CommentsALPERN AT LARGE--People need a place to live--I've still not forgotten my earlier days in medical school, and as a resident, and certainly I care deeply about my nurses and my patients. Where are they going to live? Hence my decades-long efforts to encourage affordable and innovative ways for people to live, work, and enjoy a quality of life.
Whether it's breaking the law, or looking the other way while others break the law, just to live, clearly we're talking about short-term solutions that can't possibly work in the long term. I've known many who lived in their cars and who work or go to school, and they merit our support.
And considering the success of our city and county homeless/affordable housing efforts, we're clearly encouraging law-breaking as the only way to survive. One shouldn't have to be a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or other highly-reimbursed professional just to own a house or rent an apartment.
But that's where we're at, aren't we?
The Section 8 vouchers many rely on are becoming extinct, and it's because (understandably, from landlords' perspectives) it's more profitable to just charge higher rents than what the government will pay.
Santa Monica is now stopping the construction of more housing for extremely low-income households. Great job, Santa Monica!
But there ARE answers, if people are willing to be intellectually and morally honest:
1) People of all income levels need housing, and if the low-income workers are forced to rely on cars to get to their jobs on the Westside, then traffic will go up. Workforce affordable housing should be part of what's asked by employers, and if that means their taxes go DOWN to accommodate that, then so be it.
2) As tuitions go up in all of our colleges, the responsibilities of colleges and universities to create affordable housing for their students (and their teachers and other employees) should be required by Sacramento and our cities. Making it financially advantageous for the colleges and universities make sense, but milking students and their parents doesn't.
3) Whether it's locally, statewide, or nationally, situations such as that we see in Southern California, where 10-15% of our housing is owned by Chinese and other foreign nationals, is untenable and should be ended. Mexico and New Zealand and other nations have stopped this practice, and we should do no less for our taxpaying citizens.
4) It is relatively cheap to build low-height housing of 4-5 stories or less, and they are infinitely more accessible and desirable to residents than the 8-story or higher beehives that seem to be pushed by those who (quite hypocritically) don't want to live in them but are okay with having "others" live there.
5) Finally, it might be politically correct or advantageous to underfund energy and water infrastructure, but we're spending our private and public T/I all wrong, and in a fiscally-irresponsible and inefficient manner (this isn't any new concept, folks). Utility costs are going up and aren't affordable for the middle class.
Yet we keep electing the same folks, and throwing our money at the same folks, while ignoring those who understand economics, physics, and biology.
Perhaps the answer is just to keep doing what we're doing and encouraging those who can to LEAVE to save their financial, physical, and emotional health.
Or we can do what might not sound right in our modern, anti-math/science political environment and renew what built this state to begin with: affordable infrastructure and housing that is both attractive and modern.
Because talk is cheap, but the rents and mortgages ain't.
(CityWatch Columnist, Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D, is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties, and is a proud husband and father to two cherished children and a wonderful wife. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Outreach Committee, and currently is Co-Chair of both its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure and Planning Committees. He was co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chaired the nonprofit Transit Coalition and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)
-cw
