Photo by La Eneida

It is 7 a.m., 51° and headed to drop to 65 from 73° on Wednesday, but I’m guessing we’ll do better than 65 because the sun will be out in all of its splendor. Details for the next 10 days are here.

Long, but very good piece on the housing crisis on Tech Crunch. Among other notable connections made by Kim Mai-Cutler is the one between the 1978 Prop 13, which cut property tax revenue by 60 percent, and the current housing crisis.

Without the ability to rely as heavily on property taxes, city governments throughout the state had to favor office and retail development over housing in order to boost sales taxes. It may have even accelerated the homogeny of suburbs as smaller city governments had to cut deals to attract “big box” retailers to boost sales tax revenue, crowding out independently-run stores.

It also created a lock-in effect as California property values soared, creating a bigger gap in property taxes on newly-sold properties and ones that homeowners had held onto for a long time. READ THE FULL PIECE.

KQED has an update on the new Airbnb rules that David Chiu has proposed for San Francisco.

StreetsblogUSA gives us a cheat sheet on what we should know about walking and biking in the USA. Most interesting is that we are still below the levels of 1990 for walking and only slightly above for biking.

We got rid of our car about eight years ago, but I  think people in the city with kids probably still need to have a car. Once the kids go off to college, however, little is more satisfying than dumping that car.

Enjoy the day!

Follow Us

I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

Join the Conversation

1 Comment

  1. I wasn’t aware that Prop13 cut property taxes at all. I thought it merely limited future property tax increases. And that made sense given that some municipalities were doubling their ad valorem rates year-on-year, which was an intolerable burden on residents and businesses. Hence the massive populist support for Prop 13 which endures to this day.

    And the main impact of Prop13 was not new development, most of which would have happened anyway, as it does in States that do not have Prop13. But rather it led to sky-high state income and sales tax rates which, AFAIK, are both the highest in the nation.

    California has an addictive spending problem and not a revenue problem.

    0
    0
    votes. Sign in to vote
    Reply
Leave a comment
Please keep your comments short and civil. Do not leave multiple comments under multiple names on one article. We will zap comments that fail to adhere to these short and easy-to-follow rules.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *