Prepared ... for the Commission on Government Reform.

"Proposition 13, adopted by California voters in 1978, mandates a property tax rate of one percent, requires that properties be assessed at market value at the time of sale, and allows assessments to rise by no more than 2% per year until the next sale. In this paper, we examine how Prop 13 has affected the average tenure length of owners and renters in California versus in other states. We find that from 1970 to 2000, the average tenure length of owners and renters in California increased by 1.04 years and .79 years, respectively, relative to the comparison states. We also find substantial variation in the response to Prop 13, with African-American households responding more than households of other races and migrants responding more than native-born households. Among owner-occupiers, the response to Prop 13 increases sharply as the size of the subsidy rises. Homeowners living in inland California cities such as Bakersfield receive Prop 13 subsidies averaging only $110/year and their average tenure length increased by only .11 years in 2000, but owners living in coastal California cities receive Prop 13 subsidies averaging in the thousands of dollars and their average tenure length increased by 2 to 3 years"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

In A Good Tax, tax expert Joan Youngman skillfully considers how to improve the operation of the property tax and supply the information that is often missing in public debate. She analyzes the legal, administrative, and political challenges to the property tax in the United States and offers recommendations for its improvement. The book is accessibly written for policy analysts and public officials who are dealing with specific property tax issues and for those concerned with property tax issues in general.

Advocates for reforming Proposition 13, California's historic property tax limitation initiative, typically emphasize the measure's implicit preference for owners of commercial and industrial property. Unlike most property tax regimes, Prop 13 assesses property at the owner's purchase price rather than the property's market value. In a rising real estate market, this “acquisition value” rule favors longtime owners relative to more recent purchasers. Reform advocates claim that, because commercial and industrial property changes ownership less frequently than residential property, Prop 13 has shifted tax burdens from commercial and industrial property owners to homeowners. To counter this trend, reformers advocate a “split roll” property tax in which commercial and industrial property would be regularly reassessed to market value.This article draws attention to a different and additional argument in favor of reforming Prop 13 to adopt a split roll regime. While most arguments for a split roll are rooted in fairness claims relating to the distribution of the property tax burden, this article highlights the efficiency gains from taxing commercial and industrial property at market value. These gains derive from the fact that the benefits of Prop 13's acquisition value rule accrue disproportionately to land rather than structures. Standard planning techniques utilized in the commercial-industrial setting (e.g., ownership of real estate by legal entities, long-term leases) operate to preserve low base year values for both land and structures. Over the long term, however, the physical and design limitations of aging structures will lead to new construction, which under Prop 13's rules will enter property tax rolls at market value. The result is a concentration of Prop 13's benefits in underassessed land. This observation leads to the important insight that any reform assessing non-residential property at market value would be, in large measure, a tax on post-1975 appreciation in land values. Current estimates suggest that two-thirds of the revenue gain from adopting a split roll would come from taxing land, arguably the most efficient source of tax revenue available. Coupling such a reform with a reduction in property tax burdens on new construction (for example, by exempting from tax for a period of years some percentage of the owner's investment in new construction) would further enhance the efficiency gains from adopting a split roll regime.