George Marlin’s bizarre screed in his column From the Right regarding Gov. Hochul’s retreat on housing deserves a rational response.
Let’s get something straight: Hochul’s proposal wouldn’t “end” single-family housing unless someone was willing to bulldoze them all. No one was proposing that, but Mr. Marlin brought out his biggest dog whistle for the scaremongering of “urban blight” and “public housing,” which was not part of the proposal. Apparently, adding a granny flat to a 100×70 plot is the equivalent of a housing project.
Marlin’s conceit is a simple one: he’s beside himself when he points out how “liberal” enclaves like California and New York are losing population, while at the same time denouncing anyone who dares to provide housing to accommodate it. This is called “cognitive dissonance:” the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time.
The greater hypocrisy is that Mr. Marlin, by denouncing housing reform, declares himself to be anti-growth. There is no prosperity without a growing base of producers and consumers, and the idea that any part of the country can freeze its housing stock to present levels is patently absurd. We saw this with the Amazon fiasco. Mr. Marlin was all for it, but if I understand him correctly, the only way to house Amazon’s mythic “25,000 workers” was to throw out 25,000 existing residents. Is this how it’s supposed to work?
At this point, I presume Mr. Marlin turns to the camera and says, “You know, this public policy stuff is trickier than I thought!”
He rails against “Democratic” problems like homelessness when his policy is to prevent additional housing, which is plainly senseless. Homelessness isn’t the moral failing Mr. Marlin and his kind would have you believe, and that is easily demonstrated that in some places, people can hold down two jobs and still not earn enough to rent a dwelling the size of a two-car garage.
How is that a dedicated follower of the same church that canonized Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Martin of Tours favors keeping people in grueling poverty and throwing families to the curb? Only Mr. Marlin can answer that.
Something, and someone, has to give.
The refusal to address this crisis is barbaric and inflicts pain on people whose only crime is to live in an era when housing stock is deliberately, if not cynically, limited so as not to grow with the population. And those who have owned their homes for decades are so pleased with themselves simply for being born at the right time. Congratulations. You’re all geniuses.
The decision to wrest control away from local stakeholders didn’t come in a vacuum. Once again, Long Island mirrors national issues.
UC Berkeley will now have to deny thousands of undergraduate applicants because local homeowners have repeatedly blocked any chance of additional student or multi-family housing being built. Berkeley is the crown jewel of California’s education system, and it has produced thousands of educated and successful students who have made no small contribution to America’s economic and technological supremacy.
Some students are now being housed in an underground garage. Since rents have predictably skyrocketed to jaw-dropping levels thanks to enforced scarcity, adjunct professors live in their cars.
When the university protested, the homeowners simply demanded they no longer accept foreign students, as if that was a solution.
I’m sorry, but you can’t give veto power over something like this to people like that. It’s not a “local” problem anymore.
The recent Tower Ford fiasco is proof of this. The joke couldn’t have written itself better: You folks don’t know a Tudor from a four-door, and here you all were, waxing eloquent like you were Paul Goldberger over a piece of property that should serve living people who need it. Watching you all kid yourselves was priceless. Worthy of a tale from Sholom Aleichem’s “Wise Men of Chelm.”
Americans have come to believe in a “scarcity mindset” as some economists call it, the idea that resources have to be husbanded as if we were running out of them. There are some good pieces on this pathology, but I won’t bore you with that.
People need to sit themselves down and have a good think about this. Or at least have the decency to stop procreating. Even Mr. Marlin might go for that.
Donald Davret
Roslyn
