They make it up in volume ...
Posted on 09/30/2015 6:31:22 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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 paycheck. 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 1,000 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.
One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up.
This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge. Economists have understood supply and demand for centuries — and so have many other people who never studied economics.
#share#Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States. But, beginning in the 1970s, housing prices in these communities skyrocketed to three or four times the national average.
Why? Because local-government laws and policies severely restricted, or banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land. This is called preserving “open space,” and “open space” has become almost a cult obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are sufficiently affluent that they don’t have to worry about housing prices.
Some others have bought the argument that there is just very little land left in coastal California on which to build homes. But anyone who drives down Highway 280 for 30 miles or so from San Francisco to Palo Alto will see mile after mile of vast areas of land with not a building or a house in sight.
How “complex” is it to figure out that letting people build homes in some of that vast expanse of “open space” would keep housing from becoming “unaffordable”?
Was it just a big coincidence that housing prices in coastal California began skyrocketing in the 1970s, when building bans spread like wildfire under the banner of “open space,” “saving farmland,” or whatever other slogans would impress the gullible?
When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the “complex” question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?
However simple the answer, it will not be easy to go against the organized, self-righteous activists for whom “open space” is a sacred cause, automatically overriding the interests of everybody else.
Was it just a coincidence that some other parts of the country saw skyrocketing housing prices when similar severe restrictions on building went into effect? Or that similar policies in other countries have had the same effect? How “complex” is that?
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Move away from that cesspool..it’s the only solution
Obama wants to build housing projects in more affluent areas. I believe San Francisco is a great place to start. Silicone Valley is another great place to build housing projects. Most any affluent liberal mecca would do.
Damn. How can all those illegals afford to live there?
Simple supply and demand. As long as the housing inventory stays as depressed asit currently is the cost of rent and home buying will remain astronomical.
It’s nothing another major earthquake can’t change.
San Fransisco is overdue for its share of vibrant diversity (and that means black people, just like it does everywhere else), HUD better get a move on gettng some “affordable housing” there and moving the vibrancy into it. If it’s good for podunk conservative whiteopia, it’s good for SF.
Hey I got it, they can just pass laws that limit the price of housing and still keep the open space. There, now was that so hard?/s
Mexifornia is doomed.
Why waste words?
They not only restrict what land may be built upon, the height of new buildings is also restricted to “preserve the view”.
I agree, but we all know that though this regime may pick a couple of affluent, majority-white areas to scapegoat for their “redistributing” the vibrancy, they aren’t going to actually inflict the vibrancy on the places where they themselves live, work, and play, because if they really wanted to be “fair” in their terms, they’d be building low-cost housing on Martha’s Vineyard and a few other majority-white wealthy white enclaves. No, they’re going to zero in on middle-class areas which are either majority-white, or the largest minority is Asian (honorary white, in spite of their voting majority ‘rat, because they have that honorary white privilege-getting educated, having a work ethic, etc).
Ah. Bless that landlord’s heart for willing to take part in the Section 8 program.
Obama will target his enemies. He will force the future ghetto housing on white conservative areas.
Martha’s Vineyard won’t be a target because obama doesn’t want to be around the ghetto people.
If republicans hold the house and senate, they should be able to control the spending. They shold make sure it is fair and equitable but we know they won’t.
Also, seems it would make sense to put these economic development plans in poor areas where they most need them. Instead, hussein Obama would rather take a shot at whitey.
Obama will target his enemies. He will force the future ghetto housing on white conservative areas.
Martha’s Vineyard won’t be a target because obama doesn’t want to be around the ghetto people.
If republicans hold the house and senate, they should be able to control the spending. They shold make sure it is fair and equitable but we know they won’t.
Also, seems it would make sense to put these economic development plans in poor areas where they most need them. Instead, hussein Obama would rather take a shot at whitey.
15-20 of them in a 3 bedroom house.
Put the refugees there. Next to Nancy’s house.
From what I remember, the open space land along the 280 is not accessible to anyone.
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