This is going to sound a tad blasphemous, but here goes: But why does Sacramento worry about affordable housing to the point they mandate cities to adopt policies that are much ado about nothing?
The short — and obvious answer — is it is nothing short of political pandering.
Politicians preen and say they feel “your pain.” The horrid truth is the same people who shake legislative hearing rooms with their indignant thundering about people being squeezed and challenged when it comes to housing in most parts of California virtually always vote to make affordable housing impossible.
They vote for prevailing wages on government funded “affordable” housing projects. They keep pumping steroids into the environmental review process tossing up more hurdles for developers to scale. They push land use policies restricting where homes can be built. They pass mandates with goals such as agricultural preservation that require local jurisdictions to adopt fees in order to implement them that are collapsed into the price of a new home. They establish standards that make it impossible to house people legally.
All of these things add to the cost of building, buying or renting housing.
Maybe it’s a convenient disconnect that one doesn’t get how things are interrelated. Or maybe they are just political hacks or zealots without a single bone of pragmatism in them who would rather be blessed by self-righteous special interest groups than address California’s needs holistically.
Standards, you argue, are about safety. But that is not 100 percent true.
California generally makes it illegal for more than two people to share a bedroom. The state also adopted the Housing and Urban Development standard that goes a step further saying a bedroom needs a minimum of 70 square feet per occupant and a minimum of 50 square feet for two or more occupants. While this is likely to be enforced on rentals where those that receive government assistance are living and only when a social worker conducts a targeted inspection, it sets a tone for using government power.
It begs a real serious question: What is more important, a person’s space or securing a roof over their heads that isn’t in a garage, the back of a van or under a tent pitched along a freeway right of way?
In Texas, nonprofit groups have ben converting old shipping containers into housing for homeless veterans. The insulate them, equip them with heat and air conditioning, wire them, add plumbing, punch in a window two, add a door and furnish it.
Mention doing the same thing in California and the howls of indignation about how inhumane it is would bust your eardrums.
If you get beyond that opponents would glean through reams of bureaucratic rules and zoning laws to throw everything at you including the water softener unit under the kitchen sink.
We really don’t want affordable housing in California unless, of course, it fits in with the image that we’ve cultivated of what housing and neighborhoods should look like.
Market forces driven by Bay Area paychecks make anything in Manteca on lots less than 6,000 square feet with free standing homes of at least 2,200 square feet along with two-car garages a pipe dream. Add to that development lenders who go for the deepest pool when it comes to what will profit everyone the most on the initial sale and subsequent resales which in Manteca means the Bay Area buyer, and you’ve got what is unrolling over the next 40 years on Manteca fields, orchards, and dairies.
If you don’t think a new 1,000 square-foot home on a 3,000-square-foot lot with only a carport wouldn’t sell in Manteca if it cost $200,000 versus $400,000 for a typical new home, then you don’t have a Manteca paycheck.
Local leaders could try to encourage such development but it would be a Herculean task. First they’d have to pry the knuckles of bureaucrats — in-house and from other agencies — from clutching those regulatory safety blankets that have nothing to do with health and safety.
You’d have to come up with incentives for a developer to forge new waters with all of the inherent risks instead of going with what sells the most in a California housing market that hasn’t been able to bridge a basic housing shortage now for decades.
And you’d have to get construction lenders on board who would see it as a risk as you’re not building the easy to sell McMansions catering to the nation’s biggest concentration of high dollar paychecks — the Bay Area.
So, you might ask, if the situation is so desperate why aren’t their more people on the streets?
It’s because we like lying to ourselves.
Manteca along with Lathrop and other communities are seeing more and more new homes bought that are occupied by two families as well as extended families. The Ozzie and Harriet days are fading fast. There are a lot room rentals and house sharing taking place that would skewer Census data.
It isn’t reported for a lot of reasons. It is hard to detect plus people are reluctant to report having people renting or sharing a house when payment for such constitute taxable income.
Single family neighborhoods defined by a collection of freestanding homes are no longer single family neighborhoods in much of Manteca and elsewhere.
Yet that doesn’t stop us from spending $150,000 plus on another worthless housing element mandated by the state that assures at least the consultant will be able to afford a house.