Opinion by The Pasadena Pundit  |  Exclusive release to Pasadena Now

Look at the front page of almost any newspaper in any place in America and you are likely to find a story about some victimized group that is aided by a government housing program or non-profit, using government funds. In Pasadena it is the Desiderio Project and Habitat for Humanity. Or it is the proposed Heritage Square with Danny Bakewell's politically wired low income housing project which will require a multi-million dollar over-market subsidy. Or it is the City of Pasadena's Inclusionary Housing program.
     According to the City's website there are 1,945 units of affordable rental housing in Pasadena whose occupants are assisted by some form of government financial housing subsidy and/or entitlement. Most of these units are restricted to very low income households at affordable rents. About another 350 units of affordable Inclusionary Housing have been mandated in new luxury apartment and condo developments, mainly in the City's urban core. In other words the impression left is that the only affordable housing in the entire City have been produced by government either by subsidies or by regulation.
     We've also seen the "poster boy" and "poster girl" photos in the front page of the Pasadena Star News and Pasadena Weekly with their stories about how low income persons can no longer can afford housing in upscale downtown locations or in gentrifying neighborhoods. Typically these photos are of single-parent minority women meant to jerk our emotional chains. Left unsaid is that it is government actions that are creating “exclusive” downtown luxury housing and “gentrifying” neighborhoods: namely redevelopment and the influence of the Gold Line light rail.
     The editors of the Pasadena Star News and the Pasadena Weekly tend to run stories and photos that only deal with the activities of the welfare state. That is because the welfare sector is what newspaper reporters identify with - it is what sociologists call their “reference group.“ How many newspaper reporters have contacts with landlords, realtors, or developers? Other than the ads a newspaper reader would hardly know there even was a private housing sector. The private sector is invisible.
     Liberals are fond of using the term the "invisible poor." They see the media as the mechanism that makes the poor visible and see themselves as their champions. But they don't want to make the landlords that house such poor people come into the light of day. So the bulk of the poor and their private sector housing providers remain invisible alright - but due to liberal media.
     Consider the City of Pasadena where about one third of its roughly 130,000 population are low and moderate income persons according to the 2005 updated U.S. Community Survey Census. About 40,000 are Hispanic. Of the Pasadena Unified School District's 21,321 total student enrollment about 11,701 (or 55%) are Hispanic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau about 14%, or 18,200 persons, are in poverty in Pasadena; of which about 2,246 are elderly. That leaves about 16,000 non-elderly in poverty. About 14,000 more people fall into the "moderate" income category (80% of median income). That's nearly 25% of the City population who are low and moderate income. This number may be much higher if highly transient student housing is included.
     The newspapers report these poor people as lacking affordable housing. This is often based on highly biased samples of newer Class A luxury apartment buildings in upscale locations rather than rents in the lower tiers of the rental housing market. Sure low and moderate income people cannot afford a $1,800 to $2,500 per month apartment in the Paseo Pasadena without subsidies. But that isn't indicative for all of the Pasadena rental market as the U.S. Census reveals. Affordable housing means old and obsolescent housing, not new luxury housing on expensive commercial land next to light rail stations.
     This begs the question: how can so many poor and moderate income people live in Pasadena if housing is so unaffordable? The obvious answer is that the private real estate market is accommodating most of the low and moderate income people already residing in the community! If you take the estimated 30,000 low and moderate income people in Pasadena and subtract about 4,500 living in public subsidized or regulated units, the private sector is housing 85% (about 25,500) of them. In other words, the private sector dwarfs the public sector in providing affordable housing.
     But you will never read that in the newspaper. Nor will you hear it in an City-sponsored Inclusionary Housing "Workshop" or a PUSD Surplus School Site Affordable Housing Commission Meeting. All you will hear is affordable housing atrocity stories.
     As journalist Jon Ham has written:
     "Reporters love these stories. They play into the standard journalism template that the private sector has questionable motives, i.e., profit, whereas the public sector's motives are pure, i.e. altruistic. Often ignored in reporting is the view that it's easy to be altruistic with other people's money, which is all the government has at its disposal.
     Why are newspaper journalists and City bureaucrats so out of touch with economic reality? One only needs to look at opinion polls to find out that journalists live in a cognitive ghetto of the Daily Planet newspaper published on Mars while the public lives in the real capitalistic world of planet Earth-USA. When journalism and city planning was "professionalized" any sense of objective reality was lost. As George Orwell stated: “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent (i.e., educated) person could believe in them.”
     Again as Jon Ham has written:
     "Because most had been immersed in the new culture of professional journalism (or city planning or environmentalism) their worldviews were amazingly similar. They wanted to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." They wanted "to change the world," not just report on it."
     What this means is that for the most part there is no "affordable housing crisis" per se in Pasadena. Certainly there is not enough of a crisis to justify regulatory takings of a third of the value of landowners properties to remedy “exclusionary housing.” There is a shortage of work force housing and a shortage of "flop houses" for the homeless, both mostly created by the demand for housing by immigrants. But neither the press or politicians want to deal with this politically incorrect reality. And anyone who challenges the prevailing affordable housing orthodoxy will find themselves silenced and branded as prejudiced against the poor and immigrants with surprising effectiveness. That the affordable housing crisis could be caused by a "proletariat" of immigrants rather than by the "bourgeouise" is not what journalists and city planners were programmed to believe in graduate school.
     The world views of politicians and those of the cognitive elites in our newspapers and in city planning make us believe in such an affordable housing crisis. Liberal politicians don't want all these new apartment and condo units going into downtown Pasadena and diminishing their political base. So they want their "fair share" of political constituents. For every four or so market rate tenants in new apartment projects they want at least one low income tenant for “political back-filling.“ So they concoct an affordable housing crisis to serve their political ends. Newspaper journalists are all too willing to take such a housing affordability crisis as a taken for granted reality. Newspaper reporters become political apparatchiks in the process.
     This is what novelist George Orwell meant by the term "NewsSpeak." As Orwell wrote in his novel "1984:"
     "Newspeak was the official language ... The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits ... but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable."
     Armed with the above knowledge when dealing with the affordable housing crisis in Pasadena we can get an idea of what George Orwell meant by the phrase in his book “1984” that “Ignorance is Strength.” So the first step in doing something about any so-called affordable housing crisis in Pasadena is to change our vested ideas even more than our vested interests