Everybody wants to go to heaven, nobody wants to die. Everyone wants housing to be affordable, but few are willing or able to subsidize other people’s rents. But in our perfect world of Santa Cruz, somebody should, and we know who that is: the next guy. For 40 years now that’s been the ethical foundation of our so-called inclusionary housing policy, which is the only active housing policy we’ve ever had.

Granted, there’s a self-serving logic to it, summed up in that old adage, “Perfection is the enemy of progress.” Progress of course is anathema to conservative minds, as is imagination and innovation, judging from the look of our built environment. The imposition of some ill-defined perfection justifies running out the clock on the entitlement process for building applications, encumbering them with costly delays and studies, revisions and every feel-good accessory in the catalogue, and then insisting that the developer rent or sell 10, 15 or 20% of the project at a loss, which of course necessitates raising the price of the rest proportionately, which in turn requires project upgrades to attract a more affluent clientele. That is seen as proof, to the perfectionists, of just how greedy the guy was to begin with, and justifies upping inclusionary requirements even further, always expecting a different result. For a long while it actually did succeed in suppressing new housing, and everyone here who already owned their housing grew richer for it.

The flood of new construction that we see today is the inevitable outcome of decades of this ruthless suppression through such strategies, coupled with intentionally inflated construction cost mandates — like our very own “green building” rules piled atop already stringent state requirements — which finally drove demand to such extremes that building housing became profitable again and, with state mandates in place, possible. Something had to give. But this too could and probably will change.

The last time robber barons had their way with this country, we got the Great Depression. That was a global catastrophe. America got out of it through socialism — Roosevelt’s New Deal. Germany got out of it by going to war. This country is leaning German these days. I worry about that a lot, especially as I watch all our safety nets being shredded. But there’s a lot we can and should remember about the Great Depression, apart from the trauma it caused our parents and grandparents.

Imagine real estate values dropping to 1975 levels. Buy a three bedroom, two bath fixer-upper for $25,000, if you have that much. Or pick one up at auction for the back taxes, to be paid for by consolidating your far-flung family under one roof. Many hands make light rent. Or shuffle all the little ones into one bunk bedroom and take on boarders, two to a room. Any garage that isn’t a repair or workshop for the otherwise unemployed becomes home for another family. And if you’re not growing food in your front, rear and side yards, you’re probably not eating. That’s how citizens housed themselves when governments failed. It’s harsh, but it beats the Hoovervilles and the ‘Bo camps and the company towns.

New housing doesn’t cost anything if you don’t build it. Construction costs a fortune if you’re intent on discouraging it. That’s all we the people have learned in 50 years, or at least the people we’ve elected or hired to guide us. They have no other vocabulary with which to define and address planning. And that’s why, unless our mayor institutes meaningful audits and reforms to the city’s bloated and corrupted entitlement pit — before we’re asked to vote on it — his $5 million a year housing initiative is doomed to produce little or no housing, only more perfectionists. Because, sad to say, regulations and initiatives add up to little more than one administrator’s way of creating another administrator, and one stick-in-the-mud’s way of creating more mud.

I would rather be tasked with emptying the ocean with a spoon than to rely on hobbled technocrats to provide democratic housing solutions.

Mark Primack would like to hear from you at mark@markprimack.com.