‘Affordable’ Housing–Can Government Please Help Me Live In St. Tropez?

Here is where most people would like to live – St. Tropez - a sophisticated European city with a perfect climate, excellent French Mediterranean cooking, a lively port, access to Portofino, Nice, and Cannes, a short rocket ride to Paris. The problem is they can’t afford it.



 Here’s a listing for a very desirable home in St. Tropez for only $20 million.

La Grande Clarté in the village of La Croix Valmer near St Tropez is just the kind of house buyers are looking for. It's a belle époque villa hidden among palm trees in a large, colourful garden, with views straight out to sea, a swimming pool and terraces. There are six bedrooms and staff quarters; it's a short drive from the beach clubs of the Plage de Pampelonne and the nightclubs of St Tropez, yet surrounded by vineyards and a short walk from the local market. (Telegraph 9.09)

Of course not everyone can live in St. Tropez, but the housing market offers many options. Buyers have always balanced home, lot size, and price; neighborhood quality, status and allure; security, commuting distance and the increased value of urban work; and made rational cost-benefit economic decisions to find the right place to live.  The well-off have homes in close-in neighborhoods. New immigrants share housing in far-out suburbs and ride six-to-a-car to get to work.  Middle-income civil servants find modest ramblers or inexpensive condos on the subway line.  All without government assistance.

The point is that you live where you can afford.  Many would love to live on Park Avenue or in Bel Air, St. Bart’s, or in a hotel particulier in Paris; and wouldn’t mind a place like the palazzo Gritti near the Grand Canal in Venice; or an English country home.  The only problem is nie mam pieniędzy – no money.

A lot has been made these days of ‘affordable’ housing, but the concept is troubling.  It has come to mean that government programs should be undertaken to ensure housing for low-income people in high-rent cities like New York, San Francisco, or Washington, DC.  According to this theory people who could not otherwise afford to live on Park Avenue, Pacific Heights, or Spring Valley have a right to do so. 

It is not clear at all on which Constitutional principle this right is based; but affordable housing advocates push on nevertheless, basing their arguments on the notion of ‘diversity’. A community is healthier, progressives say, if it is comprised of a mix of rich and poor, white and black, Latino and Anglo. It is good thing for wealthy Americans to see exactly how a poor family lives.



This of course is a specious argument.  The white 30-somethings moving into LeDroit Park or Bloomingdale - two hot, up-and-coming transitional neighborhoods in DC – like the diversity as long as their neighbors don't litter, drink on stoops,or  make too much noise after 9pm.  In other words, black people and Latinos are OK as long as they act white.

What happens, of course – and what most 30-something urban pioneers want and expect – is that the 'diverse' residents of their new neighborhoods pick up and leave so that their communities can be safe and economically and socially homogeneous, and property values can rise.

People have the right to live close to their work, affordable housing advocate say.  Why should a fire fighter, police officer, or janitor live far from their places of employment, spend valuable family finances for the commute, and arrive home tired and dispirited from the long journey? These civil servants provide a critical but undervalued service to the community and should at least be afforded the benefit of close-in living.

Of course doctors provide an equally important service to the community; and in this increasingly complex age so do lawyers, accountants, and financial advisers all of whom find their own housing and pay for it accordingly.

Governments have no business in social engineering. Labor follows employment, and every family, wealthy or low-income calculates cost and benefit in the same way. How much is anyone willing and able to pay to live close to work?

Former New York City Mayor Bloomberg was criticized for allowing Manhattan to become a wealthy enclave; and while it is true that Americans and foreigners alike are buying up pricey real estate, New York is becoming an even more exciting place to live – an urban architectural landscape bar none.



Bloomberg invested in the development of Battery Park and the entire West Side riverfront; helped foster development along the High Line, and followed in former Mayor Giuliani’s footsteps to create a safer, cleaner, and more appealing city both for residents and visitors.  Without a doubt lower income residents left Manhattan; but the increased tax revenues have allowed the City to make public investments in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, improving the entire city, not just Manhattan.

The free flow of labor and capital has always been a principle of America’s market economy; and recent (2012) IRS figures confirm that over 40 million Americans move their residence every year.  While net in- and out-migration rates vary by region and by decade, constant movement is the rule rather than the exception.  While there will always be populations that are less mobile than others, most Americans have the wherewithal to follow better opportunities.  As suggested by the IRS, legions of us move every year.  We move from cities to suburbs, suburbs to suburbs, county to county and state to state.  Move we do and as we always have done.

The central issue of the affordable housing debate is this - what is the rationale for disrupting the market and using taxpayer dollars to enable citizens to live where they could not otherwise afford to? There is none.  In fact, government subsidies aimed at keeping people in place discourage the incentive to move and to seek new economic opportunity. If you are poor, unemployed, and on welfare, government will add another perk – low-cost housing; thus increasing the incentive to stay poor, unemployed, and on welfare.

Taxpayer investment, if considered at all, should be used to build the infrastructure and provide the services necessary to attract employment.  If every jurisdiction has the same goal in mind – increased economic activity – the movement of labor to opportunity will increase and wages will rise thanks to competition.

‘Affordable’ housing, rent control, rent stabilization and any other distortions of the housing market only discourage private investment, economic growth, and individual opportunity, and should be discontinued.

Don’t Coddle The Elderly

How old is elderly? It depends, of course.  Most 70-somethings who pump iron, run half-marathons, suit-up in Italian-style biking outfits, and surf the California coast do not consider themselves old at all. This guy is 79 and if you ever called him an alter kocker, he would knock your block off. 

Most 20-somethings would retch at the sight of this bag of bones, all wrinkled and juiced, trying to pretend he’s younger than he really is. Why don’t these decrepit, useless, moribund people stop dawdling at lights, tying up traffic, taking up whole lanes at the supermarket with their walkers, and taking forever to board the bus.  They can’t see and can’t hear.  They stumble, bumble and get big ugly purple bruises. What use are they?

Worst of all, they simply won’t get out of the way.  Politicians simply hang on for dear life as though it were their right to rule the world for ever.

Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger are still doing action movies.  Old Hollywood guys think it is cool to hook up and show the world how hunch, totter, and wobble are still cool.  They are not cool.  They are stupid, ugly-looking, and not funny at all.

Add to all this is the fact that the elderly are sucking up federal monies like they were going out of style.  They are the beneficiaries of almost half of all federal dollars.

Young people are up in arms as well they should be.  It may be OK to smile at grandma when she makes no sense whatsoever, but another thing to have her and her old cronies rob the treasury blind.

It gets worse.  Old people make and accumulate money more than young people.  As Robert J. Samuelson reports in the Washington Post (11.5.13):

The numbers are instructive. From 2007, the year before the financial crisis, to 2010, median income for the families under 40 dropped 12.4 percent to $39,644. For the middle-aged from 40 to 61, the comparable decline was 11.9 percent to $56,924. Meanwhile, those aged 62 to 69 gained 12.3 percent to $50,825. For Americans 70-plus, the increase was 15.6 percent to $31,512.

Old people don’t take the criticism lightly. They claim that they have worked hard for their money, been judicious in their savings, and have been part of generations which have made and kept America great.  They deserve every penny they get.

I was at a lunch recently with some older, liberal friends who ‘celebrated diversity’.  It was wonderful to live in a part of Washington which was comprised of white and black, Latino and Asian, gay and straight; and most importantly, old and young, one friend said.  Older Americans contribute mightily to the community. “We are passionate about ideas, books, and art.  We have travelled, eaten in the best restaurants, and seen culture up close and personal.  We have a lot to pass on to the young”. 

Most 20-somethings, on the other hand, think old people have absolutely nothing worthwhile to pass on at all.  All they do is bang on about The Sixties and smoking dope .  Big Fucking Deal.  They are responsible for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam.  They are capitalist pigs who bleed poor people. Their ‘good old days’ aren’t worth a shit.

The problem is that old people today are going to live even longer.  A man aged 65 today is likely to a whopping twenty years more; and he will continue to drain the public coffers until he topples over.

The one bright side of all this is that with a little jiggering young people can help to reverse the flow from young to old.  The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that while only 16 percent of Americans 65 and older work today, 27 percent worked in 1950. Increased federal benefits have been one reason why fewer older Americans are working. They are coddled  But they could, can, and should work. In fact the same guy pictured above pumping iron more than likely has a well-paying job as an accountant, and has no intention of quitting.  Raising the retirement age a few years to say, 68, makes ultimate sense.  Many older Americans do not need government largesse, especially not for the twenty years or more that they are going to live.

The AARP is perhaps the most powerful lobby group in the country.  It has a membership of 400,000,000 and is worth billions.  Thanks largely to AARP, discussions about Social Security and Medicare are off the table and will unlikely get on it for many years to come.  Many older people who know they are getting a free ride at the expense of the young, find it hard to get off the royal barge.  The checks keep rolling in, and whether or not they represent a big chunk of their retirement income or a drop in the bucket, they love them.

As someone of ‘a certain age’, I want all of us older Americans to move over, free up the traffic lanes for speedier, quicker thinkers with more energy, ambition, and ideas.  We have had our day, done our duty, and contributed one way or another.  If we are thinking clearly, we reject the old saw circulating in retirement communities (‘You’re only as old as you feel’) and look at the numbers. If we are 70, regardless of how good we feel, we still have very few years left; and, like it or not, we will soon fall apart and disappear.

Retirement is fine and dandy. Temporary good health and physical conditioning, a brain that still works, and a big government check in the mail every month, takes the sting out of the equation 85-75=10.

Do Your Politics Reflect What You Think Or Who You Are?

I have a friend with whom I grew up  and saw for many years until politics pushed us apart. Over time he grew more and more liberal and I more conservative.  We were far apart on most issues, and our interchanges became contentious and personal.  He at last said that we would have to stop talking, for continuing would erode the last intact bits of the long friendship.  Politics are are not just what you think, he said, but who you are, and I don’t like the person I see in front of me anymore.

I have never subscribed to this view; and have always felt that the real mettle of a man – the core of his character – has nothing to do with politics.  It is about intelligence, humor, perception, enthusiasm, ambition, and energy, not about tax reform or voting rolls.

I am good friends with the most ‘progressive’, idealistic, and irremediably liberal person one can imagine.  There is not a Left-wing cause that he does not espouse. He is passionate about the environment and implacably committed to the rights of women, gays, and minorities. He is unremitting in his attacks on the One Percent, on the unconscionable economic and social inequality of America.  He has been untiring in his work for world peace, international harmony, and a non-nuclear, non-threatening world.

I am opposed to John on just about every one of the issues about which he so passionate, yet we have remained good friends since college. Perhaps it is because we liked each other long before our political views had formed. There were no politics in the scramble to get up to Smith for pussy at the Northampton Inn; none at all in Potty Court  launching water balloons over the Gothic towers of Trumbull, across College Street, over the even taller towers of Davenport, and down onto the dorks in the courtyard.  We never talked politics but only ideas – Kant, Kandinsky, Modernism, and ethics.  We laughed at Paul Weiss’ adumbrations and Harold Bloom’s famous ten-hour marathon dissection of Blake’s The Tiger. We listened to Vincent Scully rant on about horned mountains, the Cretan Minotaur, and the great, potent, thrusting,phallic, immanent power of Mount Psiloritis. Scully was a circus act, a one-man burlesque show, and we loved him.

Perhaps because I knew John as a late child before life got all serious, I could never take him seriously. Or perhaps even more accurately because beneath the carefully-crafted, perfectly consistent, ‘progressive’, liberal professional exterior, the outrageously smart and funny fat kid from Far Rockaway was never far.

I have a good friend from Alabama who is just as far Right as John is far Left.  Bob is a gun-toting, Tea Party, Washington-hater.  He is convinced that Obama is a socialist scourge who will bring the country down. Yet he is a charming, generous man who values friendship, camaraderie, and gracious living.  He is unapologetically Southern, proud of the five generations of his family who settled the Coast, farmed the red dirt just west of Meridian, planted cotton in the black prairie near Eutaw, lived in grand antebellum homes, and suffered through the agonies of Reconstruction.  He is gentleman. 

If it is so easy for me to ignore politics in friends, how is it that my friend whom I have known since childhood; and who was rough and temperamental as a boy, then an Ayn Rand individualist, and finally an “I never ride buses” patrician before his political epiphany many years after college, decide that he and I are too different to remain close?

The more I think about it, the more I think that he may be right about political destiny.  Politics is not simply a matter of preferring one political party over another, being partial to the private sector, or seeing government as the principal instrument for social change.  It reflects a personal philosophy and a view of the world which is no mere intellectual construct but moral and ethical principles derived more out of character, genes, and upbringing than experience .

There are two fundamental issues over which Left and Right argue and which reveal a fundamental difference in perceiving human society. The first and most important revolves around human nature.  Conservatives contend that human nature is an immutable given, an inbuilt, hardwired component in all of us.  Human nature is necessarily acquisitive, self-serving and self–protective; and commoners and kings have always fought to expand defensive perimeters, to acquire capital, labor, and natural resources.  They have rejected all comers, battled their way from Europe to Palestine, from the Steppes to the Far East, from Mecca to Spain; from one rugged prehistoric plain to another.  There is no way to eliminate war, reduce international tensions, and secure world peace.  The only solution to conflict is to meet force with force, accept aggression as a fact of life and imperfection an absolute.  An uneasy, temporary balance of power is as good as it gets.

Liberals believe just the opposite.  There is no such thing as an immutable human nature, they say.  We are all malleable creatures, endowed with wisdom and intelligence, and only need education, guidance, and leadership to evolve.  Perfectibility is indeed an option and a goal; and government is the way to achieve it.

Everything flows from those two differing conceptions of society.  Conservatives value the individual and the liberty to follow his instincts and human nature.  Life is a constant struggle, a survival of the fittest world where individual interests are pitted against each other and from which excellence emerges.  Life is intrinsically unfair, but individuals will always struggle to survive, to beat the odds, to take on enemies and aggressors, and out of the conflict will come resolution and evolution.  Government gets in the way, for it stifles individual liberty, enterprise, and initiative.  Conservatives see economic and social inequality as facts of life, borne out by history.  The winners and losers will change, but the struggle will never end. There is no such thing as progress.

Liberals contend that we can learn from history and avoid its mistakes.  Conservatives reply that we have never learned and cannot learn because we are fated to always act in the same predictable ways.

The literary critic Jan Kott observed that if Shakespeare’s Histories were laid side by side in chronological order, the reader would see the same dramas played out over and over again.  Kings, queens, and courtiers might change, but what they did and how they acted would not.  All of them plotted, devised, and plundered.  England vs.Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, the Pope, and the Holy Roman Empire. Cleopatra was never in love with Antony but bedded him to secure power and wealth - just like she did with Julius Caesar. 

Cassius and his co-conspirators felt that by murdering Caesar they would save Rome and the Republic, but they only wanted their own power and glory. Every Comedy, Tragedy, and Romance of Shakespeare is about power, conflict, and the ineluctable forces of human nature.  Today’s conservatives are not the first by any means to assess history from this objective, rational perspective.

The argument over income inequality has often been couched in terms of distribution of wealth.  In a just society, say liberals, wealth should be equally distributed.  Conservatives, on the other hand, say that wealth has always been and will continue to be unequally shared because the intelligence, will, and enterprise needed to generate wealth are in short supply. Some people are simply more able than others, and they will prosper.

Liberals feel that it is the obligation of the wealthy to help those less fortunate.  The poor can’t help that they were dealt bad cards, but the house can reset the odds.  Conservatives feel that such patronizing attempts to redress unequal abilities will not only fail, but will numb the only armaments that the less fortunate have at their disposal – desire, ambition, and energy. Only those in the most abject conditions – physical and mentally impairment– need and deserve the help of others. 

I am, therefore, philosophically far removed from my ‘progressive’ friends.  We see the world differently.  We interpret history differently.  For every reference I can cite strengthening my argument about the irreversible course of human history, they can match me with brain imagery, psycho-social experiments, and anthropological studies which prove the existence of a Generosity Gene; a verifiable, common social trait of selfless cooperation; or irrefutable anecdotal evidence of voluntary caring, commitment to higher ideals, and a prayerful optimism of millions.

How can we possibly be friends? Two reasons – fatalism and humor.  I think my ultra-liberal friend, John, my Tea Party friend Bob, and I really don’t care that much about political philosophy. After all, if those we leave behind remember us for anything, it will certainly not be for our views on Obamacare or immigration. If we are lucky, it will be for what we felt, not what we thought.

I recently went to the funeral of a close friend.  I heard eulogy after eulogy in which friends and colleagues talked of her professional abilities.  She could write excellent proposals. She worked well with African counterparts.  She was a consummate public health expert.  I heard nothing of the warmth, passion, and exuberance that I loved. Her work, her professional expertise, her political savvy working the bureaucracy of the federal government meant little to her. They were means to personal ends. 

When John and I are alone, far from his censorious and sanctimonious ‘progressive’ friends, we laugh about duck-and-cover, global warming, Wall Street greed, and capitalist predation. We trash welfare queens, white crackers, ghetto do-rags, bling, and street creds.  We savage black preachers, Monopoly capitalists, uppity women, and trannies. Life is all one big, three-ring circus.  Funny as hell.  Humor as well as fatalism have sealed our particular bond of friendship.

My childhood friend shares neither my fatalism nor humor, and takes life very, very seriously.  He cannot see that for all my conservatism and political views, I am at heart only indifferent. The world will continue to turn left, then right, then left again, Jan Kott’s Grand Mechanism grinding its gears perpetually and moving in predictable cycles, and occasional political paroxysms are little more than the static caused by periodic sun flares.  They come and go.

How can he not laugh at all the energy, posturing, sanctimony, and outrageous lies and deceit practiced in the name of political conviction?

I am sorry that he and I do not communicate much these days, for I still consider him one of my oldest and closest friends; but age has a way of making most things meaningless.  As the old saying goes, no one wants their epitaph to say “He worked late at the office”.