Tuesday’s election results were the most pleasing I can
remember: five emphatic NO votes to higher taxes and
sleight-of-hand fund-shuffling, and one resounding AYE vote to stop
raises for legislators who cannot control their spending. Free
translation for any politico who still doesn’t understand: We are
mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.
Tuesday’s election results were the most pleasing I can remember: five emphatic NO votes to higher taxes and sleight-of-hand fund-shuffling, and one resounding AYE vote to stop raises for legislators who cannot control their spending. Free translation for any politico who still doesn’t understand: We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.
In other news, the City Council is considering a proposal to rezone 83 acres of cherry orchard into a pre-fabricated home park for active seniors. The advantage, we are told, is that it would help Gilroy meet state goals for affordable housing and thus be eligible for state funds.
Now, this is very confusing if one imagines that an affordable house is a house one can afford, because Gilroy has the lowest priced homes and rentals in Santa Clara County. But “affordable housing” no longer means housing one can afford. It is governmental Newspeak for subsidized housing. This point deserves some elaboration.
In the old days, when affordable housing meant a house one could afford, young people would move out of their parents’ homes into rooms for rent or low-cost apartments. They would save up and eventually with great pride make a down payment on a modest home. Later, if things went well and they made more money, they would buy a bigger home in a more well-to-do neighborhood – but still within the confines of what they could afford.
Older people tended to stay put in their established neighborhoods, providing a stabilizing influence on the community, at least until they got too feeble to care for their homes. Then they would sell to younger couples making that first down-payment on a modest house.
This scenario is still practiced, but is complicated by the advent of so-called affordable housing. The term is Orwellian Newspeak at its finest and most contemptible because what it emphatically does not mean is a house one can actually afford. Indeed, it means a house one cannot afford without a government subsidy. And in the wake of Tuesday’s elections, do I really need to remind anyone that government subsidies are entirely funded by tax dollars? Not only the tax dollars to pay for the subsidized housing, but the tax dollars to pay for the salaries of the bureaucrats who run the programs?
The state apparently has $2.8 billion to spend on subsidized housing. The Tuesday Dispatch article has a terrific sidebar culled from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which sheds light on who exactly HUD deems in need of a government housing bailout.
n Low income homes for rent ($961 to $1111 per month) or sale to singles or couples making $59,400 and $67,900, respectively.
n Houses for sale in the low $200,000s to low $300,000s for those earning 120 percent or less of county median income.
n 2009 median family income in Santa Clara County: $88,600 for an individual; $102,500 overall; $123,000 for a family of four.
There are many, many houses for rent and for sale in Gilroy in those price ranges. Check the classifieds. But basically what the latter two statistics mean is that HUD thinks that people of average income need a government subsidy. What really flabbergasted me was the realization that our family probably qualifies for affordable housing: certainly before our second son graduated from college and became self-supporting we would have qualified.
To think, for all those years, I have been budgeting and shopping at Goodwill and GGO so that I could make our monthly mortgage payment and all the while I could have bellied up to the public trough and swilled down my share of entitlements! Of course, my husband would never have stood for it. He has these odd, old-fashioned ideas about providing for his family and being independent.
I think that, rather than paving over a cherry orchard to make an old-folks ghetto, we should lower our permit fees, as many cities in California have done, to encourage small-scale independent in-fill. This will foster truly heterogeneous neighborhoods, stabilize our downtown, and possibly lower our crime rate by encouraging solid citizens with median incomes to consider renting and buying in neighborhoods they can afford.
