Housing

A huge topic these days is when and where we’re going to accommodate the current and future housing needs. There has been a lot of talk with not much serious realistic information included over the past year. I’m not talking about the edict from the state of California requiring an outrageous number of houses to be built in Santa Barbara County. This directive had no input from the communities involved, apparently had no input from people who had actually visited the county, and clearly had no realistic input as to where all of these houses could be located. There was absolutely no understanding of topography issues or sensitivity to local residents’ visions for their community.

So where are we today? Some of us in the community have been wrestling with county staff for many years over housing issues. For some reason we have never been able to convince them that our vision of our community is one of rural harmony, where people build or own their dream houses but, if possible, the casual traveler will never see much of them.

 

The agricultural community also has been involved for years in trying to solve the issue of housing for agricultural workers, starting with the county Residential Agricultural Unit program. I always thought that this should be a fairly simple concept, providing housing on the ranch or farm for the workers, but for some reason county staff has been reluctant to be practical. After three years of trying to work together, staff came up with a program that was so unworkable for the agricultural community that in five years only five applications were received.

 

I can tell you some of the reasons why that happened. First, my father was still alive during this time, although he was 90 years old and lived in his home in Santa Barbara. One of the requirements of the RAU program was that the landowner had to live on the property within a one-acre footprint of the proposed new employee house. My father was not about to move back to the ranch to satisfy county staff. I lived on the ranch at the time, but I didn’t own the place and I didn’t particularly want to live on top of any of my employees. I am sure that would have made all of us uncomfortable. Limiting the size of the house was something else I thought was nobody else’s business because that restriction eliminated the possibility of hiring potentially wonderful employees who had large families. Another issue that doomed the RAU program from being useful and successful was the stipulation that the house built for the employee could never be rented. So what do you do with it if your employee, for whatever reason, moves on and there is a period of time it is vacant until a new employee is hired? In a rural area such as the valley, the wildlife will quickly take over and ruin the house. It is practical to rent out the house to someone who, for a reduced rent, will look after the property and report any trespassers, hunters or other things requiring management’s attention. And what about a situation where the farmer or rancher is downsizing the operation, perhaps due to age or illness, and no longer needs an employee who would have lived in that house? Are we going to require that they just abandon the house and let it disintegrate? This approach is not only unfair, it is recklessly and needlessly destructive. Therefore, we could not build the housing for our employees that we had wanted to do.

 

So where do we go from here? I suggest that we stop the useless social engineering concepts and start to realistically assess what our needs are. It would, in my opinion, be useful to allow ranchers and farmers to build, within reason, housing on their operations which (1) would free up housing in town for non-ag people, (2) would reduce commuter traffic in the area because employees could live where they work, and (3) would make it easier for employees to do their jobs, which sometimes includes rounding up livestock after a car has gone through a fence in the middle of the night. Requirements of the owners living on the property within a one- or even three-acre footprint is ridiculous when so many ag properties are owned by out of town interests who never have, and never would, live on-site. The restricted footprint also is not practical for many ag operations as it would be more desirable to have housing located in more remote areas to serve the dual purpose of providing housing for one’s employees, which would make the job more desirable, and providing a human presence to deter outside people from thinking this is a place to do unlawful things. Is there something wrong with that way of thinking? There is, according to county staff, but then they don’t have a rural background from which to draw experience.

 

 

Economics

Some rather scary things have been going on in the economy these days. Aside from the stock market seesawing up and down, which always makes one feel a bit queasy, there is a lot of scare talk going on, too. I find it appalling, the amount of misinformation that is spewed out by the mainstream media in order to make sure that you look at things a certain way. I think it is obvious that I don’t look at things the same way they do and, furthermore, I feel there is quite a concerted effort being made to distort reality so that people will feel one way or the other. There are a couple of basic truisms that I think most of us forget.

First, it is a popular concept these days to “tax the rich,” who are believed to be withholding too much money for themselves, those selfish souls! I think many of you would be surprised to know that if you don’t qualify for welfare, you are likely to fall into that category of people who will pay double the taxes should certain presidential candidates prevail this fall.

 

Second, it is promised that if those certain candidates win, they will abolish the “Bush tax cuts.” Many people believe, wrongly, that only wealthy people have money in the stock market, but the truth is that in addition to those people, the largest investors are the huge mutual funds that group together smaller amounts of money from smaller investors. Many of these funds are retirement funds in which people have invested to make money to supplement their limited social security income. I don’t believe it is very nice to double their taxes on whatever money they make, do you?

As for the rich folks, there also are some pretty basic misunderstandings about them as well. Now it is true that some of these people don’t deserve much special treatment, which I am sure most people think they get. Consider this: who is providing the money for your paycheck if you are a working person? The company? The employees? What about the person who started the company in the first place? Did they not provide the capital to start the business, hire the employees, and provide the desks, computers, paper, etc., in order to function? What about their financial contributions that provided your job? If you tax them out of business, make it unprofitable to continue, what happens to your job? I imagine it would disappear, don’t you?

 

So, one needs to be somewhat careful what one wishes for. Perhaps it would be more sensible to spend less and support candidates who think that way, and I do not mean by slashing the budgets of the most important public functions, such as police and fire protection, which the politicians always want to do away with first. It’s just something to think about.

 

 

Politics

A dear friend sent me a very interesting article written by Charlie Reese, a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel. He wrote about 545 people — 100 senators, 435 congressmen, 1 president and 9 Supreme Court justices — out of 300 million citizens of this country.

He pointed out rather eloquently that these 545 people are responsible for everything in this country, by virtue of the fact that they have the power and the responsibility.

In the article, he states, “Do not let these 545 people shift blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

 

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exist disembodied mystical forces like ‘the economy,’ ‘inflation’ or ‘politics’ that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.” That sounds pretty intelligent to me, and it applies not just to the national scene but to our local one as well. Perhaps we need to pay attention.

We do have the power to change this and elect new people who will truly represent us.

If we do not take the hint, we will lose our sovereignty, our representation and our self-respect.

And we will deserve all of it.