☆ Joffe on MTC bond: Residents right to be confused, “skeptical”
Image by Wikimedia Commons
Cato Institute's state policy expert Marc Joffe is dubious about Metropolitan Transportation Commission's slated $10-20 bn “affordable housing” bond. Due to the proposal's fuzzy verbage, it's unclear just how much taxpayers would fork over—and how many housing units would get produced (and when?). An Opp Now exclusive.
It’s hard to assess the costs and benefits of this measure without final ballot language. For example, advocates say that the bond would add $10.26 per $100,000 of assessed value to our property tax, but that is based on a $10 billion bond issue, which is at the lower end of the range being discussed. We also don’t know where interest rates will be next year, and those have a big impact on debt service costs.
There is a reason to be skeptical about how quickly and how costly this affordable housing will be. Looking at Measure HHH in Los Angeles, it took years for the $1.2 billion bond to yield a significant number of units, and costs are approaching $800,000 per unit. The more expensive the housing, the fewer units that can be built.
Over the holidays, I received a push poll over my phone from a company called Dyndata, which was evidently hired by MTC. They only asked me about a $20 billion bond sizing, despite the fact that the public information from MTC has been saying $10–$20 billion.
I asked a spokesman for MTC whether I should interpret this to mean that they had decided to go with $20 billion. He didn’t know but speculated that other people may have received a variant of the poll asking about $10 billion. He also gave me a number for the woman at MTC (or more specifically the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority) pushing this bond, but she has yet to return my call. [Update 1/8/2024: She just called me back and left a voicemail confirming what the spokesperson told me. They commissioned two polls: one at $10 billion and one at $20 billion.]
Related:
Opinion: MTC's housing bond a big black hole of missing information
Perspective: Regional bond would be a big flop for housing affordability crisis
On outmigration, living standards, and (yes) taxes: What's really at stake with ACA 1?
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