☆ Khamis: SV leaders will ask for more taxes. Deregulation does “a lot more” to fix housing.
“There have been so many fees and taxes that have driven out all the developers,” says Silicon Valley Business Alliance’s Johnny Khamis. He’s hopeful that rolling back fees will increase building, not just downtown high-rises but throughout San Jose. Will voters keep trusting the tax hikers who still haven’t fixed housing, health care, transportation or mental health services?
It’s going to be more of the same. Our leaders are going to ask us to just tax ourselves more so that we can fix the problems that the last few taxes still haven't fixed.
We've had Measure B from the county, which was a $1 billion parcel tax and Measure E from the City of San Jose, which was the transfer tax. Those were supposed to “end homelessness and provide low-income housing and, yet, we're not getting housing prices down and we certainly didn't end homelessness. We have had several tax measures for transportation but our roads are still congested and public transportation is still not being used. Before we tax ourselves more, we need to see how our money is being spent.
People are going to continue to complain about the cost of living rising when, in fact, they keep voting to increase their cost of living by taxing themselves. Whether it be property tax, sales taxes, higher fees, you name it: there's all kinds of new proposals out there to increase the cost of living and people need to recognize that raising taxes raises their cost of living.
I’m also hopeful that San Jose is starting to look at rolling back some of the high fees of construction and regulations that have made it nearly impossible to build housing.
There have been so many fees and taxes that have driven out all the developers. There are things being discussed right now that will make it easier to build housing, whether it be looking at regulations that make historical monuments out of ugly, 60-year-old buildings or housing impact fees that increase the costs to build housing here. The council has seen some success already during the last year: since they reduced the high-rise fees and some other fees, developers started coming back.
We need to increase development by reducing the fees and regulations in the rest of the city, not just for high rises in downtown San Jose but on infill and all multifamily development.
Deregulation is going to do a lot more than taxing. I just hope the population asks for more accountability and doesn't just trust that if we tax ourselves more, we're going to solve housing, mental health, hospitals, and other problems.
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