This isn’t unique to Lake Tahoe…
The housing crisis in Tahoe is as vast as the divide between real estate prices and local wages, and many people are stuck somewhere in the middle. Local incomes average around $60,000-$65,000 for an individual, while the median price of a home in North Lake Tahoe has vaulted to $1,125,000 — a 129% increase from before the pandemic, according to Mountain Housing Council and the Tahoe Sierra Board of Realtors. In Truckee, those real estate numbers are $1,082,500 for median home price, a 44% jump since the pandemic.
Renters are getting displaced by landlords who either wish to sell their home to take advantage of a real estate market that’s booming, or raise the rent to match the rates that San Francisco transplants with tech salaries are paying.
What’s the old saying — “We wanted workers. We got people instead?” Rents and home prices chase the wages of newcomers, and enforced by the cartel, those who hold the land.
Without viable places to live, locals are leaving town. Already, about half of Tahoe’s workforce commutes from outside of the Basin, according to a new study by the Tahoe Prosperity Center.
Without a workforce, “we won’t have any services in our region,” Zuardo said. “So that means we won’t have groceries. We won’t have restaurants. We won’t have anything. That’s what we’re talking about here.”
I haven’t given a lot of thought to ground rents or land value taxation for resort property but it seems reasonable to assess a value per square foot that goes up for advantageous locations — waterfront or view property. If the value rises to make private homes unsustainable, some other development idea will present itself, I’m sure…a hotel or club that preserves access to that value but makes economic sense for developers.
The fact that Lake Tahoe’s business community has been shoveling its wages outside the city is something that should have occurred to them but no shame, it seems to be an unrevealed mystery to other cities as well. Public employees and low-paid (“essential”) workers live furthest from their workplaces, traveling farther (a tax paid in time), adding to the climate issues we see in the news, and of course, taking local wages to spend on housing elsewhere. Ground rents or land value taxation would restrain the cost of housing and fund the development of more to meet the need.