22
Opinion of Thomas, J.
hood." Brief for Petitioner 5; see also id., at 7 (Petitioner's "1988 property tax assessment on her unpretentious Baldwin Hills tract home is almost identical to that of a pre-1976 owner of a fabulous beach-front Malibu residential property worth $2.1 million, even though her property is worth only 1/12th as much as his"). Because California not only has not tried to repair this systematic, intentional, and gross disparity in taxation, but has enacted it into positive law, petitioner argues, Proposition 13 violates the Equal Protection Clause.
This argument rests, in my view, on a basic misunderstanding of Allegheny Pittsburgh. The Court there proceeded on the assumption of law (assumed because the parties did not contest it) that the initial classification, by the State, was constitutional, and the assumption of fact (assumed because the parties had so stipulated) that the properties were comparable under the State's classification. But cf. Glennon, 58 Geo. Wash. L. Rev., at 271-272 (noting that some of the properties contained coal and others did not). In referring to the tax treatment of a "class of property holders," or "similarly situated property owners," 488 U. S., at 343, the Court did not purport to review the constitutionality of the initial classification, by market value, drawn by the State, as opposed to the further subclassification within the initial class, by acquisition value, drawn by the assessor. Instead, Allegheny Pittsburgh assumed that whether properties or persons are similarly situated depended on state law, and not, as petitioner argues, on some neutral criteria such as size or location that serve as proxies for market value. Under that theory, market value would be the only rational basis for classifying property. But the Equal Protection Clause does not prescribe a single method of taxation. We have consistently rejected petitioner's theory, see, e. g., Ohio Oil Co. v. Conway, 281 U. S. 146 (1930); Bell's Gap R. Co. v. Pennsylvania, 134 U. S. 232 (1890), and the Court properly rejects it today.
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