Oakland’s ‘rent control’ covers a much smaller slice of the rental market than most people realize — and studies have shown that parcel taxes are substantially passed through to renters.
Thank you again for the clarity and accessibility of this series. For me, you have removed the fog of partial understanding, excuses and moral flexibility that typically prevents real action to fix the system. Frankly, it's a shame that Oakland and this area are effectively a monopoly for a greedy Democratic Party that is run by elites and billionaires, just like the other one!
I would love for you guys to compare our property etc. local taxes to those of nearby cities like Berkeley and Richmond. And also compare their budgets/size of population to Oakland. Also police dept. budgets/number of cops.On the one hand I'm sure the city government is plenty dysfunctional as you endlessly stress but on the other hand I feel like the property taxes we pay on our house(yeah bought almost 30 years ago) are actually quite reasonable.
Hi Brzuno, thank you for your comment, and for reading Oakland Report. We would like to publish it in our next Letter to the Editor column. https://www.oaklandreport.org/t/letters
If you have read other articles in this series, then you may have seen that Oakland now charges the highest taxes per capita in the state compared to similar cities.
Another data point is that Oakland's special taxes have surged 379% over the past 20 years. That's over 6 times higher than the increase in the cost-of-living, as measured by the consumer price index, over that same period.
Your suggestion to compare specifically to Berkeley and Richmond is interesting -- in fact, we looked into it while researching for this series, and we may delve into that in a future article as time allows. For now, the short answer is that these three cities have some significant differences from each other, in particular their property values and taxation mixes, but when we looked into this briefly we found that Oakland has the highest median property tax bill as a percentage of median home value:
Oakland - 0.97% (median $7,811 bill / median $802K home)
Richmond - 0.93% (median $5,890 bill / median $632K home)
Berkeley - 0.73% (median $10,234 bill / median $1,395K home)
Thank you again for your comment; the discussion is appreciated.
Yes, “the rules include various mechanisms to pass increased costs to renters by raising rents..”. However, please dig deeper into the realities. ‘Fair return’ and ‘Capital improvements’ rent increases require petitioning the Rent Board, a group of diehard activists. How many of these have been approved in the past TWENTY years. No surprise: ZERO!
Real solutions require good faith negotiations between stakeholders. Radical rhetoric from 19th century economic theory has made that impossible.
Rental economics is a complicated subject involving more than basic math. It seems that both sets of skills are undeveloped in our society. Not encouraging.
Thank you again for the clarity and accessibility of this series. For me, you have removed the fog of partial understanding, excuses and moral flexibility that typically prevents real action to fix the system. Frankly, it's a shame that Oakland and this area are effectively a monopoly for a greedy Democratic Party that is run by elites and billionaires, just like the other one!
I would love for you guys to compare our property etc. local taxes to those of nearby cities like Berkeley and Richmond. And also compare their budgets/size of population to Oakland. Also police dept. budgets/number of cops.On the one hand I'm sure the city government is plenty dysfunctional as you endlessly stress but on the other hand I feel like the property taxes we pay on our house(yeah bought almost 30 years ago) are actually quite reasonable.
Hi Brzuno, thank you for your comment, and for reading Oakland Report. We would like to publish it in our next Letter to the Editor column. https://www.oaklandreport.org/t/letters
If you have read other articles in this series, then you may have seen that Oakland now charges the highest taxes per capita in the state compared to similar cities.
Another data point is that Oakland's special taxes have surged 379% over the past 20 years. That's over 6 times higher than the increase in the cost-of-living, as measured by the consumer price index, over that same period.
Meanwhile, public safety service levels have either remained flat or decreased on several metrics. https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/20260415-shrinkflation-oakland-is-charging
And earlier this week, we examined how Oakland's property taxes hit deep East Oakland's homes up to 48% harder than Rockridge's, continuing a historic trend of disproportionately burdening East Oakland neighborhoods. https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/20260420-oakland-taxes-hit-deep-east-oakland
Your suggestion to compare specifically to Berkeley and Richmond is interesting -- in fact, we looked into it while researching for this series, and we may delve into that in a future article as time allows. For now, the short answer is that these three cities have some significant differences from each other, in particular their property values and taxation mixes, but when we looked into this briefly we found that Oakland has the highest median property tax bill as a percentage of median home value:
Oakland - 0.97% (median $7,811 bill / median $802K home)
Richmond - 0.93% (median $5,890 bill / median $632K home)
Berkeley - 0.73% (median $10,234 bill / median $1,395K home)
Thank you again for your comment; the discussion is appreciated.
Yes, “the rules include various mechanisms to pass increased costs to renters by raising rents..”. However, please dig deeper into the realities. ‘Fair return’ and ‘Capital improvements’ rent increases require petitioning the Rent Board, a group of diehard activists. How many of these have been approved in the past TWENTY years. No surprise: ZERO!
Real solutions require good faith negotiations between stakeholders. Radical rhetoric from 19th century economic theory has made that impossible.
Rental economics is a complicated subject involving more than basic math. It seems that both sets of skills are undeveloped in our society. Not encouraging.
Hi RJ, thank you for your comment. We would like to publish it in our next Letters to the Editor column. https://www.oaklandreport.org/t/letters