The Problem With Section 8: A Crackdown in The Antelope Valley

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Good piece of reporting today on LATimes.com about a crackdown on Section 8 tenants in The Antelope Valley, and the various issues it raises. Chief among those issues, as Jessica Garrison and Ted Rohrlich report, is whether it’s fair, or even legal, to have armed deputies piling into an apartment without a warrant to investigate a neighbor’s complaint about the people who live there.

But we’ve heard this story from another angle, and it’s worth revisiting. Suppose you have saved for years and can finally afford a house -- a newly built house -- in a new subdivision in Palmdale. You buy the home in part because you’ve heard that other homes in the subdivision are selling quickly -- it must be a good buy. Then you move in and learn who was buying those other houses: investors. Then you learn their scheme: they buy houses, sometimes newly built, and immediately rent them out under the Section 8 program. You realize that you haven’t bought into a middle-class neighborhood of like-minded homeowners at all; you’ve put your life savings into a neighborhood of low-income, federally subsidized renters. You hear that property values in the subdivision have already fallen sharply in the several months since you bought your house. Of course you’re upset about Section 8.

Realtor Donna Oehler told us about one subdivision where an investor bought 14 houses and turned them all into Section 8 rentals. She was explaining the risks of buying into a brand-new subdivision rather than an established neighborhood.

Comments? Thoughts?
Photo Credit: LATimes