Affordable housing advocates are naive or lying about the problem behind expensive housing costs. More supply is all a charade to allow unfettered development and destruction of open lands. They are prioritizing themselves, but what they always forget is that once “they have affordable housing,” what about the next 10,000 newcomers? The demand just goes on and on.
Los Angeles County has over 20 million people. They covered all their land in houses. Is it affordable? No, they still can’t keep up with demand. But the affordability advocates say it is simply a “supply” problem. Wrong!
Supply is not the problem. In fact, in many areas developers have likely over-built and will suffer in the short term. The real cause of inflation is that since COVID both political parties of our federal government printed money and indebted our nation. This is what causes debasement of the dollar, thus housing prices went up approximately the same percentage as the money/debt was printed. All that printed money needs to go somewhere. Investors of all sizes use desirable real estate as “land banking” to offset inflationary money printing. This is why the stock market continues to hit all-time highs.
The Last Best Place is insanely desirable real estate. There will be no affordability. Sorry to say, there is no easy answer, but the newcomers who want to “build our way to affordability” have literally no clue how the Federal Reserve works and how it affects prices. Longtime residents fear these newcomers will destroy what we love about our town so they can satisfy their own needs, as they forget about the next line of newcomers behind them.
If people really want affordable housing, they should make it law that a affordable house, once built, stays so, restricting the sale for profit for the next owners and no fair market value sales on self-help homes.
Grant Davis
Moab
