Just another manic Tuesday
On October 1, San Jose lawmakers held a symposium on displacement, inviting local leaders to strategize on how to make San Jose’s housing market work for low-income residents. Some of these leaders, like property manager Jeff Zell and real estate developer Shawn Milligan, accurately advocated for an increase in housing production to solve this problem.
The other panelists, led by the University of California Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project, expressed biases and supported measures that reveal many key anti-market elements of the progressive mindset. An examination of some of those biases are found nearby.
But their driving principle—at least for Nadia Aziz, directing attorney of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, which “uses innovative legal advocacy as a tool for social change”—is that “that everyone deserves to stay in San Jose,” irrespective of their ability to pay market-rate rent.
As Opportunity Now has shown in the past, the Urban Displacement Project’s studies on displacement have been shoddy and have shifted the focus of lawmakers away from the core problem of displacement: San Jose’s housing supply.
But the Urban Displacement Project is not the only entity mischaracterizing the displacement issue. A spokesperson for the Affordable Housing Network, in a statement to lawmakers, said that San Jose “is planning to displace people.” The spokesperson is right to say that local government is distorting the housing market at the expense of low-income residents, but her identification of how the city is doing this is misplaced. The city does not consciously plan to displace people, but the central planning of the housing market—which comes to fruition in the form of tight zoning restrictions and limits on development—cause displacement by artificially increasing rents.
A councilmember accurately noted “You’re not going to solve this problem from the top down.” Although the councilmember was responding to a proposal to build more units of housing at all income levels, including luxury apartments, this could be seen as a wise sentiment for governing San Jose. The status quo of a strictly regulated housing and land market does no favors to San Jose’s residents. The only way for San Jose to get out of the housing hell it has found itself in is to reduce regulations that hamper development, instead of enacting policies that will inevitably fail in a market system.
--by Simon Gilbert, Opportunity Now Web Editor and sophomore at Claremont McKenna College, where he studies history.