[Editorial]
You all have probably heard about the nation-wide housing shortage.
Politicians have proposed many solution but they never have addressed the the underlying cause… greed!
Take a look at the houses of the 50s, 60s, and the early 70s. Look at the sizes of the houses. Now look at the sizes of the houses of today. Notice the difference?
Back in the 50s when my parents bought there house, we had a 3 bedroom, one and a half bath with a living, dinning rooms and a kitchen. Their house had around 1,200 sq ft of floor space. Now it is 3–4 bedrooms, 2.5+ bathrooms, home offices, and larger kitchens with over double the floor space! The Mc Mansions can have over 3000 – 4000 square feet of floor space!
You can’t really blame the builders, they have have a choice of building 3 or 4 regular size houses or one Mc Mansion for the same profit… which would you rather build?
Then we have the NIMBY crowd. Where I have my cottage on the Cape (For those not around New England, “The Cape” refers to Cape Cod.) the town bought a campground that went out of business and there is a hugh debate over what to do with it. The town wants to make affordable apartments because of the shortage housing for the summer workers. Many in the town are screaming the usual complaints… rune the character of the town, traffic (As if low income people have more cars than upper income people… I think it would be the other way around.), a burden of the schools… um this is summer help!
As a result, the number of apartments have dropped considerably. It took about five years for Truro to build low income housing after defending all the law suits. Another problem that is creeping up is secondary rentals, you have a low income unit that you sub-rent to someone not qualified for low income housing.
What gets me is that the same people who are complaining about the low income housing are are the very same ones complaining about the lack of summer help, they can’t find somebody to mow their lawns or they complain about the lack of waitstaff!
Yes, we do have a housing shortages but the solution is not simple!
[/Editorial]
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