Here in Seattle, "affordable-housing activists" such as John Fox tell us we have an "affordable housing crisis".
The root causes of the "affordable housing crisis" are perfectly simple: Enough people are willing to pay enough money to live in Seattle that they bid up the prices of the existing housing stock to the point of pricing some folks out of the housing market. What are the natural ways to lower housing prices? Either discourage people from living here or increase the supply of housing. [Destroying the city's public schools might help depopulate the city, but we'll save that issue for another time]. A particularly good way to lower prices through increased supply would be to remove height restrictions on new buildings. So you'd expect the "affordable-housing activists" such as John Fox to be tickled pink and delighted with Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' latest proposal, which "considers allowing taller buildings and more dense development downtown"
Nickels said he would like to see proposals that would create much more downtown housingSounds like a good idea to me. But wait
"If the mayor does not undertake a true cost analysis associated with turning our city into another Manhattan or Vancouver, I believe he won't be around for a second term," said affordable-housing activist John Fox.The most debilitating cause of the "affordable-housing crisis" may well be the epidemic of economic ignorance among the self-appointed "affordable-housing activists". Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 11, 2003 02:49 PM
This is one of those things that drives me absolutely insane about living in the Seattle area. Most of the same people who are supposed to be concerned about the poor are the same people who support anti-sprawl legislation or support restrictions on building height. These are two things that prevent the less well off from buying homes in Seattle.
It's like people who don't want us to use $87 billion to rebuild Iraq, but think it's perfectly reasonable to spend $2 billion to build a rail line from South Seattle to Tukwila, what is that? 12 miles?. At that cost, the they could build 400 miles of light rail in Iraq. And don't get me started on the monorail.
Posted by: Ken J on November 11, 2003 04:00 PMThe reason housing developers don't build "affordable" housing is because they don't make any money off of it. It doesn't have much to do with zoning or "anti-sprawl" or height restrictions. YOu could deregulate the market entirely and they'd still spend their energy building for middle to upper class buyers, cuz that's who's got the money.
As for Shark's suggestion that you depopulate your city by destroying the public schools, I hope that's a joke. Isn't it pretty obvious that if you destroyed the schools, the people would stay anyway? After all, the public schools are the refuge of the people who can't afford to go anywhere else, right? Isn't that why they're practically destroyed already?
Posted by: beetroot on November 12, 2003 07:37 AMI'm only using personal experience as an example. I had to get a townhouse in Bellevue because I couldn't afford a house in Seattle. And if I wanted to buy a house I would have to live an hour away from work. For the price of this townhouse, I could have bought a three bedroom house in Phoenix.
Have you ever seen anyone bulid new houses in Seattle? I mean more than one or two on lots that used to have another house on them? My point wasn't even really about housing so much as it was about the people here. They'll bemoan the plight of the poor and the minorities, but if you suggest someone cut down a tree or grade a hill to build them houses, they'll go apopleptic. And people think it's strange that Seattle is 98% white.
Posted by: Ken J on November 12, 2003 08:10 AMRemember the beloved, top-down, hijack-local-control-of-land-use Growth Management Act. It assured the masses that there would be 'affordable housing', but made no attempt to define 'affordable', or who would do the affording or build the housing. Its principal triumph was to restrict the supply of housing by restricting the the freedom of sellers owning land to sell to willing buyers. It also was a bonanza of mandatory jobs for unelected planners.
Rather like the old Soviet system of internal passports: the State government could refuse to allow Joe Blow to live where he chose, even if the local government did allow it. Politically appointed State Boards were created to overrule democratically elected sets of County Commissioners, or City Councils, in case they failed to see the light as defined by an unelected politburo calling itself the 1000 Friends of Washington.
None of these enlightened nabobs made any attempt to create conditions in which housing could be profitably built for lower-income people. Instead, in order to preserve the bucolic scenery they like to drive their Saabs and Volvos through, they created conditions where incoming population must all be piled on top of the urbanites already within the city limits. Big demand for housing, no supply, of course the prices are astronomic.
Let these 1000 Friends start their own construction company and show us how their political triumph was supposed to work to house the huddled masses.
In Southern California, one of the affordable housing movement's favorite (and somewhat successful) tactic has been to extort below-market housing units from developers wanting to build. The economic effects are predictable. Leftist politicians love it because the cost is hidden. Groups like ACORN are pushing the City of L.A. to pass a mandatory inclusionary housing ordinance. Speaking of economic ignorance, our esteemed City Council gives us this kind of nonsense:
"Let's get educated," said Los Angeles Councilman Ed Reyes, standing in front of City Hall flanked by Councilmen Eric Garcetti and Antonio Villaraigosa, and members of tenants organizations and housing rights groups. "Let's understand what the rest of the state already knows: that mandatory inclusionary housing does not hurt the economy."
With this kind of thinking, we/re doomed.
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