Contrary to popular opinion, "densification" is not a panacea. Generally the architects and advocates advancing the notion of high-density are also in favor of relaxing parking restrictions and waiving building codes that require things like closets and bathrooms. There's a guy in my neighborhood who's getting everyone up in arms because he's going to put in an organic grocery store but he can't "make it work financially" unless he's allowed to waive density standards. How does he want to do this? By building up, of course. So what's wrong with that? He wants to go up 19 stories. Building code limits the City to 40 feet above grade, which is enough for 3-story buildings, which is what surrounds the site at the moment (which is full of multi-family mixed-use which has no problem meeting the standards). But if he can go up 19 stories, he can get views of Lake Washington and sell penthouses for $150/sqft. Forgotten in all this is it's the character of the extant neighborhood that attracted everyone to it, and the extant neighborhood doesn't include eight stories of shared living dorms with no parking. More than that, this is California, where property values have been deliberately sky-high since 1978. Incidentally, here's your densification. $2100 for a 500sqft studio, homey. But hey. See if you can do better.
What is proposition 13? I've heard about it a few times now but the Wikipedia article for it doesn't do justice to the charged tones any conversation pertaining to prop 13 carries. State politics are normally dense, but California is on another level. I recall your top Reddit comment in defense of the Golden State. Jerry Brown is literally coordinating international efforts to mitigate climate change since Trump won't, and they're like the sixth largest economy on their very own. But prop 13 just seems like a subsidy up there with the mortgage interest tax deduction.
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. http://www.newsweek.com/california-property-tax-loophole-must-be-fixed-364802California 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.