Housing Crisis in California and Beyond – An Insider’s Expose:
On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan said at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev! Tear down this wall!” The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. It should be the end of Socialism. But in less than 30 years, in 2019, polls in the US showed that most young people preferred socialism over capitalism. What went wrong? How could this happen?
When I came to this country in 1962, I worked for a dollar an hour while minimum wage was $1.15. I was cheap labor, but the rent for my room in a boarding house in Los Angeles was even cheaper. I paid only $17 a month. In a little over a year, I saved enough to attend graduate school and to work my way to join the middle class. A friend of mine started almost the same time and at the same way. A year later, he decided not to go to graduate school, instead; he wanted to buy a house. With a few hundred-dollar savings and a minimum-wage job, he was qualified to buy a house under construction in Orange County, California.
A full-time job used to be a ticket to fulfill ones American Dream., Now a worker with a full-time job may be homeless. Could this still be the land of opportunity? For many workers in the US, the land of opportunity is the land of desperation now. Why are there so many homeless people in the US? Why are housing costs so expensive in many places in the US? Who is responsible for the high housing costs in those places? What are the effects of high housing costs? Is there a solution to this problem? This book will answer these questions for you!
It is surprising that there is a crisis of high housing costs in the US today. Building a house is not a big deal. The greatest president in US history, Abraham Lincoln, built his own log cabin. As a statesman, he was second to none, but he was not known as a great do-it-yourselfer. If he can do it, any average able-bodied person can do it.
We can all agree that Abe Lincoln’s log cabin differed from a modern dwelling that we might have today. These days, there are many new materials, machinery, and equipment that Abe Lincoln didn’t have when he built his log cabin. We can count a few dozen different trades in housing construction. Each one of these trades would want you to believe that it is impossible for an amateur to build a modern house nowadays. But don’t let that fool you. Housing construction requires very little skill, just a lot of know-how. In this Internet age, know-how is easy to come by. With a cell phone in hand and an Internet connection, one can easily get any information online.
Building a house today is not much harder than building a log cabin 200 to 300 years ago. When we look at an expensive house, most likely, the expensive part is not actually the house, but the land the house sits on.
Land-use is a local issue, so local politicians have full control. The United States of America is a democratic country, where voters control all levels of government. Local politicians are elected too, so in theory, voters control local land use. However, once we elect politicians, they have minds of their own. They are not robots programmed to follow voters’ wishes. They are the pillars of society. They are the leaders to guide us.
As the Covid-19 virus started spreading in America in Spring, 2020, many politicians hesitated to close public schools because a large portion of school children needed the free or discounted school lunches. Many workers hesitated to stay home because they needed a paycheck to pay rent and other necessities. Many small business owners hesitated to close their business, because they needed to stay in business to survive. Their hesitations contributed to the rapid spread of the virus. If housing cost didn’t explode out of control in the last few decades, most people would have built up considerable savings for the rainy days. If the total lockdown was the proper policy to stop the spread of the Covid-19 Pandemic, nobody needed to hesitate to carry out the right policy. The policy makers’ hesitations killed. But don’t just blame the current policy makers, those who pushed up the housing costs sky-high should bear the responsibility.
At the height of the pandemic in 2020 Spring, California Governor Newsom was on TV news report daily. For a few days, the top news was that Governor Newsom tried to secure 12000 motel rooms to house the homeless. He really showed his compassion for the unfortunates. His administration also sued local government for lack of affordable housing, and he signed legislation to force local communities to provide more housing. He also stopped landlords from evicting any tenants during the shelter-at-home time. But how serious was he? Before elected governor, he was Lieutenant Governor. Before elected Lieutenant Governor, he was Mayor of San Francisco. Before elected Mayor, he was a member of the Board of Supervisors. For over 12 years he was part of the power center of San Francisco, in charge of the land-use policy. We need to ask him what did he do to provide affordable housing in San Francisco!
Tens of millions of American workers get up early in the morning and put in an honest day’s work to earn a living. They do it day after day, month after month and year after year. We cannot expect them to do much more. We expect them to enjoy their lives in comfort, to have their own families, raise their own children and fulfill their American Dream. Not everyone, but the vast majority of their children should be able to have a better life than their parents. I came to the US in 1962, and I was very grateful to come to this country. I was even more grateful to become a US Citizen and to realize my American Dream, and now I have a better family than I ever wished I could have. But in less than 50 years, the country that allowed me to realize my American dream has changed for the worse. In San Francisco, a person needs to work over 4 full-time minimum wage jobs to afford to live in the city.
Did Governor Newsom solve the problem of homelessness in San Francisco during the Pandemic in 2020? Of course not! Why should anyone bother to ask? You can call whatever he did anything you like; posturing, political show, lip-services, pretending, etc., but not solutions.