HOUSING PINCHES
Claiming ‘underpaid’ firefighters and teachers are entitled to affordable housing insults taxpayers
BY KEN WARD

Ken Ward is opinion page editor of the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla. A Las Vegas resident from 1990-2002, he was a freelance columnist with the R-J and assistant managing editor at the Sun. E-mail him at kenricward@juno.com  Other stories by Ken Ward

Looking at its façade, affordable housing attracts strange bedfellows. Folks who style themselves as free-enterprise types hook up with left-leaning social “progressives” with the ostensible goal of creating “attainable” dwellings for the so-called working poor.

It’s a match made in Hades.

In this odd coupling, the Lefties at least bring an ounce of altruism. They truly (albeit mistakenly) believe that government can genuinely improve people’s lives and that affordable housing is a fundamental basic human right. (Apparently, the Founding Fathers overlooked that one.)

But, of course, government isn’t the solution. Indeed, Sen. Harry Reid and his minions make housing less affordable in Nevada by tying up real-estate under federal control and drawing arbitrarily restrictive development boundaries. Such manipulations simply allow politicians to traffic in personal favors. So the rich get richer.

And that’s where the “entrepreneurs” come in. Whether housing is hot or cold, the hyperactive real-estate/development complex works to gin up “P3s” (public-private partnerships) that leverage tax subsidies, density bonuses, fast-track approvals and a host of other publicly funded gimmicks to pad profit margins.

Affordable-housing advocates are useful tools in this regard. They provide political camouflage for the industry by burnishing developers’ faux image as concerned corporate citizens.

Clearly, there is a problem when surveys show only 14 percent of residents are able to afford an average-priced home in Clark County.

Yet that figure won’t improve as long as politicians in Washington keep a stranglehold on the Las Vegas Valley. Senate Majority Leader Reid, who’s turned a land deal or two of his own, has anointed himself real-estate czar, rejecting the release of more acreage from federal hands. When Harry speaks, the Bureau of Land Management listens.

Such artificial constriction of supply, enforced by obsessive top-down control, would make Karl Marx proud. As long as Reid & Co. are calling the shots, they’re writing a prescription for further proletariatization of Nevada.

Unfortunately, these political hacks have a lot of influential company, including legions of professional planners and environmentalists collaborating for the “greater good.”

The Urban Land Institute is just one of the hired guns that goes around the country concocting politically correct ways to “synergize” public dollars and private profits. The ULI’s copious corporate and civic sponsorships show how adroitly it works both sides of the street.

Meanwhile, the housing pinch just gets tighter. The P3 machine, in Vegas and in cities across the nation, cleverly uses the “little people” as cannon fodder to push its “affordability” agenda. Anyone who dares to question these noble intentions is branded an “elitist” or dismissed as a not-in-my-backyard hater.

This is completely backward, of course. The real elitists — even “socialists” — are those who grab corporate subsidies for themselves by getting into your wallet, all the while loosening the rules to maximize their bottom lines. These hustlers are no more free marketers than BLM functionaries who periodically deign to conduct a “disposal” auction. In each case, government is the ultimate paymaster.

The gauleiters overseeing the local operation are city and county politicians. They relentlessly bleat about the supposedly sorry plight of public employees being priced out of the housing market, even as government policies ensure ever-escalating prices.

Because government takes care of its own first, “civil servants” are always No. 1 when discussion turns to affordable housing. Wealth transfers? Here again, private-sector developers are oh-so accommodating as they tailor their “affordability” guidelines to serve the most politically palatable populations.

Doling out discounted housing is a slippery exercise under the best of circumstances. Claiming that “underpaid” firefighters and single, 23-year-old teachers are “entitled” to new, specially subsidized homes is a costly insult to taxpayers who are getting their pockets’ picked.

Let’s be clear here. There’s no law that says anyone can “afford” to buy a new home anywhere he or she wants. We should stop pretending like there is.

The sooner politicians and developers quit running their shady game of three-card Monty, the better off Joe Lunchbucket will be. Affordability finds a home when government keeps its grubby paws to itself and stops dealing from the bottom of the deck.

More land equals more choice, which equals more freedom.