'The Fire-breathing Elephant'

Editor:

Every article I see about housing costs (“Why California Housing Costs Are So High,” Oct. 24) ignores the fire-breathing elephant in the room: the profit motive. These articles always seem to omit the effects of house flippers, the anonymous LLCs buying up mobile home parks and apartment buildings and jacking up the rents, and the conversion of housing to vacation rentals, all of which demand a “reasonable return on investment” that is anything but reasonable. The articles never refer to the mortgage crisis of 2008, when the banks scammed people into buying houses they couldn’t afford, then repossessed them when the crash came and sat on them to keep prices high. Or the commercial real estate moguls that evict longstanding, popular tenants and leave the buildings empty for a tax write-off, keeping upstairs apartments out of the pool in the process.

I’m not against mom-and-pop landlords with a couple of rentals. I get having a vacation home — good for you. But if housing is a right and not a privilege, we need to do something about the housing parasites, whether that is levying higher taxes on investment entities (not real people) or somehow privileging homebuyers who plan to live in that home versus use it as an investment.

Beth Warner, Eureka