1. > The issue I have is that they don't - not really. If they paid property tax on their house's market value then I'd actually have a lot less of an issue with it. [..]

Nobody gets away without paying property taxes. This is literally an ignorant statement. I don’t know how I can take anything you say seriously after you say something like this.

Property taxes are not based on market value. It is based on sales price. When the property is sold, the new sale price will reflect market value. Property taxes are Ad Valoreum taxes. It is not on speculative market value of an asset that hasn’t been sold yet.

It seems like your real problem is that seniors have the security of the homes they built and lived their lives.

Why should they pay as much as their new neighbors? Are you being paid as much as these seniors were paid 30 years ago when their mortgages kicked in?

2. If you’d like to stay, you can’t do it at the cost of kicking someone older out. And making them pay for it.

Put simply, you are not wealthy enough to afford Palo Alto. Move to Newark. It’s a nice area. You are always move up the property ladder when you can afford Palo Alto.

3. > Again, because the housing costs prevent us from buying in and the refusal to build new housing keeps the price astronomically high. Also the 'new tech crowd' has been here for decades at this point and does represent a large part of the community.[..]

That isn’t true. Many tech employees have purchased and moved into Bay Area homes that are affordable on their paychecks.

4. > If they have to pay the insane tax they're forcing on everyone else, then maybe they'd be a little less resistant to increasing housing supply.

What ‘insane tax’ are you paying as a renter? If a new property owner, you pay the same percentage of tax on the price you paid to purchase the property. Suppose you buy a property for 1 million and the your neighbor comes in next year after paying two million. Do you think you’d be ok if you have to pay tax on market value or on the value of your home at the price you bought? Property valuations increase every year. It is used to pay for schools. And public services. It goes to the county into a big pot and then redistributed. For schools, it’s redistributed for the whole state.

PA has its own water and recycling. They will soon have their own microgrids. Schools are funded by parcel taxes. The taxes they pay are actually more than what they get back from the state. The seniors who bought the properties years ago and paying taxes are paying for services they don’t need anyways. New PA residents should be thanking them for sharing the burden.

Rental units are built by commercial builders abd real estate giants. You are targeting home owners who are families and often seniors on fixed income who would like to live in the homes they paid for without being penalized with taxes on a value that they haven’t earned yet because they haven’t sold the home.

5. > People in Palo Alto have a black lives matter signs outside of their house while at the same time leverage local control to block any new supply and prevent anyone who isn't super rich from buying in.

Huh? What does BLM signs have to do with anything? It IS a rich neighborhood. That’s why you want in, right? Better than Newark, right?

6. >When they themselves have benefited from insane monetary return on their own property, could never have bought in today, and pay relatively nothing compared to their new neighbors in financial support for their own community.

How have they benefitted? I would say they have lost more than they have gained. Their city is more congested than ever.

7. >They basically won the housing lottery (where the zoning laws were explicitly racially skewed historically).

You can’t discriminate against someone for their skin colour.

8. >The residents are villains because they've skewed the entire thing in their own favor.

Because they came in before you and built homes, took mortgages and didn’t die soon enough to have their homes sold at market rate for others to move in?

9. >They've gotten massive returns on their house value, they prevent new housing to keep prices high for other people, they pay relatively no property tax on that value.

What returns? Nobody hands them free money because tech start ups sprout in PA. You keep saying things without proof or numbers or evidence.

They are living their lives. You keep painting this picture as if they are chasing people away with pitchforks. Or like they demolished new homes. PA has affordable housing, below market rent units, condos, townhomes, senior housing as well as expensive bungalows and SFHs. Most tech workers won’t qualify for the affordable or senior rent controlled or below market rate units. They can’t afford the market rate homes. Anywhere there is affordable units, market rate goes up. It’s mathematics. The higher you build in density, land value per lot shoots up. Not everyone can afford it. No one demands that the 5 acre lots in woodside and atherton and Los Altos hills should be razed down for high density homes.

10. >The entire economy has been built from people starting companies that have driven that value for them and the people that have done that have to pay rent to the people that just happened to be here.

That’s incredibly arrogant and ignorant. Homes and land is not computers or smartphones. When supply is limited and more people demand it, it’s value is going to increase.

11. >Also in Oakland it's the opposite, people that have lived there are getting priced out of their own community.

Interesting. Who is pricing them out? Tech workers? So they are the villains in Oakland? Why? Because you don’t want to live in Oakland and Palo Alto is nicer, the villain roles are switched?

12. >In Palo Alto it's people that live there keeping prices high to price new people out.

HOW? Prices are not determined by Palo Alto residents. It is determined by the market by those who WANT to sell their Palo Alto homes to newcomers. Price of homes is set by desirability and demand.

13. >Both issues are solved by building more housing.

Convenient. That’s like asking someone if they don’t mind getting raped. And then blaming them for refusing.

14. >It's the hypocrisy that gets to me, I'd rather the people just said "we don't care about anyone else, but ourselves and the people already here - we don't want anyone else to join unless they're extremely rich and we have skewed all local policy in our favor to guarantee that outcome" and stop with the self-righteous political nonsense.

I assure you Bay Area is a beautiful place and there are affordable places everywhere. If climbing the home ownership ladder is important, prudent financial decisions have to be made..and not emotional and reactionary ones. I Want, Don’t Get.

If home ownership is not a criteria, the taker has to play with the market as per the rules of the market.

Only those who foot the bill can make the rules. Local governance and not regional governance is the only way to manage cities sustainably.

Thanks for engaging. I don’t have the bandwidth to debate today. I realize we disagree and I suspect that neither of us would be able to change the others’ mind. Probably best if I bow out of this discussion now. Take care. I do wish you the best in your pursuit of home ownership.