Thomas Sowell on affordable housing and its opponents:
Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of “affordable housing” as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters… One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up. This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge… When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the “complex” question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?
Oh, you can still find affordable housing in San Fran.
San Fran Shack for just $350K
Everything can be affordable as long as someone else can be compelled to pay for it.
Israel has the same problem. 96% of the land that is available to built on is owned by the State of Israel and very little of it is released to be built on.
So everyone crowds into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and the left complains about housing costs but won’t release land and whines about phony environmental concerns.
No one in Israel lives in the 65% of the country made up of the Arava and Negev deserts, but no one lived in Phoenix, Tucson or Las Vegas either until air conditioning arrived along with the Hoover dam and other water sources. 65% of Israel’s water comes from desalination plants and there’s no shortage of sea water in the Med or the Red Sea.
Point being is that government is totally capable of screwing everything up anywhere and any time. Same stupid stuff everywhere. The left is quite insane.
Yeah and it doesn’t help when every real estate speculator in the state is on the Dem payola installment plan buying themselves immunity from realty gouging with sale kick-backs.