Opinion: Gavin Newsom tells Southern California NIMBYs to expect new housing in their backyards

Opinion: Gavin Newsom tells Southern California NIMBYs to expect new housing in their backyards

Construction in downtown Los Angeles.
(Los Angeles Times )
By KERRY CAVANAUGHEDITORIAL WRITER
AUG. 23, 2019
1:33 PM


Gov. Newsom has talked a good game about housing in California. He said he wants to build 3.5 million units by 2025 to end the housing shortage. He said he wants to yank transportation funding from cities that refused to build enough housing to meet their communities’ needs.

But the real question was whether the governor would stand firm when faced with the inevitable slow-growth, anti-development pushback from local governments.

This week, he did.

His administration decided that cities and counties in Southern California will have to plan for the construction of 1.3 million new homes in the next decade, Times reporter Liam Dillon reported Thursday. That number is more than three times larger than what local elected officials had wanted to commit to.


By overruling Southern California leaders’ recommended construction target, Newsom made clear that his administration is going to be far more aggressive in requiring cities and counties to make room for new housing.

The housing target set by the Department of Housing and Community Development is required under the state’s “fair-share” housing law, which instructs cities and counties to plan and zone every eight years for enough development to house their proportion of the state’s growing population. Cities aren’t required to build the homes — that’s up to the private sector — but they have to plan and zone for them.

For decades, some local governments have looked for ways to shirk that responsibility, bending to complaints from NIMBY groups that want to minimize traffic, discourage development and preserve the region’s low-slung suburban character. That’s one reason California is in a deep housing shortage that is fueling poverty, displacement and homelessness.

At the heart of the “fair share” process is the estimate each community makes for how much housing it needs. A higher number means cities have to zone for more housing, factoring in the need for affordable units as well as market-rate ones.


In June, the board of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which is composed of city and county elected officials from across the region, voted for the woefully low number of 430,000 homes by 2029. Housing advocates and some regional leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, complained that such a low-ball target wasn’t enough to help ease the housing shortage that is driving up rents and housing prices.

The Newsom administration heeded those complaints and, fortunately, the state sets the target. And although 1.3 million new homes in Southern California between 2021 and 2029 is an ambitious target, it’s still less than some advocates and experts say is necessary.

That works out to about 162,000 new units a year across the SCAG region, which is home to half the state’s population. The entire state of California has averaged only 80,000 new homes a year over the last decade. But state law demands an ambitious target both to address the existing shortage created by decades of insufficient construction and to meet the needs of the growing population.

By the way, the fight over the region’s total housing-need number is probably nothing compared to the coming battle royal over how to divvy up that number. SCAG is now developing the methodology to assign cities their fair-share allocation, including how many affordable homes they need to plan for. Cities will then be required to identify properties that could accommodate such housing developments.

Housing advocates are pushing SCAG to assign most of the new housing to coastal urban centers, where there are jobs and more extensive transit systems — and where housing costs have skyrocketed. These are also the areas that tend to fight density and new development most vociferously.

All of this is probably going to intensify the fight in Sacramento between state lawmakers who want to push cities to approve more home construction and city and county elected leaders who don’t want to cede any local control over housing decisions.

Local officials may not have been paying close attention two years ago when state lawmakers began passing bills to add teeth to the fair-share housing law. They’re paying attention now. But they’ve got to contend with a governor who is increasingly pushing cities to say, “Yes in my backyard.”

Editor's Note:  Let these writers and housing activists call us NIMBYs.  Anyone drive in downtown San Francsico, Sacramento, Los Angeles or San Diego recently?  Let these writer's tell us that we are to blame for the homeless crisis.  Let THEM defend their policy solutions with FACTS. 

The Tragic state of Cities

If there’s anything productive to come from his recent Twitter storm, President Trump’s recent crude attacks on Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings have succeeded in bring necessary attention to the increasingly tragic state of our cities. Baltimore’s continued woes, after numerous attempts to position itself as a “comeback city,” illustrates all too poignantly the deep-seated decay in many of our great urban areas.

Baltimore represents an extreme case, but sadly it is not alone. Last year our three largest urban centers — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — lost people while millennial migration accelerated both to the suburbs and smaller, generally less dense cities. These demographic trends, as well as growing blight, poor schools, decaying infrastructure and, worst of all, expanding homelessness are not merely the result of “racism” or Donald Trump, but have all been exacerbated by policy agendas that are turning many great cities into loony towns.

Politics run amok

Take tech rich San Francisco, where decades of tolerance for even extreme deviant behavior has helped create a city with more drug addicts than high school students, and so much feces on the street that one website has created a “poop map.” In Southern California’s far more proletarian city of Los Angeles, we have a downtown filled with overbuilt, overpriced apartments and is, like Baltimore, being overrun with rats. A UN official last year compared conditions on the city’s Skid Row to those of Syrian refugee camps.

One would think such nasty problems would spark something of a political rebellion, as seen in previous decades with the rise of successful, pragmatic mayors — Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles. But so far, at least, many of today’s big city mayors seem more interested in bolstering their “resistance” bona fides than governing effectively.

Los Angeles’ Eric Garcetti, for example, speaks enthusiastically about his own “green new deal” and turning the city into a transit Valhalla even as blight and homelessness expand inexorably. The mayor is less rhapsodic about practical things that people actually need, such as decent roads, reliable water supply or electricity.

Economic growth generally is not much of a priority for the woke urban political class. In New York, Rep. Ocasio Alexandria Cortez’s allies succeeded in driving Amazon’s new headquarters out of her district. Meanwhile her socialist comrades in Seattle have helped persuade the on-line giant to relocate more of its employees out to a massive new building in the suburb of Bellevue while the Emerald City hosts a rising homeless population.

The demographics of ultra-progressivism

Ironically, this far-left trend partially can be traced to the post-2000 urban resurgence, sparked by the now unappreciated pragmatic mayors who made cities safer and more business friendly. Safe streets and thriving businesses lured large numbers of young people, many well-educated and mostly liberal, to the urban core in numbers not seen for generations.


Yet since the 1970s the middle class in cities has been in a precipitous decline while poverty has remained stubbornly high. Philadelphia’s central core, for example, rebounded between 2000 and 2014, but for every one district that gained in income, two suffered income declines. In 1970, half of Chicago was middle class; today, according to a new University of Illinois study, that number is down to 16 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of poor people has risen from 42 to 62 percent.

The most attractive blue cities — led by New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Boston — now suffer, according to Pew research, the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles of all U.S. cities.

The post-2000 urban success increased housing prices but failed to create a new stable urban middle class. Most young urbanites don’t stay long enough to build long-term communities; once they hit the family formation period in their thirties, they still largely depart for the suburbs. As the Atlantic recently noted the number of babies born in Manhattan this decade dropped nearly 15 percent; already home to a majority of single households, the nation’s premier urban center could see its infant population cut in half in 30 years.

Remaking urban politics

The new demographics have hollowed out the political middle in most cities.

The old urban middle class leaned Democratic, but they were largely interested in practical outcomes — like paved roads, fixed lights, and access to jobs. Their departure, and replacement by temporary hipster populations, has helped insulate city governments from constituents who would be most adamant about reforming usually failed school districts or demanding improvements in public infrastructure or maintaining public order.

Electoral engagement has faded in most cities, with turnout for mayor averaging 15 percent for mayoral races in our most populous cities. In Los Angeles, the 2013 turnout that elected progressive Eric Garcetti was roughly one-third of that in the city’s 1970 mayoral election. Garcetti’s 2017 re-election boasted a similarly low turnout.

The prime beneficiaries of these changes have been the well-organized. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s primary victory rested on 16,000 votes out of a total Democratic registration of almost 215,000. She won not by sweeping the proletarian or minority masses, but marshalling the votes of white young educated hipsters. These voters are driving the rise of far-left socialists in other cities, including Denver, who seek to replace not Republicans but more traditional liberal Democrats.

Can this be turned around?

The new urban politics threatens the future of family neighborhoods, local entrepreneurial ventures as well as an apolitical, exuberant diversity. Immigrants and aspiring minorities want good schools, safe streets and less onerous regulation. Resolutions on sanctuary cities, condemnations of Trump tweets, social justice demands and boasts about combating climate change do little to improve tangibly reality that cities like Baltimore or even superstars like San Francisco, Washington, and New York.

Only when grassroots people and concerned businesses decide to challenge the urban status quo and the virtue-signaling political class can decay and the relentless bifurcation of our cities be reversed. After all, large and powerful companies, like Amazon, can always pack up and migrate to less insane political environments. But those with a strong stake in the local economy and neighborhoods have fewer options. It will be up to them, to restore our cities’ historic role as places for both families and middle-class economic aspiration.

Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org).

An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis

 Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.

For drug cartels and low-level street dealers, the business of supplying homeless addicts with heroin, fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids is extremely lucrative. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834 in drugs per month. Holding rates constant, we can project that the total business of supplying heroin and other opioids to the West Coast’s homeless population is more than $1.8 billion per year. In effect, Mexican cartels, Chinese fentanyl suppliers, and local criminal networks profit off the misery of the homeless and offload the consequences onto local governments struggling to get people off the streets.

West Coast cities are seeing a crime spike associated with homeless opioid addicts. In Seattle, police busted two sophisticated criminal rings engaged in “predatory drug dealing” in homeless encampments (they were found in possession of $20,000 in cash, heroin, firearms, knives, machetes, and a sword). Police believe that “apartments were serving as a base of operations that supplied drugs to the streets, and facilitated the collection and resale of stolen property.” In other words, drug dealers were exploiting homeless addicts and using the city’s maze of illegal encampments as distribution centers. In my own Fremont neighborhood, where property crime has surged 57 percent over the past two years, local business owners have formed a group to monitor a network of RVs that circulate around the area to deal heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines. Dealers have become brazen—one recently hung up a spray-painted sign on the side of his RV with the message: “Buy Drugs Here!”

What are local governments doing to address this problem? To a large extent, they have adopted a strategy of deflection, obfuscation, and denial. In her  #SeattleForAll public relations campaign, Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only one in three homeless people struggle with substance abuse, understating the figures of her own police department as well as the city attorney, who has claimed that the real numbers, just for opioid addiction, rise to 80 percent of the unsheltered.

The consequences of such denial have proved disastrous: no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts. Los Angeles, which spent $619 million on homelessness last year, has adopted a strategy of palliative care—keeping addicts alive through distribution of the overdose drug naloxone—but fails to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions. The city has been cursed, in this sense, with temperate weather, compounded by permissive policies toward public camping and drug consumption that have attracted20,687 homeless individuals from outside Los Angeles County.

No matter how much local governments pour into affordable-housing projects, homeless opioid addicts—nearly all unemployed—will never be able to afford the rent in expensive West Coast cities. The first step in solving these intractable issues is to address the real problem: addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless and must be confronted honestly if we have any hope of solving it.

Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal. He is a documentary filmmaker and research fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth, Poverty, & Morality. Follow him on Facebook here.

How some Southern California drug rehab centers exploit addiction

How some Southern California drug rehab centers exploit addiction

Timmy Solomon lights a glass pipe of crystal meth in the bathroom of his sober living home in San Clemente. He closes the window and turns the shower to steaming hot to disguise the smell. He said he got the meth a few days earlier from another addict at their outpatient treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. Less than an hour later his housemates call the house manager to report him being high. A few hours later he’s kicked out and sent to Mission Hospital Laguna Beach where he spends the night.(Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)
245 COMMENTS
By TERI SFORZA | tsforza@scng.com, TONY SAAVEDRA | tsaavedra@scng.com, SCOTT SCHWEBKE | sschwebke@scng.com, LORI BASHEDA, MINDY SCHAUER | mschauer@scng.com, JEFF GRITCHEN | jgritchen@scng.comand IAN WHEELER | iwheeler@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: May 21, 2017 at 5:55 am | UPDATED: November 5, 2018 at 2:37 pm

REHAB RIVIERA

Navigate to a section:
Part 1 | Some rehabs use loopholes, Obamacare to exploit addicts
Part 2 | Many recovery centers fail to deliver
Part 3 | Recovery homes can make tough neighbors
More | A note from the editor and other findings
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Timmy Solomon’s mood swings between euphoria and sadness after shooting heroin and crystal meth, a concoction aptly named “goofball.” One minute he’s dancing: “I’m the luckiest person in the world!” The next minute he’s crying because his ex-wife won’t allow him to see his 1 1/2-year-old daughter when he’s using. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Part 1: Some rehabs use loopholes, Obamacare to exploit addicts

As they push their grocery carts and clutch their coffees, the shoppers scurrying through the Ocean View Plaza parking lot pay little attention to Timmy Solomon.Timmy hunts for cans in the garbage and turns them in for cash at the recycling station to buy drugs. “I never pictured this as my life, ever dude.” he says. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

For many, he’s easy to ignore.

His hair is dirty and matted. His voice is raspy. And on this sunny Tuesday, Solomon is dragging around a bag full of cans and bottles that he hopes to sell to the RePlanet Recycling station behind the Ralph’s in San Clemente.

He wants to raise $20 so he can get high one last time before he goes into rehab.

As a kid, Solomon was taught not to steal or use drugs. But today, at 28, he’s grown up to become a shoplifter and a junkie, addicted to heroin and meth and benzodiazepines, one of the hardest drugs to kick.

Those aren’t the only contradictions in Solomon’s life.

As broke as he is, Solomon is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chronic drug users like Solomon are commodities, exploited by a growing world of drug and alcohol rehab operators who put profit ahead of patient care. Everything from the opioid epidemic and Obamacare to prison realignment and legal loopholes has created conditions in which unethical operators can flourish, using addicts to bilk insurance companies and the public out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Though many legitimate centers remain, critics and long-time insiders say a darker version of the industry is emerging, built around an illicit world of patient recruiters, fraud-driven clinics and drug-testing mills.

Southern California, where the implementation of Obamacare makes it easy for recent arrivals to sign on for insurance, is on the front line of the conflict.

More HERE

Is There a Homeless Industrial Complex That Perpetuates Homelessness?

Is There a Homeless Industrial Complex That Perpetuates Homelessness?

By Joel John Roberts | Aug 5, 2013

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In recent years, the approach to homelessness dramatically changed from how to “manage” homelessness to how to “end” homelessness. This was not merely an alteration of semantics, but a systematic change in how to allocate the limited resources that were spent every year on America’s growing homelessness problem.
Even now, the speeches at conferences, forums, and workshops on ending homelessness are instilled with a sense of pride that the homeless services and housing world has its priorities and approaches right – allocate resources to immediately house people who are homeless, also known as “housing first”, and create detailed plans to end homelessness.
But do those of us in the “business” of ending homelessness really have it right?
For years, I heard directors of homeless agencies and key leaders in the field say, “We are working toward going out of business, when there is a day that there is no homelessness.” Are these hollow feel-good words?
Communities across this country were mandated by HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development) to create plans to end homelessness. When the plans are compared to each other, most are very similar.
But I do not know of any community plan that actually details how to dismantle the existing homeless service system after homelessness has ended. Where do all of the Executive Directors, Development Directors, and Finance Directors go after the agencies go out of business? How about the social workers, security guards, and peer counselors? Do we sell off all the agencies’ property and assets?
Within the agencies that I lead, we have nearly 250 employees. Should I be giving everyone a post-dated pink slip, explaining to them that they will all be out of a job within the next 5 to 10 years (depending on what plan we are going from), since homelessness will end and there will be no need for our services?
Peter Buffet, a scion of the famed Warren Buffet, recently penned an op-ed piece, “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” that has turned the charity world upside down. Some of his points are poignant reminders of how charities (perhaps, even within the homelessness world) trend toward perpetuation rather than elimination:
Philanthropic Colonialism – Buffet says that the charity world would rather transport a solution to a local social issue (in our case, homelessness) from the outside (for example, “housing first”) rather than understand the local dynamics and resources for why the issue is actually occurring in a local neighborhood. He infers that this causes perpetuation.
A Growing Charity World – In a span of ten years, from 2001 to 2011, the philanthropic world has increased by 25%, a clear sign of perpetuation.
In the homeless charity world, local homeless agencies are going out of business. Not because homelessness has ended, but because they financially cannot keep their doors open.
The world of homeless services and housing remains massive. The federal government alone spendsseveral billion dollars per year, not including private dollars. Some would say that the system of ending homelessness should increase because the need is increasing.
Conscience Laundering – Is all of this charitable energy to end homelessness simply a guilt-relieving exercise for those of us who are not homeless? Are political and community leaders investing in homelessness to keep, as Buffet would say, “the existing structure of inequality in place”?
“The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over.”
I don’t think any of the leaders I have worked with to end homelessness would think they are putting in 60-hour work-weeks to prevent a revolution from occurring in this country, nor do they feel guilty because they are not homeless. On the contrary, our energy in this social struggle is because we are called to help those who are hurting, and because we, too, feel we could be without a home given the fragility of this economy.
Buffet’s assessment of this country’s charity industry may be correct in many cases. But within the homeless services and housing world, the goal of ending homelessness in this country is a public expression that the homeless charity world truly wants to go out of business, and not become what Buffet calls a “perpetual poverty machine”.
While some may feel ending homelessness is utopian, or wishful thinking at best, the direction and approach to its realization are correct.
When industry leaders and funders begin to help homeless agencies transfer their staff to other employment sectors and guide organization on how to sell their assets, then I may need to start issuing pink slips. Ironically issuing pink slips might be cause for celebration, because homelessness will have ended.

The Homeless : A Disturbing Look Inside

One Day At A Time- Homeless In San Francisco

We went out to San Francisco to ask homeless people in San 
Francisco what their plans for the future were and gave them some pizza in return! :)

Under the Table Business of Homelessness in San Francisco

Permanent Homeless Shelter Zoning has been established at Marinwood Plaza and Big Rock Deli

Permanent Homeless Shelter Zoning has been established at Marinwood Village and Big Rock Deli

From LeeLee Thomas, Principal Planner Marin County Development Department  to me on 12/18/2013

" Effective January 1, 2008, SB 2 (Chapter 633, Statutes of 2007) required every California city and county to engage in a detailed analysis of emergency shelters and transitional and supportive housing in their next Housing Element revision, regulates zoning for these facilities, and broadens the scope of the Housing Accountability Act to include emergency shelters as well as supportive and transitional housing. As part of this bill we are required to establish a zone or zoning districts were a homeless shelter is a principally permitted use. Planned Commercial (CP) and Retail Business  (C1) were selected during the Planning Commissions hearings and were adopted by the Board in January 2012 as part of a package of development code changes. "


Note that Marinwood Plaza and Big Rock Deli are two locations that are now zoned for Homeless Shelters.

Given that San Rafael Mayor has stated that he wants the homeless out of downtown and housed in the county areas,  we should be very concerned that we may find ourselves with several large homeless facilities in our neighborhood.

Homeless in San Francisco

New Approach to Homelessness in Marin

Homeless camps along the bike trail in Santa Ana

How I Overcame Homelessness Twice to Become a Billionaire | John Paul DeJoria

John Paul Dejoria has had a rough ride to the top. Yet being homeless twice and being abandoned by his wife early on didn't shake his drive to make it in this word, and he's managed to turn an admittedly difficult hand into a royal flush. These days he's a billionaire several times over with a successful Paul Mitchell haircare line and even a founding stake in Patron tequila brand. So how did he maintain motivation? He remembered giving two dimes to the Salvation Army as a boy, and how his mother told him that those dimes add up and can really help people. This lesson directly helped him overcome a period early in his career where he was collecting bottle caps to get money to eat.

GOOD FORTUNE, a documentary based on John Paul's life, is available on all digital platforms on August 1st

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Transcript: A lot of people ask how I got into donating to various causes, and how I got involved in even homelessness along the way, and popped out of it—well it's a very interesting story. My mom has a lot to do with it.

At six years old we didn't have any money; there was my mother, my brother and I. We had a deadbeat dad; left us before we were two, but she took us at Christmas-time to downtown Los Angeles. We had little cars going around in circles, it was pretty cool, and decorations in the window.

She gave my brother and I a dime and told us, "Boys whole half of it each, give it to the man ringing the bell in the bucket." We put it in this bucket, we said, "Mom, why did we give that man a dime? That's like two soda pops." This is 1951, two soda pops, three candy bars.

And mom said, "Boys, that's the Salvation Army. They take care of people that have no place to live and no food. And we don't have a lot of money, but we can afford a dime this year. Boys, always remember in life: give a little something to those in need, they'll always be somebody that's not as well-off as you are. No matter where you are or how far down you are, try and help someone along the way." It stuck with me.

The first time I was homeless I was 22-and-a-half years older and I had a two-and-a-half year old son. I was working as the Master of Ceremonies at the Second Annual Sports Vacation Recreational Vehicle Show and I had a check coming in at the end of the week.

Well, I came home and I drove our one car up to where we lived and as I was getting out of the car and going up towards our apartment door my wife—we were very young, we got married at 20 and 19 years old—my wife was coming down the stairs and she said, "I'm going to storage," and she took the keys. By the time I got through the door I saw my little boy, two and a half years old, kind of just sitting there on top of a pile of clothes with a note that basically said, “I can't handle being a mom anymore. He'll be much better off with you. Good luck.”

Now, what I didn't know also was that she had planned this for a few months. She had not paid the rent for a few months and kept the money and I didn't know that. She wiped out what little we had in the savings account in the bank and took the only car we had. So unbeknownst to me, two days later I was evicted—completely evicted, power shut off, the landlord—she just really timed this one. And I had this little kid with me, two-and-a-half years old, and now I had to be mom and dad and that was really a bummer, I had no car! So I ended up borrowing a 1951 Cadillac with a broken water pump from someone that was very, very dear, had to put water in it every four hours, and that's kind of how we got going.

Second time I was homeless is when I started John Paul Mitchell Systems. I knew I needed $500,000 to start John Paul Mitchell Systems, had to have that. So we had the backer lined up, I had a good job at the time, lived in a nice house, and I left everything I had because $500,000 was coming down the street, I was going to start a company. So I left it all behind. I left what money I had with my wife—we weren't getting along well at all—and the best car. And I took the older car—it was a good one but an older car, it ran good—down the hill to get my money.

Human Livestock- Thoughts about the Elite and wee little people.

Share the Wealth Sucker!

Rich kid from Marin, child of the streets join share-the-wealth effort

Mill Valley-raised Iris Brilliant, left, and homeless activist Lisa Gray-Garcia joined poor Native American, black and Hispanic people on a tour of Belvedere to encourage residents to “redistribute” their wealth to the needy.Robert Tong — Marin Independent Journal


By Paul Liberatore, Marin Independent Journal


POSTED: 06/24/17, 5:19 PM PDT | UPDATED: 2 MINS AGO13 COMMENTS

Lisa Gray-Garcia, center, co-founder of POOR Magazine, is with the staff in Oakland. Gray-Garcia calls “wealth and resource hoarding” a disease.Robert Tong — Marin Independent Journal

Giving Back

To learn more about the “Stolen Land/Hoarded Resources Tour’ and the Bank of Community Reparations, call 510-435-7500 or email poormag@gmail.com.


Iris Brilliant and Lisa Gray-Garcia come from two very different Americas.

The 29-year-old daughter of a well-known Mill Valley physician, Brilliant grew up wealthy and privileged in affluent Marin County.

Gray-Garcia, nicknamed “Tiny,” was a child of the streets, homeless and destitute and desperate, her troubled single mother’s sole caregiver when she was just 11 years old.

In a country with glaring income inequality and disappearing social mobility, these two women have broken through social and class barriers to become unlikely cohorts and allies.

“It took a lot of effort because our lives were set up to never have a relationship,” Brilliant said. “We were trained not to be able to build a relationship with people like each other. That we’ve been able to do that is almost a miracle.”

Brilliant, Gray-Garcia, First Nations leader Corrina Gould and other activists associated with Oakland’s Poor Magazine, which Gray-Garcia co-founded in 1996, have joined together in a new kind of “community reparations” movement — one that identifies rich people as “wealth hoarders” who can make things right by “redistributing” their excess money, land and assets to the poor and homeless.


For the past year, groups of black, brown, indigenous and disabled people have been embarking on what they’re calling “Stolen Land/Hoarded Resources Tours” of upscale neighborhoods across the country, going door-to-door with a novel spin on the concept of sharing the wealth through a new “Bank of Community Reparations,” founded by a coalition of Bay Area nonprofits. There is also a Go Fund Me website.

Loosely modeled on India’s Bhoodan Movement, which involved wealthy landowners gifting land to the poor, the tours began last Earth Day in San Francisco’s Nob Hill and Pacific Heights neighborhoods, then moved on to Piedmont in the East Bay, Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, Manhattan’s Park Avenue and the Main Line in Philadelphia. Last Sunday, the tour arrived in Belvedere, one of Marin’s wealthiest enclaves.

BELVEDERE VISIT

“These tours take a strong emotional toll on poor folks and people of color,” Brilliant said. “It can be traumatizing for them to enter into a  See Article HERE

Editor's Note: Don't miss their video.  Is this group for real?

Portland Housing Stupidity Grows (Lessons for Marin)

Portland Housing Stupidity Grows

in Economics, Housing, Planning, Urban Issues /by Randal O’Toole

Here’s an incredibly stupid idea to deal with Portland’s housing affordability problems: Multnomah County proposes to build tiny houses in people’s backyard. The people will get to keep the houses on the condition that they allow homeless people to live in them for five years.

That’s supposed to be an incentive. For five years, you have to share your yard with a homeless person who may be suffering from a variety of problems, after which you get to keep whatever is left of the tiny home. But as one Portland neighborhood activist points out, what homeless people need is healthcare and social work, not to be warehoused in someone else’s backyard.

I suspect homeowners are going to be wary of this offer because they will have little control who lives in their yard. Not only would the homeowners be required to maintain the tiny houses while the homeless person or people lived in them, Portland is making it increasing difficult for landlords to evict unwanted tenants.

Update: Despite my pessimism, 580 homeowners have “inquired about hosting a homeless family in their backyards.” Initially, the county will build four, and if it can raise the funds, it will build as many as 300 more.

More important, this plan is stupidly expensive. The county estimates that each 220-square-foot tiny house will cost $75,000. That’s $341 per square foot! There are an estimated 3,800 homeless people in Portland, so housing them all this way would cost $285 million. That assumes one person per tiny house; some may house two, but housing people in tiny homes will also attract more homeless people into the area.

There’s also a not-so-hidden agenda here: “creating a denser, more affordable city.” At least, that’s the plan. The reality is density doesn’t make cities more affordable. In fact, the densest cities tend to be least affordable.

In Portland, people who build tiny houses in their yards face a huge increase in property taxes. That’s because, under Oregon law, their existing home is taxed at its 1996 value, plus a small annual increase for inflation, while new construction is taxed at today’s value. Thus, a new, 220-square-foot tiny house may be taxed more than the 2,000-square-foot house it shares a lot with.

Multnomah County says it will “try” to waive property taxes for people willing to accept tiny houses for homeless people in their yards, at least for the five years that homeless people live in them. How generous! Mercy, thy name is Multnomah County! Except really, it’s name is Stupid.

Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

There is Only One Way Out of Poverty

Have you viewed city streets recently? That massive population of homeless folks appeared under the "compassionate liberal policies" under Obama and big city mayors. Opportunity is the way up from poverty, not government programs.

For a different view on government funding and social welfare:

Trump's Budget: Expect Reagan-Era Levels of Homelessness

Van Jones claims 40% of students are homeless at one school in Marin

Van Jones  gave a video message to the Marin Equity Summit in October 2016 and makes an incredible claim that we have a school in Marin where 40% of the children are homeless.

Does anyone know which school he could be referring to?

Can Tiny Homes Solve Homelessness?

Nationwide homeless population drops, while Marin County and San Francisco increase

Nationwide homeless population drops, while SF sees increase

Matthew Doherty, executive director of U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness said Thursday the homeless increase in West Coast cities involves multiple factors, but certainly the hot real estate market is among them.

“The housing market is definitely a huge impact on the ability of people to retain stable housing and avoid the experience of homelessness,” Doherty said. “And then I think it’s also becoming harder and harder in many of these communities for people to exit homelessness and to find the places to call home that they can afford.”

He added, “In many communities we are also seeing more indications of a strong connection between the opioid epidemic and experiences of homelessness.”

Julián Castro, HUD secretary, said that “homelessness is down significantly in our nation since 2010, but we also know there is a lot left to do.”

Castro called for “even more leadership by mayors and governors, nonprofit organizations, in addition to the federal government to prevent and end homelessness in the United States.”

San Francisco has the six largest homeless population of other major cities. New York City has the most, at 73,523. The numbers are from a count of one day in January.

Doherty said that there was a “need to urgently focus” on increasing affordable housing across the country, improving employment opportunities and collaborating among federal, state and local governments.

Doherty praised the leadership of Los Angeles’s mayor and Board of Supervisors for their success in passing this month a $1.2 billion voter-approved bond to house the homeless there.

“It’s a matter of being able to take the supply of housing opportunities to the scale that’s needed to meet the needs there. That’s why the passage of the proposition is so important to bring those new units online,” Doherty said. “That’s the strategy that is working in every community.”