Low Taxes Make Good Neighbors

The talk of Stephanie Nordlinger’s neighborhood on Tuesday was Stephanie Nordlinger, and the Baldwin Hills woman was lucky to have missed it.

“She’s going to be on the news at 5!” a woman who lives next door to Nordlinger hollered across Sycamore Avenue. “Channel 2’s got her.”

“Who?” another neighbor yelled back.

“That bitch who wants our property taxes to go up!”

Nordlinger was in Washington, where the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments in her legal challenge to Proposition 13. Nordlinger contends that the 1978 tax-cutting measure is unfair, forcing new homeowners to pay higher taxes than those who bought before the initiative passed.

Taxes and constitutional law can be tricky, but it doesn’t take Oliver Wendell Holmes to understand what Nordlinger’s lawsuit has done to her neighborhood standing. Yes, she has sympathizers, but much of the talk on Tuesday was personal, mean and downright unneighborly. You wouldn’t want to run her for block captain anytime soon.

The modest but well-tended stucco houses in Nordlinger’s neighborhood were built as a tract in 1947. The neighborhood has endured white flight, emerged as a bastion of the black middle class, and now, with the influx of a few whites such as Nordlinger and other races, has become more mixed.

On her block live a preacher, a television actor and, the neighbors say, a drug dealer. For the most part, though, it is a street of blue-collar workers, aspiring professionals and retirees--the middle class.

Cliff Tobin, a public hospital worker, moved from South Los Angeles to Sycamore Avenue in the late 1960s--one of the first blacks on the block. He remembers how the Prop. 13 campaign confused him. He worried that it might kill police protection and schools, that it might be, as opponents suggested, a racist ploy. He doesn’t buy those arguments anymore.

Tobin was shown a document from the Nordlinger case that listed his address as one of 20 specific examples of the inequity she claims that Prop. 13 has created. His property is assessed for tax purposes at $36,800; hers is set at $170,000. It was all there on the list, and the list made him mad.

“If she wanted to pay the same taxes I do,” he said, “she could have moved over here earlier, when I did. Nobody stopped her. When I moved over here, the people with names like Nordlinger were moving out as fast as they could. When I moved on the street, you should have seen the ‘For Sale’ signs go up.”

And so it went throughout the neighborhood on Tuesday. An airline mechanic remembered the capriciousness of assessors: “Now you buy a house and you know what your taxes are, going in. Before, it all depended on what kind of mood the guy was in that day.” A mother of four complained that it would be unfair to saddle her family with new taxes: “The voters voted for Prop. 13, and it was approved, and we work hard for our money.” An 80-something retiree worried that he might be forced from his home of 40 years: ‘If they try to even things off between the old guys and the new guys, I don’t know what us old fuddies will do. We’re on a budget.”

The reasoning varied from house to house, but the conclusion was almost universal--don’t undo the handiwork of Howard Jarvis. If the newcomers want the same tax break, the neighbors said, let them advance their own version of Prop. 13. And most interestingly, while they all complained about declining government services, only one or two of the neighbors blamed it on Prop. 13.

As one said: “The government has enough money, it just doesn’t know how to manage it.”

In a way, this neighborhood talk was as relevant as anything the attorneys could tell the Supreme Court justices Tuesday. No question, Nordlinger has pinpointed an inequity. Even Paul Gann, Jarvis’ cohort, talked in his last years of finding tax relief for newer homeowners. But it wasn’t as though Prop. 13 was passed in the dead of night, like a congressional pay raise. The voters heard all the arguments, and still embraced it, by a 2-1 ratio.

What is important--and this is where the neighbors make the best experts--is why. Yes, Prop. 13 was about a more equitable tax system, but that wasn’t all. It also was about distrust of a runaway government, about anger. Jarvis-Gann gave voters the tool, however crude, to whack Sacramento between the eyes, to get its attention.

From the talk on Sycamore Avenue, it is clear those powerful feelings have not died. And from the timid talk in Sacramento over how to proceed should Nordlinger prevail, it’s clear that the whacking is remembered. And that’s more important than anything the Supreme Court can do to Prop. 13.