Cause, Effects of Housing Crunch
* Re “An Unaffordable Housing Crunch,” May 7:
Your editorial, which advocates housing priced so that our service-industry employees can afford to live decently, indicated one result of failing would be the loss of jobs.
That, to many, would be the ultimate growth control measure. Don’t build the housing and the jobs will go and Orange County won’t have this growth problem.
It doesn’t work that way. The jobs continue to grow regardless. Our weather and transportation systems are such that this area will not reduce jobs because of not producing housing for the working poor.
The poor want work more than anything else. They will continue to come to Orange County for the low-wage jobs and they will live with relatives and friends in overcrowded apartments. The use of apartments by more than one family will continue to grow. It is quickly becoming a permanent part of our Orange County culture.
These are families who cannot afford to take the Riverside Freeway home at night.
We should be ashamed of allowing the children of these families to live in squalid, Third World conditions. They live in a bedroom with a deadbolted door, closed windows, smokers, dampness and mold. They suffer from asthma and other respiratory illness as a result of this awful environment.
The result of that squalid housing arrangement is what we should worry about. Most of these children are uneducable due to illness and the inability to study at home. They are the next generation who will make housing seem like a minor problem when we witness their lack of survival skills. We shut them out--the gangs welcome them.
There is no leadership in Orange County, other than the ineffective elected officials who try their best, but are turned back by the public every time they try to approve apartments for the working poor.
They don’t get help from the Brens, the Eisners, the Segerstroms, the Lyons, the Buffets, the Gateses about conditions behind the Orange curtain.
ALLEN P. BALDWIN
Executive Director
Orange County Community
Housing Corp.
* There are only a very few reasons for the “well-documented shortage of housing countywide” (“O.C. Gets Target for Housing,” April 24).
First and foremost are the needless constraints imposed by every local government agency, dictating minimum sizes, land areas, parking and amenities, irrespective of what people need, want and can afford.
Second are activists always protesting housing construction, delaying housing starts, and consistently reducing the numbers of homes built.
These people are invariably liberals, who like our president, know what is best for everybody else. They are determined to force their edicts down our throats at any price.
Their tactics include class warfare, painting real estate developers as greedy and the rest of the world as victims of such greed.
Finally, there is the added cost and risk of litigation, which was, last time I checked, 100% certain for builders of condominiums, the most cost-efficient kind of home ownership.
If NIMBYs are so smug and sure that they have all the answers, why don’t they form the NIMBY Construction Co., and risk millions of dollars of their own and invest thousands of hours of their own time, all for the good of humanity, and for no profit whatsoever.
I can’t wait to see the results of these destructive hypocrites. They have their own homes, and yet deny the same to others under a plethora of feeble excuses, the most commonly used of which is, “They’ll increase traffic.”
NIMBYs will drive anywhere to complain about traffic, which in the process, they do themselves.
JOHN JAEGER
Irvine
