'We Simply Can't Afford It' Is a Lie

A Payroll Tax on the Affluent Could Help Address Our Housing Crisis: San Diego’s Historic Legacy of Inequality Makes it Unlikely

By Jim Miller

Recently, the San Diego Union-Tribune had an interesting roundtable where they asked their usual group of local business leaders and economists whether San Diego should follow Seattle and adopt a payroll tax on those who earn $150,000 or more to help fund affordable housing in the city.  

While one would not expect such a group to be racing to embrace this kind of a proposal, it was interesting that not a single person voiced any support whatsoever for the idea.  

Predictably, the responses were full of the usual anti-tax ideology about hurting business and/or driving high earners out of the state, with no one really coming to terms with the elephant in the room: it costs money to fund housing and nothing the city is doing is successfully addressing what is already a pressing crisis.  

So it goes.

Indeed, the lack of affordable housing is key to several of our other persistent social emergencies like homelessness and the climate crisis, both of which are exacerbated by the lack of affordable homes for either owners or renters.  The lack of housing is also a key driver of economic and racial inequality here in San Diego as the status quo does little to benefit working people and communities of color are overrepresented in the ranks of renters in San Diego as a result of both historic and current policies that enforce discriminatory housing patterns.  

Thus it has become even more difficult for young workers and people of color to make the move from renting to owning..

Nonetheless, despite its current Democratic supermajority, San Diego still seems incapable of embracing bold policies to start redressing the long-standing inequities that continue to afflict most of its residents.  

In fact, even the policies that many progressives have criticized for not being commensurate with the problems they seek to solve such as the tenant protection ordinance, the moves toward more density, and the construction of more accessible transit have all been met with fierce resistance from landlords, “neighborhood” groups representing more affluent or generationally fortunate homeowners, and various other NIMBY types who have an aversion to virtually anything that will make housing more affordable or transit more accessible. 

All of this fits the historic pattern that Mike Davis critiqued when the suburban rebellion of aggrieved homeowners brought us Proposition 13, which ushered in California’s perpetual underfunding of schools and other public services and has ended up enshrining a stark generational inequity with regard to housing and even more severe economic and racial inequality in our now deep blue, liberal state.  

In addressing the roots of this political tendency, Davis noted that, “If the slow-growth movement . . . has been explicitly a protest against the urbanization of suburbia, it is implicitly—in the long tradition of Los Angeles homeowner politics—a reassertion of social privilege.”  

And this, at base, is the root of the struggle we are seeing as San Diego transitions from its historically Republican dominated past.  While the Republican Party is now profoundly disadvantaged demographically and ideologically on a wide range of issues, the one area where the thorough liberalization of California as a whole and San Diego in particular has failed is making the argument that we need a permanent, stable revenue stream to fund the big ideas that would make the California dream real for the majority of us.  

Hence, as long as our politics reflect the impulse of the anti-tax chorus at the San Diego Union-Tribune and shy away from the revenue question, even progressive rather than regressive taxes, our liberal politicians will forever be stuck telling their constituents that while they would love to address the big problems that ail us, they simply can’t afford to do so.  

There are solutions out there, particularly if one looks globally, as a fantastic piece in the New York Times on social housing in Vienna did, noting how much more affordable a robust public role in housing made life for that city’s residents.  The root of the problem, the article notes, is not exclusively the lack of revenue devoted to such measures but also the fact that far too many tax subsidies and other forms of government funding go to homeowners and/or private developers.  

Changing that, however, would mean fundamentally upending the system of social privilege that has led to the deep, entrenched inequities that are the cause of so many of our most intractable problems.  

Note: My column be on hiatus for June and July.  See you all again in August, dear readers.  

Lead image: Morgen Dutil, Montserrat College of Art