KTOO’s Clarise Larson recently reported that Juneau’s housing prices are the highest in the state, despite the city’s many attempts to subsidize its slums and trailer parks. We go in depth to analyze the ongoing crisis of dealing with Juneau’s increasing home values.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” admitted Ron Sheehan, Interim Deputy Senior Assistant Director of the CIty and Bureau of Juneau’s Planning Division of the Office of Affordable Housing, “the bean counter guys who try to explain Juneau’s rising housing prices use antiquated terms like ‘supply and demand,’ but that kind of oversimplification is dangerous, because it overlooks important issues like social justice and equity.”
Sheehan pointed skeptically to a copy of the widely criticized recent report by the American Economic Association that lays blame for rising Juneau housing prices on the lack of available land due to the city’s hoarding of undeveloped lots, the intense restrictions on private development, and the overall prosperity of Juneau’s government-dependent population. “These ‘academic’ studies are what I’m talking about. Yeah, the city owns most of the land in Juneau and yes, the city is pretty tight on developers. And there’s no use arguing against the point that Juneau is an extremely rich city in terms of per capita income. But that isn’t the whole story,” Sheehan noted. “Juneau has an entire office devoted to subsidizing our slums and trailer parks. You would think that years of this kind of government intervention would have knocked down housing prices everywhere, but clearly we aren’t doing enough – obviously the only way we’re going to reduce housing prices is by spending a lot more tax money on ‘affordable housing,'” he concluded.
Jane Withers, Managing Assistant Senior Deputy Director of Juneau’s Office of Underhousingness Management, echoed the sentiments expressed in the KTOO article. “When some people use the term ‘working class,’ they are using it as a sort of dog whistle to mean ‘trailer trash’ or ‘riff raff’ or some other derogatory term,” Withers explained. (Editors note: for our working class readers, “derogatory” means “not nice”) “We don’t use the term “working class” that way in city government,” she continued, “we use it in a more formal manner to mean a class of people that, when compared to bureaucrats like us, are generally less-educated, poorer, smellier and dirtier, kind of like the type of people you see in Lemon Creek when the work-release van rolls in.”
One of the core successes gained by years of ever-increasing welfare spending by the city government, has been the culture of dependency and lowered standards that have transformed the working people of Juneau into a permanent underclass, Withers told us. “While we still call it the ‘working class,’ the truth is that a lot them don’t actually work these days, so it’s kind of a misnomer. We could call them ‘the proletariat,’ but most them don’t have the education to understand academic terms like that, so we try to keep it simple,” she noted. (Editors note: For our working class readers, don’t worry about the term “proletariat.” It is too complicated for you to understand.)
We previously explored Juneau’s brilliant plan to lend taxpayer money to people who can’t afford to live in a trailer park, in order to provide these poor people with a down payment so that they can finance trailers to expand Juneau’s stunning trailer parks. Bill Johnson, Assistant Juneau Vice Mayor, spoke with us about the troubling failure of such spending on “affordable housing” to reduce property values in the city. “We can’t figure it out,” Johnson said. “I mean, we’re throwing money at slums and trailer parks left and right. We just dumped a couple of million of taxpayers’ money into building a new slum in the heart of downtown, for crying out loud!” he asserted, obviously frustrated. “I think there a whole lot of people who don’t realize that Juneau is a city in perpetual crisis. They come here, look around and think ‘this place looks pretty nice and the people seem richer and friendlier than other places’ and that’s as far as they go. They don’t see all the dirt under the rug.” Johnson went on to say that privileged rich people who have more wealth than they deserve and who selfishly want to live in a beautiful place, might actually be willing to spend more money to buy a house in Juneau than they would be willing to spend to buy a home in a poorer, uglier town that has a surplus of cheap land.
This makes it harder for the city to subsidize slums and trailers. “We are losing the fight for affordable housing,” Withers noted. “We have 15 full-time analysts working on it just in our office, not to mention the work being done through grants by the contractors, but it seems like the more tax money we spend, the higher housing prices go up!” she exclaimed, in exasperation.
Gary Gasparini is the CEO of Juneau Real Estate Development, Inc., a local for-profit company that is approaching 90 years of continuous operation in the city and that has become adept at exploiting Juneau’s affordable housing spending to pad its own bottom line. He foisted his capitalist, profit-centered opinion upon us at the beginning of our conversation. “The idea that you can reduce housing prices by increasing government spending is asinine,” Gasparini argued, without evidence, in a confrontational tone that made us feel unsafe. (Editor’s note: For our working class readers, “asinine” means “dumb.”) “How in the Hell does spending more money ever reduce prices?” he asked, fleeing to the cover of his irrelevant rhetorical question, instead of directly addressing the issues of local inequity and the lack of social justice to which he and his company have contributed. “The problem is that the damned city owns all the decent land. They should auction it off and let it get developed. That would take care of the housing shortage,” he ranted. As for the rising housing prices, Gasparini took us off guard with his radical, contrarian ignorance of the obvious affordability crisis, “Housing prices are up to a record. That is a good thing, not a bad thing! What kind of a moron wants housing prices to go down in their town, for Christ sake?!” he exploded, before his hateful arguments and his insistence on restricting our discussion to factual matters forced us to conclude the interview.
Juneauites we encountered randomly in the parking lot at the Breeze-In in the Valley unanimously and immediately refuted Gasparini’s bourgeois capitalist nonsense. When we asked them “would you rather pay more or less to buy a house?” all 22 people said they would rather pay less to buy a home, versus paying more. Digging deeper into their motivations, we asked the same group, “if you buy a home, would your rather spend your own money on it, or would you rather have the government dole out money to pay for it for you?” Again, all 22 respondents reported that they would rather have the taxpayers pay for their home than actually pay for their homes with their own money.
Surprisingly, we struggled to find an expert willing to address Gasparini’s false claim of a relationship between rising housing prices and increased spending on affordable housing. Eventually, we persuaded Professor Henry Stapleton, Chairman of the Economics Department at the University of Washington, to give us his perspective. “It was a lot simpler in the past,” Prof. Stapleton explained, “America wasn’t defined by class back then. Anybody could make as much money as he wanted to make. The ‘working class” 20 year old steel worker in 1950 could become a ‘middle class’ or ‘upper class’ member by the age of 30, just though hard work and smart decision-making. Back then, nobody wanted to live in slums or trailers, and if the average guy was forced to live in them, he aspired to work his way out of them as fast as he could.” As a result of this kind of misguided ambition among the working class, the local policies were extremely different years ago, Prof. Stapleton said. “Local governments realized that people, even poor people, actually preferred to live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods, instead of living in trailer parks and slums, and if they had opportunity, they would move,” he noted. “So the cities back then enacted policies that discouraged ‘affordable housing’ in favor of quality housing,” he finished. The result was a general antipathy toward non-working people who experienced underhousingness. “They actually called those people hobos, bums or mooches,” Professor Stapleton continued, “the police would actually roust them out and drive them away in order to appease the residents who wanted to live in a ‘nicer’ environment.”
Today, the political landscape has changed completely. “The key to quelling the ambition of the working class was to eliminate their dangerous traits of independence, hope and opportunity and to replace these traits with a culture of expectancy, sloth and dependency. This replacement is the ‘secret sauce’ that keeps them on the reservation, nowadays,” Professor Stapleton continued. “When you read the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels made it seem like it’s a piece of cake to destroy and replace such deeply embedded ambitions, but it turns out to be really hard to accomplish that kind of transformation in practice. It took literally trillions of dollars in welfare spending and years and years of legal wrangling, but we were finally able to degrade the education system, the family structure and other social institutions in the working class to the point where now the poor bastards don’t have the means to leave the slums on their own, even if they wanted to. So they’re stuck where they are, and that’s right where we need them to be in order to advance to truly classless Utopia,” before crossing his fingers, “which is right around the corner, keep the faith!” he promised with learned confidence.
“Today, most of our cities have seen the light. City leaders realize that unrestricted dangerous ambition among the proletariat leads directly to unbounded productivity and economic growth, both of which are anathema to resolving the inequities and injustices driven by heartless and competitive capitalist policies. Thus, it makes much more sense today to invest the taxpayers’ money in slums and trailer parks than it does into dumping that money into nice houses in nice neighborhoods,” Professor Stapleton related to us, as we prepared to leave, “that is, as long as they keep the slums and trailer parks over by the dog pound, the jail, the dump, or some other nasty place where we don’t have to look at them, of course,” he said, before relating a funny anecdote of a town that once built a bunch of slums too close to the town’s only golf course. “You had panhandlers getting into the clubhouse and using the restrooms and the police were out there three times a week chasing those slumdogs around. It was like a Three Stooges movie!” Stapleton said, laughing as he related his humorous account. Concluding on a more serious note, he gave us his final thoughts, “until we make it to the classless society, it’s best for the bourgeois and proletariat to live apart and to let us academics guide the bureaucrats in running the economy.”
At the end of the day, only one path makes sense. An exponential increase in government spending will be necessary to reduce housing prices to healthy levels in Juneau. Vice Mayor Johnson summed it up, “we’re going to need to dole out 10 or 20 times the amount of taxpayer’s money that we currently do, if we want to see real downward movement in Juneau’s housing prices,” he said. “Of course, the city is just not equipped with the staff we’ll need to get that kind of spending done, so we’ll need to plan and hire for a couple of years before we’re ready to implement such an ambitious program,” Johnson clarified.