CASA Meeting Dec 13, 2017 375 Beale St S F

CASA is the most powerful government committees that you have never heard of.  It is a group of developers, politicians and NGOs that want to set housing policy for the entire Bay Area region of Governments (101 cities and towns).  They do not videotape their meetings. A private citizen, Ken Burkowski of Emeryville has been videotaping meetings for several years and posts them at www.regional-video.com .

The Future of the Bay Area Housing CASA Committee-transparency and lack of middle class housing.

CASA is the most powerful government committees that you have never heard of. It is a group of developers, politicians and NGOs that want to set housing policy for the entire Bay Area region of Governments (101 cities and towns). They do not videotape their meetings. A private citizen, Ken Burkowski of Emeryville has been videotaping meetings for several years and posts them at www.regional-video.com .

Here is a clip of Zelda Bronstein addressing CASA for its lack of transparency.

Former ABAG economist Steven Levy complains about the lack of middle class housing.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that a "quiet coup" has seized our local government power in favor of an unelected regional body, developers and NGOs. We must stand up for our local communities

and democracy.

- Not only do they not videotape their meetings; as I noted, they don’t document their proceedings with minutes. There is an audiotape, but it’s not posted. You’ve have to ask MTC staff for a link. I think the meetings of the CASA Steering Committee are taped—check it out. But the Steering Committee doesn’t steer. And, if you watched Ken’s video of last Wedneday’s Technical Committee meeting, you know that the extent to which that entity is going to be allowed to provide advice is unclear. Zelda

Marinwood Park Tree Vandal exposed Before and After

Quietwood Dr. Homeowner illegally removes trees in Marinwood Park. Seen above is the satellite photo showing a lush canopy of trees appearing on Google Maps behind the house.



Trees have been clearcut and illegally removed in December 2017

Eric Dreikosen, Marinwood CSD manager refuses to hold the vandal responsible because "she had no malicious intent".


A similar situation happened in McNears Park and the resident was charged with felony vandalism and threatened with civil action up to $80,000. See the story in the Marin IJ HERE.

Do you think we should allow residents to clearcut trees in Marinwood Park when it interfers with their view? Write the Marinwood CSD and Staff:

Bill Shea
IRVING SCHWARTZ  
 Izabela Perry
Jeff Naylor
Leah Kleinman-Green
Shane Demarta
Eric Dreikosen

Marinwood Fire Department: How To: $500 DIY Kitchen Remodel while waiting for Martha Stewart

The Marinwood Fire Department INSISTS they have a new "Martha Stewart Kitchen" makeover.  The original estimate cost was $5000 but rose to $100,000 quickly as demands for luxury appliances ($5000 oven,  $4500 Viking Range, Custom stone countertops) and Contractor's with ties to the Marinwood CSD and the Fire Service "competed for bids".   The Marinwood CSD altered the contract to "reduce costs" but still the bid was way out of budget range. One very generous resident offered to DONATE THE ENTIRE COST of the Kitchen up to $25,000.  The Marinwood CSD refused the gift.  Now the CSD is insisting on using special "government contractors" at 4 times the original bid cost when a VERY SERVICABLE kitchen can be done quickly for well under $25,000. 

It is absurd.

So, as a public service, I am posting this video for Marinwood CSD.  This is how REAL PEOPLE innovate when budgets are tight. It may contain a few ideas they can use to freshen up the kitchen while awaiting their "Martha Stewart Kitchen" to arrive.

Marinwood CSD December 2017 - A circus of lawsuits and huge waste of tax resources (again!)

Lawsuit settled with Marinwood Firefighters for $10k PLUS $107,000 in legal fees, Marinwood FD kitchen makeover gets sent out to bid AGAIN. CSD insists on a luxury kitchen makeover for $$$ (featuring $4500 gourmet range and granite countertops) when a simple remodel could be done for less than $25k. Arguments erupt when CSD president attacks public speakers.  Marinwood manager Eric Dreikosen avoids discussion of Miller landslide conflict and ignores illegal tree removal in Marinwood Park by resident.  Huge sums have been spent on legal fees in 2017 instead of providing for the district.  Why won't the CSD board will  hold manager accountable?   Secret CSD board committee to decide future of the Marinwood Fire Department, populated mostly by fire department personnel and people known to be big supporters of the fire department will decide the FATE of the Marinwood CSD.  The feckless CSD directors have Marinwood on a path to bankruptcy . It is already technically insolvent due to pension obligations but refuses to make fundamental changes that will put it on a path to financial sustainability.

Millennials in the Workforce

How My Parents’ Divorce Ruined Our Holidays And Family Life Forever

How My Parents’ Divorce Ruined Our Holidays And Family Life Forever

In the decades since my parents’ divorce and through the years of my marriage, I have learned no-fault divorce is one of the biggest lies of our culture.

By Anonymous
DECEMBER 12, 2017

December always reminds me how much I hate divorce. As the lights on the Christmas tree twinkle while we wrap presents, I am anxious about family gatherings and travel plans. Three decades ago, when my parents divorced, family Christmas gatherings became very complicated.

My parents’ divorce is the one that their generation was told to have. Like many others married in the 1970s, their marriage ended with a no-fault divorce. One of them wasn’t happy and felt the only way to solve that was not to be married anymore. In the name of fulfillment and contentment, our family broke apart.


Fast-forward 30 years, and you’ll find the children all thriving in adulthood and two parents who rebounded and eventually remarried. On the surface, it seems like we all lived happily ever after.

The media loves to feed these sort of lies to their audiences. For example, The New York Times runs terrible pro-divorce articles regularly; here’s a particularly disturbing one.
Pro-Divorce Arguments Are Built On Lies

The writers at The Times of London currently have a campaign trying to reformEngland’s divorce laws. They believe divorce should be easier to get than current legislation that requires “a married couple wishing to split up [to] show evidence of irretrievable breakdown in the form of adultery, unreasonable behaviour, desertion, two years’ separation with consent or five years’ separation without consent.”

They propose instead: “Divorce, wherever possible, should simply be an acknowledgment that people have moved on. A marriage that lasts only ten years can still be deemed a success. It should be assumed that divorces are no one’s fault and that people need a simple, dignified, relatively fast way to split up, while also acknowledging that a partner who has sacrificed their career to look after children will need help to set up again.”

Pardon me while I roll my eyes. As our culture tries to negate the beautiful union of covenantal marriage, we look the other way from the hurts and hardships divorce creates.

In the decades since my parents’ divorce and through the years of my marriage, I have learned that no-fault divorce is one of the biggest lies our culture tries to get people to believe. In truth, “no-fault divorce is destroying women, children, and men. More precisely, divorce destroys marriage, and the destruction of marriage harms every party involved. The legality of no-fault divorce just makes it infinitely easier to hurt people. There are no two ways about it. No one comes out of a divorce a happier and more whole person.”

Divorce Is Never Just About the Couple

When a marriage ends, it doesn’t just affect the immediate family — the two people who are no longer spouses and their children. Parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, and friends all are part of a larger network of relationships divorce hurts and breaks. As the divorced couple begins new relationships separate from each other, the relationships become yet more complicated, especially for the children.

Navigating a divorced family was and is like walking through a field of landmines. I was supposed to call my stepdad Dad but by his first name when I was with my real dad. I also certainly was not to ever refer to my biological dad as my real dad in front of my stepdad — I mean Dad.

My dad (real, not step) also remarried a woman I was not supposed to talk about in front of my mom. My stepdad wanted me to call his parents Grandma and Grandpa, but they told me not to “because they were never really going to be my grandparents.” I have step- and half-siblings who are allowed to call my dad’s (step, not real) parents Grandmaand Grandpa because they are biological family. My step-siblings call my mom by her first name and call me their stepsister, but I was always expected to introduce them as my just my brothers and sisters. My half-siblings don’t want to hear anything about my real dad and my parents’ divorce.

Confused? So was I. I have a hard time keeping it all straight even now. As a child, I felt like I couldn’t explain to my friends who my family was because all of the titles and names were offensive to someone. Before I had even finished half of elementary school, the man called Dad living in my home had become a different person, and a different woman was living with my dad.

The way our extended familial relationships suffered due to the divorce might be some of the hardest consequences for me to understand. At my biological grandma’s funeral, my siblings and I were left out of the family pictures. We watched our cousins treated differently just because their parents had remained married. We stopped getting invited to family reunions. Today I’m a stranger to most of my relatives on my dad’s side because growing up I saw him so little and them even less.

When I was a child, anxiety loomed over visits with my dad. Both of my parents always loved me, but to have excitement to visit my dad was a judgment against my life with my mom, and to be happy to return home after a visit with dad was an indictment against him. Either way, I caused a parent grief. I was torn in two and couldn’t tell anyone how I felt. I coped by pretending whichever parent wasn’t present at the time didn’t exist.

My Story Is the Story of Children of Divorce

My story is just one experience, but Leila Miller interviewed 70 other adults whose parents divorced, and their stories are all similar to mine. She compiled their stories into a book called “Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak” to give what is “rarely offered: The actual words of those most affected by divorce, but who almost never get to speak for themselves.” Miller is an impartial person to offer this book, as her family’s marriages are still together.

Listening to Miller speak about what she gleaned from her interviews, I felt as if I was hearing my story told by other people. Miller found that “even inside the family, the children are not permitted to voice their real feelings. Love inside the family feels fragile: The kids have absorbed the message that people sometimes leave each other or get kicked out. They may view love as unreliable. Even if children could verbalize their feelings (which they can’t), they are afraid to risk losing their parents’ love. They don’t want to upset Mom or Dad.” Today I still have to fight the insecurities that creep into my heart.

I’ve never wished that my parents were back together, and I certainly wouldn’t want my parents’ second marriages to end. The divorce was always final for me; I just always wished I didn’t have divorced parents. I love my stepdad, stepmom, step-siblings, and half-siblings, all relationships I wouldn’t have if not for my parents’ divorce. I have a beautiful life. But there is this sadness that aches because I know we all have broken and scarred relationships because of divorce, and I can’t do anything about it.
My Parents’ Divorce Terrified Me for My Kids and Marriage

Since I married, I’ve prayed that my husband and I will grow old together; that we will be quick to forgive, slow to anger, and not keep a record of wrongs against each other. We are sinners who need to give and accept grace if we are going to pass on a legacy to our children of love and faithfulness in our marriage. I have no disillusionment that I am somehow above divorce. But may God save me — and my husband and children — from ever having to suffer on that road.
Everything good about it was ruined because it ended with that dreaded separation, just like all of the Christmases of my childhood I can remember.

I am terrified by the statistic that adults who come from divorced families are more likely to divorce than those whose parents remained married. Not surprisingly, both of my parents come from divorced homes. My mom once told me the two greatest hurts in her life are her divorce and her parents’ divorce.

The only time my dad ever spoke to me about the divorce was when he said it was the only regret of his life. It makes sense. He didn’t get to teach us how to drive, walk me down the aisle, and spend most holidays with his kids.

One December 26, my dad picked us up and told us how excited he was to celebrate Christmas with us. I remember feeling sad for my mom, who was standing at the door waving to us as we left. Looking back, I see how much effort my dad put into that day—the only day he came to see us that month—but it fell so flat.

We went to the movies, opened presents, and got to eat at least twice the number of desserts my mom would have allowed. When it was all done, we said goodbye to dad for four weeks. Everything good about it was ruined because it ended with that dreaded separation, just like all of the Christmases of my childhood I can remember.

The Divorce Never Really Ends the Suffering

I once thought the holidays would be easier when I had my own family. I didn’t know that grandparents would have expectations about when they got to see their grandkids. I didn’t know that Christmas would still be shuffling back and forth between my parents’ homes hoping not to upset anyone. I didn’t know that I’d have to explain to my children for many years why I have two sets of parents.

When my children were small, I thought all of the grandparents would like a photo calendar of the children for Christmas. I put together the best pictures from the first three years of their lives. When I flipped through the pages, I realized couldn’t give it to my parents. One of the pictures had my mom and stepdad in it. Another one had my real dad. Everyone would be offended. I kept the calendars, and a day later I bought everyone generic gift cards and a box of chocolates.

That Christmas I gave out lame presents that should have been something so much more personal and delightful, and I had to do it twice because that’s how a divorced family does Christmas. You pretend everything is jolly even though at every gathering some of your family are missing. You establish new traditions and memories that exclude some of the most important people in your life. And no one wants to know that even though you’re fine, you really think it stinks.

Will Marin become a two caste system too?

Will Marin become a two caste system too?

Playgrounds for Elites

The increasingly left-wing politics of leading U.S. cities clashes with the aspirations of middle-class residents.

By Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox — December 12, 2017

The revival of America’s core cities is one of the most celebrated narratives of our time — yet, perhaps paradoxically, urban progress has also created a growing problem of increasing inequality and middle-class flight. Once exemplars of middle-class advancement, most major American cities are now typified by a “barbell economy,” divided between well-paid professionals and lower-paid service workers. As early as the 1970s, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income neighborhoods began to shrink more dramatically in inner cities than anywhere else — and the phenomenon has continued. Today, in virtually all U.S. metro areas, the inner cores are more unequal than their corresponding suburbs, observes geographer Daniel Herz.

Signs of this gap are visible. Homelessness has been on the rise in virtually all large cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, even as it declines elsewhere. Despite numerous exposés on the growth of suburban poverty, the poverty rate in core cities remains twice as high; according to the 2010 census, more than 80 percent of all urban-core population growth in the previous decade was among the poor. For all the talk about inner-city gentrification, concentrated urban poverty remains a persistent problem, with 75 percent of high-poverty neighborhoods in 1970 still classified that way four decades later.
Clearly, then, the urban renaissance has not lifted all, or even most, boats. San Francisco, arguably the nation’s top urban hot spot, is seeing the most rapid increase in income inequality of any metropolitan area in the nation, according to a Bloomberg study. The ranks of the country’s most bifurcated cities include such celebrated urban areas as San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where the poverty rate is higher now than before the 1992 riots, both in the city proper and in the riot zone.
The new urban demographic — a combination of poor residents, super-affluent households (many childless), and a younger generation with limited upward mobility — has created conditions peculiarly ideal for left-wing agitation. This marks a sharp contrast with the early 1990s, when urban voters embraced pragmatic mayors like Rudy Giuliani in New York, Bob Lanier in Houston, and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles. Even San Francisco in 1991 elected Frank Jordan, a middle-of-the-road Democrat and former police chief. In some cases, these pioneering mayors were followed by less groundbreaking but highly effective leaders like New York’s Michael Bloomberg or Houston’s Bill White. The resulting golden era of urban governance helped foster safer streets and more buoyant economies, attracting immigrants and a growing number of young and talented people to the urban core. Ironically, though, the urban revival fostered demographic changes that would make it much harder for these reform mayors to win today.
The new urban demographics have also occasioned a huge drop in civic participation in cities like New York and Los Angeles; in such Democrat-dominated cities, little motivation exists for any but the most ideologically driven or economically dependent voters to go to the polls. Bill de Blasio, for example, won the 2013 New York mayoral election with the lowest-percentage turnout since the 1920s, while Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti won reelection with only 20 percent of voters casting ballots — less than half of the turnout when Riordan won in 1993.
The electorate has not only shrunk but has also become demonstrably more left-leaning. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan garnered 31 percent of the vote in San Francisco, while winning 27.4 percent in Manhattan and over 38 percent in Brooklyn. By 2012, Mitt Romney, a more moderate Republican, won barely 13 percent of the vote in San Francisco, and he garnered less than half of Reagan’s share 28 years earlier in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Donald Trump did even worse in all these areas.
Cities today are about as politically diverse as the former Soviet Union; they are increasingly dominated by “the civic Left,” for which pragmatism and moderation represent weakness and compromise. The emergence of Trump seems to have deepened this instinct, with mayors such as de Blasio and Garcetti, Seattle’s Ed Murray, and Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges all playing leading roles in the progressive “resistance” against the president. Their anti-Trump posturing is mostly for show, but these mayors are pushing substantive — and increasingly radical — agendas of social engineering. Their initiatives include, in Los Angeles, imposing “road diets” on commuters to reduce car usage (while making traffic worse), as well as “green energy” schemes that raise energy prices. Most are committed to serving as “sanctuary” cities and enacting unprecedented hikes in the minimum wage in an effort to eliminate income inequality by diktat.

Many of these efforts clash with the aspirations of middle-class residents, who tend to drive cars, want to preserve their human-scale neighborhoods, and own small businesses highly sensitive to wage levels. Regulatory policies that seek to limit lower-density housing have led to escalating home prices in areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland. In these areas, housing costs (adjusted for income) are roughly two to three times higher than in places like Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh.
At the same time, high income taxes work against upper-middle-class entrepreneurs, who are usually stuck footing the bill for the “civic Left” playbook. These businesspeople often don’t have access to tax shelters, and they usually don’t earn most of their money through capital gains. Particularly vulnerable are those paying higher local income taxes, most of them living in and around the big coastal metros and the Midwest’s new basket case, Chicago.
No surprise, then, that many of those leaving California, New York, and other blue havens are people in their mid 30s to early 50s — precisely the age when people are raising families, buying houses, and launching businesses. For many, an escape from the Left means heading to places where the political climate is, if not outwardly conservative, more moderate and business-friendly.
Nor is the progressive agenda likely to help its intended beneficiaries: the poor. The prospect of rapidly rising wages for mid-level jobs is undermining sectors like the Los Angeles garment industry, for example, where an exodus of employers is already occurring. Overall, as documented in a Center for Opportunity Urbanism study, economic prospects for minorities are much brighter in metro areas other than New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. This is particularly true for homeownership, where the rates for blacks are at least 20 percent higher in cities like Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlotte, compared with those more glamorous cities. Adjusted for income, homes are less than half as expensive for blacks and Hispanics in metropolitan Atlanta or Dallas–Fort Worth as in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Meantime, heavily white cities with rising real-estate values like Portland, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle are seeing what remains of their minority neighborhoods disappear.
Crime poses a conundrum for the new Left urban politics. The decline in crime in the 1990s reduced homicides dramatically, likely helping to reverse population loss in most cities. Now homicides are back on the rise in many large cities — but instead of bolstering law enforcement, most mayors have embraced the Black Lives Matter critique, which blames crime on institutionalized police racism. They do so despite measurable evidence that the main victims of this outlook, which has led to “de-policing” of vulnerable communities, are minorities and the poor.
Seattle, a city that has benefited mightily from the recent tech boom, epitomizes the tendency to pursue a left-wing agenda that undermines the very people it is intended to help. A city-funded University of Washington study found that Seattle’s minimum-wage increase actually reduced incomes and jobs for lower-wage workers. In a state with no income tax, Seattle’s city council unanimously passed a law that applies a 2.25 percent tax on income above $250,000 for individuals and above $500,000 for married couples filing together. Developers outside the city limits, such as in nearby Bellevue, are eager to accommodate the inevitable exodus of residents.
There is nothing inevitable about the future trajectory of urban economies. The suburbs, consigned to the dustbin of history by many urban boosters, have rebounded from the Great Recession. Demographer Jed Kolko, analyzing the most recent census numbers, suggests that most big cities’ population growth now lags their suburbs, which have accounted for over 80 percent of metropolitan expansion since 2011. Even where the urban-core renaissance has been strongest, ominous signs abound. The population-growth rate for Brooklyn and Manhattan fell nearly 90 percent from 2010–11 to 2015–16.
The disposition of the Millennial generation, on which so many urban dreams rest, will be critical. Roughly 70 percent of Millennials already live outside core-city counties and, Kolko suggests, as they head into their 30s, many appear to be moving back to suburbia. USC demographer Dowell Myers suggests that we have reached “peak urban millennial” as the generation, albeit more slowly, becomes adult householders, not hipsters seeking a great “urban experience.”
Economic trends follow a similar trajectory. Nearly 80 percent of all job growth since 2010 has occurred in suburbs and exurbs (see chart above). Most tech growth takes place not in the urban core, as widely suggested, but in dispersed urban environments, from Silicon Valley to Austin to Raleigh. Despite the much-ballyhooed shift in small executive headquarters to some core cities, the most rapid expansion of professional business-service employment continues to happen largely in low-density metropolitan areas such as Dallas–Fort Worth, Nashville, and Kansas City.
And most young people are not doing well in elite cities. For example, in New York City, Millennial incomes (ages 18–29) have dropped in real terms compared with the same age cohort in 2000, despite considerably higher education levels, while rents have increased 75 percent. New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have three of the nation’s four lowest homeownership rates for young people and among the lowest birthrates.
Housing costs might be the biggest driver of Millennial migration in the future. According to Zillow, for workers between 22 and 34, rent costs claim up to 45 percent of income in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Miami metropolitan areas, compared with closer to 30 percent of income in metros like Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston. This may be one reason, notes a recent Urban Land Institute report, that 74 percent of Bay Area Millennials are considering a move out of the region in the next five years, while a recent survey by the UCLA Luskin School suggests that 18-to-29-year-olds were the group least satisfied with life in Los Angeles.

If the flight of moderate, middle-income homeowners continues, along with the growth in population of poor residents and childless hipsters, urban centers will be destined to serve as sandboxes for the progressive political class. Most urban leaders and media boosters have been slow to recognize such trends, which call for a thorough change in policy. Urbanist Derek Thompson suggests that cities like New York are wonderful for new immigrants, hipsters, and the ultrarich but “not a great place for middle class families.” Yet young families, not single hipsters, will now be increasingly critical to urban success.
Rather than indulging feel-good radical experiments in social justice, cities need to rediscover their historical role as creators of the middle class, as Jane Jacobs put it. If they don’t, some extraordinary areas — in brownstone Brooklyn, much of Manhattan, Seattle, west Los Angeles, and San Francisco — will likely become ever more exclusive, divided between the rich and the hip (many of whom are their subsidized children) and surrounding poor populations working in low-end services (or not working). The policy emphasis should shift to middle-income areas — whether in the Sunset district of San Francisco, Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Queens, or South Brooklyn — and closer suburbs, which could keep some younger families in the urban orbit. Such a shift will require a new kind of urban politics, one that encourages grassroots industries and corporate relocations that create more middle-income jobs, promotes the flourishing of human-scale neighborhoods, and accommodates families with good schools and low crime. The appeal of urban living remains viable, though today’s urban political class sometimes seems determined to kill it.
READ MORE:
The Open-Borders ‘Liberaltarianism’ of the New Urban Elite
Urban Terror: Why Cities Are Uniquely Vulnerable in 21st Century
City Terrorized by Whole Foods
— Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and the executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Wendell Cox is the principal of Demographia, a public-policy consultancy, and a senior fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454546/american-cities-must-abandon-progressive-radicalism-serve-middle-class-needs

Kill the Mortgage Interest Deduction Now!

The case against the mortgage interest deduction.  I don't have problems with it as long is it is a part of wholesale tax reform- such as the flat tax.  Just eliminating the deduction will give a HUGE tax hike for the average homeowner.  Short of massive tax reform, I think it is foolish to consider changing it.

Judge Halts Indiana Town's Cruel Attempt to Fine Residents Out of their Properties

Judge Halts Indiana Town's Cruel Attempt to Fine Residents Out of their Properties

Property owners were ordered to pay thousands for violations unless they agreed to sell to a redeveloper.

Scott Shackford|Dec. 5, 2017 12:40 pm

Institute for JusticeA judge in Indiana has stopped a city's nasty plot to make people sell their homes to a redeveloper or else face thousands of dollars of rapidly accumulating fines.

In Charlestown, Indiana, a community north of Louisville with a population of less than 8,000, the mayor and other city leaders have been trying to transfer ownership of private plots of land in the low-income neighborhood of Pleasant Ridge to a developer. This developer would then raze all the properties and build an entirely new neighborhood.

Charlestown did not take advantage of Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court decision that allows the government to transfer property to a private developer via eminent domain. That would have required the city to pay the property's current owners.

Instead, the city targeted Pleasant Ridge with ruthless code enforcement. Property owners were cited and fined hundreds of dollars for every individual violation. Unlike the usual practice in code enforcement, the owners were not given any grace period to correct the problems before the fines were levied: They were levied immediately and compounded daily until the problems were fixed. And even when the violations were fixed, the owners had to pay the fines. The only relief offered to them came if they agreed to sell their properties to the developer.

Once the developer bought and boarded up the homes, by contrast, the city refrained from citing it for code violations. Neighbors complained that the company's properties were overgrown and full of garbage and weeds, creating a public health risk. But the law wasn't being used to target public health risks; it was being used to target people who wouldn't sell.

In February, the libertarian attorneys of the Institute for Justice stepped in, representing several landowners and a neighborhood association. Yesterday, a circuit judge in Scott County sided with the institute and its clients. Judge Jason Mount ruled that Charlestown had violated its own code enforcement regulations in order to target Pleasant Ridge. He has ordered the city to give property owners the opportunity to appeal citations and a grace period to actually fix problems before the city is permitted to start levying fines.

In a release, Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Anthony Sanders took note of the victory and the judge's acknowledgment of the unfair enforcement:

Today's ruling unmasks the City of Charlestown's and developer John Neace's actions for what they are: a naked land grab, taking from the poor to give to the rich. With this injunction in place, the city either must force Mr. Neace's company to pay several million dollars in fines or waive the fines it has illegally and unconstitutionally issued against the residents of Pleasant Ridge.

That's two wins in less than a week for the lawyers at the Institute for Justice. That's good news for private property rights.

Read more about the case here

The Vampire Cure for Aging

Watch out Millennials! Baby Boomers are out for blood.

Ronald Bailey | February 6, 2015

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Human blood enables vampires to remain physically attractive and mentally sharp according to ancient lore. But the anti-aging properties of blood may be more than a legend. Researchers at the biomedical startup Alkahest in California are actually running a small clinical trial that involves injecting human blood plasma from young people into dementia patients. The hope is that factors in the blood of young people will repair and rejuvenate ailing brains. It worked in mice, so maybe it will work in people.

Researchers associated with University of California, Berkeley, biologist Irina Conboy jumpstarted the hunt for youthful factors in blood with their work with mice involving heterochronic parabiosis. Heterochronic means differently aged and parabiosis means next to life. In their experiments the researchers basically sewed together young mice and old mice to see what would happen as their circulatory systems melded. They discovered that tissues in geezer mice were rejuvenated. Apparently, something in the blood of young mice stimulates the worn-out stem cells in old mice to start proliferating again to repair damaged tissues.

Stem cells are surrounded and supported by cells that regulate their activities and also respond to biochemical signals transported through the circulatory system. The support cells accumulate damage over time and lose their ability to nourish and protect the stem cells, which, in turn, lose their capacity for repair and replenishment of damaged tissues. In addition, factors found in the bloodstream also diminish the regenerative capacity of the stem cells.

Experiments on mice by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and the Universities of California at Berkeley and San Francisco all find that young blood rejuvenates tissues and organs including muscles, liver, heart, and brain. Neurologist Tony Wyss-Coray heads up the Stanford Brain Rejuvenation Project and is the founder of Alkahest. In May, 2014, Wyss-Coray and his team reported in Nature Medicine that "exposure of an aged animal to young blood can counteract and reverse pre-existing effects of brain aging at the molecular, structural, functional and cognitive level." Specifically, they found that factors in young blood restored function in the hippocampus, the area of the brain where memories are consolidated. On the other hand, exposing young mice to old blood speeds up their decline. The researchers also found that it was not necessary to stitch old and young mice together. Injecting them with blood plasma was sufficient to elicit the effects.

NosferatuThe finding that exposure to young blood improves brain function is what is behind Alkahest's clinical trial to see if infusing blood plasma from young people into patients suffering from mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease will improve their cognition. The company expects to enroll 18 patients in the coming trial, half of whom will receive infusions of human blood plasma donated by men under age 30 once weekly for four weeks. The other half will receive saline. The trial will chiefly focus on the safety of the treatment and compliance by participants. Additionally, researchers will compare both groups to see if those treated with blood plasma perform better on a number of tests for Alzheimer's disease and if changes suggestive of cognitive improvement can be identified in their brains. The trial ends in October 2015.

What factors in young blood are responsible for its rejuvenating effects? As it happens, Harvard University researchers Amy Wagers and Lee Rubin in May 2014 reported in two studies in Science that the protein growth differentiation factor 11 (GDF 11) alone rejuvenated the vascular systems, muscles, and brains of old mice. They injected GDF 11 into the brains of geezer mice and found the protein improved blood flow and jumpstarted the growth of neurons. It is an open question if GDF 11 fixes damaged stem cells or enables them to overcome biochemical stop signals after which they then proceed to repair aging damage.

In September 2014, Science noted that University of California, San Francisco's Peter Ganz and his colleagues have followed nearly 2,000 elderly heart patients for nine years. Their so far unpublished data indicates that lower levels of GDF11 in the blood predicted higher rates of heart attack, stroke, congestive heart failure, and overall mortality. The Harvard researchers expect to have GDF 11 in initial human clinical trials in three to five years.

The good news is that if GDF 11 and other anti-aging factors can be isolated from young blood and synthesized, we baby boomers can then avoid having to siphon blood plasma from Millennials in order to maintain our position as the most (self-)important generation in history.

They're leaving California for Las Vegas to find the middle-class life that eluded them

They're leaving California for Las Vegas to find the middle-class life that eluded them

By STEVE LOPEZ
DEC 03, 2017 | 7:00 AM
| LAS VEGAS


Las Vegas is one of the most popular destinations for those who leave California. It’s close, it’s a job center, and the cost of living is much cheaper. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)


The rent steals so much of your paycheck, you might have to move back in with your parents, and half your life is spent staring at the rear end of the car in front of you.


You'd like to think it will get better, but when? All around you, young and old alike are saying goodbye to California.


"Best thing I could have done," said retiree Michael J. Van Essen, who was paying $1,160 for a one-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake until a year and a half ago. Then he bought a house with a creek behind it for $165,000 in Mason City, Iowa, and now pays $500 a month less on his mortgage than he did on his rent in Los Angeles.


Van Essen was one of the many readers who responded in October when I reached out to people who got sick and tired of the high cost of living in California. I heard from someone in Idaho and others who moved to Arizona and Nevada.





Solid recent data is hard to come by, but 2016 census figures showed an uptick in the number of people who fled Los Angeles and Orange counties for less expensive California locales, or they left the state altogether.


"If housing costs continue to rise, we should expect to see more people leaving high-cost areas," said Jed Kolko, an economist with UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation.


Las Vegas is one of the most popular destinations for those who leave California. It's close, it's a job center, and the cost of living is much cheaper, with plenty of brand-new houses going for between $200,000 and $300,000.


So I went to Sin City to see whether, when you add up all the pluses and minuses, there is life after California.


Cyndy Hernandez, a 30-year-old USC grad who grew up in Fontana, says the answer is yes, absolutely.


"It's easier to live here and have a comfortable lifestyle," said Hernandez, a community organizer with NARAL Pro-Choice Nevada.




Play VideoCyndy Hernandez, a 30-year-old USC grad who grew up in Fontana, moved to Las Vegas because of the cheaper housing costs.



I visited Hernandez in the two-bedroom, mountain-view "apartment-home" she shares with a roommate. Each pays $650 a month in a gated development with free Wi-Fi, a swimming pool and cabana-shaded deck, fitness center, media room and complimentary beverages. It's like living at a resort.


Like other transplants I spoke to in Nevada, Herndandez didn't want to leave California. It's home. It's where she went to school and where her parents still live in the house she grew up in. But unless you choose a career that will pay you a small fortune to manage costs driven higher by a stubborn shortage of new housing, California is not a dream, it's a mirage.


Moving to get a better job or move up the workplace chain is nothing new. But what's going on here seems different — people leaving not for better jobs or pay, but because housing elsewhere is so much cheaper they can live the middle-class life that eludes them in California.


After college, Hernandez worked as a congressional staffer in Washington, D.C., and then went to Chicago for a few years. But the West drew her back. Not California, but Nevada, where she worked on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in Las Vegas and then joined the staff of a state legislator in the state capital.


"I started looking at the bigger picture in Carson City, where I was able to pay the rent, have a car and a comfortable life and put some money into a 401(k)," Hernandez said. "Would I be able to do that in California? Probably not."


She moved to Las Vegas in June, enjoyed exploring the city beyond the Strip and made new friends, and her financial stress melted away in the desert sun. Now she's saving up for a house, which she doesn't think she would ever have been able to do in California.


Hernandez connected me with Arlene Angulo, 23, who grew up in Riverside, worked as a cast member at Disneyland, loved the L.A. culture and got her teaching credential at UC Riverside. She had her pick of two teaching jobs — one in the Los Angeles area and one in Las Vegas.


"L.A. would have been my first choice, and I didn't want to have to leave California," said Angulo, an English teacher who understands basic math. She knew that on a starting teacher's salary, "I couldn't afford to stay there."


In Summerlin, a Las Vegas suburb, Angulo and a roommate each pays $600 for a big three-bedroom apartment. Angulo is in graduate school at the University of Nevada Las Vegas while teaching by day, and said she's going to start saving up to buy a house in the area.


Jonas Peterson enjoyed the California lifestyle and trips to the beach while living in Valencia with his wife, a nurse, and their two young kids. But in 2013, he answered a call to head the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, and the family moved to Henderson, Nev.

Jonas Peterson, in front of a billboard promoting Las Vegas, moved to Henderson, Nev., with his family from Valencia. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )


"We doubled the size of our house and lowered our mortgage payment," said Peterson, whose wife is focusing on the kids now instead of her career.


Part of Peterson's job is to lure companies to Nevada, a state that runs on gaming money rather than tax dollars.


"There's no corporate income tax, no personal income tax...and the regulatory environment is much easier to work with," said Peterson.


Some companies have made the move from California, and others have set up satellites in Nevada. California, a world economic power, will survive the raids, and it will continue to draw people from other states and around the world. Its assets include cutting-edge tech and entertainment industries, major ports, great weather and dozens of first-rate universities.


But the Golden State is tarnished and ever-more divided by a crisis with no end in sight, and this year's legislative efforts to spawn more housing for working people lacked urgency and scale. Slowly, steadily, and somewhat indifferently, we are burdening, breaking and even exporting our middle class.


Breanna Rawding, 26, felt the squeeze. She grew up in Simi Valley and until recently worked in Anaheim as a marketing coordinator, but lived in Burbank because family friends let her stay in a tiny backyard cottage for just $400 a month.

Breanna Rawding, 26, manager of marketing communications of Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, spends time with her dog Bodie in her apartment in Las Vegas. She moved from Burbank to escape a long commute. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )


Her commute, by car and train, took between 90 minutes and two hours each way. She wanted to move to the Platinum Triangle area, near her job, but scratched the idea when she saw that studio apartments were going for as much as $1,700.


Rawding endured the commute, as well as a long-distance relationship with a boyfriend who was raised in Torrance and went to UCLA, but lived in Las Vegas. There, he could afford a nice apartment on his teacher's salary, and he recently signed papers to buy a house in a new development.


"I didn't want to leave California. I love the weather, I love the outdoors, I love my family and friends," said Rawding, a Chapman University grad.


But in California she saw a future in which she'd be trapped, indefinitely, by high rents, ridiculous commutes, or some combination of the two.


"I saw articles about millennials leaving California because they were never going to be able to have houses they could afford," she said.


In June, everything changed for Rawding.


She got a marketing communications job with the Global Economic Alliance in Vegas and rented a lovely $900-a-month apartment that's so close to work, she goes home at lunch to let her dog Bodie out. And it's near her boyfriend's place.


Nevada's gain, our loss.


California, the place where anything was possible, has become the place where nothing is affordable.

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