If you belong to one of the unfortunate families in San Diego County who don't own their own homes, we have some bad news for you: County bureaucrats have asked the Board of Supervisors for a whopping $3,000 increase in government fees on each new home built in the unincorporated areas.
Surely the supervisors, all five of them proud Republicans, will summarily reject this new fee, right? Sadly, this is the same Board of Supervisors that last year jacked up a separate, “traffic impact” fee on new homes by up to $10,000 in some areas. The damage to commercial and retail construction was even more dramatic, amounting to a staggering $64 per square foot in extra government levies for new supermarkets in rural areas.
The timing for such fee increases couldn't be worse. The once-hot real estate market, which accounted for fully half of local economic growth in recent years, is beginning to cool measureably. Builders are pulling back. Higher costs mean fewer houses, setting the stage for another round of price hikes when the market turns around.
The supervisors said the new traffic fee would raise $900 million over 25 years to build roads. But several developers immediately canceled retail projects, citing the size of the fee. Thus, by killing local jobs and shopping, county officials made congestion worse by encouraging driving to distant retail centers.
The latest fee would fund construction of parks with swing sets, barbecues and ball fields that the public generally expects in urban or densely built suburban cities. No money would go to expanding open-space preserves – by the county's definition, a back-country version of Balboa Park or Mission Trails would get no money.
It's not clear why folks in Ramona, Alpine or Valley Center, where homes typically occupy two-acre parcels, can't host their own barbecues. The best guess is that county planners, who want to dramatically increase housing density along major rural roads in General Plan 2020, want small parks to support “smart growth.”
By the way, “fee” is how local politicians prefer to describe a tax increase. State law requires officials to dedicate such stealth taxes to a specific purpose. With a little creative accounting, this allows elected officials to carve out projects to fund and then go shopping for victims to pay for them.
In California, the victims are most often families who hold down jobs, pay their bills on time, and thus should be able to buy a house. In unincorporated San Diego County, fees add $35,000 to the cost of building a typical home. Granted, it's a hair cheaper than in the city of San Diego, which imposes $40,600 on average.
Taken together with zoning restrictions, such taxes on home building nearly completely explain why only 55 percent of families own homes in the region, down from 56 percent in 1994. Meanwhile, national ownership rates have soared to 70 percent over the same decade. There's just no nice way to say this – if you are tired of renting but can't afford a new home, chances are good that your state or local government is to blame.
