Genuinely Addressing Homelessness Is Not Deregulating Our Way to Paradise

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

One of many similar editorials appeared recently in the Davis Vanguard, asking "How Can We Fix America’s Shocking Lack of Affordable Housing?" It notes the US is millions of units short of providing  needed low-income homes, and answers the headline question with what has become the orthodox standard advice about what keeps us from building such housing: Cut regulations, zoning restrictions and the rest of the bureaucratic, unproductive government bumpf that so frustrates builders of any type of housing. The fact that the same banks and builders who have built only for the wealthy for decades now profit from deregulation too is just a side benefit[!]

What the standard deregulatory advice omits is the history of public policy that actually produced what is now the largest homeless population since the Great Depression. The Nixon administration stopped the federal government from building affordable homes. To add insult to that injury, as it was cutting taxes on the wealthy roughly in half--so they'd "trickle down" their newfound wealth-- the Reagan administration cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. In the spirit of bipartisanship, the Clinton administration signed the Faircloth amendment limiting federal contributions to affordable housing.

So...I would agree that homelessness, and the lack of low-income housing is a failure of public policy, but the culprit isn't zoning or environmental regulations. It's literally generations of skimping on publicly-funded low-income housing. Incidentally, those regulation aren't always the most intelligent thing, but they exist because, before they existed, bad things happened in real estate, just as regulations about food followed meat packers shipping poisonous canned meat. Improving or even deleting them won't magically produce affordable housing.

Zoning arose because polluting industries were harming people in neighboring residential areas. Similar horror stories meant environmental restrictions were so popular that business-friendly Richard Nixon started the EPA, and Ronald Reagan signed CEQA when he governed California. CEQA is California's master environmental regulation. 

It doesn't take too much investigation to find the instances when wealthy interests bypassed those "restrictive" zoning regulations, either. Land speculators in California regularly turn less-profitable agricultural land into suburban sprawl with massive profits. When building a basketball stadium for the Sacramento Kings' wealthy owners, the state legislature passed an exemption from CEQA's environmental studies so the stadium could be built swiftly, before the public became disenchanted with the horrible deal it embodied.

Meanwhile, there are more vacant homes in the US than homeless people. San Francisco reportedly has five times its homeless population in vacancies. Unless the US does like Vancouver and taxes homes left vacant, what's needed is public policy that funds and builds affordable homes--preferrably at the federal level. The federal government not only creates the currency, so it has all the dollars it needs whenever it needs them, it can ignore local zoning restrictions and build wherever it wants. 

Here's something no one said, ever: "The Japanese just attacked Pearl Harbor, but we're a little low on dollars, so I guess we won't respond." 

One caveat: A tradesman acquaintance says, after servicing a low-income property, his observation was that those low-income renters "trash" their homes. This makes sense, since poor people are not as concerned about material conditions as the wealthy. It's why they're poor! So skimping on maintenance for those low-income units is covert sabotage that counts on citizen disgust to discredit any policy that accommodates them. Why those homeless people seldom even bathe! Ew!

As you might imagine, when China was much poorer than the US a couple of generations ago, it too had a homeless problem. Rural Chinese, desperate because of poverty, would come to the big cities to beg. So the Chinese said "Let's get rid of zoning and environmental regulations...Yeah, that's the ticket!"

No. That's not what they said. They said "Let's give these people jobs." And they did. Now there's no more homeless problem in China.  

And the US won't deregulate its way out of the trouble it's in now any more than raising interest rates at the Federal Reserve will open the Strait of Hormuz, or reshore all that offshored manufacturing. My question is this: When will op-ed writers and editors stop believeing the deregulatory baloney. Intelligent regulations are essential to a functioning economy...and ecology. 

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The author sat on a Sacramento County Community Planning Advisory Council for nearly a decade.