"Remarkably this article hardly mentions government fees. In Santa Cruz, close to the Bay Area, where I have a number of properties as well as my beach home, it'll cost you at least $65,000 in government fees before you even stick a shovel in the ground (someone has to take care of all those poor homeless drug addicts!). Then you add building permits etc etc. To add insult to injury, they fix the property tax based on the total cost which includes their enormous fees! Santa Cruz was credited to be the most unaffordable place in the country to live. Small wonder! Ask Tim May. I know people there who pay $650 a month to live in a closet and no, I'm not kidding."
Well, that silly article _does_ mention government fees, taxes, and involvements. It says we will need _MORE_ of all the above. Yeah, raising taxes and fees and bureaucracy will really make for "cheaper dirt."
Housing in Santa Cruz, near the beach, stops at a precisely-defined point, near where Elmer once worked. Beyond this point, for 50 miles up the coast, nothing but brussel sprouts, artichoke, and strawberry farms. Between Highway 1 and the ocean, just farm fields and vacant land, with the occasional farm house and the _very_ occasional beach house built prior to the Coastline Initiative of 30 years ago.
Do the math.
As for the Bay Area getting crowded, pricey, and increasingly frenetic, this is all true.
So?
People and employers will do what they did when Manhattan got too expensive to build factories in: they will go elsewhere.
It's the natural trend, underway for the past 30 years in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area in general. When San Francisco got too expensive, too weird, companies began moving operations to Pleasanton, Concord, Livermore. When _those_ places got more expensive, the move was to Texas, Arizona, Ohio, etc.
It's too silly for words to think government taxation, government handouts and subsidies, and government interference will change the price trends.
But the government clowns will no doubt staff a six-story "Administrative Center" with planners, tax experts, lawyers, and urban traffic engineers....and five years from now they'll produce a report: "The Bay Area is getting crowded."
Duh. Politicians are an infestation. Too bad Al Q-aida hasn't chosen to target their nests.
--Tim May |
