Who’s Your Nanny?
Staff editorial

Mission Hospital executive Peter Bastone wrote an article appearing in the Orange Grove column on July 11. [OC Register, “Housing shortage and a ‘brain drain.’] After a week with no comment from readers, perhaps no one felt his specious logic merited a response.

Bastone complains that young workers making $70,000 a year can’t afford a home in Mission Viejo. He stated, “Every city in Orange County shares the responsibility for facilitating an adequate supply of housing for Orange County’s workforce.” Bastone would like zoning and environmental restrictions eased to increase the housing supply.

Since when is providing homeownership the job of government? For whatever reason, young people today are apparently entitled to ownership that their parents slaved and saved for many years to achieve.

Bastone didn’t mention he lives in a $1-million-plus lakefront home in Mission Viejo’s prestigious Tres Vistas. Would Bastone like an affordable-housing project plopped next to his estate? The city could condemn three or four mansions as “blighted” and put aside pesky zoning to build a lakeside high-rise of affordable condos. Instead of the guarded gate locking Yuppies and other riffraff out, it could lock them in.

Consider Bastone’s line, “Unfortunately, anti-housing forces crying ‘not in my back yard’ make new housing politically unpopular in many cities.

The affordable-housing project wouldn’t be in Bastone’s back yard (which is the lake). It would be in his side yard.

Throughout the council’s three-year dance with two developers – UDR Pacific and Steadfast – Mission Hospital administrators repeatedly came to the podium to support more low-income housing in this built-out city. Back then, the battle cry wasn’t for Yuppies making $70,000, it was for the hospital’s minimum-wage employees. A planning commissioner in 2004 suggested the hospital should pursue creating housing on its own property if it were so interested in taking care of its employees. No response from the hospital on that one. Somehow, the hospital couldn’t understand that its hiring so many minimum-wage employees with little buying power wasn’t the government’s problem.

But, that was then. Now, Bastone laments Orange County has a “brain drain” because such workers as teachers, paramedics, firefighters and police employees are fleeing Orange County in pursuit of more affordable housing. Apparently, renting and finding roommates while saving money for a down-payment is a completely alien concept at Bastone Manor.

Na‹ve or misinformed people seem to think creating more housing will lower the price, and that’s incorrect. Cities with higher-density residential areas (Santa Ana, Garden Grove) don’t have lower prices because they have more housing, they have lower prices because they’re a mess. According to an Orange County mortgage broker, “Despite the current leveling off, Orange County communities building thousands of homes, condos and apartments have experienced rising prices along with other Orange County areas that aren’t building like crazy.” Cities can overbuild to the point the entire county becomes unlivable, and supply still won’t meet demand. Check the unlimited number of home-seekers streaming across the borders.

Immigrant families are willing to share – two and three families in units intended for one family. A three-bedroom home becomes a boardinghouse for 10 or more people, and unrelated adults combine resources to come up with down-payments. Consequently, a young professional making $70,000 doesn’t have the range of choices Bastone would apparently prefer.

The answer is clear, and it isn’t up to the taxpayer, who is already providing free healthcare, free education and free everything else to those who haven’t earned it. Bastone should put his $1-million-plus home on the market for, say, $85,000. He could show he’s willing to sacrifice instead of asking everyone else to bear the burden of buying homes for his employees.

Here’s a curve for Bastone. High prices are a good thing. They reward people who sacrificed and saved for years to buy a home. As a real shock, many of Mission Viejo’s homeowners bought their homes while making $70,000 a year or less. They commuted to work in places like Newport Beach, where they couldn’t afford to buy a home.