More hypocrisy from Silicon Valley
Uber-hip and rich San Jose, Ca., just ripped down the nation’s largest homeless community –a 68-acre shantytown called “The Jungle.”
It was built along a stream called Coyote Creek and featured lean-tos, underground bunkers and a tree house.
The city was pushed to act by the rotting trash that piled up not to mention the rats and human waste.
And the action appears appropriate and necessary.
But why did they allow it to build up in the first place? And could you image the scorn the residents of San Jose would heap on a Texas or Pennsylvania community compelled to act in the same way?
Apartments now average $2,633 per month in the San Jose region up from $1,761 two years earlier. The median home price is nearly $700,000
The area has about 7,600 homeless with about 75 percent sleeping outside on sidewalks, in parks and under freeway embankments even before their shantytown was destroyed. It’s a greater percentage than any other U.S. metropolitan area.
In a fit of liberal guilt, San Jose spent $4 million to get housing for 144 of them. Nice job. Now just 7,456 to go.
“Apartments now average $2,633 per month in the San Jose region up from $1,761 two years earlier. The median home price is nearly $700,000”
Those prices are driven in large part by open-space preservation laws and other land use restrictions, that the local residents voted for themselves. I think of that every time I see a sign in the townships around here, “The land preserved as open space”. And I ask myself if the township supervisors who enact those restrictions, and the residents who vote for them, realize that they have decided not to allow the land to be sold for more productive use, that will generate more tax income.
Good points Brad. It beats having the “open space” just get taken over for a shanty town.
You have good thoughts and ideas Brad. Have you thought about running for office?