Government made me get rid of my grill!

My family has a long history of grilling, going back to time immemorial. Earlier this year, just before his death at 90, my father and I were grilling at our home in Arizona. So he showed he the secrets of grilling for 52 years.

I remember back in the 1960s in Detroit my Grandma would work up some burgers with a delicious recipe that included onions. Grandpa then would grill them on his grill in the backyard.

Now that tradition is gone. The tyrannical Huntington Beach Fire Department has banned grilling in apartments on the second floor, which is what I have, supposedly because grills there area a “fire hazard.” I had to get rid of my grill, even though I’ve lived here more than 15 years and this apartment complex is more than 40 years old.

This is nothing but bureaucratic dictatorship. We’re all supposed to worship firemen after the NYFD guys died on 9/11. But they’re still government bureaucrats who make a high salaries, around $150,000 a year on average (some well over $200,000), plus plush benefits that would make a pasha blush.

There’s no reason why fire departments even should be part of government. They all should be private: either volunteer, or hired by insurance companies.

I supposed I could get a house of my own. Except that the massive taxes I pay to the firemen and other government functionaries preclude me from doing so. It’s now a two-tier, class society: Government workers at the top, controlling everything and taxing us to death; the rest of us the peons at the bottom, working for them, obeying their arbitrary assaults on our ancient freedoms, such as the freedom to grill.

Now even the dead are leaving Detroit

It sounds like something out of one of those “Night of the Living Dead” movies. The news story headline:

Flight of the dead: Suburban families move loved ones from Detroit cemeteries

The reason is that violence is so pervasive in Detroit that families no longer want to go even to the cemeteries.

Before my parents retired to Arizona, they went to see my grandparents’ graves in Detroit. When some hoodlums jumped a fence and began approaching them, they retreated to their car and got out fast. Even though my father, a retired district judge, had a conceal-carry permit and was packing a pistol.

That was in 1987. It’s even worse now.

My parents grew up in Detroit and loved the city. They moved to the suburbs only because my father’s law firm posted him there, a few months before I was born in 1955. So I grew up watching Detroit get destroyed.

It was destroyed by leftist and big-business “urban renewal” fanatics. Detroit, much like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and other Eastern big cities, was a patch-quilt of ethnic groups, not just blacks but others in such areas as Poletown, Greektown, Corktown (Irish), and other areas with Germans, Belgians, Jews, Yugos (Yugoslavs), etc.

The urban renewers destroyed around 22% of the city’s housing stock, most of it in black neighborhoods, to put up freeways and high-rises for the rich. Eminent domain was used to steal the homes of Detroiters, especially the blacks. The blacks were forced to move into “the projects,” instant slums, or into the other ethnic neighborhoods. It was called “integration,” but really was white liberals and business interests socially engineering the city into destruction. First the white ethnics, then most of the blacks moved to the suburbs.

In 1955, the city’s population was nearly 2 million. Now it’s around 800,000 and dropping fast. Instead of “integration” the urban renewers produced a city 90% black, the most segregated big city in the country.

Things are so bad that houses in Detroit are selling for $1.

I didn’t drop any zeroes.

Keep that in mind when our presidential candidates, both Obama and McCain, offer up their housing polices. Click on the links to their names and you’ll see that both are connected to dubious developers that profit from government manipulation of housing and mortgages.

Government should just get out of housing entirely. But it won’t.

There will be more Detroits. Given that something similar might be in the future for your city, here’s a tour of the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

(h/t to Karen DeCoster of Lew Rockwell’s blog.)

Guest article: What is a fair share of low-income housing?

By Wayne Lusvardi

The City of Irvine is suing the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) over its mandate that 21,282 units of low and moderate income new housing be built within the City by 2014. Mark Asturias, the housing manager for the City of Irvine, says the requirement “burdens Irvine with a mandate that is unfair, unreasonable, unattainable and inequitable.” But what is a fair share of affordable housing?

The national homeownership rate was 55.0% in 1950. Contrary to popular notions, since 1960 the homeownership rate in the United States has increased 6.8 percentage points, from 62.1% to 68.9%. The homeownership rate in the United States in 2005 was similar to that in other modern nations at 68.9%. It is not that the homeownership rate in California has fallen but that it has lagged behind the relative rise outside of California.

In California, one’s chance of homeownership increases greatest, from 47.4% to 67.2%, if one moves from Los Angeles to Riverside-San Bernardino. Conversely, chances of homeownership are the lowest in Los Angeles County (47.4%). Moving from Los Angeles to Orange County would increase one’s chances of homeonwership to 61.4%. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the homeownership rate in Orange County actually increased from 1994 to 2005, from 58.6% to 61.4%, a 2.8 percentage-point increase. Why should Irvine have huge quotas of low and moderate income housing imposed on it, leaving unaffordable cities and counties such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area with relatively light quotas?

The U.S. Census reports that California homeownership actually increased 1.6% percentage points, from 55.4% to 57.0%, between 1995 to 2005. Contrary to another popular misconception, homeownership rates in California have always hovered in the 50% range, growing from 54.3% in 1950 to 57.1% in 2000. So why do we consider that we have a housing affordability crisis in California now if we didn’t consider it so in 1950?

As for rental occupied housing, there is not even reliable data from which to ascertain if there is an actual rather than just a perceived affordability crisis.

Survey after survey is trotted out by local government agencies using the apartment rents in brand new luxury apartments or Class A apartment buildings, which typically have amenities such as pools and gyms and are located near convenient shopping centers or light rail stations. True affordable housing is old, small, unrenovated, obsolescent, not near shopping, freeways, or public transit, and usually owned by a mom-and-pop landlord. But typically these aren’t counted in low-income housing surveys. Only “new rooftops” meet the State housing-mandate criteria.

According to the U.S. Census, about 15.6% of individuals in Irvine are considered in poverty, compared to 13.3% for the state. By this criterion, there is no basis for imposing affordable housing quotas on Irvine because it already has its fair share of such housing.

Affordable housing mandates in California are a bottomless pit and have no measure by which to judge success because the number of newly arriving immigrants in poverty grows daily, the proportion of renters who desire to be homeowners is endless, and the affordability of apartment rents is unknown.

How do we know if Irvine already has met its fair share of affordable housing? We don’t and we can’t because there is no such “fair share standard” in the first place. The quotas are well-disguised political contrivances apparently meant to achieve more of a political balance of low income residents in Red (Republican) counties and cities. It is hard to see housing quotas as anything but Stalin-like attempts at politicized population engineering.

——————————————————————

Wayne Lusvardi, of Pasadena, is a former low-income housing analyst for Los Angeles County and appraiser for the Metro Water District of Southern California. The views expressed are his own. He blogs at PasadenaPundit.com.

Recall Attorney General Moonbeam

Even if you don’t live in Nutsifornia, you’ve probably heard of our Gov. Moonbeam. That was the name the late Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko gave to Gov. Jerry Brown.

Now Brown is attorney general of Nutsifornia. And he wants to shut down development in California.

A.G. Moonbeam is using a law called AB32, which another of our Nutsifornia nuts, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, signed into law last year. Moonbeam is suing San Bernardino County to halt development there unless it complies with Moonbeam’s interpretation of AB 32. Effectively, he wants to be not just governor again, but Sultan of California.

If he gets his way, housing development in the state would grind to a halt. The price of a house, already at a median of $650,000, would rise to $6,000,000. The middle class, already leaving Taxifornia, would stream out like the Vietnamese Boat People did from their country after the 1975 Fall of Saigon. The state population, currently 37 million and rising to 60 million by midcentury, would drop to around 5 million.

Which would make the state a nice nature preserve to be enjoyed only by rich Leftists like Brown. That’s the point.

Which is why he must be recalled, now. We recalled a bad governor, Gray Davis, in 2003. We can recall A.G. Moonbeam.

Capitalist solutions for “Commie Girl” and the housing shortage

Frank Mickadeit brings up the new project of “Commie Girl,” Rebecca Schoenkopf, formerly of the O.C. Weekly: affordable housing.

I can sympathize. My friends and I mostly live in apartments and grouse about the high rents all the time. We even talk about leaving O.C. for someplace cheaper. Rebecca herself writes:

I would rather not move to Palmdale, thank you. No, I will not accept your offer of an adjustable rate/stated-income loan.

Don’t worry about me: I will continue to pay more than $2000 a month in rent for a reasonably nice home in dirty, smoggy, traffic-choked Anaheim, and I will have my delight in your downfall to keep me warm at night.

But let me provide a little capitalist perspective on all this:

1. Return to the gold standard. The main cause of our housing problems is the lack of stable money. I won’t make your eyes glaze over here, but check what I’ve written. Gold, not that paper stuff, is the only real money. Not having a gold standard means inflation. With gold prices having doubled the past 5 years, is it surprising housing prices zoomed so high?

2. Cut taxes. California’s tax structure encourages high housing prices. That’s because we have the country’s highest top income tax rate (10.3%), top capital gains tax rate (9.3%), and one of the highest sales tax rates (7.25%, plus local add-ons).

By contrast, Proposition 13 makes California property taxes among the lowest in America. That means the best tax dodge in the state is investing in real estate. Federal tax laws also encourage real estate investment (the first $500,000 in profit from the sale of a home is tax-free for a couple; Clinton signed that into law in 2000 and it is a major spark of the boom in prices).

The solution is not to repeal Prop. 13, but to cut or repeal the other taxes. The cap gains tax is the worst: it kills more income (by reducing economic activity) than it brings in. The income tax could be cut to a revenue-neutral flat rate of 5.5% (as Arthur Laffer proposed a decade ago before he left the state last year because of its high taxes). Cutting other taxes would move investment money out of housing, without increasing housing taxes.

3. Eliminate zoning, as in Houston. Let people build what they want, where they want. The free market will determine the best location, and price, for whatever is built. The resulting efficiency will reduce housing prices.

4. End ridiculous “environmental” restraints on growth. High-class Republicans are as apt to want to protect the “wilderness” next to their mansions as are Democrats who want to protect the “wilderness” environment. The resulting one-two punch to property rights — and development — reduces the housing supply, increasing prices. The environment can be protected by private parties buying, on the free market, what they want and preserving it.

5. Control immigration. It’s hard enough providing housing for citizens, let alone illegal foreigners who come here and rip off our welfare system, paid for by our high taxes. As the late Milton Friedman said, you can’t have both a welfare state and open immigration. You also can’t have reasonable housing prices and open immigration.