Priced out on housing
I, Publius
By Alan Chartock



GREAT BARRINGTON
A sign outside a doughnut shop in Great Barrington proudly announces that the establishment is hiring and that the pay is "nine dollars and up." That's a good deal of money, substantially above the minimum wage. Does anyone believe that the employer is doing so out of the goodness of his or her heart? It's really just a matter of supply and demand.

I thought about this when I was grocery shopping and talking with someone who works in the store. She tells me that practically everyone who runs an establishment in South Berkshire is always looking for help. Some businesses aren't expanding, she told me, because they know there isn't a work force they can depend on.

I asked my secret correspondent if she had a theory on why there was such a scarcity of workers. Indeed, she thought she knew why. It has to do with the skyrocketing price
of homes in South Berkshire. The culprit is the real estate bubble that we are experiencing. Houses that not so long ago would have sold for $100,000 are now approaching the million-dollar mark. Small starter homes on our very street are listed at nearly $300,000.

In other words, people are paying incredibly inflated amounts for their homes. We all know that many of the people who are moving in, often very wealthy second-home owners, are not about to have their kids work as baggers at the local supermarket. In fact, many of these people are older and no longer have teenagers at home.



Our communities are experiencing such a rise in the available tax bases that they are spending like drunken sailors. Real estate taxes have risen to the point that longtime residents have to get out. They simply can no longer afford the taxes. In Great Barrington, you know things have gone too far when you see sidewalk construction projects that are neither needed nor wanted.

Of course, there are those who sell their houses for massive amounts of money but who continue to resent the fact that their kids can no longer afford to live in our town. We all know that you can't have it both ways. If you sell your house for big bucks, you have to understand that your kids will not get your house or probably anyone else's. That's really too bad for all of us.

One of the things I have always loved about Great Barrington and the hill I live on is that we have always had a mixed neighborhood and everyone usually got along. When I grew up on the West Side of Manhattan, I learned about how things were in the real world from the kids I played with. Some of my more wealthy friends didn't recognize that not everybody enjoyed the same resources they had until they got to the Peace Corps. To their credit, they caught up.

Because the high price of housing is keeping many young families out, a number of schools in our area are experiencing declining enrollment. That only exacerbates the employment population decline. So what's to be done?

We have wonderful, well-meaning folks at organizations like Construct right here in our back yard. These folks have been thinking about what is now being called "affordable housing." This is tricky stuff. Almost everyone who has a classical liberal arts education articulates the need for such housing. But that understanding about finding everyone a place to live is mixed with the NIMBY or "not in my back yard" syndrome.

A lot of people just don't want to live next door to people whose houses "drive down property values." Don't deny it, we've all heard it. As long as this type of thinking is around, it will be very hard to get middle-class and poorer people into home ownership. So we have to educate ourselves about what's really at stake here. I can only hope that our Planning and Zoning boards think this through and do what they can to make things better. Converting one-family residences into two will open up some housing stock.

There has been much talk about the "housing bubble" that is about to burst. There are many people who are counting on it. If that happens, houses may decrease in value and opportunities will arise once again. It won't be the first time. When we got to the Berkshires in 1970, the big houses on our hill were seen as white elephants. Now they are in demand. Things change.

It's all very complicated, but as the old saying goes, "There but for the grace of God go I." A lot of folks found out about that during the Great Depression. I hope we can come up with a fix to this problem. If we put our minds to it, there's no telling what we can do.
- posted by Raymond @ 6/27/2005 08:31:00 AM