Bay Area cities are to blame for this Housing Crisis Christmas
Around the Bay Area, households are getting ready for an annual tradition. Mothers and fathers prepare their homes for the return of their children. Sons and daughters plan and pack to return from far-off places.
After the holidays, these families will go through another annual tradition: They will say goodbye until they come together again late next year. This is what makes it a Housing Crisis Christmas: Christmas made sweeter in reuniting yet hollowed out by the looming long farewells to follow.
How we got here is simple to explain. We live in a region that draws people from around the world into exceptionally highpaying jobs. We do not build enough housing for both the newcomers and for our own children. When our children are grown, they are presented with a choice: Do they compete with highly compensated specialists for basic housing? A few are in a position to do this, and many of those stay. Others make the hard choice to scrabble by, consigned to a much lower standard of living than their parents’ as rent consumes their paychecks and roommates fray their sanity. Some others would have gone to pursue opportunities elsewhere regardless of conditions here. It is blunt to say that we have made economic refugees of the rest of our children — but that is essentially accurate.
Why we keep making the choice to displace our young, generation after generation, boils down to our preferences. Many would rather view a lawn than architecture or would rather see curbside parking gratis and empty than full and metered. Many who enjoy shade provided by a tree claim disgust at shadows cast by buildings. Such preferences are distilled by local elections into local leaders. Those local leaders refine them into local policies. Those policies made housing functionally illegal in many areas and economically impossible to produce at scale everywhere else.
Every city wants to remain frozen in time, like a snow globe, while others solve the housing crisis. But doing this freezes out our own children.
Displacement hurts not only those who are displaced but also those left behind. In the months after the coming goodbyes, many Bay Area parents will see empty parking spaces and be soothed, but they will not see the playing grandchildren who would make them enduringly happy. As they age into isolation, too many become embittered.
Despite all of that, Housing Crisis Christmas truly is a special time of year. It lets us grasp what we are losing, however briefly. That gives us a moment in which we might choose to start making the choices that would in future years allow our children to stay. Perhaps this year we can make the decision to lay the foundation for future generations to enjoy Christmas without so very many goodbyes.