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near services, however downtown infill housing is not family friendly. Also, high occupancy developments in older downtown areas that were meant to be occupied by small stores will require new expensive infrastructure because existing systems cannot handle the increased demand. In addition, parking structures will almost certainly have to be built to provide adequate parking. Finally, it is difficult to monitor the continued affordability of a few scattered units. Peter MacDonald, 400 Main Street, Suite 210, said the draft Housing Element represents a sincere effort by the City staff to balance all of the forces that play in Pleasanton politics. The process has been inclusive and the staff work has been extremely professional. Unfortunately, certain housing policies incorporated in the Housing Element involving rent controls will exacerbate the extreme shorting of housing and drive the real price of housing even further beyond the reach of our children and the next generation of Californians. We have a moral obligation and the resources to leave our children a better world than the world we inherited. In the field of housing the Bay Area is failing miserably. The measure of our failure is the price level of housing. In 1970 the Bay Area median house prices were approximately 40% higher than the national median. By 2003 the Bay Area median house prices have risen to approximately 275% higher than the national median. What went wrong is that revised California planning statutes in the early 1970 gave local government complete control over the housing supply. By the mid-1970's the price of housing began to escalate precipitously and has relentlessly continued to rise faster than the price of housing in the other 49 states. One unfortunate side effect of this government sponsored increase in home prices has been that living standards have declined for all of those who are forced to buy in this over priced housing market. A common and economically destructive local government solution to government scarcity is to micro-manage that scarcity through rent controls. That is the approach taken in the draft Housing Element. Rather than just taking the land, as with the Bemal Property, the Housing Element proposed to expropriate 25% of new housing units for the benefit of low and very low income households through inclusionary rent controls in perpetuity. Inclusionary rent controls have the same poisonous effects on housing supply as any other price control scheme. Hardly an apartment has been built in Pleasanton since the City adopted the inclusionary rent controls in the year 2000. The price level of housing soon rises to reflect the cost burden of the subsidized units. At Pleasanton's rate of growth, ten years of inclusionary rent controls will generate subsidized housing for only 2% of the population. As a cruel irony, people in the subsidized income categories alone will pay at least five times more in higher housing costs than the subsidies received by the lucky winners of the City's subsidized housing lotteries. Inclusionary rent controls allow anti-housing politicians to tell voters they are "for affordable housing" while implementing a policy designed to make housing less affordable and less available to 98% of housing consumers. Inclusionary rent controls are the wrong model to address a very real problem. What passes for urban planning in the Bay Area is a terrible scheme to increase home equity that is failing to deliver a decent quality of life to ourselves, our children, and the next generation of Californians. He has no hope that current trends and policies as stated in the draft Housing Element will do anything but worsen the government created housing mess we are in. What can a community do if it wants to re-empower the private housing Pleasanton City Council 17 04/15/03 Minutes