This is why Massachusetts will continue to bleed population even as it becomes more and more liberal. For all that the politicians, including uber-liberal gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick, talk about stemming the tide of the population drain—Mass. is the only state to have decreased in population two years in a row—and curbing the skyrocketing cost of living, they just don’t get it.
(N.B. When I say liberal here, I don’t just mean Democrat. The Republicans in this state are often just as liberal.)
What is their prescription? They want to pay cities and towns to create “affordable” housing. There are already two laws on the books for this. One would pay them $1,000 per unit of housing in specially zoned districts. The second would pay the towns out of state coffers to offset the increased cost of government services like education, policing, and so on.
Where do they think this money comes from? The problem is that people can’t afford to live in Massachusetts. So in order to solve the problem they’re going to take even more money out of our pockets, throwing good money after bad instead of cutting the incredible amounts of waste and corruption. We spent billions on the Big Dig. Millions on the incredibly corrupt Turnpike Authority. I won’t bother continuing the list because it would take an encyclopedia to catalog the wasted money going to politicians, their families, and their cronies. And on top of that they want to subsidize “affordable” housing.
Who qualifies for affordable housing?
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I think a big factor in the high cost of housing in Mass. is resistance by those who already have homes. The weekly paper for my suburban town has a front-page story every week about someone or some company who wants to build something: an apartment development, an office complex, a big-box store, or even a donut shop. Invariably they face opposition from neighbors and abutters, or even people in the neighboring town who think that the newly built thing (whatever it is) will generate unbearable traffic and ruin the environment. The hip term for such objectors is, as Dom knows, BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
In my building, the elderly neighbors, expressing a narrow self-interest, typically oppose new housing that might bring in families, because they expect it’ll raise the town’s school expenses and therefore taxes—as if the new residents wouldn’t be paying too.
Just as an aside, it might be worthwhile to look at new residents in a town as a possible help to the local parish and parish school.
Similar situation in Salem. The plan is to tear down St. Joseph’s Church (I’ve written about this before) and build some mixed-use housing. I don’t think it’s a perfect idea, but it’s a start. Unfortunately the neighbors have filed a lawsuit.
They all agree the city needs more and more affordable housing, just not in their neighborhood.
Unlike in MA here in Italy you can’t run away, because most European countries are just as bad. Our employees here have told me that one of the major reasons that people are not having children is the ambiguous position they find themselves in economically. Our employees are fairly well paid and have real job security, but still with the costs of living, taxes, food, fuel, it is difficult for even a responsible pro-life catholic parent to consider getting married and having children.
It would also cost jobs by shutting down private Internet providers. Typical liberal. Destroy a profit and tax generating business, shifting the burden to the rest of us that remain. Until they take over another industry. Exactly what not to do.