OPINION
By Dave Price
Daily Post Editor
The newly created regional agency that plans to ask voters for a $20 billion housing bond issue in November made a huge error in its ballot documents.
Originally the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority said the property tax would raise $670 million a year over 30 years.
Then a citizens group did the math and told the authority the tax would actually raise $911 million a year.
Whoops!
They missed it by $241 million.
That’s an important error when you’re asking people to increase their taxes. Why would anyone trust these guys after this? What assurances do we have that this agency, which has never built a single home or apartment, will carefully spend the $911 million that they’ll be collecting each year?
In case you’re wondering, this tax — known as Regional Measure 4 — would be the biggest property tax increase ever seen in the Bay Area.
For the owner of a home with a tax value of $4 million, Regional Measure 4 will cost $760 a year. For a home valued at $1 million, the cost would be $190 a year.
With higher prices for gasoline, rent and groceries, and wages that haven’t kept up with inflation, can you afford the additional taxes?
The proponents of Regional Measure 4 will run TV commercials showing sympathetic families struggling to find a place to live. But you’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. You’ve already approved higher taxes for housing.
• In 2016, Santa Clara County voters passed Measure A, a property tax increase to fund a $950 million bond issue for housing.
• Also in 2016, San Mateo County, voters in 2012 approved Measure K, a sales tax increase for more housing along with other government endeavors like new office buildings.
Backers of both measures promised big results. But we’ve still got a housing shortage. Why are we doing this again?
And the ballot measure’s language doesn’t say where the housing authority will build the promised 70,000 housing units. They could build tall government housing projects in the middle of single-family home neighborhoods.
Another problem with Regional Measure 4 is the timing. When a government sells bonds, they promise investors that they’ll pay a certain rate of return on those bonds. Right now, the rate on such bonds is at a 10-year high. So doing a bond issue now means millions of dollars that could be used for homes will go into the pockets of Wall Street investors.
It would make more sense to wait for a year or two because interest rates will probably come down.
Right now, this $20 billion bond measure will actually cost $48 billion when interest is included in the total.
Regional Measure 4 is a mess. If the housing authority doesn’t pull it off the ballot, voters should reject it in November.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
A $241 million mistake is nothing to these people. It’s other people’s money to them.
This has got to be very embarassing for MTC’s Margaret Abe Koga, she was one of the commissioners who architected this whole thing. Will the board really vote to remove her baby from the ballot? Doubtful
This reminds me of the Bullet Train measure that a lot of folks stupidly voted in favor of. Did that measure come with a set of blue prints to show where it was going to be built or how much eminent domain they would use to bulldoze through a neighborhood…nope, and I don’t see the blue prints for this one either. Just where exactly will they build all this housing that the hardworking taxpayers will be paying for? I trust these folks as far as I can throw them. Our politicians have done gone full throttle on trying to destroy our single family home neighborhoods with ADU’s, JADU’s, SB9 and SB10. This measure appears to be just another pile on of the same, except this time, the taxpayers will be giving them a nice blank check.