My neighbor handed me a speeding survey. Then she told me people my age want her dead. - Max Mautner My neighbor handed me a speeding survey. Then she told me people my age want her dead.<br>A neighbor on my street handed a flyer to the house next door. It was a one-page printout, calling for neighbors to write down details of speeding vehicles on our street (make, model, time, direction), which she planned to compile and bring to the city.<br>I appreciated the intent.<br>I called the number on the flyer and invited her over. I expected to talk strategy with her about how to persuade the city to make our street safer.<br>She stayed for an hour at my home. We spent less than 10 minutes talking traffic. I offered her coffee and tea. She declined both. She had not really come to talk about cars on the street.<br>She came to tell me three things.<br>One: people my age want her to die so her house comes onto the market and frees up housing supply.<br>Two: her taxes keep going up.<br>Three: city services — street cleaning, storm drain vacuuming, sewer lateral coverage — have steadily disappeared.<br>She is in her seventies. She lives with her husband in a 3,700 square foot residence. The Zestimate on the house is $2.2 million. Prop 13, California’s 1978 law capping assessments, has her assessed at $740,000 — she is paying property taxes on a basis that has not meaningfully moved since the Carter administration.<br>The traffic survey was not about traffic.<br>Each thing she told me is wrong, in a direction.<br>I do not know a single person under forty who wants her dead. I know dozens who would like to be able to live within walking distance of their aging parents and cannot financially make it work. She fears the inverse of what’s happening.<br>Her taxes have, by law, gone up no more than 2% a year for as long as she has owned this house. Everyone in San Mateo who has bought a home since the 1980s pays a larger share of their property’s actual value in tax than she does. She is in the privileged tax bracket. The system she is complaining about is the one protecting her.<br>City services have in fact eroded. She is half-right about this one — she is wrong about why. Cities have shed services in large part because their property tax base is choked by the same 1978 law that locks her assessment at $740,000. The missing street cleaning is downstream of the missing tax revenue from her own house. The services she remembers were funded by the tax structure Prop 13 dismantled — the dismantling she has spent decades defending.<br>She is not lying. She believes all three things. They are wrong in different directions, but they point the same way. Each identifies people like me, or change, or the future, as the threat. Each absolves the regulatory and tax regime she has been defending for forty years of any responsibility for what she is feeling.<br>But she is not wrong that something is wrong.<br>The street outside her house has cars going faster than she can safely walk across. The walk to the grocery store requires crossing some long crosswalks in the path of speeding cars. The neighborhood is mostly empty during the day. The corner store closed over a decade ago. Her friends are dying. The people who would visit her live somewhere else, because the somewhere else is what they could afford.<br>Each of these has a fix. Slower streets. Denser zoning so a corner store could survive. Missing-middle housing so people who would visit her could afford to live nearby. Frequent transit. Safe bike infrastructure. Reduced parking minimums. Every fix is on the agenda at the planning commission. Every fix is opposed by people like her. Sometimes by her specifically.<br>Homeowners in her position have spent decades opposing the changes that would have made life in their 70s easier. She inherited Prop 13; she has spent forty years defending it. Lower density meant no corner store. Single-family-only zoning meant the next generation could not afford to stay. Wide streets meant fast cars. Free parking meant transit could never compete. Each fight sounded reasonable, in isolation. Stacked up together they built the cell she is now alone inside.<br>I think she has been handed the wrong story about why her life feels diminished, and the people handing her that story — neighbors, Nextdoor, local media — are unanimous in the wrong direction. The young people she is afraid of want her to thrive in her house for another twenty years. They would also like to be allowed to live nearby.<br>She killed an hour of my afternoon. She did not want coffee. She wanted to tell me three things, and what she actually told me was the worldview of some — not all, but enough — of my older neighbors. It is a worldview in which the people next door are the threat, the tax system is rigged against them, and the city is failing them. None of it is true. All of it is felt.<br>They vote.<br>She thinks we want her dead. We want her to have neighbors.<br>May 25, 2026 &middot; california, housing, politicsEnjoyed this post? Get new posts...