Mailbag: Argument against affordable housing ignores working people

Re. “No one is entitled to affordable housing so close to the coast,” (April 16): Costa Mesa City Council candidate Al Melone’s rant against efforts to promote “affordable housing” is mean-spirited, short-sighted and out of touch with reality.

Yes, we do live in a very affluent community, where one is hard-pressed to find anything to buy that is less than $1 million. Mr. Melone simply suggests these folks move inland, or even to Iowa or to Texas. If everyone in middle- or low-income brackets took that advice then where would we find people to teach our schools, deliver our mail or care for us when we land in the hospital?

The fact is that wages for middle-income workers in no way makes them able to afford to buy, hardly even to rent, decent housing around here. I’m not even talking about the poor here!

Yes, some of those folks could move to Corona or Riverside and clog our already-overburdened freeway system and add more pollutants into the air while they literally burn up even more of their hard-earned income. Is this really the solution?

There are plenty of unaffordable homes around here, which the folks with the bucks can buy, and they are not going anywhere. Our property values are certainly not going down.

Yet Melone complains that the overregulated, overburdened and over-taxed developers have to cough up more fees so as to provide homes that people with more-modest incomes can buy. A few dozen units here and there, maybe?

The author also brings up America’s heritage of self-reliance and how this is being destroyed by the “social liberals in Sacramento” upon whom I suspect Mr. Malone lays the blame for all of our country’s ills.

Well, I have news for him: America has changed a lot since the pioneer days, when folks moved West in covered wagons and often starved or froze to death in their failed attempts to make it.

We live in a different, more interdependent and complex society. The state of California has more people now than did the entire United States in the 1840s, when the pioneers first began to head West in large numbers. The standards of modern living require that people have good housing, transportation, medical care and the rest. Call it social liberalism, if you must, but we live in a much better society since World War II than mankind has ever lived in before.

To maintain such a society we need efforts by our government to mitigate the social ills which are results of a myriad of causes, including skyrocketing property values in desirable areas.

To simply suggest that we should allow such trends to push an entire class of people to far-off areas is naive and downright mean and heartless. If Mr. Melone wants to run for City Council, that’s his right. Should he be elected, then governing the city should be a service he extends to everyone in the community, not just the people with deep pockets.

The lack of affordable housing in this area is a real one. I have a family member currently struggling with this issue. I’d kind of like to keep our family together and local — and it’s not easy. If government-induced solutions can help with this problem that that is a good thing. I seriously suspect that Mr. Melone is one of those right-wing Republicans who claims government doesn’t work and then hope to get elected so he can prove it to be so.

Lenard Davis

Newport beach

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Affordable housing is not an answer to homelessness. The term “affordable” housing means different things to different people. Al Melone’s article was spot on! When did living in desirable communities become an entitlement?

Juli Hayden

Newport Beach

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Let them eat cake!

Two things come to mind when reading Al Melone’s piece: First, does he understand the meaning of “nonpartisan” offices, such as the one he’s running for? And second, is he related to Marie Antoinette?

Robert L. Stein

Irvine