Fable: The Ox who Envied the Pig. ( A lesson for Politicians/Planners/Activists seeking OBAG grants.)

THE OX WHO ENVIED THE PIG

ONCE upon a time there was an Ox named Big Red. He had a younger brother named Little Red. These two brothers did all the carting on a large farm.

Now the farmer had an only daughter and she was soon to be married. Her mother gave orders that the Pig should be fattened for the wedding feast.

Little Red noticed that the Pig was fed on choice food. He said to his brother, "How is it, Big Red, that you and I are given only straw and grass to eat, while we do all the hard work on the farm? That lazy Pig does nothing but eat the choice food the farmer gives him."

Little Red noticed that the Pig was fed on choice food.

Said his brother, "My dear Little Red, envy him not. That little Pig is eating the food of death! He is being fattened for the wedding feast. Eat your straw and grass and be content and live long."

Not long afterwards the fattened Pig was killed and cooked for the wedding feast.

The fattened Pig was killed and cooked for the wedding feast.

Then Big Red said, "Did you see, Little Red, what became of the Pig after all his fine feeding?"

"Yes," said the little brother, "we can go on eating plain food for years, but the poor little Pig ate the food of death and now he is dead. His feed was good while it lasted, but it did not last long." 

They Saved Marin in the 50s and 60s from this Awful Future

SF Bay Area: What Might Have Been

Editor's Note: You simply must go to this wonderful new website to see the San Francisco Bay that might have been HERE .  It is a wonderful tribute to the gallant efforts of people to save our treasured county.  It is a positive crime that the same forces of urbanization are being championed by Steve Kinsey, Kate Sears and Katie Rice under the false flag of environmentalism. Plan Bay Area imposes rapid urbanization of Marin and the other counties in the Bay Area. These are just a few of the stories.  We will Save Marin Again!

Marincello: Invisible City

Marincello may be the iconic example of “what might have been”. Instead of miles of hiking trails, epic vista points, and the occasional bobcat or hawk sighting, one could find themselves standing amongst cul-de-sacs ringed by multiple-car garages and private backyards.

Such was the aim of Marincello, a planned community for 25,000 residents on 2,100 Headland acres proposed in 1964 by Pittsburgh developer Thomas Frouge. The plan included model homes, a mile-long mall, and central high-rise hotel. Financially backing the project was Gulf Oil.

Support for the plan came from local newspapers and on November 12, 1965, the Marin County Board of Supervisors approved the Marincello plan. According to John Hart: “Three attorneys labored on this seemingly lost cause: Robert Praetzel of San Rafael, and Martin Rosen and Douglas Ferguson of Sausalito… ‘I got involved not so much for an environmental purpose as a civic

Most of Britain's Parliament is not elected... Meet THE LORDS (Lesson for MTC)

We Don't Need your Facilitation! Leave us alone!

The CASA Compact written by big cities/developers but nofiscal analysis

We don't have $15 million to spend for housing in the South Bay

"You want to tax on gross receipts? That's crazy!"

Damon Connolly, Marin supervisor not sold on proposed solutions

Housing crisis plan discussed in luxury; Marin supervisor not sold on proposed solutions

In emails, Marin Supervisor Damon Connolly wrote that while the housing plan contains some good ideas, “there are significant problems with the approach.”(Robert Tong/Marin Independent Journal)

By RICHARD HALSTEAD | rhalstead@marinij.com | Marin Independent Journal
PUBLISHED: November 28, 2018 at 5:26 pm | UPDATED: November 28, 2018 at 8:50 pm


Metropolitan Transportation Commission board members, including Marin County Supervisor Damon Connolly, are meeting at the swank Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn this week to discuss a blockbuster new plan for addressing the Bay Area’s critical shortage of affordable housing.

The plan calls for generating $1.5 billion per year in new revenue over the next 20 to 25 years to achieve its goals. It would include new taxes and fees affecting property owners, developers, employers, local governments and taxpayers.

Marin critics of the MTC and its initiatives, such as Plan Bay Area, see the choice of venue as indicative of the commission’s hauteur.

“It smacks of decadence,” said Richard Hall of San Rafael. “While working to house people with low incomes, we have a group of politicians living it up at a wine resort in Sonoma.”

Some members of the commission will be staying overnight at the inn while attending the retreat, which cost the commission $29,000. Mission Inn’s amenities include a spa and a Michelin-rated restaurant; the Sonoma Golf Club is next door. The commission had Connolly on a list of attendees planning to spend the night, but he said Tuesday that was incorrect. See article HERE

Tax Scheme to raise BILLIONS of dollars for developers

Private Developer,  Michael Corvarrubias speaks to MTC CASA technical committee about a proposal to raise BILLIONS annually from San Francisco bay area residents and businesses to fund affordable housing.  The CASA technical committee consists of industry insiders and appointed politicians.  Absent from this group are taxpayers. They had hoped to raise THREE times the amount.  This is a sick.  It will tax millions of people out of their homes, enrich a few and wreck havoc on the local economy.   It is time to sound the alarm.

We did all the marketing right but the dogs didn't like the dogfood*" ABAG considers what went wrong with Plan Bay Area I

Brad Paul demonstrates the arrogance and stupidity of the ABAG staff.  They call us names and think we cannot do math.  Gee,  maybe we REJECT the massive urbanization and Government control..   Maybe we don't want central planners guiding every aspect of our lives and destroy our neighborhoods.   He is a hint Mr. Paul.  We love our communities.  We love our homes and we don't need ABAG to "improve our lives".

At 5:00 Mr. Paul uses an illustration of Wincup "stack and pack" as an example of bad construction.  See the written reports of ABAG insights HERE
===========================================================================

*We did the marketing right but the dogs didn't like the dog food" refers to marketing folklore about a major product launch that failed.

"We did everything right. We hired the best agency. Celebrity endorsements.  Bought millions of dollars in prime time advertising. Got prime shelf space in the stores.  It was destined to be a hit!"

What happened?

"The dogs wouldn't eat it"

Product testing with end users is an important step of any successful product launch.  Success takes hold only AFTER the "dogs eat the dog food".

Bob Brown "Traffic will Increase under Plan Bay Area"

Novato Planning Director, Bob Brown asserts that traffic will increase under Plan Bay Area and become gridlock. He says that nothing can be done since it was decided during the 1972 Housing Element. Essentially he is saying that no one has any rights to govern the development of their community since it was set in stone. These bureaucrats want to govern us. We must save Marin Again!

The Freeway Revolt of 1956-1966 proves Citizens can make a difference.

The Freeway Revolt

Historical Essay

by Chris Carlsson

Freeway protesters in City Hall, c. 1960

Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Picketers protesting against the Southern Freeway marching at City Hall, April 18, 1961.

Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Save the Panhandle Park rally in Golden Gate Park, May 17, 1964.

Photo: Bancroft Library

Malvina Reynolds sings her anti-freeway ballad at the May 17, 1964 rally to save the Panhandle in Golden Gate Park.

Photo: Bancroft Library

New ramps to Washington and Clay Streets from the Embarcadero Freeway, August 15, 1965.

Charles Cushman Collection: Indiana University Archives (P14851)

Construction of the Embarcadero Freeway stopped here at Broadway due to popular anger.

Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Freeway protestors walk along Embarcadero, old Embarcadero Freeway and Ferry Building in background, c. 1964

Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library

In the 1950s, the California Division of Highways had a plan to extend freeways across San Francisco. At that time the freeway reigned supreme in California, but San Francisco harbored the seeds of an incipient revolt which ultimately saved several neighborhoods from the wrecking ball and also put up the first serious opposition to the post-WWII consensus on automobiles, freeways, and suburbanization.

Early plan for 8-lane freeway to cut under Russian Hill on its way from the Embarcadero to the Golden Gate Bridge

The Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC), one of the city's oldest and most persistent neighborhood groups, dates its origins to the initial struggles against the proposed Panhandle-Golden Gate Park freeway, which was to extend the central freeway up the Oak/Fell corridor, slice 60% of the Panhandle for the roadway, and tunnel under the north edge of Golden Gate Park before turning onto today's Park Presidio towards the Golden Gate Bridge.

On November 2, 1956 the San Francisco Chronicle graciously published a map of the proposed and actual freeway routes through San Francisco even though its accompanying editorial was already chastising protestors: "The remarkable aspect of these protests and claims of injury is their tardiness. They concern projects that have for years been set forth in master plans, surveys and expensive traffic studies. They have been ignored or overlooked by citizens and public official alike—until the time was at hand for concrete pouring and when revision had become either impossible or extremely costly. The evidence indicates that the citizenry never did know or had forgotten what freeways the planners had in mind for them."

Highway 101 just south of Cesar Chavez exit, 2007

Photo: Chris Carlsson

James Lick Freeway under construction in 1953: San Francisco's first. Seals Stadium, the old ballpark is visible in center-left of photo

Photo: Ed Brady

Just three years earlier San Francisco had opened what became known as "hospital curve" both for its location behind General Hospital and its high rate of accidents. On October 1, 1953 the Bayshore Freeway opened from Army to Bryant/7th Street, nearing a later direct link with the Bay Bridge. San Franciscans could now drive three unmolested miles of "divided no-stop freeways" from Alemany to Bryant. The new Bayshore Freeway was the first highway to open after the failed effort of state highway authorities to build a 2nd Bay Bridge right next to the first, a plan they pursued from 1945-49 before it was finally defeated, in part thanks to Mayor Elmer Robinson appealing to military authorities to halt it because it would reinforce the bottleneck the Bay Bridge already presented for getting in or out of the City.

California passed the Collier-Burns Act in 1947, which allowed the construction of freeways to proceed without charging tolls. The Act reoriented the state highway system from multipurpose rural roads to limited-access superhighways and extended them into the cities for the first time. The assumption, which was borne out by developments, is that by building the new highways into the cities, the state gas tax revenues (which were raised 50% in the same bill) would rise rapidly because of all the additional driving the highways promoted among urban dwellers. As it turns out, it was California’s lead that shaped the 1956 Interstate Highway System, which followed the same funding formula. As Katherine M. Johnson has written, the “major flaw of this solution to the rural bias of American highway[s] was precisely its fiscal logic.” Focusing on solving a funding problem ignored basic issues of design standards and integration into the urban fabric. Instead, new highways were marketed as solutions for urban blight, dovetailing with the massive urban renewal programs that were gutting central city neighborhoods in dozens of cities from the late 1950s into the 1970s.

As the plans unfolded, public opposition grew. By the time the Embarcadero Freeway was nearly under construction in 1958, a loud opposition had formed, going on to campaign for its removal after its completion. Over 30,000 people signed petitions at meetings organized in the Sunset, Telegraph and Russian Hills, Potrero, Polk Gulch and other threatened areas. In 1959 The Supervisors voted to cancel 75% of planned freeway routes through the city, much to the shock of the Department of Highways and the state government. But that was not the end of the freeway revolt.

Proposed freeway routes

Freeway builders continued to resurrect various routes, encountering persistent, well-organized resistance by San Francisco neighborhoods, especially in the Sunset and Richmond where neighbors were dedicated to stopping the proposed Western Freeway. Supervisor William Blake was a key opponent of the freeway planners.

Lost in the story of the Freeway Revolt is the role it played in helping BART get institutional support. After the 1959 Supervisorial defeat of freeway plans, BART advocates got surplus Bay Bridge tolls allocated to the proposed transbay tube. After the 1961 vote against the Western Freeway, Mayor George Christopher and the influential Bay Area Council both endorsed the proposed BART system. As freeway proponents continued to advocate for their plans, Supervisor Blake proposed burying a freeway in a “crosstown” tunnel as an alternative to the “beautified” Panhandle freeway. But state highway officials derided it as an unrealistic and costly plan, and after a year of study, ruled it out. San Francisco officials, including new Mayor Jack Shelley, made it clear they wanted the Embarcadero Freeway taken down and replaced with an underground route, the proposed Golden Gate Freeway, that would connect to the Golden Gate Bridge.

In 1964 the Panhandle-Golden Gate Freeway plan reached a climax, with a May 17 rally at the Polo Grounds to save the Park, featuring a "Natural Anthem" and a dedicated tune by Malvina Reynolds, the famous left-wing folk singer, and a speech by poetKenneth Rexroth. Months later, in a final, climactic 6-5 vote, the Board of Supervisors rejected the Park Freeway on October 13. Black supervisor Terry Francois cast the deciding vote, delivering a point-by-point six-page rebuttal to the pro-freeway arguments. (It is interesting to note that the other No-votes on that Board were future mayor George Moscone, future CAO/auto dealer and consumer of sexual services Roger Boas, future Lt. Governor Leo McCarthy, William Blake and Clarissa McMahon. In favor of the freeway were "progressive" supervisors Jack Morrison, Joseph Casey, Jack Ertola, Joseph Tinney and Peter Tamaras.) Mayor Jack Shelley was all for it, as was the Labor Council from which he hailed. The Supervisors' Transportation Committee had received a petition with 15,000 signatures, 20,000 letters and telegrams, and had received opposition from 77 community organizations.

After all that, it seemed to be decided. But it wasn’t. More bureaucratic studies and fears of losing several hundred million in federal financing for the City’s highways led to another climax. In 1966, the Panhandle and Golden Gate Freeways were once again brought forward, pissing off the thousands of people who thought they’d already stopped the plans. Ultimatums from the State Highway Commission and much bluster from pro-freeway politicians failed to carry the day. Mobilized citizens and their community organizations won over organized labor, who now opposed the plans too, arguing that jobs would actually be lost if the city became “one long strip of concrete for commuters with bigger and better ghettoes.” Finally, on March 21, 1966 both the Panhandle and Golden Gate freeways were defeated 6-5 by Supervisorial votes.

New Bayshore Freeway soon after opening, April 7, 1955. View from Bernal Heights southeast, with Bayview Hill in background.

Charles Cushman Collection: Indiana University Archives (P08309)

View southeast from Bernal Heights towards Bayview Hill, 2009.

Photo: Chris Carlsson

Today, San Francisco's freeways have changed again, thanks to the Loma Prieta 1989 earthquake. The much maligned Embarcadero Freeway has been removed, as has an unsightly spur of the Central Freeway. A raging debate over the future of the Central Freeway ramps that go north across Market was finally resolved and has now been replaced by the surface Octavia Boulevard. The 101-280 interchange was a mess from 1989 to 1996. New offramps were added to I-280 to serve a new waterfront roadway and the planned Giants ballpark at China Basin in 1997, but no new freeways will be built in San Francisco. New transit money goes to BART and MUNI, while Caltrans and SF Dept. of Public Works continue to spend vast quantities of social wealth on maintaining the San Francisco road system. The rapid rise in value in both areas where freeways were removed, along the now open waterfront, as well as the rapidly gentrifying Hayes Valley/Civic Center area, show that profits can be drawn from forward looking urban planning, de-emphasizing cars and re-emphasizing neighborhood, community, and nature. But most U.S. urban planners still adhere religiously to the cult of the car, hence constant efforts to expand roads and parking at the expense of numerous more sensible alternatives, from decent mass transit to ubiquitous bikeways.

More on the freeways that were planned, some built, most not

Second Freeway Revolt

For a deeply detailed account of the 1956-66 freeway revolt, see Katherine M. Johnson’s article “Captain Blake versus the Highwaymen: Or, How San Francisco Won the Freeway Revolt” in Journal of Planning History 2009; 8; 56, originally published onlineNov. 28, 2008.

See also, William Issel's excellent article "Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City's Treasured Appearance: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt" in Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 4 (1999).

Andy Yan, the analyst who exposed Vancouver’s real estate disaster

Andy Yan, the analyst who exposed Vancouver’s real estate disaster

Hated by politicians, speculators and money-launderers, Andy Yan’s data on Vancouver housing has earned him the right to say, ‘I told you so’


Terry Glavin

February 14, 2018






Andy Yan is a 42-year-old East Vancouverite who came up out of the proud working class ranks of Van Tech high school, toiling on weekends in the kill tank at the old Hallmark Poultry Factory on Clark Drive. He set out on a career in urban regeneration and applied demographics that took him to projects in New Orleans, New York City and San Francisco.

Nowadays he’s the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, and while he’s too modest to boast about it, along the way he’s picked up a couple of exceedingly rare civic distinctions.

The first is the enduring enmity of all the politicians, real estate speculators, white-collar currency pirates and money launderers who have turned Vancouver into a global swindler’s paradise for real estate racketeering, a city that is now also one of the world’s most hopelessly pathetic urban landscapes of housing affordability. The second thing Yan has earned is an unfettered and unimpeachable right to say “I told you so.”


Three years ago, Yan was anxious to get a handle on the role foreign capital was playing in Vancouver’s weirdly convulsing real estate market. At the time, Yan’s main gig was his work as an urban planner with Bing Thom Architects, on contract as an urban planner. When Yan published the results of his research in November, 2015, it came as a shock, for two main reasons. It seemed to conclusively prove what everybody knew but nobody was supposed to say out loud. And it broke a taboo that was enforced so absurdly that Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson resorted to dismissing Yan’s research as racist.

Yan found that buyers with “non-Anglicised Chinese names” had picked up two-thirds of 172 houses sold over a six-month period beginning in September 2014 in Vancouver’s posh west side neighbourhoods. Contrary to public perception, however, the buyers weren’t just showing up with “bags of cash” to make their buys. Some of Canada’s biggest banks were in on it. Roughly 80 per cent of the deals involved a mortgage, and half of the mortgages were held by two banks – CIBC and HSBC.

Canada’s banks have mastered the manipulation of clandestine back channels around China’s currency control regulations—the same routes that well-connected Chinese multi-millionaires have been using to shift up to a trillion dollars’ worth of yuan out of China every year. What wasn’t clear about what was happening on Vancouver’ s west side, however, was who the real buyers were, exactly. The new homeowners’ most commonly stated occupation: housewife or homemaker.

Fast forward three years. The weirdness that Yan documented in Point Grey, Dunbar, Kerrisdale and Shaughnessy has rapidly spread southward and eastward, decoupling the bonds linking incomes with housing values across Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam, all the way out to Surrey and White Rock on the Canada-U.S. border. Metro Vancouver’s real estate market is now a dystopian tableau of panic buying, tax fraud, property flipping, overseas pre-construction condominium sales, stone cold speculation and elaborate, multiple-account money transfer rigmaroles that are the conduit of choice for drug cartel tycoons. Not even the heaviest regulatory hands at the controls of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state seem capable of shutting the networks down.

It’s not just about shady Chinese money—not by a long shot. Vancouver’s old establishment property developers and real-estate companies fed the frenzies and made a killing. Along the way, they greased the skids by pouring buckets of money into Gregor Robertson’s now-dying Vision Vancouver civic party and Christy Clark’s Liberal Party. Robertson is now a sad figure, his legacy a shambles, his term up in October, and even his celebrated relationship with his glamorous girlfriend, the Chinese pop star Wanting Qu, fell apart last year. Qu’s mother, a Communist Party official in Harbin, remains on trial on charges of embezzling $70 million in a land swindle. Christy Clark is history, too. Her government was toppled last year by John Horgan’s New Democrats. With at least 60,000 Chinese immigrant investors sloshing their money around Metro Vancouver real estate over the past few years, federal politicians, too—Liberals, mainly—have been more than happy to rake it in at cash-for-access soirees and in generous donations to election campaign war chests.

In these ways, in Vancouver’s political circles, and in polite company, one simply didn’t mention the way the city’s housing market was being restructured to serve as an offshore investment bolthole for billions of dollars’ worth of shadow currency being spirited out of China, Iran, Russia and other such kleptocracies. But back in 2015, when the profoundly caucasian Mayor Robertson attempted to dismiss Yan’s findings—“I’m very concerned with the racist tones that are implied here,” Robertson said—it was a smear too far.

Yan’s great-grandfather was allowed into Canada only after being obliged to pay the infamously racist head tax Ottawa put in effect to keep out working-class Chinese immigrants. Students, merchants and diplomats were exempt. The head tax was in place until 1923. Yan wasn’t going to put up with Robertson’s backchat, and by that time, Vancouver’s ethnic Chinese community leaders had siimilarly lost their patience. White real estate moguls and politicians like Robertson persisted in proclaiming their anti-racist bona fides and purporting to be the champions of Vancouver’s Chinese community by shutting down public debates about the region’s housing catastrophe. Brandon Yan, a civic activist and volunteer on Vancouver’s planning commission, put it best: “Let’s leave it to the rich white dudes to decide what’s racist, right?”

Vancouver’s “condo king” Bob Rennie—a primary financial backer of Robertson’s NDP-tilting Vision Vancouver team and also the chief fundraiser for the NDP’s adversaries in Christy Clark’s Liberals—had cultivated a particularly brazen habit of it. “So you had these whispers about racism being used to shut down a dialogue about affordability and the kind of city we want to build here,” Andy Yan explained. “It’s a kind of moral signalling to camouflage immoral actions. It’s opportunism, and it’s a cover for the tremendous injustices that are emerging in the City of Vancouver and across the region. It’s a weird Vancouver thing. It’s very annoying. It’s kale in the smoothies or something.”

While the politicians and their friends in the property industry were making speeches about diversity and the importance of having sensitive feelings, foreign ownership grew to account for more than $45 billion dollars’ worth of Metro Vancouver residential property. Within Vancouver city limits, 7.6 per cent of all residential properties are now owned directly by individuals “whose principal residence is outside of Canada,” by the definition of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Roughly one in ten Vancouver condos are owned by non-residents. And that’s just the owners we know about.

Transparency International reckons that perhaps half of Vancouver’s most expensive properties are owned by shell companies or trusts, with the nominal owners commonly listed as student, housewife, or homemaker. Roughly 99 per cent of the single detached houses within Vancouver’s city limits are now valued in excess of $1 million. More than 20,000 Vancouver homes are vacant, year round. Vancouver’s rental vacancy rate is hovering just below one per cent.

“I’m always careful about using biomedical analogies,” Yan told me the other day, “but what was like a little skin ailment, if you will, over the last 10 or 15 years, has become a full fledged cancer.” Over just the past four years, throughout Metro Vancouver, homes worth $1 million or more have risen from 23 per cent of the housing market in 2014 to 73 per cent of the market now. Yan has been putting together a series of maps that show how the $1 million “red line” has been moving inexorably across the region, deep into the suburbs. “But what those maps don’t do is they don’t factor in transportation costs,” Yan said. “The top two expenditures of any Canadian household is shelter and transportation. God help you if you factor in child care. The whole map might as well be red. A number of factors have all come together to produce this catastrophic situation, but what was a small concentrated pattern in the west side of Vancouver has now metastasized to hit every single part of the region, and it’s similarly metastasized into the rest of the economy.”



As for where things are headed, Horgan’s NDP government has raised expectations, mainly because of Attorney-General David Eby’s avowed determination to chase dirty money out of Vancouver’s housing market and bust up the gangland playground B.C.’s provincially-licenced casinos have become—money laundered through casinos has also been pouring into residential property acquisitions. In Tuesday’s throne speech, delivered by Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon, Horgan’s government directly addressed tax fraud, tax evasion and money laundering in the real estate market, hinting that a speculation tax is in the works. Next week, the New Democrats release their first full budget. The housing file, however, falls mainly to the more timid Carole James, former NDP leader and now deputy premier and finance minister. Preliminary indications aren’t particularly promising.

With short-term AirBnB rentals swallowing up long-term rental inventory, Yan was less than impressed with James’ solution, announced last week: short-term rental outfits will now pay the eight per cent provincial sales tax, and two or three per cent in municipal taxes. “That’s like taxing cigarettes to pay for lung cancer treatments,” Yan said.


Developing appropriately punitive taxes to discourage property-flipping and offshore pre-construction sales – those are obvious fixes. But knowing how to fix things requires a clear understanding of what’s wrong, Yan says, and closing the “bare trust loophole” that allows property owners to hide their holdings is a must-do. Ontario closed the loophole back in the 1980s. Clark’s Liberals promised to close it, but they never did.

In the meantime, Yan is focusing on converting hidden-away data into publicly comprehensible information. Some key information Yan has drawn from a trove recently released by Statistics Canada’s Canadian Housing Statistics Program, for instance, shows that simply building more condominiums won’t do. A condo building boom in Metro Vancouver has kept the property developers happy, but there’s no evidence that the boost in supply has lessened demand or beaten back prices. Nearly one in five condos built in Vancouver since 2016 were snapped up by non-residents.

To a certain extent, there’s nothing new here,” Yan said, pointing to the Guinness family’s financing of the Lion’s Gate Bridge in the 1920s, and the opening up of the British Properties on Burrard Inlet’s north shore. “But what is new is the hyper-commodification of residential real estate, mixed in with an intensification of global flows of people and capital. It’s just a statement in fact. We’re talking about the globalization of the Chinese economy and its impacts.”

Yan says there may be some solution—a mix of remedies, new laws, purpose-built rental housing, tax adjustments and so on—that does not mean a collapse in Metro Vancouver’s real estate prices. Channelling foreign investment in such a way as to serve the public interest might be possible. “But whether this comes out as a bubble-popping isn’t the point. That’s a secondary concern to the kind of society we want to build. “We need to go back to civic virtues.

“We need to talk about the sacrifices we are willing and we need to make for the greater good of the community. We need to have a discussion about what the public good is, and what we are willing to sacrifice to make it happen.”

Marin Voice: Marin County can do better with its housing plan

Marin Voice: Marin County can do better with its housing plan
By Sharon Rushton
Guest op-ed column
POSTED:   12/04/2013 06:27:50 PM PST

Sharon Rushton of Mill Valley is Chairperson of Sustainable TamAlmonte, a group of Tamalpais Valley and Almonte leaders and active residents

ONE OF THE CORE VALUES that most Marin residents share is a love and respect for nature, which has been demonstrated by a long history of environmental conservation.

However, since the adoption of the 2007 Marin Countywide Plan, Marin County's leadership has been taking Marin in a different direction.

The most significant finding of the plan's Environmental Impact Report was that "land uses and development consistent with the 2007 Countywide Plan would result in 42 significant unavoidable adverse environmental impacts." These impacts include, but are not limited to, traffic congestion, flooding, impending sea level rise, air and noise pollution, endangering habitat and a potential water deficit.

The Marin Board of Supervisors had an opportunity to reduce these unfortunate impacts, but instead, approved the plan with a "Statement of Overriding Considerations," essentially stating that providing housing was more important than protecting the environment and public health and safety from the harm that such residential development could cause.

Supervisors recently adopted the 2012 Housing Element, a plan to meet state housing quotas. According to that plan's EIR, implementation would result in many of the adverse impacts disclosed in the countywide plan. Indeed, the plan's inventory, which identifies sites that are supposedly suitable for new housing (particularly affordable housing), includes sites located in Marin's most hazardous areas, thus fostering environmental injustice by encouraging Marin's most vulnerable residents to live where they must fend against the county's highest health and safety risks.

Furthermore, proposed housing element programs reduce local control, public input, transparency and environmental protection by fast-tracking permit review and furthering streamlined environmental review of high-density affordable housing.

Other housing element programs also treat affordable housing differently than market-rate housing, giving affordable housing exceptions — exemptions to density limits, development standards and safety regulations.

Such exceptions are a boon to housing developers but pave the way for lower income households to live in conditions substandard to those of higher income households.

Moreover, high-density development has greater environmental impacts and is incompatible with the character of most Marin neighborhoods.

Why are county planners ignoring environmental constraints and pushing for more housing?

County officials have felt pressured to fulfill the state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Allocation quota due to incentives, such as transportation funding, and penalties, such as accelerated housing element cycles, possible legal action by a third party and possible carrying over of requirements from this housing element cycle to the next cycle for non compliance.

Yet, to simply comply with the allocation is shortsighted.

First of all, the allocation is based on unrealistic jobs and population projections and conflicts with the state Department of Finance's and Marin County's forecasts.

Secondly, Marin needs to conduct a much more comprehensive, cumulative and long-term cost analysis. The costs related to dealing with the adverse environmental impacts caused by overdeveloping our county far outweigh the incentives attached to compliance or penalties attached to noncompliance.

Consider the staggering costs associated with lack of water, cleaning up pollution, increased damages and injuries due to worse traffic and placing housing in high seismic activity zones; increased illness due to exposing residents to toxic air contaminants; constructing and maintaining dikes to protect buildings from sea level rise; building new schools, etc.

County supervisors should take back Marin's land-use planning and meet the true housing needs of all Marin's constituents, including lower-income households, in a manner that upholds community character, respects the limits of our environment, infrastructure, and public services, and protects public health and safety.

Sharon Rushton of Mill Valley is chairwoman of Sustainable TamAlmonte, a group of Tam Valley and Almonte residents concerned about the preservation of the area's semi-rural quality of life.

Sharon Rushton

Chairperson

Sustainable TamAlmonte

sharon@tamalmonte.org | http://tamalmonte.org

Fixing the Racist Highways of America

Editor's Note: Are highways racist?  If so, the racist "Plan Bay Area" needs to rethink its policy of infill housing on brownfield sites (toxic waste sites) for affordable housing along the freeway. (aka. "transit oriented development").  I believe that economics and politics are stronger reasons why low income housing is in the "toxic danger zone" than overt racism.   It is positively shocking to me and fellow environmentalists,  that CEQA is being dismantled to allow developers to build on urban infill sites despite the unsafe environmental hazards.  Pregnant women and children are especially susceptible to toxins in our environment.  


Anthony Foxx Wants to Repair the Damage Done By Urban Highways

by Angie Schmitt

During the first two decades of constructing the Interstate Highway System, almost half a million households were forced to leave their homes.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is offering a surprisingly honest appraisal of America’s history of road construction this week, with a high-profile speaking tour that focuses on the damage that highways caused in black urban neighborhoods.

U.S Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx spoke at the Center for American progress today about the highway system’s legacy of discrimination. Image: CAP

Growing up in Charlotte, Foxx’s own street was walled in by highways, he recalled in a speech today at the Center for American Progress. Building big, grade-separated roads through thickly settled neighborhoods devastated communities, uprooted residents, and cut off the people who remained from the city around them.

“The people in my community at the time these decisions were made were actually not invisible,” he said. “It is just that at a certain stage in our history, they didn’t matter.”

From I-95 in the Overtown neighborhood in Miami, to the Staten Island Expressway, to I-5 in Seattle, freeways divided and weakened city neighborhoods all over the country. Foxx estimates that nearly 500,000 households were compelled to relocate by the construction of the interstate highway system between 1957 and 1977. Most were people of color living in low-income neighborhoods.

“Areas of this country where infrastructure is supposed to connect people, in some places it’s actually constraining them,” he said.

The speech marks the launch of a new initiative spearheaded by Foxx called “Ladders of Opportunity,” which aims to shape transportation policy based on how infrastructure can serve as a barrier, or bridge, to jobs, education, and better health.

Foxx’s power is limited. U.S. DOT doesn’t have the authority to simply turn off the federal funding spigot for projects like the Detroit region’s $4 billion plan to widen two highways, siphoning resources from struggling inner suburbs to more affluent, farther-flung communities. The transportation secretary can’t wave his hand and stop Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper from pumping more traffic and air pollution through north Denver with the widening of I-70.

Of the $60 billion in annual federal funding allocated to surface transportation, 90 percent is doled out to state and local agencies by formula, Foxx noted. The remaining 10 percent funds U.S. DOT operations, discretionary programs like TIGER, and transportation research.

Even when U.S. DOT is poised to back a project that aims to benefit a disadvantaged community, local politics often gets in the way.

Like many other urban roads, Atlanta’s Buford Highway doesn’t work well for a lot of people who live nearby.

Foxx singled out Baltimore’s Red Line light rail project to make his point. “We had planned to commit about $1 billion to this project, only to have it cancelled by the state of Maryland,” he said. The Baltimore NAACP and other groups have filed a civil rights complaint in response to Governor Larry Hogan’s decision to spike the project.

The disparities go beyond highway planning. “Look at our basic sidewalk infrastructure,” Foxx said, pointing to a photo of the notorious Buford Highway in suburban Atlanta. “You see these roads are really designed for cars, not people. There are no sidewalks, and where you see sidewalks there are no crosswalks.”

That leaves families like Raquel Nelson’s vulnerable. A driver killed Nelson’s 4-year-old son, A.J., while they were trying to cross a hostile road in suburban Atlanta, where crosswalks were few and far between. But it was Nelson who was charged with vehicular homicide.

“This is not an isolated case, not in Atlanta and not in this country,” Foxx said. “If we want a society in which everyone has a real shot no matter where they come from, then it’s imperative that we acknowledge that these divisions, past and present, still exist.”

So what can U.S. DOT do? Foxx said the agency is retooling some of its programs to better emphasize social equity. For example, U.S. DOT is making “access to opportunity” a priority when selecting which projects will receive TIGER funding. Foxx also said the agency will beef up its civil rights office, which has the power to shut down projects determined to have a “disparate impact” on disadvantaged groups. Historically, the office has rarely exercised that authority to police the social impact of highway projects.

Mostly, however, Foxx’s campaign will have to rely on the power of persuasion. He’s trying to change the hearts and minds of governors, transportation agency chiefs, and other decision makers by raising the profile of issues that transportation secretaries haven’t tackled head-on before.

“The question that we have to ask is, ‘What kind of country do we want to build?'” he said.

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/03/30/anthony-foxx-wants-to-repair-the-damage-done-by-urban-highways/

Why politicians love cities

Glenn Reynolds: Why politicians love cities

Glenn Harlan Reynolds 4:02 AM. EST June 21, 2016




The 20th century French architect Le Corbusier, famous for his huge, inhuman structures, dedicated his first book To Authority. Too many of his successors seem to feel the same way. Now, in his new book The Human City: Urbanism For The Rest Of Us, Joel Kotkin says there’s a better way.

Today’s urban planners seem to favor high density. Like Le Corbusier, they’d like people to live in tall, densely packed buildings, take mass transit to work, and scorn the “fatter and slower and dumber” residents of the suburb, to use a description from Seattle’s The Stranger that Kotkin quotes.

The problem is that most people, especially people who have or want to have children, don’t like living that way, and that as American cities have become taller and denser, they have essentially become playgrounds for the rich and childless. “For all their impressive achievements, and sometimes inspiring architecture, high-density cores such as those in Manhattan, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C., have the lowest percentages of children,” Kotkin says in his new book.

And it’s not just in America. Kotkin says big Asian cities have the lowest fertility rates on the planet, and in Hong Kong, 45% of couples say they’ve given up on having children. Yet politicians love these cities.

As Kotkin writes, “Around the world, planners, politicians and pundits often wax poetic about these massive new building projects and soaring residences made up of hundreds of tiny stacked units, but there’s just one problem with this brave new condensed world: Most people, including many inner-city residents, aren’t crazy about it. People care deeply about where they live, and they often aren’t thrilled with the kind of urban vision held by many city leaders.”

So if people are lukewarm, why are politicians so enthusiastic about big urban development? I think there are three reasons: Snobbery, graft and politics.

The snobbery comes from the fact that most media are headquartered in big cities and the people who work there are the kind of people who like big cities — often people who, as one of Taylor Swift’s songs has it, move to a “big ole city” in part as revenge on the places they come from. As Kotkin notes, the writers, pundits and academic types who write on the subject of cities tend to live in big cities; suburban and rural people are treated as losers, or just ignored, despite the fact that most people don’t live in big cities. And there’s a class thing going on, too. As Robert Bruegmann noted in his book, Sprawl: A Compact History, nobody minds when rich people build houses in the country. It’s when the middle class does it that we get complaints.

The graft is probably more important still: Big developments mean lots of permissions, many regulatory interactions and, of course, big budgets — all of which lend themselves to facilitating the transfer of money from developers to politicians. Frequently they’re government subsidized, which allows that money to come, ultimately but almost invisibly, from the pockets of taxpayers.

(This is also why politicians like subways and light rail better than buses. You can reward a developer over the long term by putting a rail station near a development, which makes it a proper object for graft. Bus routes, on the other hand, can change overnight, so they’re not worth as much.)

Finally, there’s politics. Politicians like to pursue policies that encourage their political enemies to leave, while encouraging those who remain to vote for them. (This is known as “the Curley effect” after James Michael Curley, a former mayor of Boston.) People who have children, or plan to, tend to be more conservative, or at least more bourgeois, than those who do not. By encouraging high density and mass transit, urban politicians (who are almost always on the left) encourage people who might oppose them to “vote with their feet” and move to the suburbs.

This isn’t necessarily good for the cities they rule. Curley’s approach, which involved “wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston,” as David Henderson wrote on the EconLog, shaped the electorate to his benefit. Result: “Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections.”

But that’s OK. Politicians don’t care about you. They care about power, in urban planning and in everything else.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

Is Fascism Right or Left

Plan Bay Area is a regional plan designed to manage housing, transportation and the economy administered by government bureaucracy in direct opposition to our democratic tradition of a citizen participation. It is fascism at its core.

Battle for the California Desert: Why is the Government Driving Folks off Their Land?

The Antelope Valley is a vast patch of desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles County, and a segment of the few rugged individualists who live out there increasingly are finding themselves the targets of armed raids from local code enforcement agents, who've assembled into task forces called Nuisance Abatement Teams (NATs).

The plight of the Valley's desert dwellers made regional headlines when county officials ordered the destruction of Phonehenge: a towering, colorful castle constructed out of telephone poles by retired phone technician Kim Fahey. Fahey was imprisoned and charged with several misdemeanors.

But Fahey is just one of many who've been targeted by the NATs, which were assembled at the request of County Supervisor Mike Antonovich in 2006. LA Weekly reporter Mars Melnicoff wrote an in-depth article in which she exposed the county's tactic of badgering residents with minor, but costly, code violations until they face little choice but to vacate the land altogether.

"They're picking on the the people who are the most defenseless and have the least resources," says Melnicoff.

Reason.tv collaborated with Melnicoff to talk with some of the NAT's targets, such as retired veteran Joey Gallo, who might face homelessness if he's forced to leave his house, and local pastor Oscar Castaneda, who says he's already given up the fight and is in the process of moving off the land he and his wife have lived on for 22 years. And, while Antonovich declined an interview, we did catch up with him at a public meeting in order to ask the big question at the center of all this: Why the sudden enforcement of these codes against people living in the middle of the desert, who seemingly are affecting no one?

Writer-Producers: Zach Weissmueller and Tim Cavanaugh. Associate Producer: Mars Melnicoff. Camera: Alex Manning and Weissmueller; edited by Weissmueller.

Approximately 9:48.

Music by Audionautix.com.

CASA-How they plan to use the Gas Tax to Force Development in Marin and the Bay Area.

New York City Mayor Attacks Private Property, Praises Socialism

New York City Mayor Attacks Private Property, Praises Socialism

By Alexandra DeSanctis — September 6, 2017

The cat’s out of the bag. In a Monday interview with New York magazine, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio admitted his disdain for private property and his desire for the government to control land distribution within the city.

The mayor went on an extended riff about the benefits of socialism when the interviewer asked what has been most difficult about reducing income inequality. “What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property,” de Blasio replied. “I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be.”

More from the mayor’s answer:

I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development. . . .
Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality. [Emphasis added.]

Earlier in life, De Blasio was a left-wing activist and an ardent supporter of the radical socialist government in Nicaragua — the Sandinista National Liberation Front — which at the time was strongly opposed by President Ronald Reagan and his administration.

Today, De Blasio is well known for his intensely progressive approach to managing New York City’s government. This interview reveals that perhaps his past desire for openly socialist policies still lingers.

Editor's Note:  Many politicians laud the virtue of "Plan Bay Area"  a central planning scheme to control housing and transportation in the Bay Area.  MTC is now plotting to control even MORE COUNTIES than the original nine Bay Area counties to include Sacramento and the Central Valley in a supra regional administrative government akin to socialism We do not think it will work out well for them.

Socialism is like a nude beach: sounds pretty good until you actually see it