In an ironic twist, Huntington beach home owners who qualified for subsidized homeownership prices, are now suing the city because they are barred from selling their homes at market rates.
The law requires this subsidized housing to remain affordable, so the allowed sales prices move up with income, and move down with interest rates. With income stagnant, and interest rates rising, current Cape Ann models can be sold at $366K, not much above the 2000 price of $290K. Similar housing in that zip code goes for $650K, and that is what I presume these plaintiffs would like to charge. Does that seem fair?
I guess they don’t want the new buyers to benefit from the same laws that allowed them to purchase a home. Lawsuits like this make me wonder if we should ever provide affordable subsidized housing…ungrateful xxxxxx.
I wish I could say their loss is a foregone conclusion, but all bets are off when there’s a court and a plaintiff who claims to have been victimized by the government.
Presumably they were informed up front that the property rights they were buying were restricted – and they obviously agreed to those restrictions in exchange for getting the reduced price. This government subsidy was intended to provide for their shelter and stability, not to enable them to profit from the flipping lotto.
They claim the law limiting their sales price was enacted in 2004. If these same people had bought 3 years later, at a little higher price, say $350K, and sold in 10 years for a market price of $300K, they would be suing the government too, for not subsidizing the market price and giving them money at closing. Some people want to blame someone else for everything, and we will see a lot of blaming and suing going around when the real estate tide goes out.
I think your fundamental mis-conception is how these people think of affordable housing. To them its an affordable housing ATM. Cheap for them to get into, easy for them to extract wealth from to subsidize those stagnant wages. Easy to dump on someone else so they can retire early! Now thats affordable.
You just need to liberate yourself from those stuffy ideas of sacrifice to help your fellow man and the common good, you’ll get it!
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