When housing’s too expensive…

…here’s who you lose: Teachers, firefighters, teachers, and other middle-class workers. From Nathan Heller, at The New Yorker:

The quandary became flagrant last week: news circulated that the Palo Alto City Council had moved to explore subsidized housing for families earning between a hundred and fifty thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

The proposal, advanced by Palo Alto’s vice-mayor, travelled far and wide because the numbers seemed preposterous. In much of the country, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year qualifies as wealth. The subsidized-housing idea has an eye to public employees—government officials, teachers, firefighters—and would be part of a constellation of housing efforts that the council has launched to build units in Palo Alto’s downtown, near its transit hubs.