A blog about Marinwood-Lucas Valley and the Marin Housing Element, politics, economics and social policy. The MOST DANGEROUS BLOG in Marinwood-Lucas Valley.
A LION had been watching three Bullocks feeding in an open field. He had tried to attack them several times, but they had kept together, and helped each other to drive him off. The Lion had little hope of eating them, for he was no match for three strong Bullocks with their sharp horns and hoofs. But he could not keep away from that field, for it is hard to resist watching a good meal, even when there is little chance of getting it.
Then one day the Bullocks had a quarrel, and when the hungry Lion came to look at them and lick his chops as he was accustomed to do, he found them in separate corners of the field, as far away from one another as they could get. It was now an easy matter for the Lion to attack them one at a time, and this he proceeded to do with the greatest satisfaction and relish.
A citizen speaks out at the May 19, 2016 Association of Bay Area Governments Regional Assembly. He questions the legality and constitutionality of "regional government" where citizens don't even know about the meetings. Scott Haggerty, Alameda County Supervisor responds to quiet the citizen (peasant) citing privilege of elected office. Comment from a viewer: Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution forbids forms of government that are not vetted by the citizenry. Regional Governments like ABAG and SCAG are the definition of this illegal activity and should be abolished.
Is "reparations" for past wrongs, just and morally defensible? Dinesh D'Souza takes on the argument. Editor's note: We welcome respectful comments on this video.
Editor's Note: This video is worth a second look after the "State of Emergency" news conference by Marin Grassroots. Here you will see many of the same participants refusing to interact with their fellow citizens inside the meeting. Notably, John Young of Marin Grassroots won't go in because "he wasn't invited and on the agenda" at the end of the tape.
Brief video with the protestors outside the Citizen Marin Town Hall on March 20, 2013. The Town Hall event was open to the community to talk about affordable housing solutions. People from all perspectives were encouraged to speak up about their views on affordable housing.
This group of activists were organized by Cesar Lagleva, a Marin Profesional Public Employee Union Shop Steward (M.A.P.E.) encouraged others to protest against the public event. Their cries of Racism, NIMBYism and Classism are meant to intimidate people from speaking openly about housing. The irony is that most people inside at the event SUPPORT a fair allocation of affordable housing provided it is financially responsible and fits in to existing neighborhood densities.
Cesar was author of the highly offensive Marin Voice article I mentioned in an earlier post here.
Also present was the every present protestor and self proclaimed "Janitor of Political Waste Management", Jimmy Fishbob Geraghty. His daily rants about "racist Marinites" can be found on the San Rafael Patch and Marin IJ online. You will often see him holding signs and protesting around the Bay Area. If you can't get enough of him on the public news sites, you can get the full rants on his facebook page. After this footage was shot, I spoke with him briefly, and came away with a positive impression of him. He seems earnest but misguided and genuinely a nice guy. It was one of my personal highpoints of the evening.
Local affordable housing lobbyist, Dave Coury, also was present wearing his button to end Racism, Nimbyism and Classism. He had been overheard at the February 2013 planning meeting asking for "affirmative action complaints against the Dixie School district" on his cell phone in the lobby during testimony about the Housing Element and its effects on school funding for Dixie School District. He also has publicly called on the supervisors to simply zone all land in Marin within 1/2 mile of 101 Freeway as 30 units per acre multifamily housing. We can only guess his client list funding his activities. In the July 9, 2013 Board of Supervisors meeting, Dave Coury called the struggle for housing in Marin ""a war" and linked a shooting in Marin City to the housing issue.
Cesar Lagleva, sat next to me at a One Bay Area Plan meeting on April 16th. I greeted him and offered to shake his hand and he shot back "don't touch me". Clearly, we have a ways to go on our friendship.
Cesar Lagleva, is one of the organizers for Concerned Marinites to End Nimbyism (CMEN ..no jokes please) and their website is http://www.concernedmarinites.org/. where you will find more of their rhetoric. It is amazing to me that this public employee union official attacks the taxpayers that support him with such language I am told he is a clinical social worker or psychologist. Here is a puff piece put out by his union.
Supervisor Steve Kinsey was the keynote speaker. He thanked M.A.P.E. for organizing and told the crowd that "Marin can be very unwelcoming". Like the rest of the crowd gathered, he was invited to participate the open town hall inside and share his views. Supervisor Kinsey did not attend but stopped for a TV news interview, got in his car and sped off.
We think a fruitful discussion about affordable housing will begin with honest, open dialog and not with shouts of RACISM, CLASSISM and NIMBYism.
We still have time to talk and my offer for a cup of coffee to share with Cesar is still open.
The Marinwood CSD votes to extend their terms WITHOUT voter approval at a special emergency meeting on March 8, 2017. Several residents attended to object and were rudely ignored. The Marinwood CSD manager, Eric Dreikosen had created a report that offered only ONE possible solution to meet the demands of SB 415. In fact, the board did not need an emergency meeting to decide this issue and could have easily waited until the following weeks regular meeting for discussion. The board could have chosen to fill remaining terms at four years and have a five year term beginning with the November 2017 election. This was never discussed. It is an outrageous abuse of the democratic process to EXTEND terms by a vote and is the kind of thing only seen in corrupt dictatorships.
This emergency meeting of ABAG was held on April 2, 2013 to discuss the differences in the demographic forecasts by the California Department of Finance (DOF), California Housing and Community Development (HCD) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG).
The California Department of Finance(DOF) has long been considered the gold standard for business and government economic forecasters since it is based upon detailed analysis of census statistics and does not pretend to know the future business trends, political developments and tax policy that can affect future growth. It is a fact based methodology. It is the core statistic for California.
The Calfornia Housing and Community Development (HCD) projects housing growth in part using DOF forecasts but also include political policy initiatives into account.
The Asssociation of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) guided by chief forecaster, Stephen Levy using the data from DOF, HCD plus a "special sauce" of projections of US economic growth, estimates of the Bay Area growth, etc and projects forty years into the future. His forecasts are the basis for the Regional Needs Analysis (RHNA) that projects the need for affordable housing.
His results are highly controversial since they deviate from all other responsible forecasts of the above agencies and private business forecasts. For example, Marin population has been decreasing for the last decade but ABAG is projecting wild growth not seen in decades.
People vote in the U.S. presidential primary election at a polling station located in a grocery store, in National City, California, United States. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Joel Kotkin swears he doesn’t hate cities—it’s just that most urbanists have a misguided perspective on them. Why focus on city centers, where populations tend to be too young, poor, and transient to invest in property or politics?
For the author, pundit, and Chapman University scholar of geography, America’s low-density suburbs—the ones growing the fastest, where people are more likely to be homeowners, where voter turnout is often higher, and “happiness” is said to be more common—are where the real action’s at. In his view, suburbs offer the greatest chance at community cohesion and engagement, and should be supported, not disparaged, by planners and policy makers.
Chief among the principles of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, the Houston-based think tank of which Kotkin is executive director, is that “People should have a range of neighborhood choices ... rather than being socially engineered into high-density, transit-oriented developments beloved by overly prescriptive planners.”
For Kotkin, excessive top-down planning isn’t just an academic concern—it’s a scourge on the American ideal of community-based self-reliance. In “Restoring Localism,” a sprawling new report from the COU, Kotkin and co-author Wendell Cox identify with grave concern a national trend towards “hyper-centralization,” especially in federal and state policies on poverty, education, and climate change. This is happening in spite what Kotkin views as a popular preference for community-based solutions, an increasingly diverse set of urban and suburban populations, and the public’s documented decline in confidence in government.
“‘[H]yper-centralization’ assumes the superior expertise and wisdom of bureaucracies with the power to regulate,” he writes. “It is tied to the nationalization of politics, an approach that ignores local conditions and rationalizes single solutions for a highly diverse country.” Kotkin wants the country needs to “return” to what he terms “localism,” a governance structure that’s rooted in cohesive groups of people, as opposed to a centralized city, state, and (especially) federal government.
How might the nation embrace a mode of local governance that is truly by and of the people, in all their diversity and difference? Despite its title, the report doesn’t focus much on the mechanics; it spends more time describing the regulatory misdeeds of the Obama administration’s energy mandates and California Governor Jerry Brown’s excessively “coercive” climate and housing policies. Still, Kotkin’s larger point is provocative, especially in an election season dominated by painful political antipathies and identity “sorting” along lines of class, race, and geography. If we weren’t trying so hard to centralize big policy decisions, might we all get along a little better?
We spoke with Kotkin about local control, the value of homeownership, and what’s wrong with California. (For more urbanist mano-a-mano, our own Richard Florida will also be taking part in a town-hall-style debate with Kotkin in Kansas City on Friday, November 4.)
Thanks for agreeing to chat with us. You could say that the urbanism CityLab typically covers is rather at odds with yours.
It’s more of a different focus than a disagreement. I focus frankly on where 75 to 85 percent of the population lives, while Richard Florida is focused on where the other 15 percent lives. They’re different age groups, different populations, their economies are different. The whole argument with localism is that we’re becoming so diverse from place to place that the more regions can come up with their own ways of doing things, the better we’ll all be.
What exactly is localism?
First, it’s not an absolute ideal. Different eras require different things. The New Deal, recovering from World War II, the Civil Rights Movement: All of those required some strengthening of federal power.
But in the here and now, our problems are these high concentrations of wealth and power, and the growing desire of government to operate without getting into even the details of how local communities work. It seems to be that, especially, in an era where information can be distributed easily among groups of people, trying to concentrate everything in one bureaucracy is not the best way of going.
It’s funny to me when progressive says they want locally sourced food or business chains, but then you ask, well, do you want control over your local government? And they say no, we’d rather have ten Ph.Ds in Sacramento tell us how to live. I think those are contradictory. If you like local when you shop, why not in your politics?
You write in the report that “the New Urbanism movement is founded on the sound principle of small districts built around ‘the concept of community.’ But its founding principles favor solutions that would require centralized planning around a fixed set of preferred, even mandated, options.” Why does “centralized” planning, when it’s coming at the city level, necessarily contradict your theory of localism?
I’m perfectly OK if the city of Portland decides to ban cars in the middle of the city. A city deciding as a democratic entity on issues like minimum wage, environmental laws, density requirements—whatever those people want—I have no problem with an area deciding to do that. But what I don’t want is some big Washington, D.C. government or regional bureaucracy saying that you have to be a certain way. That’s not in the spirit of self-governance. It’s less about the result of the decisions as about who gets to decide. I think that’s the real issue, and that’s why we get these crazy politics: People feel powerless, they feel like someone is telling them what to do. And that’s not useful.
You do seem to identify a corollary problem at the city level.
Yes. For instance, the city of L.A. is moving in a direction of higher density, which I think is not helpful for most people in L.A. But that’s what the political consensus is. There I think the one big problem is size: When you’re a city like L.A., council districts are like congressional districts, and you need lots of money and support to get elected, and you can’t have grassroots democracy in that kind of system. You just can’t run for city council because your neighbors think you’d be good. It becomes something where only certain players with certain backers can get anywhere.
[California State Senator] Bob Hertzberg had the idea of breaking down L.A. into seven boroughs, each with its own local legislature made up people who weren’t career politicians. If each of those were divided into nine districts, then you could have someone from Sherman Oaks going door-to-door, gathering local support, and win. Well, that’s never going to happen, because the die there is cast. That is one of the reasons that people move to suburban areas or to smaller towns: to get a greater sense of control over things, like they don’t feel like they have in L.A.
Are there cities you’d hold up as exemplary models of localism?
What I like about Houston is that there’s a clarity of choices for residents. If I go into neighborhood A, there is this specific housing covenant. But if I move to neighborhood B, there is a protection for higher density development. That’s why there are so many planned communities outside of Houston, these gigantic things like the Woodlands and Cinco Ranch, where people say, ‘I want something that is predictable.’ I also like Houston because of the cost. You can be a young person, live inside the 610, go to bars and stay out late, and when you grow up and want a family and establish yourself, you can go to the suburbs and they’re affordable. The Bay Area is a problem, because you can’t buy a house anywhere within 40 miles of San Francisco, unless you have rich parents and you rob the bank. In Houston, there are a lot of choices—different towns with different approaches, many of which aren’t necessarily tied to any sort of city government. You know, I follow opportunities for minorities to buy houses, and it’s clearly better for minorities to buy houses in Texas than a place like New York City or Boston.
You frequently emphasize the importance of giving middle-class families opportunities in the way of work and education. Who exactly are you talking about when you say “middle class”?
Middle class is a very fungible term, but i’ll give you some sense: It’s people who are probably somewhere between the 10 and 20th percentiles, up to the 40 to 60th percentiles, in income. Everything has to be adjusted for cost of living. Making $100,000 a year in San Francisco is a poverty wage, whereas in Houston you can have a really decent life. There is also a big issue of age. The group that is really leaving California right now are people ages 35 to 44. That’s the age of marriage, kids, buying houses. That’s the group I’m interested in. Again, I’m also concerned with ethnic groups and immigrants. Can they buy houses? The chances of African-American families buying houses are way lower than for whites. I believe the Madisonian idea of having a large dispersion of homes is very important to democracy, and we’re moving in other directions all over the country. Especially in California.
A home with solar panels on its roof in a residential neighborhood in San Marcos, California. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Why is the notion of widespread homeownership so critical to you?
I think it’s the basis of a republic. You can’t have a small group of people who own the vast majority of properties. If you’re a renter for life, then you’re basically paying some wealthy person’s mortgage and have no assets at the end. That’s not healthy. People need a certain degree of independence and have skin in the game. If you live in a neighborhood of homeowners, then they’re more concerned about what’s going on in your area. You’re more engaged with local politics. If you’re a renter, maybe you stay in the neighborhood, maybe not, and the relationship to the sate is very really different. That dispersion of ownership was the ballast of the democratic system. We’ve had periods where property ownership is heavily concentrated into a few hands, like the late 19th century and now, where property ownership is prohibitive in many parts of country, and we have these large concentrations of corporate wealth. That doesn’t work well with a democratic system.
You said that California is where you see the most dramatic trend away from this vision of dispersed homeownership. What’s the matter there?
It’s increasingly centralized. It’s increasingly state mandates that dominate what cities can and cannot do. [Governor Jerry] Brown is basically saying no more greenfield development. But if you talk to developers, they say they want to build 20 units to an acre in Rancho Cucamonga but the state says it needs to be 50 to an acre. Otherwise the projects won’t get approvals, you’ll get sued by the state, you might not get transportation funding. Well, the developers can’t sell that! No one is going to move out to the Inland Empire and spend $400-to-$500,000 for a box.
Growth of state control has become pretty extreme in California, and I think we’re going to see more of that in the country in general, where you have housing decisions that should be made at local level being made by the state and the federal level too. You have general erosion of local control.
A lot of California’s state-level planning policies have been a means to reduce driving and vehicle emissions. Isn’t climate policy one of those areas where you really need a coherent, centralized vision to get results?
I think there is a vision that Jerry has had from early on, and has become deeply entrenched, which is that density is good, and if we could have a state made up of mostly renters in little spaces, that’s better. I think that’s not a very good strategy long term. A lot of the decisions being made today are not that concerned with middle-class families. California is so far gone that there is almost no discussion about that strategy left. We have these kinds of orthodoxies that have become so entrenched in planning, media, academia, and government that we don’t even think about whether there is another way of doing things that doesn’t undermine the future of the next generation.
But wouldn’t failing to develop policies that limit travel-inducing, emissions-generating sprawl “undermine the future of the next generation” in a far broader, deadlier way?
If you’re saying because of climate, we have to live this way this way and this way no matter what, then you have a certain kind of society and you’re going to have certain results—the problem is that we can really no longer make the argument that people don’t want to live in suburbs. Most prefer it.
So are there other ways of getting to that goal of reduced emissions without essentially turning America into a country of people living in little spaces with no children because we refuse to take up space? We can look at more efficient cars. Autonomous cars also opens up all sorts of opportunities to reduce space for cars. And what about the growing number of people working from home? People can have a larger house but work at home. With jobs becoming more dispersed, maybe they can commute 10 minutes rather than an hour. And maybe we should invest on making solar more effective, or converting coal use to natural gas.
I think the environmental movement would do much better if they talked about how to deal with these issues without undermining the way people live. It’s going to be ugly when you decide how to make people live—you’re going to have cities where only really rich people can have houses and backyards. That’s not my vision of a democratic society.
Which brings us back to localism. Isn’t there a risk that by grouping off into smaller sub-communities, we’re kind of exacerbating the “Big Sort” we’ve seen happening on the political landscape? The kind of geopolitical class-sorting that helped give rise to Donald Trump, and Brexit, and anti-outsider fervor in the U.S. and beyond?
Well, if you say in Europe, that people in Brussels have a right to tell you what to do with your life, you’re going to get a response. To me, Trump is different. He’s somewhere between a danger and a crackpot. He has a kind of authoritarian approach that’s almost the opposite of localism. I don’t think he’d understand what the term would mean. Hilary is probably going to be a centralizer, but at least she gets the argument.
How do you get around the fact that communities often form their identities on the basis of exclusion?
Is racism a part of localism? That’s not the case at all. The communities I live in are very diverse. People who are Hispanic and Asian and so on want the same things from their communities that Anglos do. One of the advantages of localism as I see it is that it would force people to talk to each other as neighbors as opposed to members of a particular ethnic group. Local politics have less invective than at the national level.
If nothing else I’m trying to start some sort of debate or rational conversation about things that have become orthodoxies. Why don’t we consider something else and have a discussion? I think the planning community is all reading from the same hymnal, and that’s not such a good idea. And we get this thing where planners want A and people want B and there is no attempt to figure how how to address both. That’s where I hope we’d start.
Then what? What might a localist system of governance actually look like?
The next paper, which we hope to start in January, asks: How exactly can we do this? What would a government policy look like that was respectful of local concerns and address these larger concerns? Can we empower local areas within bigger regions?
The progressive tradition was always very much about how do you diminish concentrations of power. So it’s not a liberal or conservative thing at all, or even an urban or suburban thing: It’s about governance, and who decides. And how you maintain a system where people are not disenfranchised and have some control over the world they live in.
Today's Google doodle is an image of Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became one of the most eloquent and influential abolitionists in American history. The doodle signals the start of Black History Month, which grew out of earlier traditions such as "Negro History Week" and offers a period of intensive reflection on the contributions of blacks to the history of the United States while also reminding the country of the historical realities of slavery and other unspeakable ills pushed on African Americans due to de facto and de jure racism.
Douglass, who was believed to have been born in February, 1818 is of special interest to libertarians for many reasons. As Damon Root has written for Reason, Douglass was a true classical liberal who believed in individualism, strong property rights, and voluntary philanthropy as the best way to create a free, prosperous, and inclusive society. From a 2012 review of Nicholas Buccola's The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass:
“Douglass’s arguments against slavery are, in a very important sense, arguments for liberalism,” writes Linfield College political scientist Nicholas Buccola in The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass, his engaging new study of the great abolitionist. Taking seriously Douglass’ dual commitment to both a “robust conception of mutual responsibility” and “the ideas of universal self-ownership, natural rights, limited government, and an ethos of self-reliance,” Buccola offers a nuanced portrait that illuminates both Douglass and his place in American intellectual history....
Buccola notes, “throughout his development as a political thinker, Douglass was presented with a series of ideological alternatives,” including the pacifist anarchism of Garrison, who said the only government he recognized was the “government of God,” and the utopian socialism of John A. Collins, general director of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, who believed “that private property was the root of all evil.” Douglass, Buccola observes, “consistently rejected these in favor of liberalism.”
Socialism was then becoming particularly attractive to many New England reformers. Yet Douglass rejected the socialist case against private land ownership, saying “it is [man’s] duty to possess it—and to possess it in that way in which its energies and properties can be made most useful to the human family.” He routinely preached the virtues of property rights. “So far from being a sin to accumulate property, it is the plain duty of every man to lay up something for the future,” he told a black crowd in Rochester, New York in 1885. “I am for making the best of both worlds and making the best of this world first, because it comes first.” As Douglass’ glowing description of his first paying job indicated, he also considered economic liberty an essential aspect of human freedom....
In my opinion, Douglass's 1852 speech "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" is one of the greatest texts in American literature. It simultaneously enacts what is these days lazily called "American exceptionalism" while excoriating the moral failings of the country. Douglass exemplifies the tradition of critiquing the country's laws and customs by examining them in light of rarely attained but endlessly invoked ideals of equality and justice. To me, that gesture, along with a willingness to change and grow as a nation, is what makes America exceptional. From Douglass's speech:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
The three editions of Douglass' autobiography (most Americans know the first one, published shortly after he escaped and made his way north) are phenomenal testaments both to the ideals of American freedom and the ways that ideal has rarely come close to being realized. Perhaps most important, he offered up a critique of the country's history, customs, and laws but also personified and argued for a way forward in which all Americans would both be more free and able to transcend the awful indignities and crimes of the past.
A few days camping in Northern California refreshes the spirit
Earlier this week, I took a few days to camp in a beautiful state park in Northern California. It afforded a bit of solitude and no internet access. I was alone with the sound the creek and my thoughts. Needless to say to those following this blog, I have had to deal with some very negative people recently who seem to be intent on destroying my reputation in any way possible. A former friend and political ally has launched a venomous attack on my character in the press in an attempt to silence me. Another cowardly individual attacks me on NextDoor neighborhoods in the full knowledge that I cannot respond. The NextDoor neighborhood lead has crippled my account to prevent me from posting because he considers my opinions "dangerous". Why be a community advocate only to take this abuse? In my case, it boils down to a few simple ideas of keeping our land, the community and our future beautiful. Like many people, my relatives before me were veterans in various wars and causes. They lived in much more difficult times than me and actually dodge bullets, landmines, enemy planes on behalf of our country. I have been the BENEFICIARY of their bravery and dedication to liberty. If I have to dodge a few insults, lies and innuendo to stand fast to the basic principles of democracy and liberty, it is THE LEAST I can do to honor our brave veterans. I never served in the military but I will continue to serve the community. Will you join me in advocating for our liberty?
Novato City Council person, Pam Drew addresses the Association of Bay Area Governments General Assembly on May 19, 2016. "The merger will make cities weak and counties strong"
Is Limiting Public Engagement and Local Land Use Discretion the Solution to Expedite Housing Development?
With the first round of legislative policy hearings nearing completion, one area of legislative focus is readily apparent: reducing public engagement and local land use discretion to expedite the construction of new housing.
The question we need to ask is whether reducing or even removing public input and local discretion over land use matters is the right medicine for the housing shortage.
Alternatively, are there better ways to increase housing supplies without removing the public from these important land use decisions that permanently define a community's character?
In past periods of economic boom, California produced around 200,000 housing units per year, with about 70 percent of those units single-family. Given some of the market limitations affecting single-family housing, this year’s production is expected to be around 100,000 units with about one-half higher density-multifamily.
Policy makers in Sacramento, facing concerns about escalating housing costs and viewing reports stating that the State needs up to 1.5 million more units to satisfy demand, are proposing to limit community discretion and input to expedite delivery of more units.
While housing production should be expedited where possible, legislators should also pause to consider the value and role played by public input in shaping the quality of life and unique aspects of a neighborhood or location that new residents and developers find attractive.
The residents who participate in land use hearings do so because they care about their communities and have a longer-term commitment to a place than a developer that builds and moves on.
While “public engagement” is often described as a desired policy goal, how does it work when public participation on a developer’s proposal is dismissed as a mere hindrance?
Cutting off public input may have other policy consequences as well, including expanding pressure for more local voter growth control measures.
How to Get More Housing, Especially Higher-Density Housing in Job-Rich Coastal Areas?
This is the policy question of the hour. In addition, there are many bills that try to be helpful by providing funding for affordable housing, help first time home buyers save for housing and ensure limited funds go further. Some of the bills supported by the League include the following:
Ø AB 2734 (Atkins) Dedicates portion of state savings from RDA elimination for affordable housing;
Ø AB 2817 (Chiu) Increases Low Income Housing Tax Credits from $70 to $300 million per year;
Ø AB 1736 (Steinorth) Allows future homebuyers to save for down payment tax free; and
Ø SB 873 (Beall) Allows low income tax credits to be sold more efficiently, yielding greater value.
The Bills Seeking to Reduce Public Engagement and Local Discretion over Housing
Depending on a community, the level of concern over these measures will differ, but what they have in common are prescriptive one-size-fits all edicts and other provisions intended to limit local authority and public input. All the following bills are opposed by the League:
Ø AB 2522 (Bloom) Requires housing for households up to 150 percent of median income to be a permitted use by right (and thus not subject to CEQA) or discretionary review, other than design review;
Ø AB 2557 (Santiago) Declares the development of multifamily housing to not be a municipal affair, and prohibits a temporary planning moratorium from being enacted affecting a project of more than 30 percent multifamily units;
Ø AB 2501 (Bloom) Expands the law enabling developers to demand up to 35 percent greater densities and project concessions above existing zoning standards;
Ø AB 2299 (Bloom) and SB 1069 (Wieckowski) Reduce community control of parking and other issues affecting second units in single-family neighborhoods;
Ø AB 2584 (Daly) Empowers outside parties with no direct role or interest in a project to sue and collect attorney fees from local agencies over denials or conditions imposed on housing developments;
Ø AB 1934 (Santiago) Authorizes commercial developers to demand additional floor area and other concessions above existing zoning if residential units are built on same site; and
Ø SB 1318 (Wolk) Limits future annexations if services are not delivered to adjacent disadvantaged unincorporated communities.
Next Steps
Cities, counties, the residents they represent, and others that value public engagement and local discretion on land use matters need to focus and engage in the housing-related discussion pending in the Legislature.
While there are numerous measures aimed at enhancing affordable housing resources, others focus on removing local input and discretion. If your city would like to take a position on any of these bills, please visit the League’s Legislative Database for sample letters.
Strengthening California cities through advocacy and education
Editor's Note: This is proof positive how completely nuts our local and state government has become. They actually are plotting to eliminate citizen's input in the public process because we "get in the way" of their divine work. Do they even understand the constitution? It seems that the prevailing wisdom is that the people exist solely to provide tax revenues and to shut up.
Give voters the right to decide how much development is right for Santa Monica.
Protect the existing low-rise character of the beach town that weLUVE.
Eliminate incentives given to developers in the new Zoning Ordinance to demolish existing buildings and replace them with larger, taller, denser developments.
Preserve our open skies, ocean breezes, and quality of life.
Protect renters by stopping the gentrification of neighborhoods and the demolition of existing rent-controlled apartments that are being replaced with non-rent-controlled buildings.
Prevent traffic from getting even worse.
Get special interests out of our City Hall.
The Residocracy Santa MonicaLUVEInitiative will empower residents by requiring voter approval for:
Development Agreements
Development above the Tier 1 level (2 to 3 stories across most of the city and 4 stories in downtown Santa Monica)
Major amendments to planning policy documents, such as the general plan, any specific plan, the Zoning Ordinance, and the official LUCE maps and zoning district maps
This public visioning sessions for Plan Bay Area were conducted around the bay area where the audience was seeded with professionals and paid activists posing as "the public" . Our democratic rights have literally been stolen by a sham process.
We will fight back. See this Marin IJ article detailing the paid activists in Marin that helped pass this plan.
The phenomenon of urban sprawl has become a pre-eminent controversy throughout the United States. Recently a number of scholars and writers, gathered at a conference about the issue at Lone Mountain Ranch in Big Sky, Montana by the Political Economy Research Center, decided to distill their conclusions into the following brief statement of principles. The authors have called this statement the "Lone Mountain Compact," and have invited other writers and scholars to join in endorsing its principles. A partial list of signatures appears at the end.
Preamble:
The unprecedented increase in prosperity over the last 25 years has created a large and growing upper middle class in America. New modes of work and leisure combined with population growth have fueled successive waves of suburban expansion in the 20th century. Technological progress is likely to increase housing choice and community diversity even further in the 21st century, enabling more people to live and work outside the conventional urban forms of our time. These choices will likely include low-density, medium-density, and high-density urban forms. This growth brings rapid change to our communities, often with negative side effects, such as traffic congestion, crowded public schools, and the loss of familiar open space. All of these factors are bound up in the controversy that goes by the term "sprawl." The heightened public concern over the character of our cities and suburbs is a healthy expression of citizen demand for solutions that are responsive to our changing needs and wants. Yet tradeoffs between different policy options for addressing these concerns are poorly understood. Productive solutions to public concerns will adhere to the following fundamental principles. Principles for Livable Cities:
The most fundamental principle is that, absent a material threat to other individuals or the community, people should be allowed to live and work where and how they like.
Prescriptive, centralized plans that attempt to determine the detailed outcome of community form and function should be avoided. Such "comprehensive" plans interfere with the dynamic, adaptive, and evolutionary nature of neighborhoods and cities.
Densities and land uses should be market driven, not plan driven. Proposals to supersede market-driven land use decisions by centrally directed decisions are vulnerable to the same kind of perverse consequences as any other kind of centrally planned resource allocation decisions, and show little awareness of what such a system would have to accomplish even to equal the market in effectiveness.
Communities should allow a diversity in neighborhood design, as desired by the market. Planning and zoning codes and building regulations should allow for neotraditional neighborhood design, historic neighborhood renovation and conversion, and other mixed-use development and the more decentralized development forms of recent years.
Decisions about neighborhood development should be decentralized as far as possible. Local neighborhood associations and private covenants are superior to centralized or regional government planning agencies.
Local planning procedures and tools should incorporate private property rights as a fundamental element of development control. Problems of incompatible or conflicting land uses will be better resolved through the revival of common law principles of nuisance than through zoning regulations which tend to be rigid and inefficient.
All growth management policies should be evaluated according to their cost of living and "burden-shifting" effects. Urban growth boundaries, minimum lot sizes, restrictions on housing development, restrictions on commercial development, and other limits on freely functioning land markets that increase the burdens on lower income groups must be rejected.
Market-oriented transportation strategies should be employed, such as peak period road pricing, HOT lanes, toll roads, and de-monopolized mass transit. Monopoly public transit schemes, especially fixed rail transit that lacks the flexibility to adapt to the changing destinations of a dynamic, decentralized metropolis, should be viewed skeptically.
The rights of present residents should not supersede those of future residents. Planners, citizens, and local officials should recognize that "efficient" land use must include consideration for household and consumer wants, preferences, and desires. Thus, growth controls and land-use planning must consider the desires of future residents and generations, not solely current residents.
Planning decisions should be based upon facts, not perceptions. A number of the concerns raised in the "sprawl" debate are based upon false perceptions. The use of good data in public policy is crucial to the continued progress of American cities and the social advance of all its citizens.
From Kenneth Orski, publisher of Innovation Briefs: "Smart Growth" is a movement with a political agenda that has nothing to do with improving people's daily lives. Rather, it is an effort by a certain group of urban elitists to impose their lifestyle choices on the vast majority of Americans who prefer a suburban lifestyle, and in the guise of "sprawl containment" and "open space preservation," deprive low-income households of an opportunity to share in the American dream of home ownership.
Julian Zatarain, far left, says the pledge of allegiance before being appointed to the Huntington Park parks and recreation commission. He has lived in the country illegally since age 13. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) By CINDY CARCAMO AND RUBEN VIVEScontact the reporters
Julian Zatarain always assumed the doors of City Hall were closed to him because he is here illegally, arriving from Sinaloa in 2007 when he was 13.
The 21-year-old college student found other outlets for service, such as volunteering for the Red Cross and with an organization that helps young people like him get access to educational resources.
Then on Monday, Zatarain proudly accepted an appointment to the Huntington Park parks and recreation commission. Another immigrant here illegally, Francisco Medina, 29, won an appointment to the health and education commission.
Their appointments mark a bold — and controversial — step by the small southeast Los Angeles County city to boost the participation of these immigrants in city government.
The working-class communities along the 710 Freeway have long been entry points for immigrants from Mexico and Latin America — a good portion arriving illegally.
The demographics have resulted in much lower-than-average voter turnout, with some elections dropping below 10% in the last decade. In one election in Bell, only 2% of the voting-age population cast ballots; balloting in nearby South Gate brought out only 3%.
There is also the belief that the lack of civic engagement has helped foster the corruption that has plagued city halls across southeast L.A. County, most notably the Bell scandal over public officials' salaries that resulted in national headlines and multiple criminal convictions of top leaders.
People who are in this country illegally cannot vote or seek elected office, but officials in Huntington Park said their status should not stop them from helping govern in other ways.
"Our population includes documented and undocumented immigrants, and I wanted to make sure everyone could participate," Huntington Park Mayor Karina Macias said. "If we're going to talk about transparency, being open and having a community that's involved, then the conversation also has to include undocumented immigrants. I'm hoping other cities are looking at what we're doing here."
Macias said the city began accepting new applications for commission posts two months ago, and officials began wondering what would stop them from appointing people who are living in the country illegally.
State law does not prohibit people who are in the country illegally from serving as appointed commissioners. Both men are required to undergo full background checks. And unlike other city commissioners, Zatarain and Medina won't receive a monthly stipend, which generally ranges from $25 to $75.
"These two gentlemen have thousands of hours of volunteer work," said Jhonny Pineda, a Huntington Park councilman who formally appointed both men. "They are qualified but it just turns out they are undocumented."
Experts say the move reflects a growing effort in heavily Latino cities to push for more inclusion of people without legal status in public life. Several years ago, Maywood — which is next door to Huntington Park — made national headlines by declaring itself a "sanctuary" for those who are in the country illegally and repealed practices that some considered anti-immigrant.
"It's all about inclusion in civic engagement and also about using the resources a city has, and the No. 1 resource in any city are its people," said Fernando Guerra, a political science professor who also serves as director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
This inclusion is also occurring at the state level. California this year began issuing driver's licenses to people without legal status. This summer, the California Legislature passed a measure that provides healthcare to many immigrants who are in the country illegally.
The U.S. Census Bureau last month said Latinos are now the largest ethnic group in California. But Latinos still have lower income levels than whites, and many believe the low voter turnout is blunting their political influence.
Reaction to the appointments has been decidedly mixed inside and outside Huntington Park.
Linda Caraballo, a former councilwoman and resident of Huntington Park, said that while she doesn't oppose the people who are in the country illegally, she is against the appointments of the two men, fearing it would produce bad press for the city.
"There are more qualified people," she said. "How could they be policy advisors if they can't even vote for the council members? This is just going to bring media attention, it's going to create national debate and it is something the city of Huntington Park doesn't need."
Robin Hvidston, executive director of We the People Rising, an immigration enforcement group in Claremont, said the appointments take two commission seats from U.S. citizens.
"To appoint commission seats to individuals who are breaking federal laws demonstrates that lack of respect for U.S. law," she said.
But others argued that it's important for immigrants to feel like they have a stake in how their communities are governed. When more people care about these issues, the chances of corruption are lessened, said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute — a Latino-focused public policy and research organization.
"The environment of where corruption flourishes is an environment where there is almost always a low level of scrutiny in monitoring and accountability and that is always characteristic of low level civic engagement," he said. "The participation in commissions is a logical and healthy step forward."
Zatarain, who is attending Santa Monica College, said he chose the parks and recreation commission because he believes he can help the city provide better services for residents.
He said he first thought about getting involved in government after the city picked a new trash hauler and garbage started piling up on streets.
"I was upset," Zatarain said. "Why was my city dealing with this...? I came to realize, I wanted to get involved and help."
Editors Note: I am very pro legal immigration but I was shocked by this story. I wonder where we are headed if we cannot have a legal, democratic government. We need better immigration policy and uniform laws. Ultimately, carving out special status hurts the people meant to help the most.
Many of us have been attending community meetings objecting to high density housing near transit for a year or more - yet we find ourselves facing highly organized, well-funded opponents who have controlled the conversation for years - before we ever showed up. These groups helped usher in designations of many Marin neighborhoods as Priority Development Areas – hot-spots where 80% of new housing growth is targeted by Plan Bay Area.
While we learned about neighbors wanting to build kitchen extensions somehow our elected representatives overlooked telling us about their far more radical development plans. Finally when we did show up we found ourselves dismissed as a nuisance as anything from “johnny come latelys” to NIMBYs and racists.
The outcome despite a near 10 to 1 ratio of opponents to proponents is that fast growth and high density is going through in Marin:
Civic Center is going to be turned into a 5-story Northgate City metropolis. Its "Transit Town Center" PDA designation signals MTC’s target to pack in 7,000 housing units within ½ mile of the SMART train station where there are currently only 1,165 units. (Read this MTC guide to understand PDA designations)
Marinwood and Lucas Valley face absorbing 546 high density housing units. This has the potential to cause significant impact on schools - it is estimated to place a burden of $4.9m year on local taxpayers if schools are to maintain their quality due to subsidies and tax exemptions provided to low income and affordable housing developers and residents.
Strawberry and Marin City face similar fates, Marin City’s situation is especially perplexing as high density affordable housing could displace the black population of Marin, many of whom are low income and cannot by definition afford affordable housing
Most of us returned from meetings where opponents outnumbered proponents dumbstruck by how this could have happened – and was continuing to happen. So we started to research - and we followed the money…
Plan Bay Area – Following the ABAG Money
Plan Bay Area and the associated Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) are the two major tools being used by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) to drive our cities and county to embrace high density housing.
ABAG claims there is no loss of local control, but if the planning numbers aren’t met then city and counties open themselves up tolegal liability. Those locations that embrace development via Priority Development Areas receive lucrative transportation and housing grants.
The Ecosystem of Advocacy Groups
Plan Bay Area started its conception years ago in conjunction with a number of housing and transportation advocacy groups. These groups formed strong relationships with ABAG, MTC and have also endeared themselves to counties, cities and businesses.
Here in Marin an organization calling itself the Grassroots Leadership Network was formed, it evolved to become Marin Grassroots. Receiving donations of over $634,116 in 2011, with plush offices located amongst Marin County offices, and employing multiple full time staff it doesn’t quite align with the definitions of Grassroots on Wikipedia.
Like other housing and transportation advocacy groups, Marin Grassroots embedded itself in the committees involved in planning. They showed up early and often while most of us slept unaware of the radical change that was planned for us.
In March 2013 Marin Grassroots along with other housing advocacy groups was paid by MTC to conduct focus groups to capture feedback from minorities and low income residents on their needs (see page 4). A laudable goal, but paying a political organization with a strong agenda to increase high density housing and switch residents from cars to transit was surely unlikely to produce unbiased conclusions.
But these groups weren't treated just as vendors, they are partners of ABAG with Marin Grassroots awarded a $56,000 grant by ABAG.
These groups would attend community meetings, not disclosing their relationships to ABAG and MTC and cheer on ABAG and MTCs Plan Bay Area, holding up signs promoting the plan.
When finally accused of derailing conversations and failing to disclose that they were funded by taxpayer , ABAG and MTC contributions they claimed not to have taken a position on Plan Bay Area . Yet even the most glancing visit to the Marin Grassroots' website proved otherwise as they strongly advocated not just the enactment of Plan Bay Area, but it’s most severe variant – the Environment, Equity and Jobs alternative (EEJ) - even going so far as to create a petition advocating adoption of this alternative . The EEJ option diverts a further $2.5bn from maintaining and expanding highways towards transit.
Consider also that these advocacy organizations are non-profits (501(c)(3)s) where donations are not taxable.
The Marin County supervisors are very involved with Grassroots, involving them on committees and attending and supporting their "We are Marin" party.
The Billion Dollar Community Foundations
The other way that these groups raise money is through bequests made typically by wealthy individuals to Community Foundations such as the Marin Community Foundation (MCF) or the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. MCF has assets of $1bngathered initially through bequests such as Mrs Beryl Buck and subsequent donors many of whom made donations in their wills. It is meant to direct funds to improve the quality of life and diversity for the people of Marin. However of late it has donated $250,000 to Marin Grassroots and $75,000 to Stand Up for Neighborly Novato - both housing and social equity advocacy groups that have supported Plan Bay Area.
Where Does this Leave Us Marinites?
Now we know what’s occurring Marinites can better understand how we got to this fast growth situation. Plan Bay Area was conceived and promoted by a network of political patrons. What we can do about this is vote out officials that let this patronage occur, especially those who supported it:
Supervisors Steve Kinsey , Katie Rice Judy Arnold voted to make Marin Grassroots Director, Ericka Ericsson , a Marin County Planning Commissioner despite a perceived lack of experience.
All the Marin County Supervisors are “host sponsors” of Marin Grassroots upcoming “We Are Marin” picnic event at Civic Center Park.
San Rafael city council candidate and fast growth proponent Greg Brockbank, alongside Marin County Supervisor Kinsey have both regularly attended and shown their support for Marin Grassroots events such as the declaration of the state of emergency where fast growth opponents were labeled a racist lynch mob. Supervisor Kinsey spoke with the Marin Grassroots and Concerned Marinites protest outside the Citizen Marin town hall.
Elected officials need to be on notice that their patronage and support of these organizations is unacceptable. Voters in Marin should demonstrate the ramifications of this behavior at the ballot box starting by voting for Randy Warren in the November San Rafael city council race and supervisor candidates Carol Brandtand Toni Shroyer. Businesses and individuals can also help offset the imbalance by donating to their campaigns.
Marin needs a major reform - voters need to send a clear message – this political patronage is unacceptable and we do not want Marin overrun by fast growth.
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