Sowell: The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud

Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters.

A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment.

It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The whole Bay Area is like that. Thirty miles away, Palo Alto home prices are similarly unbelievable.

One house in Palo Alto, built more than 70 years ago, and just over one thousand square feet in size, was offered for sale at $1.5 million. And most asking prices are bid up further in such places.

Another city in the Bay Area with astronomical housing prices, San Mateo, recently held a public meeting and appointed a task force to look into the issue of "affordable housing."

Public meetings, task forces and political hand-wringing about a need for "affordable housing" occur all up and down the San Francisco peninsula, because this is supposed to be such a "complex" issue.

Someone once told President Ronald Reagan that a solution to some controversial issue was "complex." President Reagan replied that the issue was in fact simple, "but it is not easy."

Is the solution to unaffordable housing prices in parts of California simple? Yes. It is as simple as supply and demand. What gets complicated is evading the obvious, because it is politically painful.

Sowell is too busy pontificating at a kindergarten level to really grapple with this kind of topic, partly because he lacks the technical background in ecology I now have. When I was writing the book, he refused to even look at a summary despite the fact that it had quantitative analyses of what he was writing about in principle. I was so far ahead of where he was going it was pathetic, showing how free markets using the lowered cost of massive data analysis and communications with intelligent agents drafting contracts could optimize the balance among the myriad possibilities in ecological resource land uses with currently intangible and unaccounted aperiodic risks and industrial demands. It left those idiots at Stanford touting Gretchen Daily and their "nature's services" scam in the dust. Henry Lamb told me in 1999 it would be fifty years before people would be ready for it. Hi might have been right, but somebody had to do it.

You have to consider who Sowell is writing his column for. . . it is not Economists or Ecologists, but the regular public, who have no idea of economics or ecology, and he has to get the basic idea that Liberals of screwed up the availability of affordable housing in under 500 words, 300 if you count intro and conclusions paragraphs. Not too much space for sophisticated arguments, don't you think?

. it is not Economists or Ecologists, but the regular public,

Obviously, but he has contacts that could have been of great service to the cause of liberty. Consider that 9-11 never would have happened had regulation not made Middle Eastern oil so critical to the West. Between nuclear and offshore drilling alone, neither would Iran be the threat it is today.

My goal has been to convince the Club of Rome plutocrats that there is a better way to make money and save the planet than their misanthropic plan for depopulation. It's going to take people managing the wild to fix the mess we've made. In fact, I may know more than anybody about what it will take (note, the latter link is a 22MB pdf).

Many years ago, when I was running a food bank I founded, I was at a dinner in which a Catholic Priest was the main speaker. HIs topic was on affordable housing. He pointed out that in the past, many of our houses had started out built as one room shacks built by poor people that could never be built under modern County building codes. These one room shacks were added on to as the poor got richer and could grow their houses and that some of them were now the most modern of ranch houses and farm steads in the County. . . but we have cut off the starting base for anyone to even begin to build such a house anymore in our modern society, because we apply our modern notions of what is "required" for a house.

It is illegal for someone to build a house that suits his purposes without also suiting the purposes of a bunch of busybodies. . . telling him he has to install this, and that, and meet this requirement and that requirement all at thousands of dollars of cost he just doesn't have. . . AND, under the code, it has to be complete within a specified time period or else he can be fined! Then he gets the privilege of paying a tax on what he has built with his own two hands. . .

Since that speech, in that community, the Liberal Inspired building code now requires that ALL low income apartments built ALL bathrooms must be handicapped accessible with wheelchair doors, and five foot turning circles, raised toilets, wall suspended sinks, etc, and all doors in the apartments, must have wheel chair widths, kitchens be wheelchair friendly etc., when only 3% of the population is wheelchair bound.

NOW add that they are demanding these improvements in all apartments even in upper floors reachable only by stairs, and do not require elevators!

To add those handicapped improvements for wheelchair access costs approximately $25,000 per apartment. Using the rules of 100 for rent calculations, that adds an extra $250 per month on top of regular building costs to the price of renting that apartment to all LOW INCOME people, and especially for apartments on the upper floors for people in wheelchairs who CAN'T REACH THOSE APARTMENTS without lots of assistance! Such short sighted Liberal feel good requirements add huge costs to building low income housing and make them economically unviable to build. . . or any apartment complex for that matter. It's STUPID!

As a result, no low income housing is being built. . . or reasonably priced apartment complexes.

Tell me, why can not the building code require all new low income housing or all apartment complexes to build 5% of their apartments as handicapped equipped and LOCATED THEM ON THE GROUND FLOOR, where they do not need to climb stairs for access?

I am not sure that is a doable hope. . . they've been at their plan for too many decades. It's like trying to stop a rushing oil tanker with no one at the helm. . . or rather too many captains at the helm, and all of them fairly stupid.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.