Millennials eye home ownership

 

 

By Gregory J. Wilcox, Los Angeles Daily News

Posted: 10/23/14, 5:06 PM PDT |

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The millennials among us — folks born between 1982 and 2004 — don’t give a hoot about owning a home, goes the prevailing wisdom.
A differing opinion surfaced this week from a not too surprising source: The California Association of Realtors.
“Contrary to popular belief, millennials still highly value home ownership, and a majority expect to buy a home in the next five years,” the association said.
The group draws its conclusion from an online survey of adults 18-34 on their thoughts toward owning a house. condo or even a yurt. The rating scale went from 1 to 10, with 1 being not important at all, and a 10 signifying it’s extremely important.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed felt buying a home rated an 8 or higher.
“The biggest advantages they see in home ownership are the freedom to do what they want with the property, privacy and the satisfaction of ownership,” the association said of the age group.
That makes them sound like the geezers of my generation, Gen X and Gen Y. It also looks like they have been paying attention to real-estate market trends.
Fifty-nine percent anticipate home prices increasing in a year, while 63 percent see them rising in five years, according to the survey. And the biggest obstacle to home ownership remains the same as it ever has: money.

Of the millennials who rent, 67 percent do so because they can’t afford to buy.
“Despite recent news reports of young adults moving back home to live with mom and dad, millennials haven’t completely written off home buying and still aspire to owning a home,” association president Kevin Brown said in a statement.
Among the current renters, 36 percent said affordable home prices would motivate them to buy now. Sixteen percent said the precipitating factor would be having the necessary down payment, and 15 percent would need an improvement in their finances.

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Mixed housing market

State and regional housing markets continued to sputter along in September, the California Association of Realtors also noted this week.
Sales of previously owned single-family homes fell 4 percent from a year ago to an annualized rate of 396,440 units statewide, though sales were flat from August. The state’s median house price rose 8 percent from a year ago, up to $460,940.
In Los Angeles County, sales fell 2 percent from a year ago, while the median price rose 6 percent, to $414,300. And in the Inland Empire, sales rose 0.5 percent and the median price increased 9 percent, to $275,820.

Friday Night Music - Rockabilly mix

Asking If 'Big Gov't Sucks' Got This Girl in Trouble with Cops, Kicked Off Campus

Asking If 'Big Gov't Sucks' Got This Girl in Trouble with Cops, Kicked Off Campus

Robby Soave|Oct. 20, 2014 4:50 pm

Turning Point USA / Youtube

Lauren Cooley, a 22-year-old journalist and conservative activist, canvassed Broward College last week asking students there whether they agreed that "big government sucks." The question soon answered itself: Campus police officers interrupted Cooley, told her that she had to restrict her activities to the designated "free speech zone," and threatened to arrest her unless she left the campus.
Broward is a Miami-area community college and public institution that hosted a debate between Florida gubernatorial candidates Rick Scott and Charlie Crist last week.
According to The College Fix:

She spent nearly 90 minutes there asking students “Hey, do you think big government sucks?” as she worked to find students interested in signing a petition to launch a Turning Point student club on campus, she said in an interview with The College Fix.
As Cooley was leaving the Davie, Florida campus she saw a male student and asked him if he thought big government sucked, and at that point she was told by a campus security guard that she needed to go to the “free-speech area,” she said in an interview Friday with The College Fix.

Cooley recorded the incident. The cops insisted that she was not allowed to speak to students about a political topic outside the free speech zone, even though many students—having just attended a political debate—were actively discussing politics out in the open (how shocking!). Cooley was wise enough to ask whether she was being detained and declined to hand over her ID. Eventually, an officer told her to leave the campus at once or be arrested for trespassing.

“Alright,” Cooley said as she walked away. “Remember, big government sucks.”
“Yeah, I know,” the officer can be heard saying in the background.

After being told in absolute terms by a police officer that she was not permitted to speak to students and would be arrested if she remained any longer, Cooley left the campus.

According to The College Fix, Cooley is a resident of Broward County. "It’s literally the college my taxdollars go to partially fund," she said.

Free speech zones are pernicious and manifestly unconstitutional staples of many campuses. That a public institution of higher learning would want to prevent a young person from discussing politics with students is inexcusable.

That the cops would aggressively enforce this restrictive policy is even worse.

Dropbox, Airbnb, and the Fight Over San Francisco’s Public Spaces

By Julia Carrie Wong

•              

On most mornings in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, elderly Asian women practice tai chi under the pollarded sycamore trees. Last Thursday morning, this long-running scene was disrupted by protesters, who gathered on the steps of City Hall to speak out against the privatization of public parks. The plaza was surrounded by barricades and guarded by a group of private security guards. The space had been rented out to Salesforce, the city’s largest tech employer, for the company’s annual Dreamforce Gala and Benefit Concert. As the protesters chanted—“Mission Playground is not for sale!”—a trio of women performed slow, graceful tai-chi movements in the alcove of a staircase, across the street, leading to an underground parking lot.

 

The protest—which drew at least two hundred people, including several middle- and high-school students who said that their parents and school principals had approved their absence from school—was a response to a video that went viral on Bay Area social media on October 10th. The video, which was first picked up by the local blog Uptown Almanac, jumped to more than half a million views after a post on the blog Valleywag. It depicts an incident that occurred, in August, at the soccer field at Mission Playground, a public park in San Francisco’s historically Latino but increasingly gentrified Mission District.

In the video, a group of adults—mostly white males—approach a dozen or so Latino teen-agers and ask them to forfeit the field. A college student named Kai, who seems to be the leader of the neighborhood kids, explains the pickup rules (seven on seven, no time limit, whoever scores first keeps the field) and asks the men how long they’ve lived in the neighborhood. “Who gives a shit? Who cares about the neighborhood?,” one of the men mutters off-screen.

The men explain that they paid to reserve the field, and a man named Conor arrives with a printed document. “It’s pretty simple, man. We paid twenty-seven dollars to reserve the field for an hour,” Conor says to Kai, holding the piece of paper up to his face. “Read it. Read it.”

 

“I know how to read,” Kai says. “I’m an educated person. I also know that this field has always been a pickup field where you play seven on seven and wait your turn. You guys think that just because you have money you can buy the field and play.”

 

Journalists and activists soon identified the men as employees of Dropbox and Airbnb, the company that many residents blame for decreasing available housing and increasing the number of evictions. Residential evictions are inherently domestic affairs carried out in hasty court proceedings or hush-hush buyouts, but the standoff at Mission Playground gave the Latino residents in the area an opportunity to see their children publicly harassed.

Kai, who asked not to be identified by his last name, told me that he and his family have been evicted from their homes in San Francisco twice. The twenty-year-old said that the family lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the Mission District until their eviction, in 2005. They then moved to the Richmond neighborhood and were again evicted, four years later, thanks to California’s notorious Ellis Act. They now live in South of Market, a neighborhood that was once dominated by single-room-occupancy units but is currently the focal point of much of the city’s commercial and residential development.

White men sporting T-shirts with tech-company logos are, in some ways, the perfect avatar of the incoming population that’s transformed the city’s demographics. They are the wealthy, predominantly white tech employees who have been pouring into the formerly working-class immigrant neighborhoods, driving up the cost of housing, and giving the landlords increased incentives to evict longtime tenants from rent-controlled apartments. (Between 1990 and 2011, the Mission District lost fourteen hundred Latino households and gained twenty-nine hundred white ones; during the same period, the black population of the city was cut in half.)

 

Kai told me that he had heard over the summer that pickup-soccer players were regularly being kicked off the field in the evening by adults who had paid to reserve the field through the city’s Recreation and Park Department. Having grown up playing soccer on that field, Kai decided to try to help the neighborhood kids make a stand for the existing rules. “I’ve also felt kind of exiled from the community, because of my eviction, and I didn’t want to see the same thing happening,” he said.

 

Nathan, a middle-school student and one of the soccer players who spoke at the rally, compared the tech workers’ actions to a kind of eviction. “When the incident happened at the park, I was mad because they were kicking me out of my second home,” he said. Another one of the soccer players, Hugo Vargas, said, “If I lose the park, I lose my family. I lose my home.”

 

Jean-Denis Greze, an engineer at Dropbox who was part of the dispute, issued a brief apology on Twitter. Dropbox apologized as a company, stating, “We were disappointed to learn that a couple of our employees weren’t respectful to this community. . . . We’re sorry, and we promise to do better.” Airbnb also released a statement: “We want to apologize for the Airbnb team at the Mission Playground. Enhancing the neighborhoods and the cities we serve is our top priority and these employees didn’t live up to our values. We have reminded everyone on our team that we all have an obligation to uphold our shared values every day, no matter where we are.”

It is a strange phenomenon to see members of an industry that prides itself on the disruptive innovation of flouting regulation line up to apologize for their employees, who, in this instance, followed the rules. (Airbnb recently achieved a major victory in San Francisco with legislation that legalizes its short-term rentals, but it continues to operate outside the law in many cities. Its apology did not come with the estimated twenty-five million dollars that it allegedly owes the city in uncollected hotel taxes.) The city did allow for rentals of the park, for a twenty-seven-dollar fee, just as Conor had stated. The problem was that the two groups were following different sets of rules—one established by tradition and cultural norms, the other by city regulations. The city’s rules favor those with twenty-seven dollars to spare and either a credit card (phone reservations require a Visa or Mastercard) or the ability to go to the department’s office (a lengthy bus ride). The neighborhood’s rules favor those who’ve been around long enough to know how the pickup system works.

 

But while the tech companies were busy waging P.R. campaigns, the neighborhood youth and their supporters were pointing fingers at a bigger target: the local government and its tech-friendly policies. As Kai put it, “Who is making the policies that are encouraging tech workers to move into communities? And how are those spaces being emptied in the first place?” The Mission Playground was not underutilized (even in the middle of the workday last Thursday, a handful of Latino men were kicking a ball around). Last Thursday, the president of the Recreation and Park Commission, Mark Buell, said, “There is no profit associated with the fees that are charged for permitting. It doesn’t even cover the administrative cost. It’s a way of trying to provide a service to the community.” The question is: Which community is the department interested in serving?

 

San Francisco’s startup culture has thrived on monetizing commodities that were once free, like public parking spaces and restaurant reservations. It’s no wonder that the parks department wants in on the action. Activists are highly suspicious of the general manager, Phil Ginsburg, who they believe wants to turn the parks department into an enterprise agency—a government institution that generates its own budget (like the airport) by charging for access and services instead of relying on tax dollars. This practice, according to the parks department’s deputy director of public affairs, Connie Chan, is not new. In an e-mail, Chan wrote, “For over 100 years the Department has earned a portion of its operating budget—all of which goes to support programs and services. Our earned revenue constitutes about a third of our operating budget and provides visitors with enhanced park amenities such as bike rentals, food trucks and docent tours.”

 

Still, to several of the city’s residents, some of the parks department’s new programs feel like a betrayal. Dozens of residents spoke to the park commission last Thursday morning, almost all pleading with department officials to stop the privatization of public spaces.

According to the young men in the video (none of the adult tech workers have responded to requests for comment), after the camera was turned off, the groups agreed to divide the field and play separately, each on its own half. Now, thanks to the outrage engendered by the video, pickup rules will continue to prevail at Mission Playground—at least for now. Ginsburg met with some of the youth from the video the day before the protest and agreed to halt the evening rentals.

 

It’s a victory for the Mission’s remaining Latino community, but there’s no guarantee that the privatization of San Francisco’s other public parks and facilities won’t continue apace. The city may be willing to forgo the twenty-seven-dollar fee for one soccer field, but it’s hard to imagine the city giving up the money that it could earn from renting out Civic Center Plaza to corporations such as Salesforce. There seems to be no real resolution in sight, and, every time something similar to what happened at the Mission Playground occurs, it’s certain to polarize the city further. “It’s a literal interpretation of what our city is facing right now,” Edwin Lindo, a leader of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club, said, at last Thursday’s rally. “Someone coming with a piece of paper who says you have to leave.”

 

Editor's Note:

This pretty much sums up the current attitude of our governments. "We own the property and request payment for its use". Wait until they institute VMT (vehicle mileage tax) to have "permission" to go down our public roads that have been paid for the taxpayers several times over through gas taxes. Suddenly we are back in the times of King George where the "king" owns everything. Steve Kinsey, Marin County Supervisor District 4 and MTC commissioner is advocating VMTs as a way to pay for all the development along 101.

When they force development in Marin, here are the people that are hurt.

Can you tell the difference?
 

NY Times: China's great forced migration

See NY Times articles:

LEAVING THE LAND

China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities

Articles in this series look at how China’s government-driven effort to push the population to towns and cities is reshaping a nation that for millenniums has been defined by its rural life.

LEAVING THE LAND

Pitfalls Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City

LEAVING THE LAND: China's Consuming Billion from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

LEAVING THE LAND

Picking Death Over Eviction

LEAVING THE LAND: Urban, But Left Behind from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo

EDITOR'S NOTE: In China, they don't bother with citizen's rights because they don't have any! That's not very "efficient". Government was not set up to be efficient. Our government was set up to find and maintain the right balance between social order and liberty which, by necessity, changes over time but I doubt requires this type of government land grab.  Plan Bay Area likewise is trying to concentrate people into narrow strips of land like the 101 Urban Corridor.  The idea is to keep people out of the "wildlands corridor". In Marinwood-Lucas Valley,  the urban boundary ends at Grady Ranch.

SB-1 is a proposed law to allow government to seize property through eminent domain WITHOUT the finding of blight.  It is the most significant land use legislation of our lifetime.  

How Planners & Politicians Are Killing Property Rights

Topic: "Private Property: How Politicians and Planners Are Killing the American Dream" 

  

People need to be aware of what is happening at the State, regional, and local level that could have significant impact on the traditional American way of life, wealth building , and upward mobility. All of these threats are being implemented right under our nose through administrative law and policies .It is the incremental implementation of collectivization of private property.

Most taxpayers are unaware that they are funding the demise of the way of life that made them successful and prosperous. The forces pushing this are well organized and funded. They use words like "sustainable development and smart growth" which sound very innocent on the surface but disguise an underlying and insideous effort to subvert property rights and control where and how you live, all in the name of saving the planet and instituting social equity.

   

The forces that want the fundamental transformation of America are counting on your ignorance, apathy, or isolation. Time to get educated and stand up for the Constitution.

  

  

Senate Committee Report Details Environmentalists' Inner Workings

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Over the past fifty years, America’s environmental movement has grown from college kids adorning flowers to a billion dollar industry. With huge budgets to employ lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations professionals, many of America’s leading environmental non-profits are unrecognizable from their modest beginnings. What may seem like an organic, disparate movement is actually a well oiled machine that receives its funding from a handful of super rich liberal donors operating behind the anonymity of foundations and charities, according to a new report out today by the Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW).
The EPW report titled The Chain of Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA meticulously details how the “Billionaires’ Club” funds nearly all of the major environmental non-government organizations (NGO), many media outlets, and supposed grassroots activists. The Billionaire Report continues by describing the cozy relationship many environmental groups have with the executive branch and the revolving door that makes this possible.
The most striking aspect of the Billionaire Report is the sheer amount of money that is in play. In 2011 alone, ten foundations donated upwards of half a billion dollars to environmental causes. Many of these foundations, whose assets are valued in the billions, meet and coordinate under the framework provided by the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA). Described as the “funding epicenter of the environmental movement,” EGA members doled out $1.13 billion to environmental causes in 2011. EGA’s membership is not public but its clout is self-evident given the amount of money its members direct to recognizable environmental NGOs.
Often times, EGA members will elect to indirectly fund organizations that are the face of the environmental movement. For example, instead of directly cutting a check to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) or the Sierra Club, the Hewlett Foundation or the Packard Foundation will contribute to the Energy Foundation. The Billionaire Report describes the Energy Foundation as “a pass through charity utilized by the most powerful EGA members to create the appearance of a more diversified base of support, to shield them from accountability, and to leverage limited resources by hiring dedicated energy/environment staff to handle strategic giving.”
The Energy Foundation’s funding paths are depicted in the Billionaire Report chart below.

Not all of this money is being used to write white papers about how wind is going to power our country or how the EPA should implement this or that regulation. In fact, millions of dollars from the Energy Foundation find their way into political spending. The Billionaire Report illuminates this process by showing how the Green Tech Action Fund is financed:

Between 2010 and 2012, both foundations [Hewlett Foundation and Packard Foundation] donated hundreds of millions of dollars to ClimateWorks Foundation, a 501(c)(3) foundation. ClimateWorks then gave nearly $170 million to the Energy Foundation. Hewlett and Packard gave directly to the Energy Foundation. The Energy Foundation then gave $5,676,000 to Green Tech, and ClimateWorks gave it $1,520,000. The Energy Foundation was incredibly brief, broad and vague in describing the purpose of its 2011 and 2012 grants of $1 million, respectively, to Green Tech. The 2011 description states: “To support clean energy policies,” while in 2012 the purpose is listed as: “To advance clean technology markets, especially energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies.”

Green Tech, in turn, donated heavily to at least three 501(c)(4) far-left environmental activist organizations during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.

This process is illustrated here:

In addition to playing in national politics through the Energy Foundation, New York and California based foundations use a handful of other charities to prop-up local activist groups. The Billionaire Report looks at the efforts in New York and Colorado to prohibit and hamstring hydraulic fracturing:

A pseudo-grassroots effort to attack hydraulic fracturing has germinated from massive amounts of funding by three foundations: Schmidt Family Foundation, Tides Foundation and Park Foundation…In typical secretive billionaire donor fashion, the foundations’ funding was funneled through fiscal sponsors. Funding through these intermediary organizations, such as the Sustainable Markets Foundation (SMF) and Food & Water Watch, create distance between the wealthy foundations and alleged community-based outfits….

One scheme, led by the New York-based Park Foundation and California-based Schmidt Family Foundation, provides numerous grants to the New York-based SMF, which serves as the fiscal sponsor for multiple New York groups engaged in this effort, including Water Defense, Frack Action and Artists Against Fracking. During 2011, SMF gave $147,750 to Water Defense. The following year, SMF funneled a $150,000 grant “to support Water Defense” from Schmidt. Notably, Water Defense was founded in 2010 by actor Mark Ruffalo, who has an estimated net worth of $20 million and was listed on Time Magazines’ 2011 “People Who Mattered” for his anti-fracking efforts. In 2011, SMF gave Frack Action $324,198, with $150,000 stemming from Schmidt grants to SMF. Ironically, one of the Schmidt grants specified that $100,000 go “to support Frack Action’s grassroots campaign fighting for a ban on horizontal hydraulic fracturing” (emphasis added).

However, the mere funding from the California-based Schmidt demonstrates Frack Action’s campaign is anything but grassroots. In 2012, SMF received $185,000 for Frack Action through grants from Park and Schmidt. While the amount of money funneled to Yoko Ono’s Artists Against Fracking cannot be identified, as SMF’s 2012 IRS Form-990 is unavailable, Artists Against Fracking’s now-removed website directs donations to SMF.

This process is illustrated here:

While even passive political observers are aware of environmentalists’ political activities – who could forget American Lung Association’s coughing baby? – few people fully appreciate how interconnected the environmental movement is with the current White House and its regulatory agencies. For evidence of the environmental movement’s influence, look no further than the EPA’s recent GHG regulation for existing plants. This regulation, hailed by its supporters as the crowning achievement of the Obama Administration, drew heavily from a Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) model regulation. The New York Times wrote that the EPA used NRDC’s regulation as its “blueprint.” NRDC’s clout within Democrat circles is well known and inspired the 2009 Greenwire article “NRDC Mafia Finding Homes on Hill, in EPA .”
But NRDC is by no means the only activist group with alumni in key executive branch positions. The Billionaire’s Report calls attention to Deputy Administrator for the EPA Bob Perciasepe was the former Chief Operating Officer of the National Audubon Society. The EPA’s Region 9 Administrator used to work for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund as well as the NRDC. Acting Administrator/Deputy Administrator for the Office of Water Nancy Stoner was Co-Director and Senior Attorney for NRDC’s Water Program. EPA’s Region 2 Administrator was previously the Executive Director of the Environmental Advocates of New York.

While former hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer may be grabbing headlines over his pledge to spend $100 million dollars this election cycle, it is clear that the modern environmental movement is already well funded and organized. Totaling more than 90 pages and containing over 400 citations, the Billionaire Report will begin an important conversation about who really funds the environmental left and what they really represent.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisprandoni/2014/07/30/breaking-senate-committee-report-details-environmentalists-inner-workings/

Backyard Bucks in Marinwood

And now for a moment of beauty in Marinwood.

Fable: Are entitlements corrupting us?

Critique of Common Core by Dr. Duke Pesta

Don't Eat Your Dog: The Surprising Moral Case for Free Enterprise