Help, don't exclude, low-income
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ike other beautiful mountain valleys located tantalizingly close to the Wasatch Front, Morgan County has seen real estate prices surge in recent years. It's good for the county's tax revenues -- higher values mean more property taxes paid -- but it can put low- to moderate-income residents at a disadvantage.
And a proposal by some Morgan County residents won't help the situation. They want the County Council to consider so-called "mother-in-law apartments" -- basement bedrooms and kitchens, heated bedrooms over detached garages and the like -- to count toward the county's low- to moderate-income housing stock.
In fact, their pitch could be seen by some as a mockery of state law, which requires municipal and county governments to create general plans for development and management that "provide for ... the protection or promotion of moderate income housing."
Our laws regarding housing include this egalitarian mandate because, in theory at least, Americans share a collective belief in economic fairness.
Even if they wanted to, then, cities and counties couldn't wall themselves off and permit only the monied classes to live there. But, if they don't have enough low- to moderate-income housing, the same exclusivity is accomplished -- but without the walls.
In Morgan, of course, the situation is much less extreme than, say, in Marin County, Calif. In 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau put Morgan's median household income at $58,865. Weber County's, by comparison, was $47,481. (The median household income in Marin County, Calif., the nation's highest, was $67,731.)
And as everyone knows, in general the more money people have to spend, the higher the prices go. And since median incomes in Morgan are 24 percent higher than in, say, Weber County, home and residential land prices are reflecting that difference.
We urge the members of the Morgan County Council to view this through a prism of magnanimity: People who don't make lots of money -- whether young adults just out of high school or college, newlyweds, single-income adults or retirees on fixed incomes -- should be able to find affordable dwellings.
Spare bedrooms shouldn't count toward low- to moderate-income housing.
