Monday, June 15, 2015

Developers can be required to include affordable housing, California high court rules

Socialism writ large.
I know what I would do in response to this, refuse to build a fucking bus stop in that state.

Developers can be required to include affordable housing, California high court rules

 
 
The California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday that cities and counties may require developers to provide below-market-rate housing as a condition of a building permit.
The decision is expected to make it easier for Los Angeles and other cities with housing shortages to force developers to build or pay for affordable housing.
“There is no reason why a municipality may not ... [require] new developments to set aside a percentage of its proposed units for sale at a price that is affordable to moderate or low income households,” Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote for the court.
 
Snip 

Monday's decision stemmed from a constitutional challenge of an affordable housing ordinance passed in San Jose five years ago.
The state building industry, backed by real estate groups, sued and blocked the city from enforcing the law. Developers contended it was unconstitutional “taking” of private property.
The law requires developers building 20 or more housing units to offer  15% at below-market rates or pay into a city fund.
Nearly 200 cities and counties have passed some version of the law.

Snip

“Providing affordable housing is a strong, perhaps even compelling, governmental interest. But it is an interest of the government,” Chin wrote. “The community as a whole should bear the burden of furthering this interest, not merely some segment of the community.”

So the argument the court used in the San Jose case was that the government there has this incentive that allows the developers to build the low income units cheaper than the regular ones.

That can't be a good thing.
You get what you pay for comes to mind and I have seen some real shoddy crap thrown up in a hurry before.

So the State with this decision, is officially enforcing Socialism by forcing developers to build things they do not want to build to benefit people who do not want to work because they can get low cost or free housing from the State.

Quite the system they have going.

First I would tell the State that if they want to force someone to build cheap housing that they should contact someone who gives a shit.
 Then I would pack up my holdings and move somewhere far away that doesn't allow the government that kind of say in how I invest my time and money.

I am so thankful that I don't live there anymore myself, I'm thinking they need to put up a fence around that place.

Maybe the State could force someone to do that for me, cheap.

1 comment:

BadTux said...

Actually, it's a subsidy to the big corporations in the valley. See, nobody who makes less than $30/hour can afford the $2,800/month average rent in the Silicon Valley. Well, these big corporations, they need janitors and gardeners and so forth. But they sure as hell ain't gonna pay them $30/hour. But if they don't do something, all the janitors and gardeners and such will move away to places where they can afford rent. So instead of paying the workers enough to afford rent, these big corporations use this "affordable housing" subsidy to house their janitors and gardeners and so forth. That way, they don't have to pay an actual living wage to their workers.

Sort of like why we have Medicaid and food stamps and such, now that I think about it. Nobody can afford to live on minimum wage if they have to pay for health insurance and all of their food plus rent, but that's what Mal-wart pays. So. Just another subsidy to Big Business.

In other words, socialism has jack shit to do with it. It's a subsidy to big business, pure and simple, so that big business can continue fucking their workers up the ass good and hard and avoid paying their workers what it costs to live in this very expensive part of the country. The SF Bay area is a bowl surrounded by mountains. The bowl is built out. There's no more land to build on, other than small infill pieces here and there, so housing is always going to be expensive as hell here. The developers in question are paying $5M/acre for land. They ain't building no fucking trailer park on a $5M acre of land. They're building condo towers where the average condo sells for $750,000 and up and they're putting 2,500 units of these condos on that $5M acre of land. So don't cry for the developers that they have to set aside 10% or 20% of those condos as "affordable housing" at half the price of the other condos, 'cause they ain't hurtin' either, these units are costing them about $30K apiece to build and they're selling the "affordable housing" units for $375K apiece (yeah, a 2 bedroom apartment for $375K is what counts as "affordable" out here, fucking unreal, isn't it?). The only people hurting are the ordinary people who ain't getting paid jack shit because the big corpos say "let them eat affordable housing" rather than paying them enough to afford full fare for what's out there.

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