Marinwood CSD threatens citizens with ARREST while COVERING UP Sex Assault against minor

Marinwood CSD has serious problems.  Here is an example of legal intimidation by the Marinwood CSD.  Keep in mind this is the same board that covered up the armed assault of minor in the very same building.  Not until the news story did they issue a public statement.  Even more damning, they did nothing to improve safety.  The public was subjected to police intimidation for months while REAL CRIME was hidden from public view.  It calls for futher inquiry and removal of people from positions of responsibility.



On April 6, 2019, a 19 year old male pointed a stolen gun at the head of 16 year old girl and demanded sex during a party at the Rec Center. He claimed he was drunk and the sixteen year old was "sexual aggressor".  Fortunately, the girl ran into the woman's restroom and called for help.  The Marin Sheriff was called and the perpetrator was arrested. See more about this in the Marin IJ HERE

The public did not learn of the crime until August 25, 2019 because the Marinwood CSD covered it up and did nothing to improve public safety.

It is outrageous.

The "police protection" of the Marinwood CSD Board lasted several more months until June 2019 when Isabela Perry claimed that she "felt threatened" by the public.

THIS IS TWO MONTHS AFTER the Armed Sex Assault.   Notice that ALL of the CSD is playing this juvenile power game of intimidation while completely ignoring their legitimate concerns of safety of our children in the Recreation Center.

The NIMBY Principle

Nowhere in America is the battle over single-family zoning more bitterly contested than the affluent suburbs of California's cities. Mike Blake/Reuters

The NIMBY Principle

LAURA BLISS JUL 26, 2019
The advocacy group Livable California has led the resistance to the state’s biggest housing proposals. What's their appeal for “local control” really about?



Susan Kirsch’s backyard is, predictably, beautiful. Past the sunny wooden patio, tomatoes, blueberries, and poppies blossom between rugged pathways. A birdbath draws sparrows to the center; a lemon tree drapes over the back fence.

But all is not perfect. Next door, her neighbors recently added a detached room, which peeks over the side fence and cuts off part of Kirsch’s view of Marin County’s rolling hills.

“It broke my heart,” she told me. “But at least it was only one story.”

In California, the debate between NIMBYs and YIMBYs—that’s Not In My Backyard and Yes In My Backyard, respectively—doesn’t usually involve actual backyards. It’s about housing: By one estimate, the state is short 3.5 million homes to accommodate current and projected demand. In cities like San Francisco, this gap has raised rents to some of the highest in the nation, fueling a homelessness problem that the United Nations recently labeled a human rights violation.


The scale of this problem has fractured the voters of this largely progressive region, pushing Californians of varying political stripes into rival camps that don’t neatly subdivide along the usual left-right lines. Struggles between homeowners and newcomers over development are fixtures of neighborhood-level politics nationwide, but the Bay Area’s version of this narrative might be the most bitterly contested in the U.S., fueled by a uniquely Californian cocktail of economic and cultural factors.

This particular backyard holds some clues about why that is, and in particular, what motivates a certain powerful segment of older, relatively liberal, home-owning Californians. Among urbanists who promote density-boosting zoning reforms, “NIMBY” is usually a pejorative. While Kirsch doesn’t appreciate the negative connotations, to her, the term can imply something good.

“It’s about people being stewards of what they love and care about,” she told me over coffee at her home in Mill Valley, an enclave north of San Francisco surrounded by natural preserves. “It’s care-giving, not excluding care for others.”

In early 2018, at age 74, Kirsch founded Livable California, a nonprofit that advocates for slow growth and local control over urban development issues. With Kirsch at the helm, the group has rallied suburbanites around the state against two high-profile housing bills that proposed to open up some communities to denser development. Their opposition helped kill both: The first bill, SB 827, was quickly defeated in committee; the second one, SB 50, was shelved until 2020.


The rhetoric around the bills has been heated. Residents who oppose the zoning changes (which would, by and large, allow just a few extra stories of residential development) have been made out as a bunch of narrowly self-interested geriatrics, unconcerned with the economic plight of younger adults. “It has begun to feel like the politics of an older generation saying, ‘Fuck you, I got mine,’” Henry Grabar wrote in Slate in May. Meanwhile, at least in the Bay Area, where the YIMBY movement took root, pro-housing activists are often made out by their foes as self-entitled Millennials whose political leaders are bankrolled by the real estate industry. “That was their message: ‘I don’t care about preservation or you people with those old Victorians. It’s our time now and you should die. You are in the way,’” is how one San Francisco preservationist summed up the YIMBY sentimentfrom a recent community meeting.
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But this narrative of class and generational combat is incomplete. Lower-income renters and homeowners are in this conversation, too, and their allegiance is somewhat torn. Some tenants rights groups buy the logic that an increased housing supply would benefit them, but at least as many view the prospect of high-volume, market-rate housing as a threat to already gentrifying neighborhoods.

Indeed, the NIMBY-YIMBY binary often reduces each sides’ arguments to cartoons, with neither camp spending much effort to understand the hopes and fears of their adversaries. Both factions are intensely community-minded and profess to love their cities and neighborhoods. Yet each seems convinced that the other represents an attack on their respective futures.

Is there any way to try to bridge this divide and find some common ground? One approach might be look deeper into the ostensible NIMBY instinct—to see if the forces that drive these passionate defenders of the neighborhood status quo are richer than pure self-interest and fear of outsiders.

It turns out, yes, they are. But also, there’s some of that stuff, too.

***

Wendy Sarkissian, a Life Fellow at the Planning Institute of Australia, has worked as a social planning consultant and academic since 1969. The co-author of the book Housing As If People Mattered, Sarkissian has theorized extensively on the psychology of NIMBYism, which is related to what academics term as “place attachment.” People latch onto their surrounding environments for psychological refuge and safety, and perceived threats can summon an instinct towards defense, she told me: “We are nothing if we’re not animals, after all. We seem to be hardwired for this.”


But emotions are hard to talk about, and to guard beloved homes and communities from change that’s outside our control, we often adopt complex rationales, Sarkissian notes. Neighborhood skirmishes over a new grocery store’s traffic impacts, or concerns about surface runoff, can elide deeply felt connections to a place.

Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosopher who coined the term “solastalgia”—the psychological pain created by environmental destruction—agrees. “I’m at the point where I think these little battles are genuine expressions of people trying to maintain their connections to life and things,” he told me.

Long before launching Livable California, Kirsch proved an effective channeler of the pro-suburban animus. SB 375, a landmark piece of California legislation from 2008 that asked regional authorities to set emissions reductions goals and plan for transit and housing that requires less car travel, marked the start of much of her activism. She may drive a Prius and support the Sierra Club, but a future where people are smushed into denser neighborhoods and deprived of personal vehicles sounds to Kirsch like the stuff of a developing nation. “That’s a really horrifying thought to me: that most peoples’ greatest asset would be a bicycle,” she said. “That’s a diminishment of the American dream.”

And she objects to the way California’s climate policies have reemerged at the local level. In 2007, Kirsch organized neighbors to kill plans for a mixed-use housing development on a major commercial thoroughfare in Mill Valley. Then she co-founded a slow-growth advocacy group for her town, and later the countywide Citizen Marin, which battled more high-density projects and regional urban plans. In 2016, Kirsch attempted to unseat a Marin County commissioner, running on a platform of slow growth, fiscal restraint, and keeping Marin politics tightly focused on Marin. “Climate change is a serious problem, and we need to get a handle on it,” she said in her announcement for candidacy. “But we need to get a handle by focusing on local control: local solutions for local issues.” She lost the race, but with a respectable 42 percent of the vote.Livable California founder Susan Kirsch in her Marin County kitchen. (Laura Bliss/CityLab)

Kirsch’s own home is modest. It’s a World War II-era, single-story three-bedroom bungalow with a snug kitchen and a living room large enough for a couch, a coffee table, and not a whole lot more. She raised her two children here; now divorced, she lives alone, save for the Airbnb guests who sometimes book a guest suite. Her Mill Valley street is full of these little houses, each now worth around $1.5 million.


Kirsch grew up on a farm in Minnesota, earned degrees in English and speech communication, and worked as an educator in Cleveland and Oregon before landing in Marin County 40 years ago. Long known as a bastion of 1960s-style communitarianism, the county is 80 percent undeveloped; its forested hills and craggy shoreline are largely intact thanks to a century of determined conservationism. Limits on developable land, strict local zoning laws, and the growth of the city across the Golden Gate Bridge has meant that housing demand has long outstripped supply.

In early 2018, momentum in the California senate was building behind SB 827, a bill authored by Senator Scott Wiener that would “upzone” certain neighborhoods. If they were near frequent transit service, parcels reserved for single-family homes would be unlocked for higher-density development. To Kirsch, the bill felt like yet another dictum from state authorities telling her community how to behave. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the streets were full of homeless people, and her county was barely taking care of its existing public housing. More market-rate apartments weren’t going to solve their problems. And with a central shopping crossroads just around the corner, her own home was in upzone territory.

After meeting up at a greasy spoon in San Francisco to discuss strategies, Kirsch and a group of friends from around the Bay Area launched a movement that quickly went statewide.


Over the next year, Livable California rallied residents to testify in Sacramento, write letters to their representatives, and spread the word against the bill through maps and images that showed leafy suburban blocks overshadowed by high-rise apartments and crowded with parked cars. Kirsch penned a raft of op-eds in her own local paper, as she has been doing for years. “We voted for local representatives to thoughtfully plan a community that reflects our values,” she wrote in the Marin Journal. “A one-size-fits-all mandate violates democratic principles, forcing us to pay for unregulated private development in the service of billion-dollar corporations.”

After SB 827 died in its first committee hearing, in large part because it didn’t go far enough to protect gentrifying neighborhoods, Wiener revised it and put forth SB 50 in 2019. In some respects, this bill targeted affluent neighborhoods even more narrowly by proposing to upzone “jobs-rich” areas, too; even if they were far from regular transit service, single-family parcels close to big employment centers would be eligible for an extra story or two, too. Livable California campaigned harder, showing up to lobby in Sacramento, speaking out at community meetings in Palo Alto, Orinda, Cupertino, and San Carlo, and protesting Wiener’s public appearances. It joined forces with a like-minded group in Southern California called the Coalition to Preserve L.A., which released a video called “Will SB 50 Kill Your Neighborhood?,” claiming that luxury condos were going to raze entire blocks. Critically, the group connected suburban homeowners from San Diego to Marin with mayors and city council members, who in turn voiced their own dissent.California’s YIMBYs now find themselves is a difficult position: They’ve whacked a hornet’s nest full of some of the nation’s most powerful voters.

It’s hard to escape the fact that most of the communities that glommed onto Livable California represent older, whiter, and more affluent homeowners from some of the most desirable enclaves in California. That is a perception that the group itself is aware of: In an internal email that was recently picked up and tweeted by a Wiener staffer, one Livable California member wrote that “housing activists ... are deeply suspicious of ‘white suburban NIMBYs’ and the objectives of Livable California.”

Kirsch recognizes these less-than-ideal optics, as well as the link between old, racist redlining practices and contemporary zoning codes. But she insists that Livable California’s only interest is keeping neighborhoods intact. As proof, she points to the pro-tenant groupsthat have aligned with the group to defeat SB 50 and its kin, out of fears of gentrification and displacement. And she talks about “activating” her fellow retirees, awakening them to what they can still achieve for the greater good. “I’m really more in favor of advancing, or whatever the opposite is of retiring,” Kirsch said.


Critics might object to this framing, but California’s suburban defenders can indeed be said to be fueled by a kind of altruism, at least for one another and for future residents who share their values. Indeed, the upzoning bills show that Livable California’s resistance is not entirely about protecting narrow economic interests: Kirsch and her neighbors would make great money selling their lots to a developer looking to build a few midrises.

But they’re not. Established residents often see themselves as long-term shareholders in their community, said Clayton Nall, a political scientist at Stanford who has studied grassroots community organizing. As such, they feel a responsibility for protecting the community against perceived threats, which might include pollution, crime, and the undesirable effects of over-development. Indeed, back in the 1960s and ’70s, NIMBYs were the people fighting highways and oil refineries in their backyards, not fourplexes. In battling upzoning, some NIMBYs are animated by the fear of a takeover of their neighborhoods by commercial interests.

“The possibility that their property interests will then be defined by corporate actors like landlords is frightening to them,” Nall said. “And it complicates their effort to protect their common interest as homeowners defending a shared way of living in their particular neighborhoods.” In other words, the distant landlords of a multi-unit building may not see the local value, of, say, tending lovely front-yard gardens.


The greed of developers and the overreach of government actors certainly come up a lot with Kirsch; to her, both seem to be strong-arming communities into cookie-cutter, “smart growth” developments. Kirsch ties these forces to the decline of homeownership since the 2008 economic crash, and the banks and investors that took over many of those foreclosures. With fewer properties in individual hands, ”the strength of a voting public is further and further diminished,” she said. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area, the tech companies whose massive success has fueled demand for housing aren’t fairly redistributing their profits. The real California housing crisis, she believes, is the runaway growth of that industry, not this handful of older homeowners trying to save their bungalow neighborhoods.

This last element of Kirsch’s thinking finds some enthusiastic and perhaps unlikely cosponsors. Richard Walker, the David Harvey-trained Marxist geographer, professor emeritus of economic geography at UC Berkeley, and longtime observer of the dark side of the Bay Area’s tech boom, says that California’s YIMBYs get the economics of the housing crisis wrong by focusing myopically on the “supply” side of the equation. When demand for housing is driven solely by the most affluent renters and buyers in a marketplace, home prices and rents are bound to run away to astronomical heights, Walker explains; this is exactly what has happened as Apple, Google, and Facebook have gotten away with paying so little in taxes and employing vast numbers of well-paid employees. “That’s who the developers want to accommodate, and it leaves working people out of the equation,” he said.


Walker is skeptical that giving developers more room to play is likely to fix the housing crisis. Instead, taxing and regulating the tech industry so that more of its profits would find their way into the pockets of the working class would go a lot further, he thinks. Restrengthening unions to set wages higher and put more housing within reach is another solution. “When was the last time a massive amount of working-class housing was built?” Walker asked. “Post-World War II, because it was the most equal time since before the Civil War.”

There are definitely progressive leaders making variations on this argument; Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign platform emphasizes raising taxes on the most affluent, regulating tech, and bolstering organized labor. But with the NIMBY-vs.-YIMBY dynamic overshadowing everything else in housing politics, a mess of ideas and principles are getting glopped into two seemingly opposed buckets. The Trump White House also wants zoning reform, of some sort, which makes liberal-leaning YIMBYs pretty uncomfortable. Meanwhile, conservatives and Marxists ally themselves against legislation like SB 50. Something about the logic of upzoning must be murky if so many divergent thinkers can interpret it as a win or loss.

***

One big problem with SB 50, Nall believes, is that its beneficiaries aren’t clear, other than the real estate developers who back it, and, perhaps, the young white-collar renters who might easily afford to move to Austin instead. Housing isn’t a pure supply-and-demand problem; location is a huge factor. Some say that the amount of demand to live in the Bay is literally insatiable, and that costs will never come down naturally. And the jury is out on whether “trickle-down housing”—also known as filtering—brings down rents. You could fill a basketball court with the economists and policy wonks who are arguing about this right now.


This is not to say that upzoning isn’t called for, along with (say) tenant protection laws and funds for low-income housing. It’s gaining traction nationally as one tool that can close housing gaps: Minneapolis has a new plan to allow for denser development citywide, and Oregon passed a bill that allows duplexes and triplexes to replace detached houses in urban areas across the state. The champions of these plans were successful, in part because they found ways to unite communities around shared values that went beyond attachments to their own blocks. Oregon’s bill is built on the state’s long history of conservation-minded urban growth management; in Minneapolis, upzoning proponents highlighted the racist origins of zoning codes and the importance of working to erase them.

In contrast, it seems California’s upzoning advocates have struggled to show how such unlocking more market-rate (read: expensive) apartments in suburban neighborhoods would help those with the biggest housing challenges. While Kirsch applauds their commitment to civic engagement, YIMBYs also strike her as whiny. “Few of us have had housing just handed to us at the level that we might havewanted,” Kirsch told me. (She compares them to her CEO daughter, who bought a house in Oakland, with financial help from mom.) California’s YIMBYs now find themselves in a difficult position: They’ve whacked a hornet’s nest full of some of the nation’s most powerful voters.


Bu the zoning reformers have succeeded in introducing a big, bold idea for addressing a crisis that demands all kinds of different solutions. Livable California, on the other hand, is short on fixes. Part of its stated mission is to “empower communities to take action to support local community planning and decision-making with the goal of an equitable and sustainable future for California.” Yet its website offers no examples of how else to accommodate Californians who would also like to live, “livably.” Instead, it’s full of links to articles and materials opposing various state housing bills.

One could not be blamed for noticing that such politics serve to protect the single-family status quo. And this is where the NIMBY principle draws its clearest line: Fundamentally, it begins with saying no.

That’s why so many housing activists view Livable California and its platform in such cynical terms. The group may share a few strands of DNA with Marxist critiques and use the language of citizen empowerment, but to critics like Nall, it is a force of elitism. Proposition 13, California’s property tax freeze of the 1970s, and the appreciation of urban land in coastal communities created what he terms a “bizarre middle-class aristocracy” that’s based almost solely on homeownership. “Single-family zoning has a lot of parallels to aristocratic land-holding systems,” Nall told me. “It’s, ‘Protect our regime from these predatory outside capitalists who don’t have the noblesse oblige that we have for our communities.’”


Kirsch strongly disagrees with this line of thinking; to her, rejecting state intervention is a way to lift up local power, which can still shepherd development, slowly and incrementally. Communities like Mill Valley have taken steps that open doors, Kirsch said—including allowing backyard “granny flats” and creating a new development impact fee to fund affordable housing. She approvingly cites other kinds of housing efforts, too: “Bigger cities are looking at additional options like commercial linkage fees, employer head taxes, 100 percent affordable housing projects, and vacancy taxes, to name a few,” she wrote me in an email.

Of course, “local control” has often served to keep resources away from those suffering most acutely under California’s housing crisis. For two timely examples in the Bay Area, see the dueling GoFundMe pages over a proposed San Francisco homeless shelter, or the large mixed-use development in San Bruno, with 15 percent affordable units, that was killed by a single city councilmember objected to potential traffic impacts. Better citizen engagement processes would address the root of these conflicts, Kirsch believes, by getting a wider representation of people to influence decisions and connect on an empathic level. “It’s about engaging in conversations before jumping to conclusions about what to do,” she said. “You can’t come in with the solution too quickly.”

Here, I think, lies the great YIMBY-NIMBY divide: a matter of intention versus outcome. While some selfish or bigoted actors may be sheltering their property values behind calls for “local control,” the desire to protect local communities, by using slow and incremental processes, is legitimate. But the single-family zoning codes that NIMBYs champion aren’t working for California circa 2019, and nor are they biblical. YIMBYs are justly impatient for progress, and they’re appealing to democratic processes for change, too. Perhaps both sides of the housing debate would be served by not assuming the worst in the other.

In any case, Kirsch is no longer Livable California’s acting leader. She stepped down in June. Now, the group hopes to file a state ballot initiative that would curtail the state’s ability to pass legislation that would alter local zoning codes. That isn’t quite Kirsch’s style: She feels her strength is in educating people at the grassroots level.

Meanwhile, she wonders if the triumph of the California suburbs may be short-lived. The bills in Oregon and Minneapolis surprised Kirsch, especially since they succeeded in two places in which she once lived. She thought leaders there would know better than to give in to development pressures. “Maybe I’m out of step with my own roots and history and about what a better way is,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be California next. All I can say is, it’s troubling to me.”

About the Author

Laura Bliss

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Laura Bliss is CityLab’s west coast bureau chief. She also authors MapLab, a biweekly newsletter about maps (subscribe here). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Los Angeles magazine, and beyond.

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FABLE: THE FROGS WHO WISHED FOR A KING

 

 THE FROGS were tired of governing themselves. They had so much freedom that it had spoiled them, and they did nothing but sit around croaking in a bored manner and wishing for a government that could entertain them with the pomp and display of royalty, and rule them in a way to make them know they were being ruled. No milk and water government for them, they declared. So they sent a petition to Jupiter asking for a king.

Jupiter saw what simple and foolish creatures they were, but to keep them quiet and make them think they had a king he threw down a huge log, which fell into the water with a great splash. The Frogs hid themselves among the reeds and grasses, thinking the new king to be some fearful giant. But they soon discovered how tame and peaceable King Log was. In a short time the younger Frogs were using him for a diving platform, while the older Frogs made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly to Jupiter about the government.

To teach the Frogs a lesson the ruler of the gods now sent a Crane to be king of Frogland. The Crane proved to be a very different sort of king from old King Log. He gobbled up the poor Frogs right and left and they soon saw what fools they had been. I n mournful croaks they begged Jupiter to take away the cruel tyrant before they should all be destroyed.




"How now!" cried Jupiter "Are you not yet content? You have what you asked for and so you have only yourselves to blame for your misfortunes."
Be sure you can better your condition before you seek to change.

‪The “virtue” of government charity‬

The Government Takings of Private Property coming to a community near you.

Government Takings of Private Property: Susette Kelo's Story from Mackinac Center on Vimeo.


The senate passed new laws allowing the government to yake property WITHOUT finding cause of blight.  This means perfectly nice neighborhoods could be removed to build high density apartment building in transit corridors.   We have heard that Steve Kinsey and other supervisors are eyeing Marinwood/Lucas Valley for their Smart Growth development BEYOND the affordable housing components.  A series of bus shelters in reportedly being planned for Lucas Valley road.  

If true, this will open a flood gate of new public and private development.   Whenever I speak with pro growth people in Southern Marin about fairness, they reply, "You have room for growth in Marinwood/Lucas Valley. We are all built out in my neighborhood."

Our fore bearers wisely bought open space to PROTECT the land and community from excess development.  We will Save Marin Again!

Lesson in Liberty-Should Majorities decide Everything?

On Government "Charity"

Marinwood CSD objects to planning its future.

The Marinwood CSD has steadfastly objected to the assembly of citizens for the discussion of the future of Marinwood and design review.  Marinwood is the subject of intensive urban development.  Prior Supervisor Susan Adams quietly submitted Marinwood for a Priority Development Area and to take up to 80% of all low income subsidized housing for unincorporated Marin.  The previous three boards have quashed all public discussion of these plans despite the radical transformation of the community that development will bring.  It is indeed curious why a citizen's committee would be so threatening.  I believe that it is seen as dangerous to the established CSD power structure.  Why shouldn't the community have discussions about its future?   The CSD beileves its only role is to spend money and disavows civic involvement in important affairs that will affect our taxes, schools, roads and even our local government

Democratic Socialism is Still Socialism

Future of the Drones Over the US

Westchester chief executive on HUD plan to force zoning (warning to Marin County. We are next.)

D

The Bridge So Far- A legacy of Corruption, Incompetence at the MTC

Imagine if you went over budget by 5 billion dollars on a project. Would you win raises and get to keep your job?

Steve Hemminger was in charge of the 25+ years of repairs at the Bay Bridge.  Be sure to watch at 22:00 where he admits that top executives overseeing bridge contracts had business interests in companies bidding on projects.  

He defends those executives and says there was no undue influence in the process.

He still has he job and is now in charge of another major scandal in the purchase and remodeling of MTC/ABAG headquarters where there is $300 million dollars in "accounting irregularities".

Steve Kinsey, Marin Supervisor serves in the oversight of MTC and Mr. Hemminger. Why does Steve keep his job?

The ‘Affordable Housing’ Bait and Switch, California Style

The ‘Affordable Housing’ Bait and Switch, California Style

Redefining language to arrive at anti-market solutions to government-exacerbated problems

Matt Welch|Jul. 7, 2015 2:49 pm

 

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Scott Timberg, a journalist whose work I enjoy, has a much-discussed piece out in Los Angelesmagazine about coming to the realization that prices and economic realities are squeezing him out of his beloved L.A. It's a personal essay about status-backsliding, so it may seem unsporting to use it as a jumping-off point to talk about related policy concerns, but there are important government failures contributing to Timberg's ennui that really deserve more attention than they typically receive from Southern California's political class.

The first has to do with one of the most abused phrases in the political lexicon, affordable housing. Sample from Timberg's essay:

For many of us in Los Angeles—a metropolitan area that 57 percent of Angelenos can't afford to live in, according to a recent study—this is a city from which we are constantly on the brink of slipping away. Average rent in L.A. is $2,550 for a two-bedroom apartment. In fact, the disparity between wages and market prices here is the worst in the country, nastier than in New York City or the Bay Area, and it's become the toughest American city in which to buy a house.

Bolding mine, to highlight what has become an absurd anti-tautology. Which is to say, on some basic level, if you live in a city, you can by definition afford to live in a city, because you are successfully, um, living in the city (that is, if you are still making rent or mortgage payments, and not sliding into bankruptcy or extreme indebtedness....Timberg's status on those fronts is vague aside from his ominous statement that "I lost my house in 2011"). You might be paying a disproportionate amount of your income on housing compared to people in other cities, and that's an important consideration (on which more below), but the word "affordable" in this case is a value judgment affixed by agenda-wielding outsiders to the individual choices of participants on the ground.

The source of that 57 percent "unaffordable" number is the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), whoselengthy presentation of the underlying data includes this verbiage:

Over the past several years, as congressional inaction has led to continued erosion in the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage, a substantial number of states and cities have enacted higher minimum-wage laws. These increases, while not eliminating the need for a higher national wage floor, do help to ensure that regular employment provides the means to achieve a decent quality of life. Cities, in particular, that have raised local minimums have often done so in explicit recognition that higher costs of living in those areas require higher wage standards so that workers there can still meet their basic needs.

This explicit advocacy does not mean EPI's data is suspect, but there's an agenda here, and a whole lot of assumptions and choices built into the research. For instance, while the group boasts of adjusting its EPI Family Budget Calculator to reflect the cost-of-living disparities "in over 600 specific U.S. communities," using the actual tool shows exactly one such community within L.A. County, the "Los Angeles-Long Beach CA HUD Metro FMR Area." Given that L.A. County has 88 municipalities and 10 million residents, and an immense geographical spread in average home listing prices—between $9,175,930 for Bel Air and $126,307 for Palmdale, with more than 100 different zip codes currently clocking in at under a half-million dollars—standardizing affordability conclusions across those 10 million individuals strikes me as less than fully sound.

You can get more tailored geographical income/housing data at the L.A. Times and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, both of which come to pretty grim conclusions about Southern California's priceyness. For instance,

Just about half (49.8 percent) of all households in metro LA spend more than the recommended 30 percent of income on rent or mortgage payments and more than a quarter (25.9 percent) are spending at least half their income

Bolding in original. That's certainly a big number, and part of the reason that Southern California's population is no longer growing, after more than a century of constant boom. But do those facts really merit headlines such as "Every Single Part of LA is Unaffordable at $13.25 an Hour," or (my favorite) "A full-time minimum-wage job won't get you a 1-bedroom apartment anywhere in America"? No, it doesn't. A full time minimum wage job in California nets you $1,440 a month; I just found a one-bedroom in Los Angeles on Apartments.com for $350, and I hear there arecheaper cities in the state. Also, the word "affordable" does not equal "costing less than the recommended 30 percent of income," no matter how many times people repeat that claim.

For instance, according to the authors of those headlines and studies, I could not "afford" to live in Los Angeles between 1998 and 2005, even with rents that never eclipsed $1,400. And yet, somehow, I did. At different stages of your life, you are willing to bet on spending higher percentages of your income for the privilege of living in an advantageous area, just as sometimes you will accept a low wage in exchange for near-term upside. A crucial part of those bets is the belief that more lucrative income opportunities lie just around the corner. Maybe, for example, you have heard of a little thing called the California Dream?

In my experience, the people most likely to expand the definition of "unaffordable housing" are maddeningly unable to tell you how many affordable units there are out there. They tend to, without any noticeable sense of self-awareness, have the most political clout precisely in polities that are the most expensive to live in. They are also the most likely to push for three specific proposals to address the situation: raising the minimum wage, stabilizing or controlling rents, and requiring real estate developers to build lower-income units in new buildings. Each of these are attempts toadvance social policy by restricting the behavior of businesses, rather than removing governmental constraints on the private-sector supply of housing.

There are other policy failures contributing to the predicaments identified and lamented by Timberg. For example:

It's no surprise that when you have kids, making the pieces fit is especially difficult, as novelist Katharine Noel puts it. She wrote in a corner of her Los Feliz living room while her husband, Eric Puchner, also a writer, toiled in a corner of the bedroom. They spent four to six hours a week commuting to their teaching jobs in Claremont, concluding that they would not ever be able to buy in a decent school district for their two kids. 

Bolding mine. The lack of quality Los Angeles Unified School District schools in neighborhoods more affordable than Los Feliz (where my wife and I, too, both worked at home in a small apartment) is an ongoing public-policy outrage, largely perpetuated by the existing political class (with some notable exceptions). Though it's also true that the type of people attracted to Los Feliz generally wouldn't be caught dead buying a house in the presumably better-schooled (and considerably more affordable) Claremont. At any rate, bad schools are a brake particularly on the lives of the children sentenced to them, and should inflame the passions of good citizens above and beyond their own neighborhood anxieties.

Underlying everything in both Timberg's piece and the wage/housing disparity he describes, is the economy:

Los Angeles and California were hit especially hard by the Great Recession, and the damage lingered longer than almost anywhere else. L.A. County's unemployment rate was up around 12 and 13 percent for years, and along the way hundreds of thousands dropped out of the labor force entirely.

Huh. And what, exactly, made California so different?

I wish Scott Timberg the best, and recommend his writing to future employers. And I hope California adopts policies that will make housing more affordable by explicitly rejecting the wishlist of its "affordable housing" advocates.

Matt Welch is editor in chief of Reason magazine and co-author with Nick Gillespie of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America.

California's Blue Utopia

  

by Robert J. Cristiano 01/04/2013

The Progressive wing of the Democrat Party sits at the left end of their spectrum. JFK’s liberal positions would be regarded as moderate today. Progressives have a unique vision of what a blue state utopia would look like that begins with clean air, clean water, and green energy. Over the last twenty years, with the backing of the public employee unions that control the political process in California, the Progressives have managed to neuter the Republican Party and turn California Blue, owning every elective office in the state. They did not need much help according to Dan Walters, who stated, “Even the most anti-immigrant, anti-gay marriage, anti-tax, anti-abortion Republican activist must now recognize that with the party's wipeout in last month's elections, continuing down its recent path is a plunge into complete irrelevance”.

In 2012, the progressive Democrats captured a super majority in both houses so that with their Progressive governor, they no longer require a single Republican vote to pass any form of legislation, leaving conservatives an “irrelevant” minority. As an independent businessman, I have created many jobs and opportunities. But despite my contributions to society, and the taxes I have paid over the last thirty plus years, the Progressives believe I need to pay more so that I pay “my fair share.” Only when I pay my fair share can their blue vision of utopia be fulfilled.

What is my fair share? Under existing Federal and State income tax rates, I will pay 50% of my income in taxes. In California alone, my “fair share” on a million dollars of income is $133,000 each year. In exchange for my taxes, I receive little from the state. In addition, I pay gasoline taxes that pay for the upkeep of the highways. I pay airline taxes that maintain the airports I use. I pay among the highest in the nation sales tax on what I consume. I pay property taxes for the schools my grown children no longer use (they have already left California). I pay utility taxes for the upgrade of infrastructure. I pay higher health insurance rates. I already pay more than my own way.

I used to develop new homes in California and paid development fees, school fees, park fees, bridge & thoroughfare fees, endangered species fees, utility hook up fees, and processing fees to employ the city workers who reviewed my plans. Such fees totaled $40,000 to $75,000 for each new home built in California. I more than paid my own way. Such new homes are no longer feasible in California considering that home prices have fallen between 20-40% since 2008. And with the new regulations to be imposed in 2013 with the passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, housing and energy will cost even more making new houses even less attractive than they are now.

A problem in Blue Utopia
The number 1 topic of conversation amongst the despised 1% in California today is when you are leaving California or whether you can leave. Property owners who cannot move their apartment building or office complexes can move their homes and change their residency. On a flight from Austin, Texas to Orange County last week, I sat next to the owner of a substantial manufacturing business whose plant is in the inland southern California community of Ontario. He lives in Austin, flies in on Monday and home on Thursday. He spends less than 180 days a year in California. His savings in state income taxes more than pays for his airfare, hotel and rental car expenses. His home and gas and energy all cost less in Texas. More significantly, he will not expand his plant in California and intends to move his plant and people to Texas over the next five years.

What do the progressives have to say about a successful businessman wanting to move out of the state? Some like Paul McCloskey who recently attempted to pass a ballot measure for a Wealth Tax imposed on those leaving the state, would like to follow the French. France imposed a 75% tax rate on anyone making more than one million Euros per year. France’s Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said about people leaving France for lower rates, “We cannot fight poverty if those with the most, and sometimes with a lot, do not show solidarity and a bit of generosity," McCloskey’s proposal would impose an additional 17.5% tax on those with incomes exceeding $150,000 ($250,000 joint) and 35% on incomes exceeding $350,000/year. He would use the extra income to purchase shares of California public companies to “influence their environmental policies and practices”. While his ballot measure did not succeed, it is sobering to think the Democrats do not need a single Republican vote to pass legislation such as this.

So many of the 1% are quietly leaving. The exodus has already begun. Spectrum Location Solutions reported that 254 companies left California in 2011. Despite claims of an upturn, a press release by the State Controller’s office last week revealed tax revenues from both personal income taxes and corporate taxes fell during the month of this November. Revenue from personal income dropped 19 percent below projections while corporate tax revenue was down a whopping 213.4 percent. Such declines will continue unabated for years to come as the California brain drain proceeds.

When a government becomes a one-party state, nothing can stop the utopians and zealots of either party. In California, there’s no brake on progressives imposing its vision of Blue Utopia on its people. California may have clean water, clean air and green energy but at the expense of its people, prosperity and fiscal health.

The problems in Blue Utopian society will be similar to the unintended consequence of protecting the Delta Smelt in the Central Valley. The Blues labeled this tiny fish, previously known as “bait,” as an endangered species. The Endangered Species Act was created to protect the American Bald Eagle but now extends protection for the Delta Smelt, forcing water to be diverted from the farms of the Central Valley to the Pacific Ocean. The Delta Stewardship Council shows the water cutoffs had no effect on the smelt population. But it did a devastating effect on another endangered species: the California family. When 300,000 acres went fallow, 37,000 jobs were lost. Unemployment has reached 40% in some areas of the Central Valley. Food lines have appeared in the world's most fertile agricultural valley. Farmworkers were forced to accept bags of carrots grown in China. Orchards that existed for decades died without water. The Central Valley now needs food stamps to feed its residents.

The Blues are excited to impose their vision of Utopia on California. I, for one, will not be here to see it. My home goes on the market next month. My company has already re-located to another state. My children have already moved away seeking a future more promising than anticipated here in California. It is ironic because that is why I left my parents in Cleveland, Ohio to come to California four decades ago. I will be sad to leave my home and friendships acquired over decades. But I realize our leaders will neither notice, and if they did, they would not care.
 
As the tax revenues continue to fall (as they always do when rates increase), the Blues will rail against the remaining 1%, claiming that if only “they” would pay their fair share, things would be perfect. They will raise rates, fees, costs, and penalties again on the business class, and will do so as long as they hold power.

But there is a problem in Blue Utopia. Short term, the state may be supported by the occasional Internet or Housing Bubble, but the money will finally run out. When it does, maybe they will ask us to come back to the Golden State. They will promise to lower rates and turn the water back on. But it is already too late for the dead orchards of the Central Valley. And it will soon be too late for all but a handful of entrepreneurs of California.

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨

Robert J Cristiano PhD is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange, CA, a Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, CA and President of the international investment firm, L88 Companies LLC in Washington DC – Newport Beach – Denver - Prague. He has been a successful real estate developer in California for more than thirty years and now makes his home in Austin, Texas.

The Heavy Hand of the California Coastal Commission.

If you think this is bad, just wait until the new Redevelopment Agencies come in to redevelop Marin!

We will Save Marin Again!

Highlights from the Video:

*a structure considered by the CCC appears to be as something as insignificant as a fence post.*a road repair seems to have been interpreted by the CCC as the construction of a road.
*the use of land appears to be generally micromanaged by CCC.
*the executive director of CCC appears to have no restraint in his influence over board members or how these CCC laws are administered.
*CCC is increasingly functioning as a one branch autonomous government agency conducting activity in legislative, executive and judicial areas using an appointed board.
*ESHA (Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area) apparently somehow was drawn AROUND a board members house and that house was not included.
*A racketeering case associated with a development in LA (the frying pan) was won by the land owners only to have them be thrown into the CCC fire.
*Without due process CCC levies daily fines and then will settle for a lesser amount or some land acquisition. These fines add up very quickly and in most (all?) cases are upheld by a judge crushing land owners spirit and ability to fight this abuse.
*For better or worse, these daily fees imposed by government agency are in part the reason the Clive Bundy stand off occurred. In Bundy's case: federal grazing fees and fines. As I understand it everyone else who owned land in this area gave up.
*A court document related to the inspection of private land stated video taping by the land owner was prohibited. Violation of the Bagley-Keene act and individual constitutional rights.
*The State AG is able to counter judicial action by land owners due to the vast resources of the State.
*Improving a structure becomes a life altering process.
*Judges in these cases are likely appointed by people closely associated with the Coastal Commission and beholden to them.
*Wildfire hazards appear to have increased as a result of CCC policy and activity. The State Fire Commission seems to view the CCC as having amended the state fire code contrary to their lack of authority to do so putting people, land and wildlife at unnecessary risk.
*there seem to be many extraneous, special purpose commissions, committees, boards and authorities that now compete with each other on a number of issues. Government competing with government has to be the biggest waste of time, energy and resources imaginable.
*Presumption of correctness in the court system makes government infallible (you may be thinking of the pope right now...).

I think it might be good to start with this last item. To deem our public servants infallible is a recipe for disaster and denies we the people any chance of equal justice under the law, not to mention our lack of ability to hold these agencies and public servants accountable. The other problem with CCC is that while the rule of law is supposed to provide certainty for we the people in our  affairs, the planning approach and its arbitrary and discretionary nature do not allow for this certainty. The law needs to be written, administered and complied with the same way for all, if we are to reach the founding fathers ideal of equal justice.

An arbitrary and capricious government moves people to find alternative ways to do what they want outside of the law. A corrupt government moves people to create black markets, smuggle and openly flout the law to accomplish their goals contributing to the breakdown of the rule of law.

An oppressive government creates a passive-aggressive behavior dynamic with people saying one thing while doing another. This lack of harmony of thought, feeling and action is a problem for people any society. If we are to remain a free people, we need to be able to trust each other and trust our government is acting in our best interest, representing us under law.

By making bad/unconstitutional law, the government creates criminals out of everyone and contributes to a growing reactive movement starting the slow march towards social unrest, a breakdown of society and its social order.  As you know, history is full of revolutions against tyranny. Government needs to extend the lightest possible hand over society, passing only those laws that are necessary to keep the peace and administer equal justice under those same laws.

Editor's at SF Gate call for "Forceful" solutions to Regionalize Government

Stalin was a master at central planning.

A need for regional thinking

San Francisco Chronicle

Published 6:00 pm, Sunday, December 28, 2014

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A giant tunneling machine dubbed Elizabeth is burrowing under London, part of a $25 billion regional train line scheduled to open in 2018. The finished product is intended to to alleviate suffocating traffic, ease pressure on housing costs and share growth across a booming urban center, not just the inner core.

Those problems, if not the solution, should get the Bay Area thinking. Our locale shares London’s anxiety about the future and the next steps to improve livability.A giant tunneling machine dubbed Elizabeth is burrowing under London, part of a $25 billion regional train line scheduled to open in 2018. The finished product is intended to to alleviate suffocating traffic, ease pressure on housing costs and share growth across a booming urban center, not just the inner core.

Costly housing and inadequate transit are concerns that occupy Bay Area residents nearly every day, topics taken on in The Chronicle’s “City on the Edge” editorial series. As the expansive London plan shows, these shortcomings can’t be isolated to the big-city center. They’re regional concerns, taking in dozens of communities.

Other areas — notably the vast region surrounding New York that includes New Jersey and Pennsylvania — are moving in the same direction as London. It’s time there, as well as here,