First-Time Buyers

This letter is in response to the Speaking Out Column contributed by Jim Antt Jr. in your April 29, 1990, Real Estate Section (“Help for the First-Time Buyer”). Antt suggests that we readers can “help” ease the affordability crisis by writing our legislators and supporting Gov. Deukmejian’s HOP (Housing Opportunity Program), which would make $1 billion available for assistance to first-time home buyers.

As the average real estate commission is 6%, HOP would deliver $60 million directly to the members of his association; a tidy sum indeed. It would be far cheaper for the state government to just give him the $60 million, and this is why I’m compelled to respond to his patronizing and misleading article.

Antt sees a one-shot opportunity at some easy cash; plans like HOP, and various 401k proposals, would be a short-term boon to California real estate. However, Antt doesn’t address where that $1 billion comes from. How do you explain to the vast majority of the taxpaying households in California, earning far less than the amounts described in his column, that their taxes are going to buy a house for a couple making up to $81,000?

Legislators who would seriously support programs like these, and are not just posturing to appease frustrated voters, are far more dangerous to California’s economy and society than affordability problems could ever be, as Antt would have us believe.

Does Antt explain how a disproportional influx of qualified buyers will push the bottom end of the market even further out of reach for the majority of California residents (read: voters and taxpayers)? And what about the poor saps who don’t have a 401k? Or the suckers that make $82,000?

The pretended benevolence of this column is both transparent and offensive.

JOHN W. CROWLEY

Redondo Beach