The line that struck me most powerfully was just tossed in offhand: Riverside's government collects 15% of its annual budget from PACE loans. The headline here

The line that struck me most powerfully was just tossed in offhand: Riverside's government collects 15% of its annual budget from PACE loans. The headline here was overhyped. The total volume of PACE loans isn't anything like the mortgage crisis, and total volume shapes secondary effects like bank failures and property value crashes. But if PACE is becoming a large portion of local government budgets, that causes its own problems. We've already seen the kind of abusive practices which arise when towns get their funding from speed traps. No one likes taxes, but tax revenue is generally a shared burden, and positively correlated with growth and population. When the incentives for financing are to operate against a smaller group of people, things go to hell really fast.