Housing is for building homes

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Housing is CRAZY expensive here (if you want to better understand the reasons why, see this report p. 10-25).  So expensive, in fact, that some good friends who had sold their company to Google just moved away because buying here is too expensive.  The move broke my family’s heart.  My daughter’s best friend from birth was gone.  The people we shared holidays with were gone.  A major source of love and support was gone.

Besides the broken heart, I’m really lucky. My landlord happens to rent below market rates.  I couldn’t move within 50 miles and find a similar situation for a similar price. The place is about 900 sq. ft. for our family of four.  The kitchen and bathroom do not look like anything you’d see on HGTV.  I am grateful.

I am incredibly privileged.  There are tens thousands of homeless people in the region.  In California, there are 250,000 homeless children.  Then there are many more low-income families living in overcrowded, substandard conditions afraid to ask for fixes because they might get evicted.  If they get evicted they truly have nowhere else to go.  If I get evicted I will find something albeit much more expensive, I’ll have to tighten the budget, stop saving for the future, maybe even dip into some savings, but my children, my husband, and I will be safe.

I will never own a home, condo, or anything else in this area.  Neighboring homes sell for no less than $2 million.  Property taxes alone are slightly less that what I pay in rent on an annual basis.

Many similarly situated middle class professionals are fed up.  They have started groups like California YIMBY that advocate for more construction of market-rate housing.  The idea is that if supply goes up, prices will stabilize or decrease.  That assumption, while theoretically sound, may not be true in reality.  With the concentration of amazing amounts of wealth across the globe, what is to stop local and foreign millionaires and billionaires from buying up the new stock?  Rumor has it, some of the high-rise condominiums in San Francisco and San Jose sit half empty.  Investors are just waiting for a good time to sell.

The community has a simple decision to make about what we want housing to be:

Is housing supposed to be a home for people or is it an investment vehicle?

Depending on your answer to that question, the policy implications are clear.

A home is a place you can count on.  It is stable.  It allows you to be a part of a community by getting to know your neighbors and supporting them over the years and by enrolling your kids in a school and investing your time and energy to make it a great place.  In a home you plant a garden and nurture trees which take years to bear fruit.  With a home the hard work of building relationships and building community feels worthwhile because you know these relationships can last – you won’t have to move away, your friends won’t move away.

I’m not concerned about the inequality between my apartment and my neighbors’ homes.  I’m ok with something small.  My environmental footprint is small.  My place is quick and easy to clean.  I get out of the house a lot.  Inequality isn’t really about money and consumer goods – in this case the size of my place.  Inequality is about the intangible feelings, relationships, opportunities, and stresses that some of us get and others do not.  In this case, I am relentlessly bothered by the inequality of stability.  I don’t want to constantly be worrying about if and when my landlord will ask me to leave.  I don’t want to constantly be moving around, constantly making new friends.  And I don’t want anyone else to have to worry about that either, or about being homeless, or about enrolling their child in yet another school, or about missing their child’s life because they commute 3 hours per day.

And the benefits of home are public benefits.  They don’t just improve the lives of the person who has a stable home, they improve the entire community.  Current homeowners in the Bay Area get to enjoy these friends, these commitments, and investments in community too.  Further, they get to slough off that nagging feeling that something is really wrong.  That feeling is injustice tugging at your heart strings and it won’t go away until we do something.

So, if we want homes for everyone, what can we do?  Low-income community leaders have shown us.  We can preserve existing affordable housing through rent control measures.  Support advocacy like that in San Jose and Mountain View in your city.  This November vote Yes on Proposition 10.  It will repeal the Costa Hawkins act and allow cities to enact more expansive rent control laws.  We can protect people from unjust evictions and housing discrimination.  We can produce more housing that is truly affordable to people of all income levels.  Go to your city council and support permit approvals of affordable housing.  Then work collaboratively to address concerns about traffic.  Consider new methods for building truly affordable housing like social housing.