Page 79 - AAGLA-JUNE 2022

Feature Story
Continued from page 76
Nevertheless, the Santa Barbara City Council is again considering a rent control ordinance that is even harsher than the one that California already imposes on landlords. Let’s examine the realities of Santa Barbara.
It is situated on a narrow strip of land between a mountain range and an ocean. It has a semi-arid climate with limited and increasingly unreliable sources of fresh water. Its gorgeous geography and comfortable climate have long made it one of the most desirable places on earth. Consequently, demand for housing always exceeds supply. Bottom line, there are finite resources, particularly land and fresh water, and infinite demand.
For at least 50 years now, property prices and rents have escalated, sometimes explosively, pressuring price increases in other sectors of the local economy and making Santa Barbara’s cost of living persistently among America’s steepest. Yet, the local economy endures. It doesn’t collapse, it recalibrates.
Sensible people recognize these realities and understand that attempting to accommodate everyone who wants to live here is not only futile, but also deeply destructive. But politics are more often about emotion than common sense, and when realities collide with egalitarian entitlement notions, it can create quite a mess.
Rent controls won’t increase rental housing, more likely the opposite — a detrimental consequence for those who for various reasons prefer to rent or who haven’t the means to own a home and must rent. Repressing the rental incomes of landlords can temporarily benefit some incumbent renters, but only until those landlords decide it is better to convert their rental units to market housing and sell them to new owners who occupy them — leaving the displaced renters scrambling to find housing from a shrinking supply.
A University of California, Santa Barbara professor who has counseled the council against rent controls has suggested housing subsidies as an alternative — sort of like food stamps. But food stamps have value only because the market has groceries. Housing subsidies would have limited value
in Santa Barbara’s tight housing market. Remember the realities: finite resources and infinite demand.
Also consider: how many people and how much money would subsidies involve? Would the number of recipients be capped regardless of demand? Wouldn’t the value of subsidies rise with rent increases? How much additional bureaucracy would be needed to administer such a program? What would be the qualification parameters? How would the city, already staggering under an obese pension liability, finance a housing subsidy program?
Santa Barbara’s housing issues, with all the attendant handwringing, entitlement indignation and dire economic predictions, haven’t changed much in the past 50 years, but the political asininity has. Case in point: Ethnic diversity is being presented by some politicians as a critical rationale for making housing affordable for certain folks. So, would we have a quota system for any affordable housing schemes, one that favors folks with the desired genetics? If so, ancestry.com might get a lot of DNA saliva analysis requests from folks wanting to qualify for affordable housing in Santa Barbara.
The City Council had enough common sense to reject a proposal for yet another expensive study by outside consultants — this time to do the thinking on rent control. Maybe this council can do its own thinking and see the folly of intervening in a housing market that is inherently exclusive and will always be out of reach for most people.
Official interventions to make housing affordable for people based on selected criteria such as ethnicity, occupation, birth right or anything but financial wherewithal create more complications and injustices than not. There will always be more folks wanting a home here than can have one. Elected officials shouldn’t choose who gets one.
Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at randyaalcorn@gmail.com or click here to read previous columns. These opinions expressed are his own. This editorial has been republished with permission of its author. This editorial was first published by Noozhawk.com.
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