Letter: It's time to stop talking about affordable housing and to start talking about managed decline

The recent lawsuit filed by Mountain Area Preservation against the Tahoe Regional Planning Authority to stop the implementation of their Phase 2 housing program is a prime example of everything that is wrong with the governance of the Tahoe Basin.

Even if the TRPA’s very modest changes were implemented, any affordable housing unit would still need hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit in government subsidies to be built. Their plan would only allow for about 1,000 new deed-restricted units when their studies (that took years and millions of dollars to produce) show the need is six times that amount. As a reminder, Sugar Pine Village is subsidized to the tune of $850,000 per unit, and they got the land for free (and property tax-free).

Enter Mountain Area Preservation, representing their 350 rich donors with their lawsuit. Even these modest changes were too much for them, and now TRPA will spend even more tax money fighting the lawsuit for years.

Layer on top of those local politicians who love dreaming up ordinances and regulations that read like a fantasy novel, further restricting height, width, density, coverage, wastewater, parking, color, shape, setbacks, transit, landscaping, and probably how many angels fit on the top of a pin. Plan approvals take months if not years - and that’s just at the local level.

There isn’t a sane developer or businessperson who will invest a serious sum of money with the uncertainty of a project moving forward given all the uncertainties and high costs of building here. It simply is less risky and higher return to invest capital elsewhere. In our current system, the only winners are the bureaucrats and their consultants, who take our tax dollars and slowly convert them into works of fantasy for us to sue each other over and steady paychecks for them. It would take roughly a billion of today’s dollars in subsidies to build out one-sixth of the affordable housing needs in the Basin. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that money isn’t coming anytime soon.

Take a drive down Highway 50, and the result of all of this is plain to see - vacant storefronts, a museum of 1960s-era houses and commercial buildings no longer fit for purpose, a population that has declined 20 percent or more, a dead airport, and a community with close to the highest cost of living in the world. Just how Mountain Area Preservation and perhaps TRPA want it, I suppose.

We’re so far away ideologically and structurally from an environment that would promote a healthy diversified economy and a growing population to support it that talking about those reforms would be a work of fantasy worthy of a bureaucrat’s fever dream. Rather, I think that we should pivot from discussions of affordable housing to one of managed decline, which is the reality we actually live in.

Oh, and one more request: would the last person leaving South Lake Tahoe please turn out the lights? Mountain Area Preservation and TRPA say it will help preserve the night sky.

- Seth Dallob

Seth Dallob is the Chief Operating Officer of NexGen Housing Partners (www.nexgenhp.com), a leading company in transit-oriented, affordable, and eco-friendly housing in Seattle. He and his wife are full-time South Lake Tahoe residents.