The Duplicity of Peter Drier on Affordable Housing in the Dupli-City of Los Angeles

The Pasadena Pundit ^ | April 13, 2007 | Wayne Lusvardi

[WayneLusvardi]

The Duplicity of Peter Drier on Affordable Housing in the Dupli-City of Los Angeles

The Pasadena Pundit - April 13, 2007

Sum: The impossible affordable housing problem in Los Angeles is propelled by images of two persons who never talk to each other. One is of the pro-immigration activist; the other the technocratic affordable housing official, academic and politician. The insolvability of the housing problem is that of the two images are personified by the same person - Pasadena's Dr. Peter Drier.

There is a prominent professor of urban policy at a local Los Angeles university who is an apparent advocate for open borders, immigration amnesty, and non-criminalized rental occupancy for illegal aliens, particularly poor migrants from South America (see Peter Dreier, et al, The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City). There is another former Boston public housing official, drafter of Federal housing legislation and anti-redlining laws, founder of tenants rights organizations, member of numerous housing advocacy organizations, researcher on how to subsidize low income homeownership by tax policies, and consultant-advocate for inclusion-ary housing in Los Angeles (see: http://employees.oxy.edu/dreier/bio.htm) The insolvability of the affordable housing problem in Los Angeles, and such mature suburbs as Pasadena, is that these two persons never seem to talk to each other. The contradiction of our housing policy is that these two images are personified by Pasadenan Dr. Peter Dreier.

Dreier shouldn't be blamed for out of control immigration or unaffordable housing -- but he personifies the duplicity and double dealing on both problems by both housing policy framers and makers. The housing issue can't be severed. However, politicians and the media, both seem to have an occupational aversion to anyone connecting the dots on this issue while they sell newspapers and votes to immigrants on one hand; and on the other hand court political favor from those in the working class who have been pushed out of affordable housing by government policies.

This duplicity is reflected in the fake debate between Dr. Peter Dreier and urban-ologist Joseph Mailander in yesterday's Los Angeles Times (see "Magic Housing Solutions:" The Battle Over Skid Row by Peter Dreier and "Let 'em have Yurts" by Joseph Mailander - here: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup12apr12,0,3194108.story?coll=la-opinion-center. Both of them only disagree on the magnitude of the problem and the expenditures to "solve" it. Their only disagreement is that Mailander naively believes that more work force housing would be built if rent control was rolled back and condo conversions incentive-ized. Neither rent control or decontrol; condo conversions or inclusion-ary housing; relocation benefits or assisting those stuck with sub-prime loans will offer much of any real solution because they are only dealing with symptoms of the problem.

Oversimplified, the problem is population pressure and too little available housing -- demand over supply mainly from immigrants, but from native-born new births as well. The real estate nexus to this problem is that certain old neighborhoods surrounding the Los Angeles Central Business District have been politically cordoned off for low income migrants as a work force for the produce, clothing, flower, toy, and hotel and tourist markets in Los Angeles. They are what might be called "politically protected neighborhoods" -- carved out by politically fomented urban riots, labyrinthine building regulations which retard reinvestment by gentrif-iers, crime and gangs, anti-landlord eviction courts, and poor public schools. All of which forces scared potential new incumbent home buyers out into suburbia. Those academics, intellectuals, policy-wonks, and politicians who loathe suburban sprawl are its very creators. The problem is that they forget that as the self-anointed champions of affordable housing for the poor they are the architects of unaffordable housing for the native working class. And politically "Protected Immigrant Neighborhoods Always Takeover Affordable Housing" (PINATA). PINATA districts are located not only in Los Angeles but in Pasadena, Santa Ana, El Monte, East Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

Housing affordability means "old." Old housing makes for affordability. But when those neighborhoods close-in to the Central Business District with old housing stock are carved out for immigrants by government policies and bullying politicians and courts the result is the opposite of a market-based real estate economy. If we had a true market real estate economy poor migrants would live out on the urban fringe in Fontana, Lancaster, and Moreno Valley and the native working class would live in the older ("affordable") neighborhoods in the first concentric ring around Los Angeles and the mature suburbs where the jobs are. But due to social engineering the opposite is the case. So those who blame "markets" for the affordable housing problem are duplicitous.

This "Push-Down/Pop-Up" phenomenon is what fuels not only our affordable housing problem, but our congested roads, homelessness, overwhelmed public schools, and gang problems. With the wave of immigrants taking over the older housing stock the former flop houses and single-room occupancy apartments for the marginally housed are no longer available. Ironically, the problem of the homeless is not housing per se but the breakdown of "mediating structures" of families, churches, friends, technological obsolescence of unskilled jobs for the socially marginal such as the old corner newspaper vendor (now replaced by newspaper vending machines).

The working class additionally has been economically pushed out of the available affordable housing by the doubling-up of immigrants in housing; inclusion-ary housing laws which make every five tenants or condo owners subsidize one low income renter or owner; and regulations and policies meant to create landing pads for a migrant work force at the expense of the native working class. To compound the problem, those in the pushed out middle and working classes who can afford to place their children in private schools pay double for schooling through taxes and tuitions.

The "Push-Down/Pop-Up" world of Peter Dreier's "The Next Livable Los Angeles" has drastic consequences on the environment - such as air pollution; perpetual energy crises caused by the mothballing old polluting power plants in the scarce "Energy Island" of California; the pushing out of housing subdivisions into contaminated former aerospace testing grounds on the urban fringe; a paucity of remote canyons for landfills now protected as habitat preserves; new development of "green power" that will create rural blight of odious wind farms and new "green path" transmission lines through the California desert; and politicized state water policies which impound too much water in the Sacramento Delta behind dangerous levees rather than exporting it to holding basins in Southern California.

To solve these "government created" environmental problems the artifice of global warming, conveniently timed with a regional drought, is a perfect foil to cover up the governments complicity. As columnist George Will aptly points out in his recent column ("Unexpeced Polluters Contribute to Warming"), "to think locally and act globally" means to buy local food (not halibut) that will save fuel. But paradoxically the much ballyhooed "urban heat island effect" is the same in suburbia as rural areas (EPA). So in a "Push-Down/Pop-Up" world of urban sprawl, warming would be arguably less, contrary to conventional environmental dogma.

But what are we to do about our insolvable housing problem? Here are some quick and dirty policies and cognitive paradigm shifts for consideration:

1. Quit demonizing developers as greedy capitalists who create the affordable housing problem by condo conversions, "playgrounds for the rich," etc, a la Peter Dreier.

2. Abate inclusion-ary housing laws which are a tax on landowners and renters (not developers) and other first-time buyers and which only inflate housing costs. Landlords and landowners have already surrendered old neighborhoods with affordable housing stock to immigrants. Let's not make landlords and landowners get wiped-out twice.

3. Stop the environmental preservation ruse on infill vacant land sites suitable for housing, which do nothing more than preserve the views of surrounding luxury homes (Annandale Canyon). Remember, new housing stock makes for obsolescence of older housing stock. And obsolescence is affordability.

4. Cease policies which build luxury affordable housing for the poor on pricey downtown commercial sites, with such amenities as gyms, pools, spas, etc. Since when was it essential for public policy to deliver luxury goods?

5. Pass legislation providing school vouchers or private school tax credits so that those in the middle and working classes who are already paying a stiff penalty for being forced out to suburbia with high commuter costs and double taxation can recoup some of their losses.

6. Educate politicians and housing activists that perhaps from one-fifth to one-third of Los Angeles' housing stock is already taken over by migrants in old close-in neighborhoods; and hence there is effectively no housing affordability problem for the poor. The main affordability problem in a "Push-Out/Pop-Up" world is that of workforce housing.

7. Repeal State housing laws which mandate that the Housing Element of each city must build affordable housing when arguably there already is too much affordable housing for the migrant population in many areas.

8. Consider targeted deregulation of the housing market in older urban neighborhoods, such as fast tracking, pre-approved housing design templates, etc. to stimulate workforce housing. Quit hidden double taxation of the middle and working class.

9. Quit blaming immigrants for a problem they didn't create but was created by elites in both political parties. Mass deportations won't solve the housing affordability problem and will only drive business and industry over the border instead of keeping it here. Let's work on creating upward mobility opportunities for the children of migrants born here by trade schools and other efforts rather than trendy education jobs programs for teachers. Supervisor Michael Antonovich's novel concept of creating a trucking hub in the Inland Empire is perhaps the start of dispersing migrant labor so that workforce housing can be liberated in the urban center and environmental impacts lessened. Some of this dispersion is already happening on its own in the form of "Brown flight."

10. Use a diversion policy to combat homelessness as successfully implemented in San Francisco (contrary to Peter Dreier's assertion that homelessness dropped 37% due to supportive housing). Reconnect the homeless with "mediating structures" wherever possible. Create low tech jobs for the marginally employable (recycling centers, etc.).

11. Stop the use of class warfare rhetoric and divisiveness in combating the housing problem. Through the "magic" of social engineering, the U.S. has attracted migrants here rather than seeing jobs and industries go over the border.

12. And last let's see the housing affordability problem clearly rather than through the proto-Marxist sociological prism of the poor ("proletariat") versus the suburbanite "sprawlers" ("bourgeoisie"). The implicit Marxist class struggle world view of Peter Dreier and the elite Knowledge Class in academia, media, and government, which self righteously believes it has social engineering solutions to every problem, only worsens the situation.

There is no moral high ground in affordable housing advocacy in a "Push-Down/Pop-Up" world. Being advocates for affordable housing for the poor is not a moral higher ground when it is only a cover for displacing the working class. Moral duplicity reigns in Peter Dreier's "Dupli-City" of the "Next Los Angeles."

Duplicitousness is deceptiveness. To see things clearly means understanding that government sponsored affordable housing programs are mostly symbolic gestures to keep urban political machines in power with protected voting blocks.

Markets can't work if they are overwhelmed due to government population and labor policies. Likewise, government can't work if it only informed by the tired old cliches and vested ideas of the Political Left which only duplicitously duplicates the problems at hand. And to perceive things clearly means we should see that those who champion affordable housing and are against the pseudo-problems of urban sprawl and global warming are also those who have helped create the very housing unaffordability problem in the first place.

[Lorianne]

Interesting. Thanks for posting this.