My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:
“Build or Die is destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center
“This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument
“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.” — Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor of The Atlantic and author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
Even if you don’t follow California politics, there’s a decent chance that you’ve heard of Prop 40, the November ballot measure that would impose a first-in-the-nation wealth tax on billionaires residing in the Golden State. Unsurprisingly, a number of billionaires—most notably Google co-founder Sergey Brin—have come out in opposition. It might surprise you a bit more to learn who else is campaigning against the measure: several labor unions, Planned Parenthood, and the affordable housing advocacy group Housing California.
Much of the Prop 40 controversy has focused, understandably, on the risk of capital flight. That’s the first talking point on the anti-Prop 40 coalition’s fact sheet, which argues that a billionaire exodus would drive down long-term tax revenues and “leave a huge hole in our budget, threatening core services like healthcare, schools, and public safety and force other taxpayers to make up the difference.”
This is a legitimate concern. Sweden’s wealth tax on high earners does appear to have instigated some capital flight before its 2006 repeal. Given that California’s budget already relies heavily on progressive income taxes (including taxes on income from capital gains), I think it’s reasonable to worry about what would happen to the quality of the state’s public services if its wealthiest residents decided to shift their assets elsewhere.
The Yes on Prop 40 camp has two responses to this concern. The first is that Prop 40 would tax only 5% of billionaire wealth, hardly enough to offset the various advantages that billionaires gain from residing in California—the weather, the proximity to the tech industry’s engineering community of practice centered around the Bay Area, and so on. The second argument is that this is only a one-time tax levy, meant to backfill the hole in California’s budget created by federal budget cuts. In The New York Times, pro-wealth-tax economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman write:
It is too late for superrich Californians to flee the state to avoid the tax. If approved in November, the tax would apply to billionaires who were residents of California as of Jan. 1, 2026. Some affected taxpayers might have left between the ballot initiative’s introduction, in late October 2025, and the end of the year. But it is improbable that any significant number of billionaires fully cut ties with California in that short period.
But I don’t exactly consider Prop 40’s provisional nature to be a mark in its favor. In fact, my biggest worries regarding the measure have to do with the potential consequences of this sort of one-off taxation. With capital flight taking center stage in the debate, I don’t think those potential consequences are getting the consideration they’re due.
Let me preface my argument against Prop 40 by saying that I support wealth taxes in principle. Unlike many Prop 40 supporters, I don’t think these wealth taxes should be used to support ongoing expenditures like Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid system) or public education, where fiscal stability and continuity are extremely important. Net wealth among the very rich is far too volatile to serve as a dependable revenue stream for those services. But wealth tax revenue could be tucked away in the state’s rainy day fund or put toward one-time expenditures such as infrastructure projects and recovery efforts in areas affected by particularly bad wildfires.
That said, the revenue isn’t the main point of a wealth tax, in my view. Instead, the point is in trying to reduce the staggering inequality that has granted a handful of individuals a dangerous degree of power over the political economy of California and the United States. Taxing wealth is less an economic measure than an attempt to arrest the country’s slide into outright oligarchy.
But if that’s your objective, then a modest one-time tax isn’t really going to help you achieve it. Nor, I think, would a wealth tax that is implemented in just one state. It’s simply too easy for billionaires to evade such a tax; hell, they could evade it by relocating from one side of Lake Tahoe to the other. Granted, billionaires also tend to find getting around federal taxes to be trivially easy, but it wouldn’t be quite so easy. And I suspect you need the resources of the federal government to beef up tax evasion investigation and enforcement to the level where a wealth tax might have real teeth.
Which brings me to one of the really big and under-discussed problems with California’s proposal for a one-off wealth tax. Accurately assessing a billionaire’s total wealth is a technically complicated endeavor, especially when compared to the calculations that go into taxing income or individual assets like property. Just ask the staff of Forbes; here’s how they assembled their list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 2025:
When possible, we met with Forbes 400 members in person or spoke with them virtually or by phone. We also interviewed their employees, handlers, asset managers and financial advisors, rivals, peers and attorneys. Uncovering their fortunes required us to pore over thousands of Securities and Exchange Commission documents, court filings, probate records and news articles. We took into account all types of assets: stakes in public and private companies, real estate, art, yachts, planes, ranches, vineyards, jewelry, car collections and more. We deducted debt and excluded funds donated to charitable foundations and donor-advised funds. Net worths for the 2025 Forbes 400 list are as of September 1, 2025.
While some billionaires provided documentation for their assets and companies, others were less forthcoming. To value private businesses, we coupled revenue or profit estimates with prevailing price-to-sales, price-to-earnings or similar ratios for comparable public companies and applied a 10% liquidity discount. For venture-backed companies and other businesses that had not recently sold equity stakes to investors, we adjusted valuations based on a variety of factors, including how their shares are trading on secondary markets, in partnership with Caplight, Notice.co and PM Insights; how institutional investors have marked their holdings in the company; and how the sector in which they operate has fared in the time since the companies’ latest funding round.
And a major error in these wealth calculations, while embarrassing to the publication that runs with it, is not particularly high stakes in the scheme of things; a $27 billion error like the one Bloomberg made in 2015 can be fixed with a correction appended at the bottom of the article. When it comes to tax collection, a $27 billion mistake is a much bigger deal.
Thus, any agency charged with implementing a wealth tax would probably need to hire and train a lot of new staff and develop new processes for auditing and validating billionaires’ tax returns. To my knowledge, no one has estimated how much additional staff and funding California’s Franchise Tax Board would need to effectively administer Prop 40. But one thing is a certainty: there is no way that FTB could achieve the necessary hiring, onboarding, and internal reforms in time to handle Prop 40 implementation. To even get close, the state would first need to completely overhaul how it conducts civil service recruitment and staffing.
I suspect real-world Prop 40 implementation would be an utter mess, likely resulting in years of costly litigation over the accuracy of particular assessments. Tax proponents estimate that it could generate up to $100 billion in revenue, but I doubt they’re factoring the state’s capacity to discover and collect that revenue into their calculations. Most likely, no one really knows how much money Prop 40 would bring in, and how much money would either get left on the table or rebated to the state’s billionaires as part of various legal settlements.
These are not the only issues with Prop 40. I was really struck by this detail that my former colleagues at California YIMBY identified in the proposition’s language (emphasis mine):
The measure’s largest exemption is for property held as an individual or what Prop 40 calls “directly held,” while property owned through business entities remains taxable. This gets housing exactly backwards. No meaningful housing production happens through directly held property, it happens through LLCs, LPs, and joint ventures. Construction lenders require project-level entities to fund development projects. LIHTC syndication requires entity-level ownership. Prop 40 creates a tax benefit for people to invest in real estate as individuals, but not through business entities. As entities are the ones that invest and build housing, Prop 40 gives an advantage to the only ownership structure that doesn’t contribute to housing production, while penalizing every structure that does.
Given that California’s housing shortage ranks among the greatest social, economic, and ecological disasters that the state faces, I don’t think we should be revising its tax code to further discourage housing production.
I suspect a lot of Prop 40 proponents will think I’m nitpicking or getting bogged down in implementation questions that can be held until after the campaign for passage ends. If we all support a wealth tax in principle, why oppose a particular wealth tax because of some trivial details?
My response, as always, is that it’s because those details are everything. They’re the difference between success and failure. And the cost of failure in this case would be high: a potential long-term decline in state revenues and economic growth, which in turn would deal a major political blow to the larger goal of enacting a federal wealth tax. Economic inequality is one of the defining crises of our era, and we can’t afford unforced errors when we try to tackle it.