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This is a result of politicians and social engineers thinking that they can combat homelessness and unaffordable housing by overriding local control and the free market.
I live in North County San Diego, coastal. The liberal element here has been trying to foist "affordable housing" and density on the area, overriding local resistance for quite a while. Now they are doing it through the state.
Of course they've never studied economics and the free market and have no idea what they're talking about. For example, they've allowed for density bonuses in relation to infill developments along the coast. Those extra units are supposed to help with the problem. It's like spitting in the ocean. Those extra units aren't "low income" at all, and developers just use it as a way to get a better return on the money they paid for raw land. What it has done is make traffic worse because the existing infrastructure can't handle it.
There's plenty of land to build on around here--it's just not as desirable because it's not as close to the Coast. Go figure: a limited supply of a desirable product (Coastal property) results in a higher price, which means that it will never be "affordable housing." But there's an unfortunate reflexive trend in local liberal politics that we need to "share in the pain" by wedging density into our neighborhoods rather than continuing to plan communities a bit farther inland, where you can build more units with better infrastructure to support it.
I consider myself to be a liberal in a number of ways, but that aspect of modern American liberalism--the ill-informed idea that you can fix virtually all free-market problems through government intervention--drives me nuts, particularly when it derives from the vague goal of "equality." Some you can; some you can't.
(A counter-example would be using taxes, incentives and penalties to address and curtail externalities, but instead we've repeatedly given into corporate interests so that they avoid paying those costs to society overall. Here's where government involvement actually could be useful, but it only grabs a few of the available tools in the toolbox).
Ok, sorry, end of rant. Just tag me: Annoyed on the Coast.
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