<p>That half acre would put it in the 2mil range here in SoCal...even if the house was a tear-down.</p>
<p>what would the tax be on that 2 mil home? What I found when browsing in real estate window in SLO was that the houses were priced higher (not by that much - could buy a 3 bdrm ranch for the price of my 4 dbrm colonial) but that the taxes were lower so all in all, I felt that the total housing costs would be about the same as here on LI.</p>
<p>One big difference in NY is that you can challenge your assessment based on other like homes in your area. In California some people might pay half of the taxes their neighbor is required to pay simply because they bought their home earlier when the cost was lower. The same is true for businesses. Since Prop 13 passed California public schools have slipped in rankings from the top to the bottom. Next year our school k-8 will have no art teacher, part time music and one drama elective. </p>
<p>Furthermore, when considering the cost of owning a house in CA vs. NY don't forget the heating and airconditioning bills. Plus most of my transplant friends agree, they pay considerably less state income tax in California then they did in New York.</p>
<p>twistedsis: tax would be 20,000 per year the year it was bought(base year). Under prop 13, tax could only go up a max of 2% of the original 20,000 (base year amount) each year thereafter.</p>
<p>All you have to do to esablish residency is: have a permante california address,california drivers licene, registerd to vote in california and lvie there for 1 year or more.</p>
<p>I'm in the same boat as people here, trying to establish residency to attend Berkeley, but the more my parents and I researched it, the more impossible it seems to do it on my own. So my dad is trying very hard to find a job in CA and move there so that we can pay in-state tuition.</p>
<p>Prop. 13 was also a response to a controversial court ruling that basically said that the state was responsible to "equalize" funding for all schools in the state. (Prior to the rulings some schools were very good and some were very bad.) Basically, the court decided that the very bad schools should be more equal to the public schools. The idea was that the state would be obliged to somehow give the poorer districts more money--to "level up" schools. </p>
<p>What ended up happening was that the state took away money from the richer districts so that they would have comparable amounts of money to the poorer districts--so all of (or at least most of) the schools in California indeed became more equal, but the equality was at the "level down" funding rate. All during this time, California property values (and thus property taxes) rose dramatically. When people living in richer areas noticed that their very high property taxes weren't actually benefiting their schools because the state took away all their "excess funds," they started pushing for property tax controls; they felt that since local taxes weren't going to local schools, there was no point in having high property taxes. Thus we have Prop. 13.</p>