December 25, 2018 Jennifer Nagorka The Dallas Morning News dallasnews.com/sendletters RE: ”Affordable Housing Builds Families” – Some comments on your Christmas Day plea for gravity defying solutions to the housing “crisis”.

December 25, 2018

Jennifer Nagorka

The Dallas Morning News

dallasnews.com/sendletters

RE: ”Affordable Housing Builds Families” – Some comments on your Christmas Day plea for gravity defying solutions to the housing “crisis”.

Ms. Nagorka,

No, I am not a heartless Scrooge who asks “Have the Poor Laws been repealed? Have the work houses been closed?” In fact, I revel when someone calls me Scrooge. At the end of “A Christmas Carol” it was said of him that “He could keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” 

7 paragraphs into your gentle Jeremiad about how since nobody is to blame for the housing “crisis” everyone is to blame for it, you say “New York City had a postwar housing crisis because the Great Depression halted new construction for almost a decade”. 

 Wrong on several counts.

First of all, I thought it was an accepted truth, one that falls under the category of “settled science” of modern American Liberal doctrine, that the New Deal “cured” the Great Depression. If you say it didn’t, I hope that revelation does not make you a Bernie Sanders/Chiquita Ocasio Cortez “denier”. There is a special place in Hell for an accepted solution “denier”.

Some facts, some, forgive me, true facts are inconvenient. One of these “turd in the punch bowl” facts is that the more the city government is involved in housing the more exacerbated the “crisis” is. New York City passed an emergency rent control law right after Pear Harbor. It required an annual renewal with the renewal certifying that the “crisis” is still a crisis. It is still in existence 77 years since its inception. It is a gravity defying offense to Logic.

Housing, and efforts to make it more affordable, inter alia, is judged on efforts, never on results. Football coaches get fired if they have two losing seasons. I can think of 8 Super Bowl winning coaches who got the chop. Yet non-productive and counter-productive housing strategies, counter-productive because they divert capital from a more symbiotic, ergo, mutually beneficial market, both “endure and prevail”. And they do so at our peril.

Back in my other life I was an expert witness on government guaranteed mortgages on the Federal Court level. The not quite infinite variety – 221, 232, 234, 235, 236, plus the mind-boggling sub-sets of same - commanded IBM to perfect its PC with necessity being the mother of invention. There is one thing these attempts at outdoing Sisyphus and getting the rock of “affordable housing” up the mountain of reality, and not just up same mountain, but over it, have in common. They don’t work.

QED? 

Do you know of any sane adult who would voluntarily move into Section 8 housing? I don’t know any either. They may be poor but they’re not stupid. 

Exactly how do you propose to “improve the situation by welcoming moderately priced homes into our towns and neighborhoods”? What happens if the “towns or neighborhoods” don’t want them? You say “we could allow builders to scatter well-designed duplexes or triplexes instead of more 4,000-foot single family houses. At the risk of introducing the ancient adage “Quis custodes custodiet?” who gets to decide which duplexes or triplexes are “well-designed”?

You say we should “invest significant public and philanthropic dollars in it”. I thought we already have.

82 years into our “housing crisis” your solution is for some distant force to impose its will on some unwilling subjects for a greater good. So far it hasn’t worked. But the “Fatal Conceit” of statists everywhere prevent them from saying that. Why stop now? So what if it hasn’t worked for 9 decades. More of the same. That’s the ticket. You go, girl!

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET