Jim Bacon discusses the housing divide between haves and have-nots, and comes to the following conclusion:
Local governments don’t let developers build housing for poor people! (Increasingly, local governments are even making it difficult to build housing for working-class and middle-class people.) That’s because homeowners don’t want poor people living anywhere near them.
That’s a terrible snip of an otherwise thought-instigating post, but the argument in a nutshell. Americans have their wealth tied up in homes, so no one wants to build “affordable housing” near otherwise well-to-do properties, etc.
Now I argue a different tack, that local governments don’t want affordable housing because that means more kids, more schools, more strain on transportation, and certainly more headaches for local leaders too weak-kneed to force growth to pay it’s own way.
Why build five one-acre lots at $200,000 a piece when you can build one five-acre lot at $1,000,000? Since property taxes make the world go ’round in Virginia, the logical conclusion is to push out affordable housing in favor of plywood palaces.
Until Virginia has the courage to abolish the property tax with a more equitable system, we will never get our hands around the affordable housing question.