patrick.net

madhaus says

Parcel taxes are not based on square footage

well that really blows. But not surprising of course. This state can't do anything right. Hell, nobody around here can.

SiO2 says

Why do people post that renting is so much better than owning (due to flexibility, don't have to do maintenance, etc) and then attack the very landlords who make it possible for someone to rent?

If we taxed land ownership more intelligently, land ownership wouldn't be the dominant expense in all our lives.

Landlordism is part of the problem, a trillion-dollar-plus suck from the working class to the investor wealthy.

This goes along with the trillion-dollar tap in health care, the $500B+ tap in energy, and the $2T+ tap with overcosted government services, but at least much of these parasitical draws result in middle-class jobs.

Rent-taking in land is just a pure tap. It is one of the most significant imbalances in the system because of this.

madhaus said: Parcel taxes are not based on square footage.
Sigh... you're giving out bad info. Here is an enumerated list of parcel tax items that you pay in the PRoB. Note that for all items you multiple sq.feet by the rate (either residential or commercial).
@Troy - The parcel tax items (based on square feet) are all local (county or city) items. State items and local bonds are ad valoreum (based on property value limited by Prop 13).

zzyzzx says

I just think class sizes should be increased to what they were when I went so school in the 70's.

And what are those class sizes?

Maybe we can go back to one-room schoolhouses? Those were awesome too.

In defense of madhaus, I did some checking and it looks like some cities do have a flat, fixed parcel tax to support schools (see Cupertino, Albany, and Palo Alto). Others have parcel taxes based a combination of land use and lot or building size (see Piedmont, Berkeley). The ones based on square footage do have some administrative overhead, but also tend of pass more easily as they have a 'tax the rich' bent to them. YMMV...

EBGuy, I didn't know there were any parcel (per property ) taxes that were size-based, due to my lack of news on non-South Bay and Peninsula practices. Every one of those tax measures was per property.

Thanks to patrick.net, I have learned something today.

Edit: The word parcel appears once in your link, in reference to lot square footage. None of the other taxes are called parcel taxes. If they are by building square feet, then they aren't parcel taxes. But it does show a parcel tax could tax by property size.

corntrollio says

And what are those class sizes?

It was around 50 in the SouthBay,,, but we also had more schools which were shut down by 1980.

Bellingham Bill says

They stopped making land millions of years ago.

In the Bay Area that would have been around mid 70s or so when Foster City was "created" by man.. dirt and all. About 100 years ago ,man actually made the land around San Francisco much bigger, where the Transamerica tower sits was actually a ship harbor.

Crazy stuff...

thomas.wong1986 says

It was around 50 in the SouthBay,,, but we also had more schools which were shut down by 1980.

If that is actually accurate, it is far far far above California's average.

There are studies on this:

Look at the third chart, where you can see California's average was near 25 in the early 70s and was down to a little over 20 by 1978, and then steadily rose through the 80s (when they did close some high schools in favor of consolidating districts), rose in after 1989 despite SB 1777, and the number didn't drop again until the mid-90s when there were some initiatives to lower class size:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG186.sum.pdf

The reasons to lower class sizes were because of various studies, some of which suggest 18-20 is best, as in the linked article below.

Note that California's average class size has consistently been above national averages since the 1970s:

There is no better example of the trade-off between desire and fiscal reality than here in California, where class size reduction has been discussed and desired for years, but class size has inexorably increased beginning in the 1970s, until today we are generally ranked either 49th or 50th in the country in this category.

http://www.calstate.edu/ier/reports/reduction.pdf

The other thing to note, if we're going to cite the 1970s as some sort of golden age for education, is that California spent more per student than the national average throughout the 70s and into the early 80s. Starting in the late 80s, California consistently spent less per student than the national average, and it only appears to have gotten worse over time. (see the first chart from the first link)

thomas.wong1986 says

Bellingham Bill says

They stopped making land millions of years ago.

In the Bay Area that would have been around mid 70s or so when Foster City was "created" by man.. dirt and all. About 100 years ago ,man actually made the land around San Francisco much bigger, where the Transamerica tower sits was actually a ship harbor.

Crazy stuff...

Yeah, this is very commonly known. We have filled in many parts of the Bay. The Marina was filled in for the 1915 expo. There are other parts of San Francisco built over various creeks, watersheds, and channels -- there is a rich history of San Francisco's lost waterways, and it still affects us today, since many buildings have to pump their basements to remove the water (including Powell BART station which has a huge pumping operation). Various portions of the Bay have been filled in at various points -- Redwood Shores is another example of an entire community built on Bay mud.

In addition, there is plenty of land in the Bay Area. Much of it is protected for one reason or another -- as open space or via various other land use restrictions that limit growth.

madhaus said: If they are by building square feet, then they aren't parcel taxes.
That (possible) technicality is not lost on me. However, both Piedmont and Berkeley (PDF - see Section 8) refer to their size based 'school assessments' as parcel taxes.