Local Interest:
Read this story in the local pioneer press. It's an op-ed piece written by the mayor of Eagan, responding to complaints about the city's lack of support for affordable housing initiatives.
An excerpt:
The Twin Cities area is a growing, strong, great place to live. Our success is due to our history and values: a strong economy lead by a highly educated work force; old-fashioned work ethics that prize independence; strong civic leadership. Since the beginning, people in Minnesota have been farmers and landowners. We own our homes. We value green and open space.
Translation:
We control our own city council, you can't tell us what to do. Likewise,we can't tell developers what to do. We're all rich so we only want expensive houses, but we do need affordable housing for when we get old and our kids move out. We want government to pay for things we need, like roads, not for expensive apartment buildings that will make us all pay more taxes. It's not fair to make us pay more taxes for social programs we don't want, like restricting growth. Besides, all you want to do is to keep people down by building projects and not helping them buy their own home.
I'm the mayor. I'm just doing what people in Eagan want.
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The article really shows the greed present in Eagan. I'm reminded of the recent referendum to increase teachers' salaries in the Eagan school district, which was voted down, despite the fact that most residents have children.
From an economic view, the article ignores the fact that Eagan's policies on housing can have a negative impact on the surrounding community, even though they have no direct negative affect on Eagan (negative externalities). If Eagan allows unrestricted growth, metro-area (and even out-state) residents end up paying for it, through increased taxes to support Eagan's infrastructure, as well as the negative effects of increased traffic, etc. The same is true for affordable housing - if Eagan has no affordable housing programs (let's ignore the details here) this shifts the burden onto other communities that do. This is another classic economic feature of government - the "free rider" problem. If Eagan wants the state and county government to pay for infrastructure (roads, sewer, police, etc.) they must be compelled to share the burden of programs that benefit the state and county as a whole. Otherwise, they end up getting something for nothing (the free ride).
It also begs the question, who in Eagan wants this ? The average resident ? The businesses there ? The real estate developers ? If you let the developers run the show, you end up with Orange County, CA, where you can't buy a house for less than $500,000, most professionals live in rental housing, and working-class housing is cheap motels ...and they're trying to get rid of that, too.
Finally, characterizing affordable housing programs as a liberal plan to force more government on Eagan, and steer people into government-owned projects, keeping them dependent on subsidies is inaccurate and inflammatory. The reality is that modern efforts are trying to make affordable housing available in more locations, deliberately trying to avoid creating exclusively low-income neighborhoods, and the existence of an underclass unwilling and unable to ever get off of welfare is largely a myth.
