KEVIN WILLIAMSON: De Blasio’s Domino’s outrage sums up why businesses are fleeing NYC.
In New York, the problem is getting home at night. In much of California, the problem is having a home to go to, with artificial restrictions on building new housing causing runaway inflation in housing prices. In a sense, Bay Area real estate is expensive for the same reason as Times Square pizza on New Year’s Eve: Entry into the marketplace is artificially restricted. There are ways around that, from regulatory reform to more sensible tax policies. Instead, progressives such as San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who calls herself “pro-housing,” impose policies that make it harder to be a developer or a landlord, for instance politically motivated restrictions on the allocation of affordable-housing units. That’s one reason why San Francisco has seen only one new unit of affordable housing built for every nine new low-wage and moderate-wage jobs created since 2016.
Partly that is genuine ignorance — they hate capitalism so much that they never bothered to learn how it works and why. Part of it is the need for political scapegoats — for every disappointment in this vale of tears, there is a cackling Scrooge McDuck swan-diving into a pile of gold doubloons, and he is to blame.
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