Reply #9: What the hell are you talking about? Prop 13 passed in 1978

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

The issue was that the tax policies of California from the 1950's till 1978 were extremely harsh to both residential and commercial/industrial land owners in that they were based on the whims of land speculators. Taxing an industrial site based on what a land speculator had just paid for one to build houses on is a good way to get factories to close. Ford for instance had factories in both Richmond and Long Beach, rising property taxes in the 1950's drove replacement factories into what was then the middle of nowhere: Milpitas and Pico Rivera. Eventually suburbia caught up with both plants as did property taxes and they closed too. The same thing happened to all the industries around Santa Monica Airport where in the mid-50's 45,000 people were employed and by 1960 nearly zero. The same thing happened everywhere else in the state where industry was run off the land either conciously to facilitate redevelopment or inadvertently by "market" property taxes.