Down a bit from SF in Santa Cruz, people might qualify for purchase of Measure O housing units that run from $240,000 and up.

To qualify, they can't earn more than ~$70,000/year.

I suppose that's affordable if you make $65,000/year but where does that leave most of the people who would like to live the dream?

Similar programs exist in SF: http://sf-moh.org/index.aspx?page=299 and http://www.homeownershipsf.org/

And, similar to Santa Cruz, one can be sure that most SF workers won't be able to afford the dream.

I found something we agree on. "Affordable housing" in large metro areas needs a new definition.

Its extremely frustrating when 1%ers from who knows where scoop up anything slightly affordable in order to rent it out and write something off on their taxes. In the mean time, people like me actually want to buy and live in the neighborhood we have rented in for years. And this is all coming from someone making a very very good salary with a wife also making good money... it seems the only solution is to move to the midwest :/

property taxes for the privilege of owning property in the state and keeping residents from being able to. It might help recoup some of the losses of revenue for the state that disappeared with the passage of proposition 13.

Until this year, the two unites adjacent to me have been unoccupied more often than not, with the occupants staying 4-6 weeks. They were basically vacation pads for whomever paid for it.

unoccupied most of the year or rented out at pricey hotel rates for other people's vacations. But the people who work and live here cannot afford to live where they work. Not only that famous people like Mc Cain and Romney and Oprah keep homes in various California locations. Not to mention every oil sheik in the ME. Let them pay.

to local education, police/fire protection, local governments, some free medical services, and infrastructure.

If these owners are not around most of the time, thus not consuming said services thus leaving those who do better off, why should one discourage this?

palatial residences their security, water for gardens, roads for maintenance workers, fire and police for protection are all the same whether or not they are there.

whether they are there or not, what difference does it make? The police are funded, school teachers are paid, the roads are paved regardless.

for the comfortable ($100,000 +) also diminishes.

The more rental units that are eliminated the more pressure is put on affordable and marginal housing to gentrify.

A healthy city regulates a housing marking that allows teachers to live in their community. Teachers, students, police, fast food workers, dishwashers, artists, musicians, etc.

n/t

But I have better plans for the tax money of the gluttonous rich. We once had free education at university level and we had programs that kept the dysfunctional and down on their luck people off the streets as homeless. Proposition 13 killed all that. It time to get some of those programs back and when people can afford to have more than one home they can pay extra taxes on the second, third and fourth homes.

If someone buys a property they pay at a minimum 1% of the purchase price in property taxes. In most cases they buy the property for more than the seller paid, so the tax base increases.

I don't understand your point.

got richer and the poor became homeless and it had a dominoe effect across America from California. I will grant anyone 1% taxes on the first family home. Anyone else, who is wealthy enough to buy more than one home or a home the size of a small hotel needs to pay 5% so we can get back the social programs we lost because of prop 13.

Even billionaire Warren Buffett suggested this to Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was Gov. and Ahnold told him to do push ups. When proposition 13 passed, within a couple of years properties had tripled and quadrupled in value because investors and real estate speculators came in from all over the world buying up all the cheap propery because the tax rate had become so attractive.

The infrastructures of our education, health care and social safety nets either disappeared or were very vastly eroded. People were out in the streets and the average renter found themselves having to pay rents three times what they had. Many of us voted in rent control to keep from having to move sixty miles from our jobs. We can change this by making the affluent pay taxes for their luxuries. Mitt Romney can pay taxes for his car elevator and he's one of those out of state multi-millionaires who can pay for the privilege.

btw property prices can go down. I watched a property in my neighborhood go down from $800,000 to $300,000 within five years.

I think I have a Facebook friend who keeps posting them. It sounds like it may be worse there than here -- not just absentee owners but large areas of affordable housing being replaced by luxury units. And where you don't have the superrich shoving their way in, you have London hipsters gentrifying the working class neighborhoods.

But checking around, it seems like it may be as much about financial manipulation as anything else. For example, this:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/16/london-s-oligarch-ghost-town.html

This, in a nutshell, is the extraordinary new reality of London’s super-luxury property market. Thousands of the city’s most desirable (and expensive) apartments and houses are being snapped up by wealthy non-nationals—Russians, Greeks, and Cypriots among them—who, spooked by financial or political instability at home, have dumped their money on the London property market as a haven.

But they have no need, or desire, to live in the properties they have bought at such great expense. They are simply repositories of capital, like so many gold bars in the vault of a bank.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former Prime Minister of Qatar, Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian business oligarch, and Vladimir Kim, the Kazakh copper magnate, are among those who own apartments in One Hyde Park.

“Rich Russians” have become convenient whipping boys for angry Londoners who can’t afford to buy because of the city’s current housing price boom. And its not just working- and middle-class citizens being kept out of the club; I know one city trader, who, despite a six-figure deposit and a healthy annual salary, was unable to buy a house in Homerton.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6cb11114-18aa-11e4-a51a-00144feabdc0.html

At least £122bn of property in England and Wales is held through companies in offshore tax havens where ownership is difficult to trace, a Financial Times analysis of Land Registry data has found.

The figure – more than the total value of all housing stock in Westminster and the City of London – reveals for the first time the detail of the scale of offshore property ownership in the UK. It raises concern that London property in particular has become a haven for dirty money from around the world.

“Property is a key risk area for the UK,” says Robert Barrington, executive director of Transparency International UK. “From Abacha to Marcos and the Gaddafis, corrupt leaders have used shell companies and trusts to hide their identities and safeguard stolen fortunes, often in property.”

Nearly two out of three of the 91,248 foreign-company owned properties in England and Wales are held via the British Virgin Islands and Channel Island structures. Just under two-thirds of the offshore-owned property by value is in Greater London, with 27 per cent in the City of Westminster.

http://www.thenation.com/article/180516/how-new-york-real-estate-became-dumping-ground-worlds-dirty-money

The journey of Wu Shu-jen’s ill-gotten cash illustrates one of New York’s dirty secrets: high-end real estate in the city is an alluring destination for corrupt politicians, tax dodgers and money launderers around the globe.

Since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in pricey Manhattan developments have been to buyers who listed an international address—most from China, Russia and Latin America—or bought in the name of a corporate entity, a maneuver often employed by foreign purchasers. Because many buyers go to great lengths to hide their interests in New York properties, it’s impossible to put a number on the proportion laundering ill-gotten gains. But according to money-laundering experts as well as court documents and secret offshore records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, New York real estate has become a magnet for dirty money.

Public officials and real-estate operatives in New York have mostly applauded the city’s influx of mega-rich homesteaders from overseas, with former Mayor Michael Bloomberg leading the chorus during his time in office. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?” he told New York magazine in September.

Combine that give-us-your-rich ethos with state and local policies that lavish tax breaks on Manhattan’s wealthiest homeowners and federal policies that let real estate agents off the hook, and the results are predictable: New York is a magnet for the super-rich homebuyers from other lands bearing money of sometimes dubious provenance.

We were told by our (crappy) realtors that the Los Altos house should be ready for the Asian market. Chinese nationals are buying up property in the Bay Area. They are holding it like stocks. Some rent out the properties, some just hold them for the land value (2-4Mill per acre.

They are out of investment properties in China... there are entire empty cities filled with condos that were sold as 'investments' - the 'cities' are vacant. The smart Chinese upper middle class investor is not falling for it anymore.

They are buying up SF and Silicon Valley.

Our relatives in San Jose have been trying to buy a home for a couple of years now. Every time they come close, they are out-bid by Chinese nationals. We're not talking outbid by $10-20k. They'll bid $100,000 over asking and pay it all in cash. What chance do Bay Area residents have against that?

Chinese gangsters and corrupt business men and bureaucrats who fear being swept up in the latest anti-corruption sweep are moving as much money as possible into Western real estate so if they're executed or locked-up forever their family has assets outside the reach of Beijing that they can draw on.

Real Estate is the last market internationally where anti-money laundering measures are mostly ineffectual, but nobody dares crack down.