Housing crisis? No, job dumping
Businesses must shoulder social cost of their growth
Hiding behind the public narrative of “housing crisis” lies an ongoing pattern of corporations dumping their costs on others.
Economists call this “externalizing.” Silicon Valley is doing it now with housing. It’s time we changed the playing field.
Feeding the “housing crisis” is bulging growth in jobs and accompanying need for office space. Now there’s a major imbalance.
When a similar imbalance occurs inside a corporation, (say hiring new employees without having the needed desks, chairs, office space, etc.) the company brings together the affected departments, agrees on the solution, and writes new procedures or rules to prevent the problem’s reoccurrence, (e.g., the personnel department must notify the office-space-management department of all new hires).
But we are not watching a rational problem-solving process here. We are watching a public political discussion — where, as usual, the public story line is largely controlled by, and financially benefits, the powerful.
Yes, a brief online search unearths the campaign contributions to elected officials supporting Senate Bill 50. Contributors include (no surprises here) corporations, and real estate and construction groups. With their “housing crisis” war cry, they artfully deflect public attention away from companies building square miles of office space, regardless of the associated cost of social services — including housing, schools, roads, etc.
Companies “externalize” costs when possible. It’s their legal responsibility to maximize stockholder profits. If it’s cheaper to dump toxic waste into the local river than to process it, then a company will dump, and will fight any action that makes it take responsibility — until public frustration forces a re-leveling of the playing field.
For example, when environmental degradation and workplace injuries and deaths became intolerable, we created the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These agencies created a national, more socially desirable, corporate playground. It’s time we did this in the Bay Area with another (intolerable?) social cost — housing.
Most Bay Area residents don’t like this imbalance in our region, where the steroid-fed San Francisco/Silicon Valley job magnet creates endless problems for the rest of us. In their heart of hearts, public officials in cities in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties aren’t always proud of grabbing a disproportionate share of taxes on commercial real estate while ignoring the effect — traffic, housing, etc. — this has on neighbors. Tax incentives motivate cities to grab what they can.
While publicly crowing over their profitable tax base, elected officials may privately admit to preferring a tax system where they didn’t benefit at the expense of others. Given a chance, most people want to be good citizens, but the solution lies beyond the reach of individual communities.
I hope we can come together regionally, under an elected representative body, to establish a truly socially equitable regional playing field (perhaps with a little help from the state). It’s time we required companies to take responsibility for the socially and financially devastating effects of job dumping.
Let’s come together, cooperatively and regionally, stop blaming local communities, and reshape the legal and financial playing field to benefit everybody. Let’s call out elected officials to stop hiding behind superficial catchphrases, such as “housing crisis,” that conceal rather than illuminate.
While corporations will understandably resist solutions that make them internalize rather than externalize costs, I believe that they will do what they have done in the past when they realized the social and political tide had turned — swallow, take a deep breath, smile, get on board and, together with all affected groups, create a win-win solution.