By Thomas Sowell
Skyrocketing housing prices are forcing out families with children [from upscale, liberal communities like San Francisco, Monterey, and Los Angeles], as well as…other people with low or even moderate incomes.
But these runaway housing prices in California did not just happen for no reason.
Prior to 1970, California housing prices were very similar to housing prices in the rest of the country. In more recent times, it has not been uncommon for California homes to cost three times what homes cost nationwide.
What happened in the 1970s was that severe government restrictions on building became common in coastal California. With supply restricted and demand not restricted, it was inevitable that prices would soar beyond many people’s ability to pay.
The main impetus behind severe restrictions on building is environmentalist zealots who demand that vast amounts of land be set aside as “open space” on which nothing can be built.
It is not uncommon for substantial proportions of all the land in an entire county — sometimes more than half — to be set aside as “open space.”
Environmentalists often talk as if they are trying to save the last few patches of greenery from being paved over, when in fact 90 percent of the land in the United States is undeveloped and forests alone cover more area than all the cities and towns in the country combined.
Behind much of the lofty and pretty talk are some ugly and selfish realities.
People who already own their homes in an upscale community pay no price for making it hard for others to move into their community. On the contrary, the value of the homes they already own shoots up when they restrict the supply of new homes.
In other words, they can keep out the less affluent people — or, as they put it, “preserve the character of the community” — while benefiting themselves economically in the name of green idealism.
“Open space” laws are just one of the weapons in their arsenal. Other legal impediments to building include so-called “smart growth” policies, historical preservation laws, and zoning boards and coastal commissions with arbitrary powers to limit or forbid building.
The financially ruinous powers of delay that these and other laws and institutions can impose on anyone wanting to build anything can be illustrated by a current legal case involving a developer who has for 15 years been prevented from building in the coastal California town of Half Moon Bay.
A judge recently awarded him $36 million in damages but that decision has been appealed. Anyone familiar with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals knows that anything can happen there — including more years of delay.
Someone once said that the ability to tax is the ability to destroy. So is the ability to delay.
When a business sets standards or policies with adverse effects that fall disproportionately on [lower income people]…, courts call that a “disparate impact” and equate it with discrimination.
But the same liberals who applaud that approach when it comes to businesses would be appalled if the same standard were applied to their own environmentalist restrictions that force vast numbers of [lower income families]…out of their own upscale liberal communities.
Last 5 posts by Deryl Robinson
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On Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day I imagine he’s getting a good laugh as he reads another piece by Thomas Sowell. Economic justice played a major role in King’s analysis of our culture. I’ll bet he would delight in talking with Sowell about communitarian and individualistic visions of society and who gets what how in the USA. The column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. in today’s Tribune understands that distinction too.
Dr. King said, “In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “The man who was a fool” in Strength to Love.
I do not think Sowell’s article was about race, and I apologize to anyone who thought that was my point.
The point was that Cambria is an example of how excessive environmental controls on building are creating a place where regular working families cannot afford to live. That in my opinion does not create a healthy community.