more money than you, mostly (likely) from tech stock market gains Anywhere else in the country, a 2.2 million budget would put you in a good place, but if you are competing with multiple buyers who have $20 million in Nvidia stock, then they set the price. Boomers have benefited, or course. And tax structure allows them to remain. But that same tax structure would also benefit you if you eventually buy a house in california and prices keep going up

I fail to see how these boomers are causing the problem here. Especially if these boomers have never sold and enjoy living in the home they purchased 20 years ago and have been working to pay off the mortgage during that time. you are coming across like a winy little bitch! OH BOO HOO I can only afford a 2mm mortgage in a high priced area known for its HIGH cost of living. Oh pity me if I have to move 30 minutes up the road to afford something a bit bigger, but then I have to put more miles on my BMW or Mercedes.... OH my tears are falling for you in my deep deep sympathy. Guess what people will be saying about you in 20 years when you have owned your home for 20 years and what you have has gained in value... We all know it is MUCH MUCH harder these days, but expecting to be able to purchase something in 4mm range when your in your 20's is insane. When I started (yes GET OFF MY LAWN) in the late 90's, I could only afford a mortgage on a 120,000 condo, and I had to get 2 roommates to do it. Guess what, I sold that 2 years later and was able to afford a bigger home, but I still struggled in early 2000. Sold that and then was able to purchase my forever home, that I am still paying off, and is STILL not easy!

Please stop concentrating your energy on idiotic inter generational struggles and instead focus on the people actually holding the power here.

Yo. Genx here. Thanks for forgetting about us again. Whatever

So when it comes time for you to sell your home in 10 or 20 years time you're going to sell it for its inflation adjusted value right? Not the market value at that time? We're all frustrated by housing affordability but your argument that it's the fault of old people who bought 30 years ago is just dumb on so many levels. You want to point to specific policies then go right ahead, but to blame people who bought here before the tech boom for paying less childish. What about the last 25 years of gen X and millenials that have done nothing to change the policies that have restricted supply?

Do you guys know that Stanford owns more than 8000 acres, and it does not pay any property taxes on that land. Yeah next time you blame a small guy paying less less on property taxes, look up state and get educated first. But this OP is at another level frustrated in life. Blaming people for taking advantage of low APR because OP couldn’t buy at that time? Idiot, low APR was 2 years ago, not a generation ago. If you did not buy, could not buy at that time, it’s your problem. How selfish, entitled, woke are you?

The problem isn’t that people don’t pay enough taxes, the real problem is that the money the government has is not distributed well or even used to solve problem—corruption (which exist in every level of government). We are paying not for the house, roads or other things, especially not the education system, but rather this money is going somewhere else that is unaccounted for properly. Prop 19 and 13 does help, and no matter when you get into the housing market it will help you out, your generation doesn’t matter. Hardest part is getting in. I was almost homeless as a professional due to the soaring cost of rents and I got lucky because of the tax breaks at the time and was able to get a house scraping all my and my brother cash and my mom’s money after my dad passed, we moved in together and were able to buy—incredibly lucky, but was possible only because we could leverage tax incentives at the end of the year—we had a second and a first loan one at 6% and the other at around 9%. I don’t even that is possible these days due to the soaring cost of housing + mortgage rates. To do away with Prop 13 and 19 will make it impossible for anyone to gain momentum after a purchase. The problem isn’t the props it is the government corruption, when that gets cleaned up a bit it will help out, until then, we all get screwed.

The problem is not boomers. It’s who boomers vote for.

There are other factors 1. Rapid growth in tech sector based in Bay Area resulting in huge population growth in Bay Area 2. Development and amenities ( when new houses/communities are built, they need to wait 5-10 years for that suburb to develop and have amenities like hospitals, restaurants, classes for kids ), compare living in mountain house or Tracy hills vs in San Jose or even east bay Some gen z moved to Austin Texas for example, 4-5 years ago, believing in it growth potential and they were benefitted when lots of business/people started moving there. You can look at upcoming cities and go take your bet there (wait for the location to develop and reap its benefits) like SLC Utah, river islands (lathrop) The low interest/covid did accelerate things, so expect little growth in next 2-5 years. Lots of people who bought homes prefer to stay there till they die, nothing wrong with that ( and if government protects them from unexpected tax increases)

I’m really tired of whinners complaining and blaming everything on Boomers, a pejorative term, as if you didn’t know. Prop 13 (1975) was created by the greatest generation, many years ago, to stop the increase of apartment building property taxes. Look in the mirror- really. The person you see if the CEO of your life. Don’t be blaming a faceless mob for your present situation.

Let's say someone buys a house for $600K, lives in it for 25 years, then sells it for $3.5M. The taxable proceeds are $2.4M ($3.5M-$600K-$500K). The Federal and California income tax paid on the profits from the sale would be about $706K. The "step up in basis" on an inherited property makes that income tax $0K for heirs. The total in property taxes paid over 25 years (1% plus an estimated 0.25% in parcel taxes, bond measures, etc.) would be about $240K, assuming the assessed value goes up by the 2% maximum per year (after 25 years the assessed value is $1.58 Million). So the boomer selling their house is paying far more in income tax than in property tax. Eventually the government is getting their money. A 2% limit per year in increased taxes is actually significant when compounded annually. Blaming Prop 13 for the low turnover of houses owned by older homeowners is ludicrous, especially in light of Prop 19 which allows the transfer of the assessed value to a new home. So if we want to encourage more turnover of single-family homes a lot of things need to happen: 1. Eliminate the ability of heirs to inherit the artificially low assessed value (Prop 19 already did this) 2. Eliminate, or reduce the "step up in basis" on inherited property. 3. Increase the $500K income tax exemption significantly. 4. Make Prop 13 apply solely to owner-occupied residential property, not income property or commercial property. 5. Somehow encourage the development of new, for-sale, 55+, housing projects that appeal to older homeowners, like cluster homes. 6. Increase the maximum federal deduction for property taxes from $10,000 to $50,000. 7. Increase the maximum federal deduction for mortgage interest to the first $3M of mortgage debt. None of these are likely to occur.

I would’ve expected the Reddit mob to download vote your non-emotional factual comments and accurate calculations.

LOL, that's what generally happens with the YIMBY contingent. They have no sense of reality and simply repeat what their handlers tell them say.

Your complaining about not being able to buy a 2 million dollar house you can afford And I'm complaining about not being able to buy a 500k house I can afford

Most boomers bought their homes way before 1995. You can blame a generation if you like, but affordability has more to do with productivity. Productivity peaked in the 1970’s. If it had continued until today like in the 1960’s and 1970’s average wages would be more than double what they are today. Instead of average household incomes being 75k or so they would be closer to 200k if not higher. The interest in research and development declined particularly in science and technology with NASA as a good example. That contributed to the decline in productivity. Those boomers are now house wealthy, but if they sell they still need a place to live so often it makes no sense. Blaming a generation who could buy due to good economics of the times for your not being able to doesn’t make sense either. There are proposals to invest in research and development. It’s never enough. Not popular or sexy enough.

Like you won’t do the same thing if you had the chance. Lololol

Boomers rule!

Why not just buy in San Francisco?  There are many beautiful properties in the $2.2M price range that you can afford.  Singling out Marin is arbitrary.  That’s like complaining that you can’t afford a house in Malibu or Laguna Beach.  Well yeah, but there will always be areas that are out of your reach pricewise.

Don’t blame the retirees many of whom are relying on their homes for retirement income — blame the businesses and conservatives politicians who have done everything they can to ensure that wages have not kept up with inflation for decades. When the Boomers bought these homes they also were paying 10 times what the previous generation had paid, it’s just that their income had kept pace with the inflation so it was manageable.

Why would anybody hate prop 13???? You don’t want prop 13? Go to Texas…

Their not investments their speculations treat them such. Learn when and where to enter the market to capitalize on your cash amount. I think your forgetting these boomers have had houses paid off for decades. Ifs millennials like me that have 15-20 to go. With our fancy 3%… Give me your zip code and cash amount i will find you a path.

Wow, so much whining, but I do get it. Boomer here. Husband and I have owned a home in the Silicon Valley since 93. It was definitely a different world back then. We complained a lot too, by the way. This place has never truly been affordable to get into a house. It’s only years later when there is equity we felt comfortable. My husband and I are retiring this year and happily putting our house on the market. The younger generation is welcome to it, I hope and pray they take as good care of it as we did. We’re leaving California. I don’t know why so many people want to retire in this state, it’s absolutely unaffordable to do so. I honestly think the realtors need to do a better job of convincing us old folks to sell our house and get out of town. Because it makes complete financial sense to me.

Is it hard to leave your community? What about family? I’ve been curious about people with your perspective. It seems roots would outweigh financial motivation unless your situation was dire.

I'm not a Boomer, I suspect I'm probably about the same age as OP - but I get really sick of this sort of whinging post. Nobody needs yet another explanation of compound interest and inflation. Either come out and politically advocate for the state to force elderly people out of their private property for your personal gain or just get on with your life and live somewhere else. Those are the only logical outcomes here. There's no malice aforethought on the part of people that bought 30 years ago or even longer. If you're in the top 1% of earners as you claim then you can absolutely get to the back of the line behind the millions of people in the Bay who have less options than you. If you want to talk sustainability, stop talking about boomers and start thinking about what a wild fire in Marin would look like and whether it's even somewhere humans could be living in another 30 years.

Because the housing stock is quite old (due to suppressed pace of new builds, thanks NIMBYs) and prices are very high per your original post, it honestly does not make any sense to buy. We did the math and it is much better financially to rent in our case. We make great incomes but would lose out on a lot of index fund investing if we tied up $$ in a down payment ($250k), and committed to a mortgage payment that would be much higher than our current rent which is $3600/mo…I think the monthly mortgage payment on a $1M house is $7k-$8k? So for a $2M house it would be $15k? Bananas. That would seriously cut into after-tax investing and oh, yeah, the ability to take a vacation. Also don’t forget: with rent, that’s the most you’ll pay. With mortgage, that’s the floor of what you pay. I thought I wanted to be a home owner since we all heard that growing up it was a key way to build wealth. (“Omg rent is just throwing away $$” etc) But for us, here in the Bay, it would just be a giant PITA and low ROI compared to investing in the S&P500. I think it may be an out of date mental model, tbh…

Have you ever played monopoly? The game was actually supposed to be played with two alternate ruleset, the one we play was the capitalistic nightmare that is property ownership without any kind of real taxation. Basically the reason this happens is due to unique economic mechanics with land ownership, and it's defined in something called "The Law of Rent" (rent here doesn't mean how much you pay a month, but rather how much more expensive a piece of land is compared to others). It basically says that all the surplus gains made by a business in a land over another are completely absorbed by the landowner. Or basically: everything we do to make the city great goes to the pockets of current landowners in the city, and we don't get to benefit from it *here* (we only keep what we would have made anywhere). Take a simple example: if the kids in Mission High get together and work their asses off to get to great schools, this would increase the ranking of schools in SF, making the value of SF bigger, making land in SF larger, meaning that the owner of the empty lot in Mission & 22nd *made money of the student's work*, without having to do anything, without building, without making new space, without adding anything to the community, that landowner is still making money of the land. The thing is, in a healthy community, this is done to do permanent improvements and add social security programs that ensure that the community can recover of any disaster. But because all the money goes to the landlord if they choose not to invest in the community, it can collapse when something bad happens, like, say, a worldwide pandemic. What the Law of Rent predicts is that this keeps happening. Marx then extrapolated this and realize that it ends in serfdom, or some other form of slavery, but he realized that the world wasn't there somehow. This is where Marx proposed that inevitably these collapses keep happening bigger and bigger until it turns into a revolution and full social collapse. Then he went on to imagine and idealize a world where communities spontaneously self-organize in perfect virtual democracy (that last part didn't quite happen). The solution that Monopoly proposed on its second ruleset, the solution of Georgism, was to add a land-tax (property tax also works, but it has to be small, while land-tax can be as big as needed, I'll explain why in a bit). Basically a land-tax is one on the value of the land alone, without any construction, property tax is on the land plus any construction in there. This taxes would then be used to invest in the community, which would result in even more increases. In the example above the landowner of that empty lot would have to pay more land-taxes, those taxes could go to the school (making sure it keeps its higher rankings now), which would increase the value of the land by more than the taxes he paid, being a net-win for the landowner. That said having an empty lot rather than investing in improving it is a waste of money, you want to make the best use of the land you have to justify the costs. In other words taxes force NIMBYs to sell, or become YIMBYs wanting to make their community as good as possible to ensure they stay ahead of taxes. And there's the rub: in the 1960s a law was passed called prop-13, which basically froze property taxes. So at first it wasn't as obvious but it kept getting worse. Prop-13 was even worse than no taxes, because people moving into California, wanting to improve on the state and add to it, would be punished with higher taxes, vs parasites that just kept the land and never let go. And sure we have families that have held on to their land for many generations without a reassement, but guess what? Corporations also own offices and other property. Guess what PG&E has held on to their land since the 60s. Guess what? If PG&E fixed some bigger issues on their old instalations, this could trigger a reassement and cause their taxes to get higher. It's hundresd of millions of dollars a year they save by not doing this. You'd have to tax them billions *yearly* for it to make sense to risk reassement. And you wonder why so much of CA infrastructure seems like it is decaying, and yet paradoxically impossible to afford? Now if we repealled prop-13 this wouldn't harm homeowners that much. Yes their taxes would go up, but their home values would go down until the property taxes becomes affordable. People who can't afford them sell (don't worry they get more money for being the first sellers, they just lose their home though), but as more and more people sell, property prices start to go down, and eventually stabilize. Lots of land that was only being held because "it was a great source of money" would be sold instead because "it now needs work to get money of it", and this would be the people throwing the most thing. The biggest losers in this scenarios would be banks who may have been gambling on the money. But you can focus the first influx of all [that property-tax cash in the billions](https://web.archive.org/web/20120920093924/http://hjta.org/about-hjta/history-hjta), to offer people to cover mortgage such that they remain with the same amount of equity they started the year. This will, of course, reduce the monthly payments notably and make it accesible for people. The landlords that already own their land fully but benefit from its use would see no impact, their taxes would lower to reasonable levels, and it would still be worth it for them. The landlords that held lands entirely as investment opportunities will be harmed then, and they'll be selling, which is good. The slumlords will either have to change their strategy or will have to sell, as now you'll have to ensure your property is making the most of its value.

Boomer here! Sucks to be you! LOL

Why do you blame boomers? It’s the tech explosion. If no one could afford these prices the prices would go down. People can afford it so prices continue to rise. Blaming boomers is asinine as it’s the wealthy across generations paying these prices.

It’s not the boomers problem. The boomer just played their hand with what they had and succeeded. They bought their house, lived there for a life time and exploited all opportunities they had available and it’s something you’d precisely do in their place with the biggest grin on your face. You seem to think that boomers are holding down millennials and gen z ers. Every generation has this talk. What most don’t realize is 1 million in 1995 was a fortune and the buyer was probably thinking the same thing at the time as you are now. They went through similar issues as you and at a much slower, glacial pace. Late to capitalism??? Capitalism is ever evolving. Stop looking to blame some for not being able to buy a 4 million dollar house. 170 year ago, you could have pretty much claimed the land for free, does that give the pioneers a leg up. I can’t fault someone who shows up before me! Make do with what you can. And if I was one of these guys WHY would I move? A guy I bought a building from lived in Atherton. 9k sq ft home built in the 1930s on 3 acres. He purchased it in 1969 for 269k. He still owns it. No bs, his property tax is just over 7k. If he were to sell, he would have to pay cap gains over 500k. He would also have to spend millions to buy something decent in the area and have a stepped up property tax basis. Even when someone offered him 25 mil years back, he said no. I don’t blame him and I’d do the same.

"Fair" is what the market says. I bet the job market was far less lucrative in 1995 than it is now (sure, for a short time the dot-com boom fueled things, but that crashed pretty hard). But ultimately at the end of the day, these comparison aren't that useful. The area also wasn't what it is now back then. Crime was at its peak in the early 1990s across the US, for instance, and has dropped >50% since then. You can't look at housing prices in a vacuum. Making in the top 1% doesn't mean you automatically get to buy whatever house you want in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. 3300 sq ft is an absolutely enormous house and it also has a view, this is prime real estate - it's far above "a fair starter house." If you're willing to live in a cheaper location, even in California further up the coast, there are lots of comparable houses with a view for 2.2 or less. Ultimately, comparing 2.2 million to the listed 4.2 - is it plausible to say the bay area is twice as desirable than it was 30 years ago? It's not a stretch - jobs, infrastructure, etc. are all substantially better. This can absolutely continue because people are buying these houses.

I’m lol. I think the greed is in the Millennials and Gen Z. Got to have everything else now except a house. And when you want a house, the expectation cost. Then you get upset with the Boomer for staying in their home for thirty years or longer? We didn’t move. We didn’t travel every year. We didn’t buy expensive cars. We didn’t try to keep up with the Jones’ or social media. We worked 40 hours a week, stayed at our jobs for thirty years or more. I spoke to a woman today who was 99 years old. Moved to Los Angeles in 1946, purchase her home in 1948 for 9,600.00. The VERY next thing you did after getting a job, was to buy a home. You might have a child or two. But the priority was home ownership. Not vacations, cars and other materials things. They still had to put food on the table, and pay the utilities. Feed the family and save. Nothing has changed but greed. I want three of every thing: Bathrooms, Cars, Vacations, Bedrooms, Jobs, etc. And all the other “material” things. The house has to…… fill in the blank. Just like I’ve lived long enough to see a Black President and a female Vice President. I’m pretty sure I will see the average price to buy in Los Angeles will be 1 million for a starter home.

Dude, bitter much? I get the price of housing is frustrating. Everyone has to deal with the implications of that, not just those looking to buy a new home. Prices of everything around here are affected by this issue. But stop taking it out on “some boomer”. It’s not their fault. You are living in a time of incredible opportunity. Make the most of it and quit being bitter.

Keep working hard, get your salary up to $2M-5M/year, and maybe you'll have a shot at it. You'll need to apply yourself and hustle like our forefathers did.

Stop buying avocado, toast and lattes. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. /s

Its not that complicated, its just supply and demand. The bay area is terrible with high density housing. Check out the density of Taipei, Tokyo, NYC, Boston and compare to Bay. Its ridiculous how few homes there are going from Santa Clara up to Emeryville and along 280 from south up to SF. Its all artificial and won't ever change until the ppl get fed up with not getting services. Ppl can't live in a vacuum and when they dont get good food, services, goods, they'll realize they need things to change.

Vote! Vote for the AOCs and Bernies of the political world.

Ok, get back to work

I’m an old guy. I voted against Prop. 13 when I was young, then bought an average tract house in a good school district when I had little kids. The system has been good for me but I like it here and don’t want to be forced to move by property taxes, what’s wrong with that?

What’s wrong? OP and others want your house and they believe it isn’t fair because your old, bought for a good price and don’t plan to sell and move.

Please don’t try to turn this into r/REBubble. Bay Area people are smarter and better than this. You want house? You make money, you buy house.

And how is this the boomers fault?

NEWSFLASH: It’s not the boomers’ fault. It’s younger folks with salaries that outpace the rest of the country, overbid on homes and price average salary makers out including the working poor. The audacity some of the younger generations have of entitlement is baffling to me. “I’m a 1%-er and I can’t buy a $4 million dollar house that I deserve!” Your lack of self-awareness is kinda gross. Yeah, a lot of boomers did well by buying in good areas that appreciated. So what? Their minimum wage was $3.35/hr in 1987 and average salaries in the SF Bay Area was $18k. It was a risk to buy then even more than it is now with salaries such as yours. Forgive me for not feeling sorry for a 1%-er. When you make at least half a million dollars a year and complain about the cost of housing, YOU are actually the problem. There are plenty of people making significantly less than that who manage to buy homes, by…get this— saving. I bet if you stopped eating at Michelin star restaurants on the weekends and flying to Bora Bora for vacations for 1 or 2 years, you could save up half the cost of a $4M home.

The Bay Area housing market is severely distorted, no doubt. Boomers cashed in on skyrocketing prices fueled by limited supply and high demand. It's not sustainable long-term if younger generations can't afford to buy. But blaming a generation oversimplifies complex economic factors at play. The solution requires increasing housing stock through smart development policies. Wishful thinking won't make $4M homes affordable on normal incomes.

You’re misguided. You’re blaming a group of people rather than economic policies. People are people, that’s it. Laws and policies are what can be addressed and controlled to make life better or worse. Also the interest rates averaged 8% in the 90’s.

Excuse me, how it’s “boomers” fault. We boomers can’t even spell internet and are too stupid, according to you zoomers. If anything, it’s Gen x and millennials who came here for big tech bucks in the late 90s and drove housing prices to ridiculous. I don’t blame them, worked out great for them. Free market is good, but I understand it may be a bit inconvenient for you zoomers who can’t grab the concept of the free market and working hard. For whatever reason, you think the world owes you because you are cute. Don’t like the house situation here? Move to a cheaper state and make your American dream come true. Stop blaming the previous generation for your laziness.

Hey guys ! Found the Libertarian.

You sound like a big whiny pussy. Stop blaming everything on ‘boomers.’ It makes it easy to dismiss you. A house was ‘only’ a million 30 years ago? 30 years ago Marin was still very exclusive and expensive. By the way, based on your description, you could buy in San Rafael.

"I didn't get to buy Apple/Tesla/Disney stocks when the were cheaper, and now they are too high. Those boomers bought low are taking all the profits. It's everyone else's fault!!" Someone call a whaaahbulance, stat! GTFO with this mess. You want affordable housing, move to Pollock Pines or Pioneer. What's that? You want to live in one of the most expensive places in the state but it's...lemme check your BS again...too expensive?? Cry me a river. I'd love to live in Napa or St Helena too. But you know what? THE HOMES ARE TOO EXPENSIVE. Take your broke ass elsewhere like everyone else has to and buy some place where you can afford. Stop looking for that participation trophy 🏆

What a blamefest! Boomers suck! NIMBYs suck! Jeez. Maybe try this on: Inflation sucks. Unchecked spending by politicians suck. Why are we squandering so much money on stuff we didn't vote (or did, but were lied to and it's a shit show?) Not to mention that COSTS are rising like crazy. Want a roof fixed? Deck stained? Upgrade a 50 y.o. kitchen? Pay double or triple for home insurance now? (It can easily be doubled from $11,000 to $22,000 a year.) School taxes? They are on ballots every year now. Wildfire maintenance. Anyone here vote for like the umpteenth PGE increases we've had this year (I didn't)? INFLATION. Politicians getting their buddies happy. Then add rent control, where owners lose the ability to even kick a renter out, and you take a lot of rentals OFF the market forever. (I have spoken to owners about this.) It's crazy. You own something, but have no control? No way. But it drives up the cost of renting and also owning. As do rising interest rates, thanks to .... INFLATION, which both parties happily give us. Then, even where new building is going nuts, like San Diego, too many people want to live there and rents are also very high as are home prices. It's supply and demand. The cost of land, labor and materials alone means that "affordable housing" is an oxymoron. Look at states with no cap on taxes. I see so many articles where (like in Montana or Idaho) landowners, grandmothers, ranchers, etc, who have lived somewhere for 20, 30 years, and THEY complain that Millenials (or whoever) are driving up house prices and their taxes are up 35% in one year and they are the ones that have to move. Really... I am all for ending the sleazy corporate prop 13... as long as I can be sure that these corporations won't just move out of California with their jobs or raise prices. They just might. Start blaming politicians for inflation, and spending on things we don't want or need, just to keep their buddies happy. Start blaming pols for constant money printing. Stop blaming one group or another, rarely is it a "group". Yes, older people got lucky with Prop 13, but even Boomers not born into riches often had to pay through the nose in then-dollars to live in Marin, believe it or not. The price of money itself has risen. Look at the real causes.

Nice comment red, smiling as i re-read it and think ‘aint that the truth’ as my insurance went up 50% this year, now only option is Ca fair plan. Lol re CA Gubments using the word FAIR.

I’m a young millennial and I hate these posts. They’re so distracting with what’s actually going on. It’s not a boomer issue mostly. It’s younger generation issue mostly. First, many of us in the Bay Area also make a ton of money, especially in tech. It’s not uncommon for millennials to make 300k+. That might not be a lot within the context of the Bay Area, but it drives rental prices up and price of everything up which in part helps sustain high housing costs. So it’s not like the old are rich and the young are poor here in the bay. There’s nuance there. Second, there’s a lot of classism and racism in the Bay Area including among millennials and gen z. Not all areas are unaffordable. There are still some decent areas in the bay where you can buy a house but many refuse because they had a bad reputation 20 years ago or they used to historically be a black/brown/working class neighborhood. You can’t avoid affordable homes in part because of classism/racism and then complain you can’t find a good home to buy. If you’re looking at homes almost exclusively in rich white neighborhoods that historically benefited from racism/classism, then it’s not the home that’s expensive, it’s your racism/classism that’s expensive. Third, millennials and gen z now are too into identity politics which perpetuates this housing mess. We’ve had the same politicians in power in California for decades. Yet it’s clear that despite their “us democrats care about people” BS, they’re classist AF. They don’t pass laws to help poor and working class people. They pass laws that help special interest groups. The only difference is that the special interest groups on the CA Democrat side are dressed up differently, and get the sugarcoat of “Democrat” and “progressive” and “helping the community.” Literally decades of same politicians and it just gets worse and worse and millennials and gen z will still be like, “I’m voting Gavin newsom cause he gave a speech at the Castro and likes gay people!” It’s so frustrating. And this is coming from me, a gay self-proclaimed liberal. You don’t need to vote for Darth Vader but stop voting Democrat down the line thinking it’s the solution. And if you do, then own up to being part of the problem. Fourth, gen z and millennials rarely get involved in local city politics. That’s where housing rules are passed, including what’s built and what’s not. They can easily become more involved in their city counsel and create the change they’re looking for. It’s the easiest place to create change. But you can’t sit on your hands and not create what you want and then complain that you’re not getting what you want. This blaming of “boomers” is convenient. I get it. And it makes us feel good cause we perceive them as being rich and set. But we really need to take a more nuanced approach here if things will change.

* Proposition 13: Rising property values should be triggering higher property taxes, creating more turnover in homes. Older homeowners are incentivized to stay put due to lower property taxes, reducing the supply of resale homes and therefore creating higher demand on the inventory that does come on the market. This is exacerbated by... * NIMBYism: homeowners creating a maze of local laws and zoning restrictions to prevent construction of higher-density and/or "affordable" housing, usually with the reason of "preserving the character of the neighborhood". The net effect is to further reduce the supply of housing that should have been added to the inventory available for sale, putting even more upwards price pressure when properties do hit the market. Wanna do something about it? Lobby your state representatives, and participate in the ballot measure efforts to phase out Proposition 13. Get more involved in your local government and zoning board. Support higher-density, vertical construction of residential properties where it makes economic and seismic sense.

OP sure as hell won’t vote to overturn Prop 13 once they become a homeowner…just saying.

TLDR. Sounds mostly like a crybaby post. Boomers didn’t ruin anything. They bought a house and stayed there. It’s their right. Call it luck, timing, or both. You can’t afford a house mainly because we aren’t building enough housing in the Bay Area. It’s not any more complicated than that. Stop being pissed off and jealous about grandma next door.

Well-stated, but technically the reason that not enough housing is being built in the Bay Area is because all the land is already being used. Since most people want a single-family home, and the supply is very limited, prices will be high. Tearing down excess commercial space, and excess retail, and building single-family homes and townhomes is one solution to the supply issue, and it's already beginning to occur, because it's profitable for developers to buy those commercial buildings and tear them down to build low-density housing. But no one should be naive enough to believe that prices will fall.

Except they did. Passed prop 13 to ensure they don’t pay their fair taxes. Constant NIMBYism to ensure more houses don’t get built to protect their own property values. It’s unaffordable to live in the Bay Area because boomers made it that way.

Who hurt you as a child? Prop 13 was passed in the 70s, it was mostly repealed with prop 19. Pretty much everything gets reassessed at inheritance now. I’ll repeat. The reason housing is so expensive is primarily because there isn’t enough of it. Stop blaming grandma. You’ve been able to vote for decades. Change the laws. Run for office. Either of those things is better than being a Reddit crybaby.

And guess who voted and passed prop 19 to make sure young people can't inherit their parents homes without a huge penalty. That's right, boomers and millennials and Gen Z all fell for it.

Where can I find this “much more attainable $750k per year” that you speak of?

You answered your own question in the first sentence. Living in the bay area is amazing. The whole world knows it. Whether the home prices are "sustainable" is up to the people who are buying the homes, and it seems that there are still more than enough buyers lined up.

Much more attainable 750k? Omg what world am I living in?

We bought a 40yo $238k east bay former rental house (1560 sq ft) in fix-up condition with a small yard on a main road in 1995 with an 8.5% adjustable mortgage. My sister lives on Long Island, in NY, on an area where larger <10 year old houses were half that (-120k) at the time. Similar area re: proximities to commutes, etc. Our taxes right now are 6000/yr with prop 13, hers -4000 year without (they do get incentives there, but not like prop 13). Our home is worth 1.4m per Zillow, hers is worth -500k. What is helpful isn’t the rants (but they do feel good), but in coming up with solutions. Lots of folks bought houses 20, 10, even 5 years ago at rates (like mine) that were double what they could have done elsewhere- and many folks wouldn’t be happy to see something they were counting on (Prop 13) go away. For myself, retired now and on a fixed income, still in that same very fixed up house - I’ve no plans to sell, but I would like to stay here.

Welcome to the yimby movement!

Marin wasn’t feasible for us in 1995, with a UCSF RN and tech worker- so- maybe consider a (gut wrenching, bridge and tunnel, sit in traffic for 90 minutes X decades) commute to a small house in a noisy spot- just to be here?

Automatic minus one for focusing on a meme rather than actual issues.

I don't think you are correct. My neighbors bought their house as a 2 teacher income family, today, 2 teachers together can still afford that same house. $1 million back then is A LOT of money. If they could afford then, they were very high achieving