When Sheri Duffy and her ailing mother, Jean, voted for Proposition 19 five years ago, an ad campaign running during episodes of “Judge Judy” convinced them the measure would provide what its title promised: “Home Protection for Seniors, Severely Disabled, Families, and Victims of Wildfire or Natural Disasters.”
Campaign mailers praised the measure for allowing children to inherit their parents’ family home “without any tax increases.”
What the Duffys didn’t realize, however, was that inherited primary residences would be reassessed to market value after the first $1 million. Just blocks from Apple’s headquarters, the family’s humble three-bedroom, two-bath house with “popcorn ceilings” that Sheri’s father bought on a truck driver’s salary in 1968 was worth more than $2 million. When her mother died in 2021, the property taxes soared from $1,300 to $18,000 a year. In August, she and her twin brother, Mike, had no choice but to sell.
“I thought I was going to die in that house, just like my mom,” said Sheri, 54, who like Mike, had sidelined careers and jobs to live with and care for their aging parents. “We didn’t realize what we were voting for. We really felt duped, just taken advantage of, lied to.”
Although it’s too late for the Duffys, Sheri is once again joining a grassroots campaign to repeal the inheritance portion of Prop. 19 that, contrary to those 2020 ads, raised property taxes on scores of Californians. At least five Bay Area counties have median home prices over $1 million.
The Duffys’ experience highlights unsettling questions about Prop. 19 that was approved by just 51% of Californians in 2020: not only do many voters feel misled, but the measure has yet to deliver on key promises to benefit a wildfire fund and send extra revenue to counties.
Even the state’s former Republican Party chair, Jim Brulte, who had endorsed Prop. 19, and was quoted in mailers as saying the measure would “protect the right of parents to pass the family home to their children without a tax penalty and without a tax increase,” said he, too, was misled.
“I asked all the questions that I asked and based on the answers we got, the mailer was done and it was approved by legal and if legal got it wrong, shame on them,” Brulte told the Bay Area News Group. “That portion should be repealed.”
In fact, he said, he signed petitions in the two previous repeal campaigns, in 2022 and 2024, to do just that. Both failed to reach the ballot for lack of verified signatures.
If the measure to “Fix Prop 19 to Save Our Children’s Future” makes it to the November 2026 ballot and is approved by voters, heirs who have been paying higher property taxes since the law took effect would see their rates revert to their previous levels. Families that already sold properties, like the Duffys, would be out of luck.
Getting the repeal to the ballot, however, is a tall order. The most verified signatures the previous campaigns collected were 560,000. They need nearly 875,000. This time, however, they don’t have any deep-pocketed backers and won’t have the muscle of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to campaign for them, as they did in the previous efforts. The organization is instead focused on closing loopholes on Proposition 13 that have allowed counties, including Santa Clara, to add “transfer taxes” to home sales.
Nonetheless, organizers of the Prop. 19 “fix” hope that, since five years have passed, the impacts of the proposition will have sunk in, including the realization that a family trust won’t protect them.
“There are people that have really lost homes, had tax increases raised on them, and they’re desperate,” said Gina Tse-Louie of San Francisco, who is leading the campaign. She got involved after she was diagnosed with a brain aneurism and feared that if she died, her teenage children wouldn’t be able to keep their home.
The repeal campaign is being run out of an auto body shop in Daly City – another potential casualty of Prop. 19. The family that owns “Masters Auto Body” on Mission Street fears that when their 89-year-old family patriarch dies, they won’t be able to keep the family home or the family businesses their parents built and the children still run. Under Prop. 19, all inherited property from parents or grandparents is reassessed to market value, except for one narrow exception: $1 million in market value is waived if the heir moves into the deceased person’s primary home within a year. The median home value is about $1.9 million in Santa Clara County, $2.1 million in San Mateo County and about $1.1 million in Alameda County, which includes the city of Oakland.
They — along with other campaign volunteers they’ve met on Zoom calls — fear they’re running out of time.
“We’re all trying to do the best to keep our parents alive, which sounds kind of weird because we’re not trying to do it any other way,” said Annette Hipona, 63, who manages her father’s fourplex while her brother, Eric Steeg, runs the auto body shop where her daughter works. “But it’s more important now, it seems, to keep them alive.”
The California Association of Realtors, which sponsored Prop. 19, told the Bay Area News Group it was “transparent throughout the 2020 campaign” about the effect on inherited property. Legislators and some media outlets, it pointed out, raised concerns that heirs were primarily using inherited property as rentals, reaping tremendous benefits from low property taxes while charging market-rate rent — a problem Prop 19 would remedy.
At the same time, however, a Los Angeles Times editorial criticized the realtors association for drafting the “cynical and unwelcome” measure that appeared to be a blatant effort to spur more home sales. The newspaper’s primary objection, however, was a separate provision, which would remain in place if the “fix” went forward, that allows seniors over 55 who sell their homes to transfer the same property tax base to a new home, up to three times. It’s an expansion of previous rules that only applied to certain counties.
The realtors association says that “tens of thousands of Californians have used these provisions,” and while the data is incomplete, “many of these homes would not otherwise have come on the market.”
Extra revenue or savings from the measure was supposed to fund state wildfire agencies and counties that may have lost property tax revenue. But according to the state Department of Finance that releases an annual four-page financial analysis of Prop. 19, neither the firefighting fund nor counties have received any money as a result.
“There were no additional revenues and no increased savings to the state” from the measure, the Department of Finance reported in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 analyses. “Therefore, the Controller will not transfer any funds to the California Fire Response Fund or the County Revenue Protection Fund.”
The realtors association counters, however, that “it is too early to judge the ultimate fiscal flow or benefits to firefighters.”
In an October analysis of the proposed repeal, the Legislative Analyst’s Office says that since counties and schools rely on property tax revenue, eliminating the inheritance tax portion of Prop. 19 while maintaining the other provisions that allow seniors to transfer their property taxes to new homes would cause annual losses of between $1 billion in the early years and $2 billion annually over time.
SPUR, a nonprofit Bay Area policy organization, had supported Prop. 19 as a way to “flatten wealth inequality.” The organization said the law closed the “Lebowski loophole” — named after Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski played by Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski.” A 2018 LA Times investigation found that when Bridges and his siblings inherited the Malibu home their parents purchased in the 1950s, they paid only $5,700 a year in property taxes, while collecting $15,000 a month in rent. The nonprofit argued that the loophole disproportionately benefited wealthier, and whiter, households that are more likely to own property and pass it on to their children and grandchildren.
But minority families are also feeling the sting. Marilyn Williams, 71, who is Black and lives in West Oakland, said she now fears that when she dies, her children won’t be able to keep her home, especially if it is valued at much over the $1 million tax exclusion limit.
“This would be the first generational wealth in my entire family,” Williams said. “It’s unfair. Just when the African Americans, what few of us there are, have something to pass on to our kids. It’s just me and my little generation that maybe was able to attain a home, even though a lot of us lost our homes during the foreclosure crisis.”
Heirs of family property who sell the primary family home, along with any other properties, would certainly benefit from the cash windfall of the sales. But for the Duffys in Sunnyvale who sold their parents’ home two months ago and the Daly City siblings who run the auto body shop, they say that’s not what they want or their parents intended.
The Duffys held on to the family home for nearly four years after their mother died, selling their mother’s diamond ring and a luxury watch from Sheri’s old boyfriend to make ends meet. But “the property taxes wiped me out,” Sheri said.
They sold the family home for $2.4 million and moved out in September. After disbursing some of the proceeds to half siblings, the twins each walked away with $700,000. It’s not enough for either of them to buy a home anywhere close to their old neighborhood. Her brother is buying an RV instead. Sheri, who is using some of the money to rent a house in Morgan Hill for $3,000 a month, isn’t sure what she’s going to do next.
“I don’t know what my future holds,” she said. “I feel lost.”