About
Since its inception in 1978, Proposition 13 has had a profound and controversial impact on the state of California. This website is an effort to organize and analyze the implications of this law and challenge the most common claims made by its supporters.
What Prop 13 does
Prop 13 caps the property tax at 1% of a property’s assessed value, sets that value at the purchase price, and lets it rise at most 2% a year until the property changes hands. Owners who bought long ago pay taxes on a fraction of what their property is worth today, and until 2021 children could inherit their parents’ assessment on almost any property. It also requires a two-thirds vote for special taxes, which later measures (Props 62, 218, and 26) extended into the rules for every local tax.
Data and code
The analyses here are built from public records: rental listings matched to the LA County Assessor, Culver City’s rental registry, and the California Elections Data Archive. Code and data are inthe site’s GitHub repository.