| Strictly Business Magazine |
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| Strictly Business Magazine A division of S&S Enterprises, a Floyd Snyder Production. Santa Maria, California. |
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| Note: This original form of this article was a letter to Jasmine Marshall in response to her story in the Santa Maria Times. A runaway American dream By Jasmine Marshall/Times Staff Writer Affordable Housing by Floyd Snyder A number of years back I was one of the founders of a committee called LOCAL: Low Cost Area Living. The result of that committee, along with a number of other local organizations, was the Oak Valley Housing Project, which included a Self-Help program. We discovered a number of other interesting factors that added to the problem then, and there is little doubt the effects as well as some portion of the thinking is still part of the problems of today. Back in those days, the majority of the City Council and Planning Commission were either professional Realtors or some of the largest holders of rental properties in Santa Maria. This created a certain amount of resistance to do anything that would drive housing prices down. It is the belief of far too many in decision making positions that supplying affordable housing drives “all” housing prices down. We also contacted the President of the Central Coast Property Owners Association to get opinions on such things as fees and how they drive up the price of housing cost including rents. I was shocked to hear they actually supported the higher fees. Their reasoning was that property value was based to a large degree on a multiply of rents and rents were established by a markup based on those higher costs. The higher the fees, the higher the costs and the higher the rents (and profits) and that leads to a higher property value. There was no support from that group for affordable housing. The organization itself was very low profile, but the membership was made up in part of people in key leadership/decision making positions. On the issue of high paying jobs, we, as a community, have had moderate success at best, at attracting higher paying jobs to the area. This is due in no small part to the city leader’s constant drive to short circuit the system to get to the sales tax dollars via retailing. They were (are?) more then willing to subsidize the retail sector to bring in shopping centers but very reluctant to offer much in anything in the way of incentives for higher paying jobs; Robertson Helicopter, FAA Air Traffic Controllers facilities and others were notable failed attempts at locating here, not to mention the reluctance to assist in affordable housing. Most suggestions of subsidizing housing were met with very high resistance. Santa Maria has encouraged two of the lowest paid sectors to expand with very little in the way of constraints; agriculture and retailing. I had a study that was published back in the days of LOCAL that came out of now defunct division of the State of California Commerce Department that showed the economic spin off both in additional jobs and the 7X factor of bringing in 100 new jobs into to your community from different sectors. Simply stated, for every $1000 of new payroll, the money creates $7000 in new economic impact to your community. You bring in the lower paying jobs while stifling the upper end income job creation, you end up with a much higher percentage of residents that can not afford median priced housing. Of course simply raising the income on the higher end of the scale may improve the buying capability on that end of the scale, improving the percentage, but still does nothing to help the people still in those lower paying jobs. If you look at the following information from the State of California Commerce page, you see the direct-effect multipliers broken down by categories. As you can see retail has a multiplier of 1.5562 for job creation and 1.8274 for earnings - while agriculture has a multiplier of 1.6950 for jobs and 2.0503 for earnings. In contrast, manufacturing (Robertson Helicopters) has a 3.7425 multiplier for jobs and 2.8668 for earnings. From this data it is easy to see that the community would be much better off, and housing more affordable with a Robertson Helicopter type of job/income creator then another Wal-mart or another strawberry patch. http://commerce.ca.gov/ttca/pdfs/detail/ersi/datalink_multipliers.pdf Another disturbing finding was that way too many people associated “affordable housing” with “undesirables”. As you pointed out, teachers and other young professionals, hardly undesirables, are priced out of the housing market. That same factor existed back then. When we battled the resistance to get Oak Valley through the approval process, the constant suggestion was put forth that the area would end up a high crime slum. A suggestion that has proven now to be the bogus, NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) idea that it was. However, I would be quite surprised if it wasn’t still a factor and a hindrance yet today. |
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