Playing those housing games

Did you enjoy the polka-dot placing poker game of allocating the unnecessary and unwarranted low income housing units in Encinitas last year? 

What fun! Let’s play “Pin the Tail on the City Hall Donkey.”

Please explain why we have been “out of compliance” for as long as Encinitas has been incorporated, without consequence, but now this state mandate is terribly urgent. Can you say lobbying by the BIA?

This might make sense to some, but not in the not-so-common sense of the word. Here we are 27 years later and I still haven’t heard a definition of “low-income housing.” It has also been agreed that the SANDAG numbers on projected growth are wrong.

Have the thousands of shared housing units, legal accessory units, mobile homes, and still more thousands of apartments and condos like those at Cardiff-By-The-Sea, Playa Mar, Seacrest, Quail Gardens, Pacific Pines, Park Place, Village Park, and Essex all been counted?

With many vacancies, many of them located less than a mile from our fabulous beaches with rents starting at about $1,100/month. That’s for three occupants. Should paradise be cheaper than that?!

Am I advocating that we close the gates now that I’m here? If I can’t afford to live on the coast, don’t I have to move out of town or in with the folks? What’s wrong with that? As the population ages, this is one of the smartest and most viable housing and eldercare options.

Unless we decide to build out the marginal land along the freeways, Section 8 and similar accommodations just don’t belong here. Oh, I guess that acreage is slated to be walled in as more and more lanes, cars, trucks, and pollution pile up. Good grief.

Test question: How much does a carpenter pay in union dues? Answer: About $100/week. If they’re even using legal labor. And where does that money go? Mostly to union management, and the Democratic Party. This is some seriously effective lobbying laid on our elected representatives in Sacra-Demento dictating what our community doesn’t need and influencing elections which we also don’t need.

Thank you, Tony Cagala, for writing a very interesting article awhile back suggesting how to replace the dysfunctional bunch up there with a simpler system of governing. The model he (John Cox) referred to, New Hampshire, is a cute little state, but I think those darn Texans might also have a handle on how to run things. It’s worth looking into. Maybe our political brainiacs will wise up and stop taking us for granted, but I doubt it. Pigs at a trough? Snort, snort.

Yes, I’m a charm school dropout, enjoying the debate as we “conversate” about how to protect our fine community quality of life.

Am I naïve about how business gets done? As a common sense fiscal conservative and conservationist, what I long for is more honesty and less demonizing and polarizing. I prefer to stay out of the mud, instead seeking common ground and finding ways of governing without hatefulness and wasted resources, graft, incompetence, and corruption.

A radical centrist, you might say, trying to maintain a sense of humor. We will never solve big problems without working together in kindness, harmony and truth.

Love my neighbor? You bet, as long as he plays nicely, doesn’t smoke in my face, fluoridate my water, pollute my life with plastic, and pave the planet. “The middle of the road is trying to find me. As long as you don’t try draggin’ my bay or droppin’ a bomb on my street.” “By the way, you look fantastic in your boots of Chinese plastic.” Thanks for the great tunes, Chrissie Hynde.

How much is being spent chasing our tails? Where are the statesmen and women who will stand up and tell Sacra-Demento to buzz off? Any chance of that? Please, more low-income housing simply doesn’t belong here.

Celia Kiewit is an Encinitas resident.