Letters to the Editor: What California’s housing shortage and car maintenance have in common
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To the editor: What a perfect analogy. Your brake fluid is dangerously low, so you just add more brake fluid. If the housing supply is low, you just add more housing (“How bad is California’s housing shortage? It depends on who’s doing the counting,” Sept. 27).
Let me expand on this a bit. Your brake fluid can be low for one of two reasons. The first reason is that your brake linings (the friction material that actually stops the car) have worn down so much that the volume of brake fluid used to push the pads or shoes to contact the disks or drums has to be much greater to fill the void caused by the worn friction material. If you just keep adding brake fluid instead of addressing the core problem, the metal backing plate of the lining will eventually contact the drum or rotor and your brakes will fail. The result will likely be a crash.
The second reason for your fluid being low is that you have a leak in the hydraulic system. You can keep adding brake fluid, but as everyone knows, leaks don’t fix themselves. Eventually, the hydraulic system will fail and once again, you will crash.
To bring it back around: When the politicians figure out how to solve our traffic congestion, our chronic water and energy shortages, our shortage of police and fire reserves, our billion-dollar city deficits and multi-billion-dollar state deficit, our crime, our gangs and our lack of infrastructure repair, then we can add some brake fluid.
William Manning, West Hills
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To the editor: This article’s focus on the lack of consensus on the definition of “shortage” misses the mark. It’s not a shortage of housing; it’s an excess of people and the woeful lack of existing resources to support even the ones who are here currently.
Are we supposed to believe that the state’s new top-down mandates to tear apart neighborhoods and local zoning to force the creation of chaotic, dense human warehouses without enough parking, water, energy, foliage and clean air make California a better place? Stumps me.
Mark Algorri, Pasadena
