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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
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Why Not a Market-Driven Housing Solution?

Why Not a Market-Driven Housing Solution?

Here’s a quote from former San Diego city manager Jack McGrory. See if you can guess which pressing local issue he was talking about:

“The process by which this whole issue has been determined is flat-out bad policy,” he said last week.

Was former city manager McGrory talking about:

A) The ticket guarantee with the San Diego Chargers that has cost the city nearly $35 million since 1997; or,

B) The decision by the City Council to not earmark any money from a potential increase in the transit occupancy tax for affordable housing?

Well, A) would be a good guess, since the ticket guarantee debacle is one of the main ingredients in the current negotiations with the team over a proposed new stadium.

But don’t expect McGrory to criticize that issue as bad policy, since he was one of the primary architects of the deal that the taxpayers are saddled with paying for today.

No, McGrory was griping about the council not earmarking any potential TOT increase for affordable housing, an issue near and dear to his heart, since he was chairman of the city’s affordable housing task force charged with finding solutions to this critical problem.

Our problem with all this is that McGrory, and other affordable housing advocates, seem to think the answer to the affordable housing problem is to throw taxpayer money at it and get the city and county into the housing business.

Clearly, we have a problem with affordable housing in San Diego, as does Los Angeles, Orange County, San Francisco, and just about every other metropolitan area in the state. With the median price of a home in San Diego around $435,000, it’s getting harder and harder to find reasonably priced housing of any sort.

The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and other business leaders recognize this, and the chamber last week called on city leaders to do whatever they can do to get more affordable housing built.

The chamber, however, was curiously vague about exactly what might help to solve the crisis, refusing to endorse any specific tax or funding mechanism.

That’s because the ultimate answer is not politically correct with those who believe we need to turn to government to solve all our problems for us.

No, the answer is that we need a market-driven solution, one where government simply plays a small role in helping to encourage the private sector to build more affordable housing.

This means our local leaders need to look at everything from restrictive zoning, the permit process developers have to go through, increasing housing density, and, perhaps even some additional tax incentives to encourage builders to construct more lower priced housing units.

Although our free enterprise system isn’t perfect, the marketplace can generally solve a problem like this far more quickly and efficiently than government can.

For San Diego to continue to thrive, we need to be able to increase jobs. Part of that process includes increasing the housing stock so people at all income levels can find a decent place to live.

We wish McGrory would have learned his lesson. Throwing taxpayer dollars at a problem as complex as affordable housing, as we learned from the disastrous Charger ticket guarantee, just won’t do.

, John Hollon

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