Overturning of Prop. 13 sought in lawsuit (California)

[Gormy Cuss]

28. Are you aware that commercial property taxes can be held down MORE than residential taxes under 13?

When individuals sell residences, it's usually a 100% ownership transfer and the new basis for the tax is the sales price. For commercial property though, the basis increases only if more than 50% ownership transfers and there are many, many exceptions to what constitutes an ownership transfer.

Here's an article from a few years back that illustrates this:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jul/13/business/fi-hiltzik13

It's not the rate paid by commercial properties so much as differences in the way commercial property are held that make it inequitable. From the link above:

[div class='excerpt']The idea is to reverse what has been a shift in California's property tax burden onto homeowners from business owners under Proposition 13.

In Los Angeles County, for example, single-family residences accounted for 39.9% of the tax roll, by value, in 1975, before Proposition 13. This year their share is 55.8%. In the same period, commercial-industrial property has gone from 46.6% of the tax roll to 30.9%. These figures are from the county assessor's annual report, but a similar pattern holds statewide.


Now that's a simple statistic but it's unlikely that the broad change in tax burden is because real commercial property value has grown by that much less.