From out of the west, a solution to forced neighborliness with the poor
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no 8-30g housing here!
FWIW’s New Mexico and Underprivileged Housing correspondent Brother Anthony sends along this delicious bit of chicanery. It’s delicious because the exact, same people who vote for mandatory poverty housing laws to be imposed on other communities are also the “save the whales” voters who use one of their mandates to evade the other. They’ve got the laws on their side because they make the laws, and know how to use them.
A wealthy town in Silicon Valley has declared itself a "mountain-lion habitat" to halt new affordable-housing projects in the area.
The state's new law, known as Senate Bill 9, allows up to four housing units to be built in a single-family lot, but Woodside, California, blocked the building of new housing projects.
In a January 27 memo, the town declared that all housing projects started under SB 9 would be indefinitely paused as of January 25 after a petition to consider Woodside a habitat for mountain lions — a species that is a candidate to be considered endangered in the state — was brought before the town council.
The town council was able to identify a clause in SB 9 that prohibits building on "land identified as habitat for protected species," according to the memo.
"Given that Woodside — in its entirety — is habitat for a candidate species, no parcel within Woodside is currently eligible for an SB 9 project," the memo said.
The town's mayor, Dick Brown, told The Almanac that it was "not the Woodside way" to prioritize housing over a habitat for endangered species.
"We love animals," he said. "Every house that's built is one more acre taken away from [mountain lions'] habitat. Where are they going to go? Pretty soon, we'll have nothing but asphalt and no animals or birds."
He added that the town was looking for alternative options for affordable housing.
Yeah — place them in those high-speed trains the citizens of Wooddale voted for, and then blocked from running through their community, when they discovered that there would be no private club car service. “The cars are parked in the desert outside Bakersfield, a town offering a far more homogeneous community for new arrivals from the south”, Mayor Brown told FWIW, “and are perfectly adequate for our little brown brothers, whom we love and care so deeply for. Why, compassion for the poor is ‘the Woodside way’, and so we won’t just abandon them out there; we’re going to pass an initiative for Californians to proved them with solar power.”
