More Housing for Working Families

Your Aug. 26 editorial, “A Job but No Place to Live,” very clearly points out the climate in Sacramento, that of encouragement and funding for the construction of housing for working people.

Unfortunately, although Sacramento “gets it,” it is in the cities of our state that housing will be built, and until our city councils “get it” (i.e., the political will), we will never see the jobs/housing balance that is necessary to sustain our economic growth.

This is especially true in Orange County, where cities such as Anaheim still deny permits for multifamily housing in older areas and Orange reduces densities in newly developing areas.

Sacramento indeed needs to provide incentives. But there are also penalties--to our local communities, as families are forced to double and triple up; to our economy, as workers travel farther and farther to their jobs; to our environment, as we sprawl farther into undeveloped, environmentally sensitive areas rather than increasing density and providing for in-fill and brownfield development (and transit-oriented housing).

We could also discuss the disincentive in our current property tax distribution--the fiscalization of land use is also a disincentive to housing development, but that’s a subject for another editorial.

Thank you, Sacramento; keep at it! Come on, cities, do your part.

LEE PODOLAK

Orange

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The housing shortage you described can mainly be attributed to one common source: the 1986 federal tax-reform law. The federal government should reduce the depreciable life of residential rentals back to no more than 19 years (where it was in 1986), reduce capital-gains tax rates and eliminate passive loss restrictions related to residential rental property.

Those changes would make the housing shortage disappear without needing any of the $1-billion subsidy and with no bureaucratic overhead.

No tax revenue would be lost, due to the increased construction activity and taxes on increased capital-gains sales. Local governments could also help by not requesting any new bond issues, which naturally decrease affordability.

VICTOR N. VIERECK

North Hollywood