An Unsolvable Problem
You can have one Housing Crisis Task Force or you can appoint 100 Housing Crisis Tasks Forces, but the result will be the same: A waste of time and money trying to solve an unsolvable problem.
Real wages have risen under 20 percent in the last 45 years as housing has gone up as much as 400 percent and more in some areas. Even the over 50 percent of kids in our local schools who have no firm grasp of math might figure out the problem: The cost of housing has far outstripped their parent’s income!
Land and material costs have skyrocketed, if they are available. We have a building waiting for two windows going into the sixth month!
Illegal aliens — 1.3 million of them, with more on the way — have taken up over one million housing units in California. Demand has far outstripped supply.
Housing has become a major investment vehicle for well-financed investment firms, just one of which has bought over 100,000 homes, some before as shovel is placed in the ground. Small investors are having problems finding housing to invest in.
Worker affordable rental housing built by private money is almost impossible to build on the California coast.
You blew over $2 million to house a few homeless for a few months in a crappy motel. That money could have been used to subsidize building affordable apartments.
Rent controls have proven to be counter-productive!
If you cannot afford to live in Santa Barbara, you must move to where you can afford to live. It will be warmer or colder and not nearly as beautiful, but there is no other choice. Many Californians have left, and many Central Americans continue to leave and move back to their home countries, because they cannot afford to live here and lack the skills for upward mobility to make more money elsewhere in our country. Doctors cannot afford to move here!
Free market housing costs are not something that you on the council can even make a slight dent in.
It’s gonna get much worse and will not get better.
SBCC is thinking about a $370 million bond issue that will cost at least $600 million to finance with rising interest rates, costs that are paid by property owners and if they should pass. Rents go up to pay for them. SBCC is closed to 40 percent of district residents. Goal of the huge bond issue: Attract more foreign students to rent local housing units. Just what Santa Barbara needs, more foreign students to house. The SBCC Trustees are the enemy of our city’s workers! Same goes for UCSB!
Keep appointing useless task forces!