Thursday, July 20, 2017
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
Astorino: 'Vindication' for Westchester in affordable housing deal
Declaring victory in housing settlement, Astorino says court-appointed monitor should be removed.
Westchester County has finally met one of the most contentious requirements in its ongoing affordable housing agreement with the federal government.
After 10 previous submissions were rejected, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has accepted a county analysis of how local zoning codes can create barriers to fair-housing choices.
The analysis didn’t find any exclusionary zoning in the county.
“This is vindication for Westchester and our local municipalities that it is a victory won on facts, on principle and on persistence,” County Executive Rob Astorino, a Republican, told reporters at a news conference in his officer on Tuesday.
In a July 14 letter to Deputy County Executive Kevin Plunkett, HUD Regional Director Jay Golden said the department “appreciates the County’s commitment to reaching an amicable resolution in this matter.”
Same analysis, different outcome
The decision comes weeks after a new administrator for HUD’s New York and New Jersey office was named. Westchester resident Lynne Patton, a former event planner and vice president of the Eric Trump Foundation, was named administrator in late June — just two months after HUD’s last rejection of the county’s analysis of impediments, or AI.
The latest AI was "essentially the same" as the previous version, both put together by the firm VHB Engineering, according to Astorino's staff. Catherine Borgia, the county legislature's Democratic majority leader, said what had changed this time was Patton's appointment.
"After years of wasting Westchester taxpayer money, and 10 attempts at submitting an acceptable analysis of impediments, it seems the 11th time is the charm for the County Executive," Borgia said in a statement.
In a letter defending the previous analysis, VHB acknowledged there were "concentrations" of white, black and Hispanic populations in the county but concluded that zoning was not the cause. Astorino said he didn't know what role, if any, the new leadership had in the decision but said the facts were on the county's side "no matter who was the president, no matter who was in the staff at HUD."
The county was sued by a housing group called the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York after Westchester had accepted $52 million in federal development grants on behalf of most of its communities by falsely certifying in the grant paperwork that it had analyzed impediments to fair housing.
Westchester settled that suit in 2009, agreeing to build 750 units of affordable housing in 31 eligible communities where blacks and Hispanics made up less than three percent and seven percent of the overall population, respectively. It also had to take other steps to promote fair housing in the region.
Astorino, who came into office in 2010 after the settlement was signed, has clashed with the federal government and a court-appointed monitor over implementation of the agreement since. The agreement was supposed to be completed at the end of 2016, but some lingering requirements have extended the county's obligations.
Former federal judge Stephen C. Robinson, the second monitor in the agreement, was appointed this year to oversee the conclusion of the settlement. Astorino said Robinson, whose costs are $675 and hour, was no longer needed.
"The idea behind the settlement was to build affordable homes, not pay lawyers," he said.
County says it met requirements
Westchester says it has exceeded its unit requirement with 790 units greenlighted and another 100 in the pipeline, but the AI has been one of the unresolved issues. The settlement requires the AI must be deemed acceptable to HUD, but the county’s analyses have continually found no systematic barriers to fair housing.
The county says it has spent $30 million more than the $51.6 million it was required to under the settlement. It says the average subsidy was $290,000 per unit.
Of the 425 units of housing that are already occupied, roughly one third are homeownership, according to Astorino's staff. Data from the county show 35 percent of those applying for the county's units identified as white, 35 as African-American and 29 percent as Hispanic and 8 percent as multi-racial.
To complete its obligations under the settlement, the county is running an education campaign to promote fair housing in the region called "One Community." The county has spent $1 million so far in marketing and outreach, an Astorino spokesman said, and will continue running ads through the end of the year.
Mike Kaplowitz, a Democrat and chairman of the county Board of Legislators, said the the settlement winding down didn't mean there still wasn't a need for affordable housing in the region. He said he expected the 2018 county budget to include incentives to build affordable units.
"I look forward to Westchester County government getting back into the business of building common sense affordable housing that is economically viable," he said at the news conference.
Twitter: @marklungariello
‘Cap and Tax’ Would Slam High-Tax, High-Poverty California
‘Cap and Tax’ Would Slam High-Tax, High-Poverty California
State Senator representing the 37th Senate District
Monday, July 17th, 2017
The craziest story of the moment is the Governor’s insistence on passing even more draconian legislation on the topic of climate change in the form of extending what is known as cap and trade (or, in this iteration, cap and tax) (also see MOORLACH UPDATE — Surprise! — July 11, 2017).
Gov. Brown believes that “climate change is real” and that California has to be the guinea pig in the world stage on addressing it. Therefore, Californians have to make certain financial sacrifices now to protect those who follow us 100 years from now. And that is only if his postulation that “climate change is real.”
With “quiet dignity and grace” (a line from “Young Frankenstein”), the Governor claimed that on Monday the Legislature would be making “the most important vote of our lifetimes.”
Is the vote to disallow collective bargaining a la Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker?
Is the vote to abolish the California Rule, and modify pension formulas going forward?
Is the vote for establishing a hybrid pension plan that includes a defined contribution component?
Is it a plan to make state government more efficient, since California has the highest tax rates and still can’t deliver decent services and roads to its residents?
Is the vote to address the highest poverty rate of any state in the nation?
No.
It’s about one man’s personal crusade to supposedly “save the planet,” when the science may not support his claims.
His comments culminated with the hysterical claim no one else in the country seems to believe enough to enact mitigating policy: “Climate change is a threat to organized human existence.” Pop some corn and enjoy his harangue.
No doubt, everyone is concerned about our planet. But, at a cost of some 90 cents per gallon of gas? Most people don’t think so.
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Monday, July 17, 2017
Marinwood CSD meeting in Five Parts, Runaway Pensions, and other financial issues.
Grand Jury Report/Response on Marinwood Pension Crisis
Park and Recreation Report
Maintenance Shed Replacement report
Fire Department Dream Kitchen $100k makeover?
Storm Damage Repairs that could cost hundreds of thousands
Sunday, July 16, 2017
‘The Ugly Environmentalist’
‘The Ugly Environmentalist’
by JONAH GOLDBERG July 14, 2017
The rhetoric of climate-change alarmists grows ever more hysterical. One of the hallmarks of the “Ugly American” is the habit of thinking foreigners will understand what you’re saying if just shout it louder and louder. The Ugly Environmentalist does something similar. He exaggerates the challenge of global warming by using ever more hysterical rhetoric, thinking that if the last doomsday prediction didn’t work, this one will.
For instance, Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicist, recently said that the consequences of Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord were monumental: “Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees (Celsius), and raining sulfuric acid.”
As Nathan Cofnas notes in the Weekly Standard, this is nuts. The share of the atmosphere taken up by that vile gas carbon dioxide (which just happens to sustain all plant life) is 400 parts per million. It’s been much higher than that in the past without boiling the oceans or raining acid from the sky. Cofnas also mentions that Venus is nearly 26 million miles closer to the sun, and that the share of carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere is 965,000 parts per million, or about 2,412 times greater than Earth’s.
And that’s Hawking, a serious scientist (at least in his own field). Journalists, always looking for novelty and drama, can be worse. A recent New York magazine cover story on climate change assured readers that all of the previous climate-change alarmism was too tepid. Basically, by the end of the century, the living will envy the dead and much of the planet will be uninhabitable or a reenactment of a Mad Max movie.
To the credit of some journalists and climate scientists, the New York magazine article got considerable pushback, even from normally alarmist Penn State professor Michael Mann.
Rachel Becker, a science writer, had a good take as well. Research shows that “scare tactics can backfire when people put up their psychological defenses against the threatening information,” Becker wrote at The Verge, “rather than defending against the threat itself.”
That’s true. The more you sound like some cowbell-wielding street preacher wearing a sandwich board that says “The End Is Nigh!” the more likely it is that people will ignore you. Particularly if your last few terrifying predictions didn’t pan out.
But this focus on how using scare tactics doesn’t persuade skeptics overlooks another problem. What about the people it does persuade? If you honestly believe that climate change will end all life on earth (it won’t) or lead to some dystopian hell where we use the skulls of our former friends and neighbors to collect water droplets from cacti, what policies wouldn’t you endorse to stop it?
There’s a rich school of journalistic and academic nonsense out there about how democracy may not be up to the job of fighting climate change, and why people who question climate change must be silenced by the state. It’s remarkable how many of the people who rightly recoil in horror at the idea of using, say, the war on terror to justify curtailing civil liberties have no such response when someone floats similar ideas for the war on climate change.
I believe, along with the late economist Julian Simon, that humans are the ultimate resource. We solve problems, and I think we’ll solve climate change too.
The environment editor for the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian, Damian Carrington, recently wrote a piece fretting about how having kids doesn’t help fight climate change. Jill Filipovic, a feminist writer, endorsed the article. “Having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet,” she wrote on Twitter. “Have one less and conserve resources.”
I found this interestingly dumb. Filipovic is precisely one of those writers you’d expect to go ballistic if some conservative Christian opined about the reproductive choices women should make. But if it’s in the name of the environment? Let’s wag those fingers, everybody!
I believe, along with the late economist Julian Simon, that humans are the ultimate resource. We solve problems, and I think we’ll solve climate change too.
But if you really want to yoke your reproductive choices to the issue of climate change (a bizarre desire if you ask me), maybe you should have as many kids as possible and educate them in science and engineering so they can come up with a solution.
For instance, did you know America may end up complying with our Paris-accord obligations despite our withdrawal? It’s all thanks to breakthroughs in natural gas, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. Thank goodness the people who came up with that stuff didn’t have parents who believed all the hype.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449477/climate-change-alarmists-environmentalists-hyberbolic-rhetoric-increasing
Saturday, July 15, 2017
The problem with “smart growth”
The problem with “smart growth”
In San Francisco today, It amounts to ethnic and class cleansing, whatever the rationalization
BY JOHN ELBERLING -
JULY 12, 2017
I think we can all stipulate that in general “Smart Growth” — environmentally-responsible urban development — is good. And in general more housing to meet population growth is needed.
But cities and communities don’t evolve, exist, and develop “in general.”
This comes to mind reading today’s commentary by a prolific local blogger complimenting the current national “Yimby” organizing as fundamentally well-intentioned in urging both.
Perhaps. but the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s new draft “Plan Bay Area 2040,” for example, which proposes providing that new housing by transforming inner city neighborhoods into such high-density Smart Growth districts, comes with a horrendous human cost: the near-complete displacement of those existing communities’ current black and brown lower-income residents and the destruction of their precious accumulated “social capital.”
Let me be blunt: the MTC proposes the conquest and destruction of long-time Central City Latino and African-American neighborhoods, to be transformed into new bourgeois neighborhoods for a mostly professional White and Asian gentry. and the displaced are literally offered NOWHERE else to go.
This IS Ethnic/Class Cleansing, whatever the rationalization.
The San Francisco exemplar is of course the fierce battle over the future of the Mission District today. The social capital of its vibrant Latino Community, built-up by four generations in the decades since WWII, is unquestionably irreplaceable and without any conceivable alternative new location in the Bay Area — even assuming its Latino residents had affordable housing options not far away, which they actually don’t.
it doesn’t matter this will be accomplished by 21st Century “market forces” facilitated by housing-development-friendly zoning regulations, instead of the redevelopment bulldozers of the 20th Century. The result IS the same. and actually, by its end redevelopment law included strong legal requirements to provide new replacement affordable housing for such displaced communities (maybe THAT is really why Gov. Brown killed redevelopment outright in 2011). Today’s zoning rules do not. The MTC Plan does not.
And the Yimbys actually oppose any such protections for the existing communities. They oppose increasing the requirements for affordable housing in private development too. They claim because any such rules might result in less new (market rate) housing being built overall they must be opposed. For example, the Yimbys oppose the pending AB915 State legislation that would ensure any project getting up to 35% more “bonus” market rate units thanks to State law has to fully comply with local Inclusionary Affordable Housing regulations.
The Smart Growth that DOES achieve the goal of providing more housing WITHOUT the conquest, destruction, and Ethnic/Class Cleansing of lower-income communities is the transformation of former military bases/industrial districts into all-new neighborhoods. In San Francisco, the Shipyard/Candlestick and Treasure Island projects alone will add 20,000 new housing units, 30% of which will be affordable. and Mission Bay, the first such project with 8,000 new units, is now nearing completion.
The problem is, due to their enormous up-front infrastructure and clean-up costs, and pay-as-you-go financing plans, it takes 30 years to complete these mega projects. Why don’t we solve that problem and build them in 15 years instead?
And also instead, rigorously protect our precious vulnerable communities and their residents, starting with the Mission District (and next, the Tenderloin), rather than allow them to be destroyed by “market forces?” Read MORE
Friday, July 14, 2017
"The Future" of the Past
In 1967 the Philco-Ford Corporation released a short film titled 1999 A.D. In it the inevitable advances of the future are demonstrated. Some of the predictions seem to be right on while others appear to have been pulled straight from Star Trek.
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