Does your employer subsidize your mortgage payment? What about extra incentives for moving closer to work? If you work for the City of San Antonio, you’ll soon be eligible to have taxpayers do that for you!
Exclusive pensions, superior salaries, and rock-solid job security apparently aren’t enough of an incentive to keep employees on the government dole. So what else would a city bureaucrat think to do? Subsidize!
As part of the Home Ownership Program for Employees (HOPE), employees of the City of San Antonio will be eligible for a portion of $240,000 in forgivable loans to be applied to their house payments, so long as they agree to move to the inner-city.
Were you looking to buy a house in San Antonio soon? Sorry. This program isn’t available to non-city employees (despite it being funded with your tax dollars).
This isn’t the first bright idea the City of San Antonio has had. Remember when they decided to spend $180 million on a boondoggle streetcar project? The Heartland Institute called it a “disaster”.
And let’s not forget their idea to install 120 electric-car charging stations to “full the needs of… 100 electric cars in the city.” That only cost taxpayers $5,000 per station.
If history is any guide, it will only be a matter of time before some over-paid bureaucrat looks north to his liberal counterparts in Austin and proposes to subsidize city employees’ transportation to and from work as they do.
