Inclusionary housing ordinances would create opportunity

[KamaAina]

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article31239620.html

Inclusionary housing ordinances help create affordable development, but they also counter a history of excluding whichever group was politically undesirable at the time from communities through zoning restrictions.

Recent research clearly shows that poor children who move into higher-income neighborhoods make significantly more money when they grow up than kids who remain in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. One of the easiest ways to create these opportunities is to make sure new development includes housing for people at a range of incomes.

If we care about income inequality and giving kids the opportunity to succeed, inclusionary housing deserves a closer look....

To make housing more affordable for all, we need to invest in programs that provide homes to our most vulnerable and to people who won’t succeed without some help. Inclusionary housing is part of that effort, but so is Assembly Bill 35, which would increase state tax credits available to developers of affordable homes and Assembly Bill 1335, which would create a housing trust fund.

[yeoman6987]

1. I would love for them to start in Malibu, bel air and the OC

I think the poor should have the opportunity to go to schools in wealthy districts. I am being serious. We should build affordable places in those areas and some in Silicon Valley. The poor have been through enough not only in California but everywhere.

[KamaAina]

2. Some of them do

Thanks to a consent decree, students in the Ravenswood district, a poor, largely minority district covering East Palo Alto and east Menlo Park, can enter a lottery for places in the wealthy districts that surround it, including Menlo Park and Palo Alto. We need more of this as well as less segregation.