What Prop 13 does for owners, rent control does for renters. Both gives huge advantages to current residents at the expense of future residents. It's obvious why current residents would vote for such a change. This allows current residents to ignore problems as they occur, so these problems grow out of control.
We can't keep giving benefits to certain populations of people. You need to work out the negative externalities and tax it. You need to work out the positive externalities and subsidize it. Anything else leads to perverse incentives. If you happen to have a surplus as a result of taxing negative externalities, you should take the tax money and give it back to your residents as a dividend.
If you want to have parking minimums, if you want to have certain setbacks and limited building height, if you want to disallow building train-tracks through your backyard, that's fine. But those are externalities on the community and they should ultimately show in the Land Value and that needs to be taxed. When it is not taxed it is incentivized, and those perverse incentives only lead to more bad policies. A Land Value Tax would instantly turn most NIMBY voters into YIMBY voters. Fixing all of these follow-on symptoms would go from an up-hill battle to a downhill breeze. Focus on the disease, tax negative externalities.
Rent control doesn't just benefit current residents, any sane rent control policy carries forwards when tenants change. Those that don't are ineffective on purpose.
Beyond that, lowering rents benefits even future residents and homeowners-to-be as they lower property values and dampen speculation.
We can't keep giving benefits to certain populations of people. You need to work out the negative externalities and tax it. You need to work out the positive externalities and subsidize it. Anything else leads to perverse incentives. If you happen to have a surplus as a result of taxing negative externalities, you should take the tax money and give it back to your residents as a dividend.
If you want to have parking minimums, if you want to have certain setbacks and limited building height, if you want to disallow building train-tracks through your backyard, that's fine. But those are externalities on the community and they should ultimately show in the Land Value and that needs to be taxed. When it is not taxed it is incentivized, and those perverse incentives only lead to more bad policies. A Land Value Tax would instantly turn most NIMBY voters into YIMBY voters. Fixing all of these follow-on symptoms would go from an up-hill battle to a downhill breeze. Focus on the disease, tax negative externalities.