Over-controlled Housing
• • • • • • • • • • October 2024 • • • • • • • • • •
San Francisco and California have tried many things to address what all call the “housing crisis.” Yet it grows ever worse. What gives?
Should we double down–on what has so far failed? Do we just need to spend more public money?
That’s the recent thinking. March 2024’s Prop 1 deploys $6.4 billion. Newsom’s HomeKey+ program grabs $2.2 of that to build 4000 rentals for low-income households. The “plus” is for mental health services, making this housing “supportive.”
Politicians love fancy words like low-income supportive housing. They perform their compassion with such words. Newsom’s latest calls for half going for veterans, winning him more kudos.
Newsom’s latest will–hopefully–bring California 4000 units, for maybe 9000 people, a very small fraction of the tens of thousands of homeless, not to mention millions of poor, or the many addicted.”
Newsom is hardly alone. Plenty of housing is for teachers, elderly, or is “affordable,” or “inclusive.” Builders are required to set-aside portions, or donate to a pot benefiting a community, with perhaps open space or entertainment venues, or rain gardens. There are just so many good works that, thinking of them all, your correspondent is flooded with dopamine (happiness).
Good intentions. But has it worked? Newsom’s latest will–hopefully–bring California 4000 units, for maybe 9000 people, a very small fraction of the tens of thousands of homeless, not to mention millions of poor, or the many addicted. Sure, there’s still money left–for his next presser, ‘er housing initiative.
A New York Times panel recently addressed why we, as a nation, and California especially, are so short of housing, millions short. The conclusion: we’re sick. That’s right, sickness befell us after the Global Financial Crisis (~2008). Before that crisis 2.2 million housing units were built per year, afterwards 600,000. Moreover, like Charlie on the MTA, the former numbers never returned. In 2023, in the US, about 1.45 million housing units were built; home building only slowly worked up to two-thirds of what had been produced before the Global Financial Crisis. Why?
Perhaps the reason homebuilding hasn’t returned is politicians. So eager were they to make a splash addressing this “crisis” that they did what they ever do: over-control. Wanting to help the most vulnerable—or appear to—they specified that new housing be “affordable,” and all the rest of the litany: inclusive, for homeless, teachers, veterans, etc. But builders want to build, not play social worker. Nor do they build new homes for the poor; they build new for the rich. Then, the homes previously occupied by the rich go to the middle, and those previously occupied by the middle go to the poor. Too, people live where they want to, which may be among their own: those from Venezuela, for example, stick together, soon constituting a neighborhood. “Inclusive” may be a politician’s ideal but may not match reality. Ironically, led by politicians, we celebrate our ethnic communities; yet pols seem determined to undermine the rise of new ones with affordable housing lotteries and demands of “supportive” and “inclusive.”
Perhaps if we just let builders build we’d make more progress.
Steve Lawrence is a Westside resident and SF Public Utility Commission stalwart. Feedback: lawrence@westsideobserver.com
October 2024
