Some promises aren’t worth keeping.
Like Rishi Kumar’s.
A mechanical engineer, perennial candidate for higher office and Silicon Valley gadfly, Kumar shamelessly pandered to baby boomers last year while running to be the next assessor of Santa Clara County, repeatedly misleading voters that, were he to win, he’d exempt seniors from property taxes.
Kumar knew that lowering taxes isn’t the duty of county assessors, whose core job is establishing the value of taxable properties. They can’t set tax rates or even collect taxes. But Kumar didn’t want to let the truth get in his campaign’s way.
Fortunately, Assistant Assessor Neysa Fligor defeated Kumar in a Dec. 30 runoff by nearly a 2-1 ratio.
Unfortunately, Kumar is still moving forward with his campaign promise of a statewide initiative to prevent homeowners 60 and over from paying property taxes. The measure awaits an official ballot title and summary from the state attorney general. From there, Kumar says, he’ll be building the operation to collect the required 874,641 signatures to place the initiative in front of voters in November.
The odds of him qualifying his initiative are long, and that’s a good thing. His plan to amend California’s Constitution would inject Proposition 13 with steroids, handing an epic tax windfall to property-owning seniors while reducing local government funds for tackling the very problem – homelessness – he purports wanting to solve.
Pity the propertied
The obvious yet unstated reason for Kumar’s campaign pledge and ballot initiative was to tailor the politically fashionable message of affordability to the financial self-interest of high-propensity voters in a low-turnout election — seniors with property.
But the stated motivation he offered was (and remains) deceptive in the extreme. Kumar describes his initiative as “a major tool in the fight against senior homelessness.”
Home-owning seniors in California are being, in Kumar’s words, “forced onto the streets” because of rising property taxes.
Does Kumar have any data to support that?
Nope, he acknowledged.
In fact, the research completely undermines Kumar’s assertions that California’s homeowners over 60 years old are at high risk of becoming homeless.
“This is not where the problem is,” says Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. As the principal investigator of the California State Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, she is one of the leading authorities on homelessness in this state.
When Kushel analyzed state survey data, she said the problem of homeowners over 60 becoming homeless was so rare that it was statistically insignificant.
Among adults who first became homeless after 50, she said, less than 5% came directly from a place they owned.
Homelessness among seniors in California is, in fact, a growing problem. And it’s Kushel’s research that’s been cited to show it. But contrary to Kumar’s fearmongering, seniors who own homes aren’t the ones at high risk.
For Kushel, she worries that the revenues lost if Kumar’s initiative passes would hurt impoverished, unpropertied Californians over 50 who actually face increasing risks of homelessness. After all, property taxes collected by California counties are often used to build housing for the homeless as well as fund local health care services, including mental health and drug treatment programs — critical components of preventing homelessness.
‘Absurd’
Darien Shanske, a professor at UC Davis School of Law and an authority on the California Constitution, says the state already has a program for seniors struggling to pay their property taxes.
The idea that it’s older homeowners, specifically, who are in need of more help is “absurd on its face,” Shanske says.
Keep in mind, he notes, that California’s Constitution was amended to explicitly help seniors stay in their homes. Proposition 13 — the 1978 voter-approved initiative — imposes a limit on base property taxes at 1% of the assessed value of a home and caps assessment increases at 2% per year.
Even for seniors on fixed incomes, that’s a deal. Social Security payments over the last 20 years have risen 30% faster per year, on average, than property taxes have.
Far from unfairly penalizing longtime homeowners, state property tax laws do the exact opposite. It’s new homebuyers, who skew younger, who face a higher property tax burden under Proposition 13.
‘Feel sorry?’
“Seniors are more than capable, by far, to pay for a home they’ve owned for a long time,” says former Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone. “It’s the young people who are struggling.”
It was Stone’s retirement last summer that triggered the special election that included Kumar.
Now in his 80s, Stone says he doesn’t need an exemption on his property taxes.
He bought his home in Sunnyvale in 1975 for $85,000. This year, Zillow says it’s worth $3.8 million, and yet it’s assessed at $306,000, meaning that, per Prop. 13, his base property taxes this year are about $3,000.
“Do you feel sorry for me?”
Desperate measures
Kumar’s initiative was never about homelessness or fairness. And it’s certainly not rooted in political conviction. In 2016, he was a delegate for a socialist candidate for president. Last year, he was running like as a Howard Jarvis-style tax-cutter. His initiative is just a desperate failed pol’s appeal to the naked self-interest of older voters.
Some campaign promises deserve to be broken. This one from Kumar needs to be buried — along with his political career.
Reach Deputy Opinion Editor Max Taves at mtaves@bayareanewsgroup.com.