By ROBBIE HUNTER |
PUBLISHED: July 24, 2017 at 11:07 am
UPDATED: July 25, 2017 at 4:27 am
Too bad that John Gamboa and Herman Gallegos didn’t dig a little deeper before they did the bidding of greedy developer/speculators in their July 7 column on California’s housing crisis.
If they would have looked around in their own back yard in the Bay Area, they would have found some real research instead of having to regurgitate the misleading information that the California Center for Jobs & The Economy spoon-fed to them as a “study.”
A study it wasn’t. Instead, the center’s report cherry-picked a few numbers out of some tired old statistical abstractions to trash the idea of paying decent, middle-class wages to construction workers.
If Gamboa and Gallegos wanted real information, they should have checked with the Mountain View City Council, which in 2013 asked its staff to look into a real-world prevailing wage project. The city’s analysis determined that the use of the prevailing wage added 10 percent to the cost of a taxpayer-subsidized, 51-unit Franklin Street Family Apartments complex.
Mountain View’s staff report relied on numbers that came straight from the developer. Gamboa and Gallegos, on the other hand, lifted some of the most CCJE’s most ridiculous readings of the prevailing wage’s impact to predict outlandish rises in housing prices, rents and poverty. They got it wrong.
The bottom line on the prevailing wage is that the higher productivity of a highly-skilled and trained work force keeps added labor costs manageable – about 4 percent, according to the research of SmartCitiesPrevail.org. And that’s before you add in the social cost savings when construction workers and their families don’t have to obtain food stamps or MediCal to survive.