According to the guys who got it passed, the point of Prop 13 was to keep all those lovely old grannies from being priced out of their Santa Monica homes by rising property taxes. I mean, Maude bought that property in nineteen diggity two and had it paid in full by the time We Liked Ike! Are you really going to make her sell and move to the Valley just because her beachfront cottage has been appraised at 1.9 million dollars? No, of course you aren't! Because you don't hate old people, do you?

However, it also applies to commercial property which means if the Daddy Warbucks Trust bought that empty field in 1804 for thirty cents, they will forever pay what they paid in 1978 (plus 2% per year, maybe).

That giant sucking sound you hear is all the money going from schools and public works to rich people's pockets.

California public schools, which during the 1960s had been ranked nationally as among the best, have decreased to 48th in many surveys of student achievement.[43] Some[44] have disputed the attribution of the decline to Proposition 13's role in the change to state financing of public schools, because schools financed mostly by property taxes were declared unconstitutional (the variances in funding between lower and higher income areas being deemed to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution) in Serrano vs. Priest, and Proposition 13 was then passed partially as a result of that case.[40] California's spending per pupil was the same as the national average until about 1985, when it began decreasing, which resulted in another referendum, Proposition 98, that requires a certain percentage of the state's budget to be directed towards public education.

http://www.newsweek.com/california-property-tax-loophole-must-be-fixed-364802