| Home | About | Issues | Schnaubelt | Stepner | Darragh | Links | Other Articles | Contact |
 Fred Schnaubelt |
San Diego Transcript Oct. 14, 2011
|
Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body. The one who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the tail like a rope; the trunk like a tree branch; the ear like a hand fan; the belly like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.
Six blind speakers at the San Diego County Taxpayers Association’s Affordable Housing Forum on Sept. 28 were asked their thoughts about the housing market. Four speakers were experts on that 5 percent of the housing market provided or funded by government. They were clueless about the other 95 percent of the market, which provides the overwhelming majority of affordable housing in San Diego. Being oblivious of how the free market actually works, they conjure different attributes like the blind men above.
The Housing Commission’s Rick Gentry; the CCDC’s Jeff Graham; James Schmid of Chelsea, a public housing builder; and the Housing Federation’s Susan Tinsky are not bad people, not uneducated, unintelligent or irrational, but all of them must comply with counterproductive local, state and federal rules. The hoax: They’re not concerned about housing opportunities for the poor but only those for which the government funds and handsomely pays them. Knowing perhaps 1/100 of how the housing market works, they nonetheless attempt to daily impose their “limited knowledge” in affecting the supply.
The San Diego Housing Commission assists 16,000 households, noted Gentry, mostly those earning 30 percent to 80 percent of median area income. The commission's home page indicates that affordable rents range from $500 per month to $1,474 for two-bedroom apartments, depending on category.
According to the latest census data, there were 155,000 apartments renting for under $1,499 per month, an additional 77,469 under $999, plus 11,307 under $499, including the Housing Commission's 16,000 assisted households. It’s evident that the private market supplies several times more affordable housing than the government. This should surprise no one, and it’s done at significantly lower cost. Granted, they're not brand-new Taj Mahals.
Affordable Housing Advocates mistakenly blames “market failure” for a lack of affordable housing while ignoring “government failure” for slums and deteriorated areas, such as parts of Barrio Logan that have been created by government edict. Blighted areas are due to government zoning and other regulations that prohibit the progressive evolution from older privately built housing to newer or modernized housing, which they pejoratively called “gentrification.”
While advocates for the poor know all the buzzwords to get government funds, the majority of their efforts intentionally or unintentionally enable not primarily poor people but middle-class tenants to leapfrog over others on their way up the housing ladder. To revitalize blighted areas, government reduces regulations and zoning restrictions and grants the subvention of property taxes to increase the potential success of government intervention, explicitly acknowledging that deregulation and lower taxes really do promote economic growth and jobs.
Affordable Housing speakers, defensive about their subsidies, were quick to divert attention. Two of the speakers claimed homeowner tax subsidies nationally were 15 to 18 times the subsidies for public housing. Wrong! A subsidy is when the government takes one person’s money and gives it to another. Letting you keep your own money by not taxing it is not a subsidy unless you claim that 100 percent of everyone’s earnings belongs to the government. Nonetheless, mortgage deductions, while not a subsidy, could be eliminated. Canada purportedly has a higher homeowner rate without mortgage deductions.
Excessively expensive government housing was addressed by James Schmid, and to his credit, he acknowledged he’s a “rule-follower.” The so-called “Taj Mahals” for which he’s been criticized are due to government regulations (and perhaps long discredited cost plus contracts). The cost of the “Spectacular Mercado” at $477,000 a unit was due to government demands, and he could build cheaper, citing several examples. To commercial real estate brokers, $477,000 a unit, if not criminal, is certainly indefensible and unconscionable. The comptroller general of the United States once reported, “Many Section 8 projects (nationally) were so expensive that only the poor could afford to live in them.” Why? Compare the cost of the “new” Mercado with the median price of “existing” apartments for self-supporting tenants — $106,000 in the first half of this year.
How committed are the advocates to really increasing the total supply of housing? In dozens of newspaper articles, there's no mention of the San Diego Housing Federation, the faith-based San Diego Organizing Project, the Housing Commission or other advocates supporting housing projects that were subject to public hearings. There is no evidence of them in favor of any of the "contested" small sampling below: 500 apartments on Mission Gorge Road; 600 homes to be built in Escondido on the old Kmart site; 404 homes near Eagle Crest; 1,700 homes in western Valley Center; 500 Homes in East Elliott; and 1,200 apartments in Peñasquitos.
This alone shows the Affordable Housing Advocates' feigned concern to be a hoax.
Housing advocates are oblivious as to how the above projects create more affordable housing and help the greatest number of people. Builders have applied for permits for thousands of unsubsidized units over the last couple of years, but the housing advocates show no interest in helping them get building permits. They’re simply content to provide cover for anti-growth politicians and NIMBYs by providing enormously expensive token showcase housing with a smattering for the elderly and disabled, which the majority of their clients are not. The Housing Commission’s budget should be cut in half and restricted to issuing more vouchers, which Gentry acknowledges are more cost-effective.
Silly as it sounds, the only solution to a housing crisis is more housing, but it’s evident that advocates are only interested in solutions they’re paid to promote. According to a University of Michigan study, "New Homes and Poor People," the construction of 1,000 new units, both single-family homes and apartments, makes it possible for 3,545 households to move to better accommodations. Of the 3,545 moves surveyed, 1,290 were by low- and moderate-income families. Historically, as well as today, this is how nearly all people admit they moved up the economic ladder to better and better housing.
Taxpayers often make the mistake of assuming that paid affordable housing advocates really care about low-income people. If they honestly cared, they would relentlessly urge support of every housing project at every public hearing. Instead of teaching future street demonstrators they can have something for nothing, they would teach that the more dwellings per capita, the more affordable housing opportunities for every income level.
Schnaubelt, president of Citizens for Private Property Rights, has been a commercial real estate broker
for 39 years and was a San Diego city councilman from 1977 to 1981.Fred Schnaubelt, 2728 Adams Ave, S.D. 92116 (619) 280-2082
San Diego CA Copyright © 2003-2011 San Diego Issues, Inc.tm - All rights reserved
619.224-8584 E-mail Webmaster Disclaimer
