People say they want more affordable housing, but what they are really saying is, “I want to live here because it’s nice, but I don’t want to (or can’t) pay the market price for housing here.”
I’m not talking about the homeless, or people caught in temporary difficulties who need outside help. I’m only talking about people who want to live on the Central Coast but say it’s too expensive and that we need more affordable housing.
That implies that the housing (for you) needs to cost less than the current market price for housing. There are only a few ways to achieve this:
• Builders/developers should build smaller homes or smaller apartments.
• Builders should build homes at a loss, or take less profit than they could. If you were a builder, why would you do that? A builder has to put up his/her own money to purchase the property, apply/wait for permits, have plans drawn up, and pay for materials and construction workers—before getting any money back for the property sale. If they can’t make a reasonable profit, they should just put their money in the bank and eliminate all the risk involved in building, which means less available housing and even higher home prices.
• “Someone else” should pay the difference between what you want to pay and the market price for housing. The two choices there seem to be:
• A wealthy individual or organization subsidizes your purchase, so you can live where you want to and let someone else pay for your privilege.
• A government agency subsidizes your purchase, so you can live where you want to live, and let other taxpayers pay for your privilege.
Maybe there is no “affordable housing” crisis?
Maybe the only “crisis” is that no one is willing to subsidize the difference between the housing people can afford and the housing they want?
And why should they?
David Mortensen
Paso Robles
This article appears in Apr 7-17, 2022.
David, this analysis is not great.
If “it’s nice” means it’s where I was born, went to school, got a job, started a family, take care of my parents – then sure, it’s nice. I’m glad you were able to move here when you wanted, because yeah, “it’s nice,” and others like you should be able to do the same.
We should build more homes, David. And we should subsidize homes. So people can live where “it’s nice,” or where “they work”, or where “they were born,” or where “their family members are nearby.”
The solution is to build government and foundation-subsidized housing on county, state, and federal land. Example: Atascadero State Hospital has abundant and empty frontage land on El Camino Real. “Market price” is a euphemism for allowing speculators, millionaires and billionaires to inflate the prices of real estate in our county. Blue collar and service workers are essential to our economy and society and we need to support them in producing the housing they can afford.
Building more homes, whether affordable or not, is completely irresponsible until solve our current & ever-increasing water resources issue. Projections by highly qualified Hydrogeologists point toward a water shortage in Central Coast in the very near future. Based on those projections, do you really want to build more homes thereby increasing population density? It’s not sustainable. It would be extremely irresponsible. Let’s solve the water shortage issue first, then go from there. It is solvable. It can be done using water recovery systems, desalination, and strict penalties for overuse.
Yes, Brent. I demand we return to the famously stable water supply of California’s past, when my home was built, before building any new homes. I mean, the water problem can be solved, but still, don’t build any new homes until we do that. Should we fund the solutions, or change any of our habits? Probably not. Do I actually want to get to a place where we’ve solved the problem and can build those homes? Also no. So until then, no more homes. Please consume your water outside of a home, or in an overcrowded home.
There will always be more people who want to live here than the area can accommodate. Building more homes in our open spaces and recreational areas will ruin what makes the area desirable. Condos at Montana de Oro or on the Oceano Dunes? Just look at dystopian Los Angeles. And of course there is the problem of sufficient water. Desalination generates brine which is toxic to marine life.
Other than the current free market, the only other approach is to allocate the existing housing production by forcing buildings to sell to lucky “lottery winners” below market, and forcing the other buyers to subsidize the lucky winners by paying even more for their homes. Big government types love this approach because it will allow the government to decide who the “winners” and “losers” will be, and they hope to have the political juice to ensure that THEY are the political winners.
“There will always be more people who want to live here than the area can accommodate” is an insanely narcissistic worldview and a condition that has never occurred in any place, ever, in human civilization. But maybe, just maybe, you are one of the special chosen few, who are against new homes for the same reasons as people in every other city and region, but in your special case you are actually right this time.
And let’s make a deal: more homes in existing cities and we agree to not build homes in Montana de Oro – a thing that nobody has every proposed.
Housing isn’t the governments responsibility and it certainly isn’t taxpayers. Why should my tax $ be confiscated to pay for your housing? One solution is to get government out of the way. The cost of development with government fees, EIRs etc is ridiculous. Additionally, if you were born and raised here and your family is here perhaps they should have insisted that you obtain a better education leading to higher wages. Yeah, I struggle with the cost of housing but it’s my issue to deal with.
Interesting society Tony! I know you also don’t think government should do transit. Government does roads for cars, mortgage interest deductions for those educated enough to have one, and that’s pretty much it I guess. Highly educated homeowners and unhoused or cost-burdened teachers. Very cool and certainly well thought out.
@neighborhood: “Narcissistic” to consider the capacity of a finite space to hold additional people? I’ll make a point to never take a ride on any boat that you are captaining. The skipper who overloads the boat because “there’s always room for one more….” tends to send a lot of passengers down into Davy Jones locker. I am too old to have to “swim” to either Monterey or Santa Barbara counties after you “sink” SLO.
Sir, the land is not a boat and it isn’t going to sink.
@Neighborhood: It isn’t? Perhaps you haven’t been listening to the climate change folks who assure us that the entire planet – terra firma for sure – is doomed, or metaphorically “sinking”.
Sir, that is not because there are too many people on the land. Or in the boat? Your boat metaphor was actually a metaphor for climate change? I’m confused.
@Neighborhood: Of course it is because we have too many people on the land. If we had a much smaller population, the gases and pollution that we generate wouldn’t be enough to be a problem. And, no matter how “green” we become, at some point the planet is going to choke to death on the population. It is simple math of trying to fit an ever growing number of people into a finite space. The “boat metaphor” is completely apt.
Check the math – over half of county residents struggle with housing costs. You’re ranting about people acting entitled to have the audacity to live here without a sense of reality. Let’s assume you are so very wealthy that money is no object to you. Ok? Now. Do you pay your workers $40 an hour and think that’s enough? $40*40hrs*50wks= $80,000 year. $2,222 per month rent or a $400,000 house are affordable to them under traditional metrics. Even taking an equally successful and frugal partner only gets you to $800,000 house. These 1/3 your raw earnings and 5x your annual salary benchmarks are so out of bounds versus reality, that that is the math of unaffordability. By the way, median SLO County income for a three person household is a bit under that $80k. All traditional metrics point to an unsustainable imbalance between wages and housing here.
If we can’t house our working people we will lose our community. Instead of developing a few multi-million dollar single family homes on large lots, we’d better start building more efficiently in cooperation with developers AND looking at other solutions if we want to retain talent, families, artists, workers, retirees who volunteer, not to mention the many less fortunate who still are here and deserve to stay here. It’s not about who can afford to live here, it’s about keeping our place here livable and thriving.
Or do you prefer a network of air bnb houses with robot helpers and self checkout kiosks? You don’t need in home caregivers, food workers, utility techs, teachers, sanitation engineers, landscapers, musicians, gas station and auto shop workers, newspaper staff, or or do you? Can you afford to live without them??
Karen Wright
SLOHS Class of 1997
Critics of new housing and Malthusians agree: “No more homes! Too many people on the land!” Now we just need to limit the population. Neat!