Morgan Hill is about to join big and expensive metropolitan areas with its obscene home prices. That’s a shame. With the impending seven-digit home prices will come the same ailments faced by bigger cities such as an eventual exodus of a young workforce unfortunately priced out of the city.

With the $973,512 average single-family home price will also come a homogenous class of residents – primarily older yuppies who can afford the hefty down payments and the high mortgage payments. Morgan Hill will have priced out low- and median-income residents.

Do we want to become another Cupertino, Saratoga or Los Gatos? Or do we want to be known as the town that continues to do more to attract all kinds of residents into our neighborhoods?

We urge our city leaders to increase the percentage of affordable projects through the city’s Residential Development Control System or Measure C. The current 20 percent allotment for such critical projects must be revised.

Typically built by nonprofit developers such as South County Housing, they fill a critical void in the housing market by building units in the various affordable price ranges. The city’s RDA needs to give more financial support to these projects, but it can only do that with the continued assistance from state and congressional leaders with money for such type of housing.

Having developers not comply and imposing heavy mitigation fees is not the solution to the problem. Forcing them to build the housing necessary to meet the demand is the solution.

The other 80 percent of housing allotments permitted in the city for market rate projects of various sizes must also increase, not just a promise to build a mere 10 to 13 percent of their housing stock for low-income, but more. Only developers who increase these commitments should win the allotments in the competition process.

In all fairness to Morgan Hill, the housing department has been administering this program well ensuring that the units remain affordable across property sales, but while the city does not subsidize these units, the developers must realize the need and act in a socially responsible way.

The city must also come up with a creative way to discourage the few developers who build small- or large-lot projects from paying hefty double housing mitigation fees to get out of building their required share of affordable units.

We also wonder why downtown projects are essentially exempt from building below-market-rate housing or paying mitigation fees. The city ought to reconsider such a policy and perhaps require a small amount of those units be priced for low- and median-income residents.

With a larger stock of affordable housing, maybe Morgan Hill could attract more jobs and become an even better community than what it is now.

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