Another Day In The Life

While the crook and the clown fight over the presidency, Instapundit gives us two more examples from the "it's just another day in your increasingly government-planned life" file:

First up, staggering ignorance of the laws of supply and demand:

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What’s the Matter With San Francisco?

We are watching the old San Francisco slip away before our eyes. Every time a housing unit becomes vacant, it goes on the market at a price so high that no organizer, writer, teacher, activist or artist could dream of affording it. Trying things that don’t have monetary potential just isn’t possible anymore.
How did we get here?

—The Atlantic’s “City Lab” blog, in a 2005 article with an unintentionally hilarious “unexpected” dek: “The city’s devastating affordability crisis has an unlikely villain—its famed progressive politics.”

Which brings us to Fox Butterfield*, Progressive Urban Planner:

“You cannot lower the cost of housing by building more. Supply creates its own demand,” said Amit Ghosh, chief planner for The City.
If more market rate dwellings are built, Ghosh predicted, “rich people living outside would want to come to San Francisco to fill them. And how does that relieve our supply problem?”

—The San Francisco Chronicle, “Highrises called cure for city housing crunch,” March 8th, 1999. Ghosh was the chief of the San Francisco planning department from 1992 to 2008.
 

Next, another installment in the Nice Work If You Can Get It series:

WHAT JOB PAYS THE MOST FOR DOING THE LEAST WORK? Try running a local public housing authority in a small town like Linden, New Jersey, Clayton, Oklahoma or Mabank, Texas. Your paycheck is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and odds are you’ll only have a handful of housing units to oversee.

“The executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Linden, New Jersey, for example, drew $295,000 a year for overseeing 200 government-owned housing project apartments and 350 Section 8 vouchers redeemed with private landlords,” reports Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

“That’s more than the same position makes in poverty-plagued Newark with 25 times as many residents, and more than the position in major cities like Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, according to HUD’s Public Housing Authority Executive Compensation database covering 2014, the most recent available year.”

The Mabank ED’s salary is only $47,005, but then overseeing a mere 16 public housing units means the job pays nearly $3,000 per unit managed. It’s not a time-consuming job, why not have a second job? Down in Marietta, GA., the ED got $242,000 in salary, plus a $50,000 bonus!