There's all sorts of factors at play. Uncle is a financial planner and advised grandma to sell her house to Grandma's House LLC for $1 and pass ownership of that LLC to the offspring, avoiding prop 13/prop 19 reassessment in california.

Part of it is honestly just people wanting a safe harbor preserving generational wealth. I think people who are generational wealthy understand what a damn advantage that is and obviously push hard to guarantee that for their family as much as they can. The alternatives are a bit terrifying given the direction of the economy, world, and climate. The only social safety net afterall in this country really beyond an abject poverty level of subsistence is reliance on well off family.

Maybe you can call it a sort of restart of feudalism, but there are no serfs in the mix really. Its not a productive estate in most cases (in some cases sure e.g. family business), but really often just a little lot with a house on it. People don't like the idea of the state coming in and carving that up and carting it off.

And really I think there are far more real things to set the tax burden upon. I mean grandmas home once again produces nothing, it is a box to sleep in; it's value is based on pure speculation. It is now worth 'more' because people say it is worth more and believe in that, not because it now actually does anything it didn't do thirty years ago. It is in far poorer shape than 30 years ago, even. Like, this is not where you find money flowing in this country. Tax where the flows actually are not the stagnant ponds, slowly being filled by the leaks off those profoundly vast flows of money and the speculative abilities those flows grant the flow controllers.

Wouldn't a European like VAT system help this ? Along with properly taxing the property of corporate and business owned properties.