Miro, tough audience last night. I never thought you were yelling, I heard passion, but some people thought you were "falling apart". Hmm. I never got it that the discourse had broken down. Maybe you felt you needed to defend your position. I think you could have done a better job listening, but we were all on the same subject. Good for you for facing this tough audience, and standing up for what you believe.
Rent control is not a solution but you need to hear the desperation and the anger people feel that housing costs too much, and slum lords get rich while not being held accountable.
It is interesting to me that where there are jobs, the cost of housing is too high, where the housing is affordable, the jobs are scarce. It demonstrates that "growth", or at least a "robust" economy, are not the keys to prosperity that neo-liberals (Greenspan acolytes) make it out to be. To achieve both quality of life and affordability, a community must be willing to seek that balance which optimizes profit seeking against affordability. This is a question of what pain we can tolerate and how it is distributed.
We are facing a classic conundrum of ecology and economy. These forces are tidal and we are just one of the pools on the edge of the ocean. State law sets boundaries on what you can do. But the simple explanation is this: Carrying Capacity predicts that you must choose your pain. With a city bursting at the seams, constraints must cause pain (Malthus reviewed this problem). There are two questions: Can the pressure be reduced? and Who will experience what pain? If we seek the optimum balance of prosperity and affordability (reducing the pressure) we can then look at the political problem of distributing the pain fairly.
The the unfettered market leads to increasing concentration of wealth, among a few, while the many suffer. The question is, how will you capture the wealth that the economy produces so that it is more fairly distributed, and applied to meet the needs of the many? Increasing the revenue for the Housing Trust Fund is an example, but modest beyond impact.
Many boats are already swamped and a rising tide simply drowns the occupant. Prosperity through growth, at its extreme, unmitigated by distribution strategies, is a failed strategy. We have growth but not affordability. What next? What will you do differently?
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