A blog about Marinwood-Lucas Valley and the Marin Housing Element, politics, economics and social policy. The MOST DANGEROUS BLOG in Marinwood-Lucas Valley.
Sprawl is not sustainable. That’s the basic assumption shaping high-rises, infill developments, and master plans in cities around the world—not to mention a guiding principle of this publication.
But a new report by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat challenges one of the central tenets of urbanism from a few unexpected angles. Comparing the daily patterns household-to-household, researchers found that certain transportation habits and overall energy use can be more environmentally efficient in suburban housing than residential high-rises.
To date, most research into urban sustainability—in terms of, say, gasoline guzzled, miles traveled, and water, heat and electricity consumption—has not examined household data in such granular detail. Studies that have generally concluded that suburbs are less efficient “are not building studies, but urban scale studies,” said Antony Wood, the executive director of the CTBUH and research professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture. “It’s urban Chicago versus total Chicago.”
Case study locations relative to central Chicago, showing major transportation systems. (CTBUH)
Wood and co-author, Peng Du, who is also a professor at IIT’s College of Architecture, wanted to capture more nuance than that. They created a survey comparing transportation patterns, energy consumption, and use of public space, which they administered to 249 households in four downtown Chicago high-rises and 273 single-family homes in Oak Park, a historic residential neighborhood. Over three months in 2014, respondents answered detailed questionnaires about their daily habits, and submitted 12 months worth of utility bills.
Wood and Du found many points of affirmation that urban life is indeed more sustainable. High-rise dwellers traveled more on public transit, walked and biked more, and made more efficient use of outdoor public space—no surprise there, since they lived closer to CTA stops, parks, and walkable amenities. The researchers also added up all the roads, water pipes, sewage lines, power and electricity supply required to serve the two types of households, and, glaringly, found that suburban development required roughly eight times more “infrastructure network length” per person than the downtown high rises.
Score one for dense urban development, right?
Overall, yes. But the details get more interesting.The building industry often assumes that suburban single-family homes require more energy to heat, light, and cool, since they have larger surface-to-volume ratios than smaller apartment units. But on a per-person basis, Wood and Du found that high-rise residents actually consumed about 27 percent more energy. On a per-floor area basis, probably because of all the shared hallways, elevators, gymnasiums, and lobbies, the downtown towers still consumed about 5 percent more energy than the suburban homes. Comparing travel habits, Wood and Du also unexpectedly found that downtown households actually traveled more miles by car, total, every year. The high rises also had more parking spaces per capita than the suburban dwellings.
What’s going on here? Demographic differences between the two groups in the study probably explain the surprising results. The large suburban households of Oak Park were full of kids, while the apartment towers held childless young professionals and empty nesters. That means, at least in a given room, more people are using the same amount of energy. Similarly, a stuffed minivan is more energy efficient than a lone commuter. “Suburban households were much more likely to have children that they bring with them during car travel,” the report states, “while single high-rise residents took more solo trips.”
This study is limited, but also important, because of the level of data it uses. On the one hand, its scope is much too small to make any sweeping conclusions about urban-vs-suburban eco-friendliness around the country or the world. Eventually Wood and Du would like to take on a larger-scale version with many more families, buildings, and neighborhood shapes. On the other hand, this pilot study offers quantified evidence that demographics count when it comes to environmental efficiency. A new LEED-certified apartment building near the subway may not be very eco-friendly if it’s full of people with resource-intensive lifestyles, as so many luxury developments are. Likewise, don’t get too pious about families out in the unsustainable suburbs: In some ways, they may be living greener than you are.
SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — California is moving closer to charging drivers for every mile they drive.
The state says it needs more money for road repairs, and the gas tax just isn’t bringing in enough revenue.
The state recently road-tested a mileage monitoring plan.
The California Road Charge Pilot Program is billed as a way for the state to move from its longstanding pump tax to a system where drivers pay based on their mileage.
But it’s not just a question about money, it’s also a question about fairness.
State Senator Scott Wiener and others are saying that when it comes to road taxes, it’s time to start looking at charging you by the mile rather than by the gallon.
“If you own an older vehicle that is fueled by gas, you’re paying gas tax to maintain the roads. Someone who has an electric vehicle or a dramatically more fuel efficient vehicle is paying much less than you are. But they are still using the roads,” Wiener said.
“People are going to use less and less gas in the long run,” according to Wiener.
And less gas means less gas tax, and less money for road repair.
“We want to make sure that all cars are paying to maintain the roads,” Wiener said.
One idea would be installing devices that would clock your mileage every time you pull up to the pump or electric car charging station. Or put a tracker on every car.
“The reality is that if you have a smartphone your data of where you are traveling is already in existence,” Wiener said.
None of this is sitting well with drivers such as Joshua Li, the owner of a hybrid BMW.
Li said he saves around $200 a month by not using gas and said he would definitely not be happy if his driving was taxed per mile.
Randy Rentschler, of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said one answer is to raise the gas tax and up the vehicle registration fee for electric cars.
“If you buy a small car that gets great fuel economy, we don’t get enough money to repair the roads … but the fact of the matter is people are buying trucks,” Rentschler said.
However, raising vehicle registration fees and taxing people with fuel-efficient, hybrid or electric vehicles could also discourage people from purchasing such vehicles.
Fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric vehicles are key to reducing vehicle emissions and improving air quality around the world.
"Social Justice" is a term you hear almost every day. But did you ever hear anybody define what it actually means? Jonah Goldberg of the American Enterprise Institute tries to pin this catchall phrase to the wall. In doing so, he exposes the not-so-hidden agenda of those who use it. What sounds so caring and noble turns out to be something very different.
Studies say that lower-income people do better when they live in affluent neighborhoods, but rich people don’t want them there. A few states are seeking ways around that resistance.
AMHERST, Mass. — When Peter Gagliardi first heard about an owner looking to sell an old farmhouse in this college town, he thought it seemed like an ideal place for an affordable housing complex. The property was across the street from a bus stop, near a bike path, and had access to two different sewer lines. What’s more, the city of Amherst, concerned with rising housing prices, had made a commitment to developing more affordable housing for residents in the town and region.
So Gagliardi’s nonprofit, HAPHousing, hired an architecture firm that would convert the farmhouse into 26 affordable units, a development that would blend into the bucolic landscape of ramshackle barns and rolling hills.
But when the plan for the development, called Butternut Farms, ended up in front of the community, opposition was vociferous.
“People basically said, ‘We’re in favor of affordable housing, but it shouldn’t be in a residential neighborhood,’” Gagliardi told me.
In a zoning meeting about the development, some people said their children had been bullied when they lived in rental developments and didn’t want that to happen again. Others said there would be too much traffic if the development was built. Still others worried that they would no longer be able to go into their backyards in their underwear. A young boy complained that the residents of the affordable-housing complex would run over the turtles that sometimes appeared in the neighborhood. Another resident complained that he used the property—which was private—to pick blueberries or race ATVs, and the development would put an end to all of that.
“Some of the things that were said were on the hateful side,” Gagliardi said. “It happens often, it’s the Not In My Backyard Syndrome.”
For more than a century, municipalities across the country have crafted zoning ordinances that seek to limit multi-family (read: affordable) housing within city limits. Such policies, known as exclusionary zoning, have led to increased racial and social segregation, which a growing body of work indicates limits educational and employment opportunities for low-income households.
But Massachusetts has a work-around: A state statute, called 40B, allows developers to get around exclusionary zoning and build affordable housing in communities where only a small percentage of units are considered affordable. (A few other states have similar policies.) The statute, passed in 1969 and upheld by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 1973, has led to the construction of 1,300 developments throughout the state, containing a total of 34,000 units of affordable housing, according to Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, or CHAPA.
Projects built under 40B are almost always controversial: The statute was enacted in the first place because most communities outside of big cities didn’t permit multi-family housing, said Ann Verrilli, director of research at CHAPA. Even with the statute, communities often spend millions of dollars in legal fees to try and stop the projects, Verrilli told me.
“There’s real resistance to change, resistance to development of any kind that may have school-aged kids,” she said.
Butternut Farms, in Amherst, took 10 years to build. (Alana Semuels)The experience of developers trying to build affordable housing in Massachusetts takes on added significance now, as housing advocates wait for a decision on a landmark case in front of the Supreme Court that concerns where low-income housing projects are placed. The case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, arose when a nonprofit housing group sued Texas, arguing that the state primarily distributed tax credits for low-income housing projects in minority-dominated areas. Inclusive Communities argued that doing so perpetuated segregation and violated the Fair Housing Act, which was passed in 1968 to prevent landlords, municipalities, banks and other housing providers from discriminating on the basis of race. The Supreme Court case centers on whether this discrimination has to be intentional in order to be illegal, or whether the Fair Housing Act also seeks to prevent policies that may not be intentionally discriminatory, but that have a “disparate impact” on minorities.
Housing advocates say the parts of the Fair Housing Act being challenged in this case are important tools in ensuring the country does not become even more deeply segregated. As things are now, few states have policies in place that try and integrate communities or develop affordable housing in so-called “high opportunity” areas. And the process of bringing discrimination claims to court under the Fair Housing Act is a difficult and expensive one. The Supreme Court may yet make it even more difficult to build housing for poorer families in anywhere besides the poorest places.
“This decision will have a very profound impact on millions of Americans going forward at a time when we need every tool we can use in the arsenal of civil rights actions to make sure we live up to the aspiration of providing equal opportunity and ending discrimination in this country,” said Dennis Parker, director of the Racial Justice Program at the ACLU, which filed an amicus brief on behalf of Inclusive Communities.
To be sure, there are reasons—besides pure racism—why a wealthy community might resist the placement of affordable housing within city limits. Many municipalities already have trouble funding schools. With more houses and families but not much more of a tax base, their budget problems could get even worse. The small Massachusetts town where I grew up, and where my brother is a public-school teacher, has been enmeshed in debate over a 40B proposal at the same time voters were asked to increase taxes so the town could continue funding schools at adequate levels.
But people who oppose 40B projects and other affordable housing developments often don’t have any complaints after the projects are built, according to research. A study out of Tufts University, “On The Ground: 40B Controversies Before and After”looked at some of the most controversial 40B projects in Massachusetts that were completed before June 2006. It found that the concerns of residents expressed before construction were usually not realized, and that controversy evaporated after construction wrapped up.
“This study provides significant evidence that the fears of new affordable housing development are far more myth than reality,” the study concluded.
Similarly, Princeton professor Douglas Massey studied an affordable housing development in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, that local residents had complained would lower home values, increase crime rates, and cause local taxes to rise.
He found that the development did none of those things. Many surrounding neighbors didn’t even know there was a housing project nearby.
What’s more, the lives of residents in the housing development improved markedly after they moved to the affluent suburb. An increasing amount of data seems to show that location matters just as much as income in determining a child’s likelihood of escaping poverty. As I’ve written about before, children from low-income families who move to more affluent suburbs are more likely to graduate from high school, attend four-year colleges, and have jobs than their peers who stayed in the city. And cities that have made an effort to keep schools desegregated have enjoyed less race-based strife than peer cities.
Still, affluent cities and towns often resist low-income housing projects: Despite 40B in Massachusetts, many areas of the state are falling back into the same segregation patterns that the Fair Housing Act sought to remedy nearly 50 years ago. Recent research showed, for example, that the Boston metro area has more racially concentrated areas of affluence (census tracts where 90 percent is white and wealthy) than any of America’s 20 biggest cities.
There are few states or municipalities that have laws targeted at exclusionary zoning. Three states—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey—have “exemplary interventions” to address exclusionary zoning, according to a paperby Rachel G. Bratt and Abigail Vladeck of Tufts University. Montgomery County Maryland also has a similar intervention. Other states, such as Oregon and Texas, prohibit mandatory inclusionary zoning requirements. In places that don’t strive to promote integration, segregation is likely to be prevalent.
“The market is going to work to de facto disadvantage lower-income residents,” Bratt told me. “The theory is that in order to deal with segregated patterns, you need to have proactive policies to deal with it.”
Many affordable housing units in the suburbs are a direct result of court cases, and even enforcement of those programs are lax. In 2009, Westchester County in New York signed a desegregation agreement and agreed to build and market hundreds of apartments for moderate-income minorities after a court found it had misled HUD by applying for funds that it said it would use to integrate housing, and then did the opposite. Four years later, the county had not complied with the provisions.
New Jersey is one of the few states that bars wealthy towns from excluding affordable housing, largely because of court decisions relating to the Mount Laurel case, but even those have been under attack. Governor Chris Christie attempted to disassemble the state agency overseeing affordable housing and wanted to allow municipalities to decide how much affordable housing to allow. A state appeals court blocked these attempts, but the instance points to the fact that affordable housing programs are being challenged in the few states that have them.
In Massachusetts, a group put an initiative on the ballot in 2010 that sought to repeal 40B. The coalition for repealing the law said that the statute “has destroyed communities in rural, suburban and urban neighborhoods alike, while lining the pockets of out-of-state speculators.”
The repeal effort failed, 58 percent to 42 percent, and Marc Draisen, the executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a state planning group, says he thinks the law now has widespread support. But that doesn’t mean it has gotten any easier to build affordable housing.
Most developers don’t want to do mixed-income developments, and prefer to build market-rate buildings where they won’t have to face any community resistance or years of legal wrangling. That’s even in a state that’s seen by many as a leader in encouraging the construction of affordable housing in communities that don’t really want it.
“40B is a legal tool but it doesn’t eliminate prejudice,” Draisen told me. “Some people just do not want low-income housing in their communities.”
This prejudice won’t likely change soon, no matter what the Supreme Court decides in Texas v. Inclusive Communities. Housing advocates see some hope in an impending HUD rule, which may make it harder for communities to show this prejudice. HUD wants to stipulate that all areas receiving federal funds for low-income housing show that they are proactively promoting integration,housing experts say.
Still, the government currently lacks the resources to ensure that every community promotes integrated housing. It may be up to developers like Peter Gagliardi to continue to keep fighting to do so. And he can hold up Butternut Farms as an example of how it can work.
The development is located off a two-lane road near Hampshire College, a campus with rolling green hills, barns, and unobtrusive brick buildings. The 26 units blend right in: They are distributed in a few red barn-like structures and one yellow multi-family house, surrounded by trees and set back from the road, located up a sloping driveway.
Butternut Farms, from the road (Alana Semuels)Gagliardi first set foot on this property in 2000. The homes opened to tenants in 2011. The intervening decade was threaded with court cases, appeals, and $150,000 worth of legal costs for HAP, despite pro bono legal assistance.
The project, which involved the construction of three detached buildings of eight units of housing each and renovating the farmhouse to include two new units, violated parts of Amherst’s zoning bylaws regarding parking and housing density in residential areas. But that's the point of 40B—it allows developers to get around those laws if the housing they are building is affordable.
The local zoning board approved HAP’s application to build a 26-unit rental development in 2002, but neighbors immediately filed suit to annul the approval. When a Land Court judge upheld the permit, neighbors appealed. When the case went to the state Supreme Judicial Court, justices decided on behalf of HAP, in 2007.
“Our conclusion does not ‘needlessly infringe’ on the ‘settled property rights of abutters,’” the justices wrote. “Rather, our conclusion takes into account that the Legislature ‘has clearly delineated that point where local interests must yield to the general public need for housing.’”
A few weeks before the first tenants moved into the apartments in 2011, a rare tornado blew through nearby Springfield, destroying dozens of affordable housing units there.
“I pointed out the irony it took us 10 years to get 26 units built here, but at the same time, many times that number of units of affordable housing were destroyed in a brief time of a tornado,” Gagliardi said.
It’s a happy ending, but the problems that face Peter Gagliardi now face the nation. The country will have to grapple with how to house low-income residents in areas of opportunity, or bear more racial strife. After all, if Gagliardi had so much trouble in a liberal town in Massachusetts, a state with some of the strongest affordable-housing laws in the country, is there any reason to believe developers will be able to build affordable housing in affluent areas in the rest of the country, especially without the benefit of the Fair Housing Act?
If you are on Food Stamps or Medicaid, you qualify for free cell phones—that is 15 million Californians. Free health care for 12 million of our citizens. In LAUSD, 90% of the students get free or reduced price meals—some as many as three meals a day—snacks not included-yet. You can get housing vouchers and more. California is the poster child for the welfare State. Now add high priced Prius vehicles to the benefits of the welfare State. This is NOT a joke.
“The pilot is limited to the San Joaquin Valley and the Greater Los Angeles area. It will provide money for about 600 cars with revenue from cap-and-trade auctions.
Mendoza still had to pay about $13,000 for his 2013 Prius. Nichols acknowledges no one will get a car for free. But she says it’s still a good deal.
Cap and trade is the California version of socialism, the redistribution of wealth based on the canard of climate change. Another Al Gore scam.
When Jose Mendoza took his 1984 pickup truck to a smog check event in Stockton last February, he heard about a new pilot program. If he scrapped his truck, he could get state money to help him buy a new hybrid.
“She told me you can get this car, we’ll take that car. I said, here’s the keys!”
Mendoza became the first client for the $5 million pilot program. He and his family took part in the press conference announcing it. And they looked on as his old truck was crushed.
Mary Nichols is Chair of the California Air Resources Board. She says getting a few dirty cars off the road will have a big affect on air quality.
“About 80 percent of the pollution that is experienced in our state today comes from about 25 percent of the vehicles on the road,” she says. “So by going after the most polluting oldest vehicles, we’re doing something benefits the entire community.”
The pilot is limited to the San Joaquin Valley and the Greater Los Angeles area. It will provide money for about 600 cars with revenue from cap-and-trade auctions.
Mendoza still had to pay about $13,000 for his 2013 Prius. Nichols acknowledges no one will get a car for free. But she says it’s still a good deal.
“This is actually going to end up saving them money once they get past the first cost of the vehicle,” she says, “because they will be saving on gasoline every week.”
It’s estimated Mendoza will save about $160 a month.
So now even kissing under the mistletoe is rape. Unless you ask the target of your boozy Christmas peck to sign a contract in advance, I guess, clearly stating that he or she consents to having some part of their face intruded upon by your lips for 2.4 seconds at the office party.
This is according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which yesterday tweeted: ‘If you bump into that special someone under the mistletoe tonight, remember that without consent it is rape #SeasonsGreetings.’ It’s hard to know what’s worse: that the PSNI doesn’t know what rape is, or its use of that passive-aggressive ‘Seasons Greetings’ hashtag. Translation: ‘Have fun tonight, everyone, but remember we will arrest you if you partake in the age-old flirty tradition of trying it on after one too many plastic cups of cheap plonk.’
The PSNI is getting it in the neck for its miserabilist, joy-destroying, authoritarian warning to the populace. It has ‘prompted fury’, says the Daily Mail. Tweeters have ripped the mick out of the kissphobic cops. ‘Are people having sex under the mistletoe now?’, quipped one, handily reminding the police what rape involves.
This is good. The PSNI deserves this virtual mauling. But let’s not kid ourselves that its wacko tweet was a one-off or even particularly unusual. On the contrary, it is in keeping with the now mainstream moral panic about ‘rape culture’ and the slow but sure criminalisation of sex, or at least of the things that make sex fun: passion, chance, taking a risk, making a move. Sex is in dire crisis. It’s being crushed under the jackboot of a new misanthropy that views any spontaneous, uncontracted interaction between adults with dread. We might have to refight the battle for sexual liberation.
It was fun while it lasted, sex. Kicking off in 1963 – in the view of Philip Larkinanyway – it granted men and women a zone of life that wasn’t subject to the same dead, cold rules of work or public life, but rather where caution could be ignored, passions engaged, and chances taken.
Not anymore. Sex is being turned into a suspicious act requiring a battery of rules and minute policing by an army of sexless officials, relationships experts, and feminists who have somehow gone from celebrating the sexual liberation of women to fuming over men who touch a woman’s knee when I guess they should be writing to said woman’s equerry to inquire into the feasibility of touching her knee on an agreed date for an agreed length of time.
Everywhere you look, a new prudishness is taking hold. Campaigners raged against Page 3 with far more zeal than Mary Whitehouse ever did. Lads’ mags are shoved into black bags lest their bikini-clad babes offend magazine browsers. Trigger warnings are added to classic texts that mention dodgy sex. Student officials have made sexual-consent classes compulsory for freshers, where they lecture them about the importance of getting verbal, non-inebriated consent for every stage of a sexual encounter, as if fucking were the same as making a business deal. (And as if 18-year-olds aren’t going to get blotto before sex. What planet do these people live on?)
Then there’s the #MeToo hysteria, which every day reveals its sexphobic streak, its McCarthyite instinct to purge from public life all those who are not perfectly au fait with PC speech codes, the new view of flirting as an ugly 20th-century thing we enlightened people have grown out of, and the treatment of sex as akin to a bank transaction in which every move and smooch and grope must be accompanied by at least a verbal contract of agreement.
In the #MeToo moral panic, perfectly normal behaviour is being rebranded as ‘predatory’. In Britain, the journalists Jane Merrick and Kate Maltby – actual adults – made the headlines when they revealed politicians had tried to kiss them or ‘fleetingly’ touched a knee. That is, someone made a pass at them. That’s now rapey behaviour. Were these women raised in a nunnery? That newspaper editors said to them ‘Give us all the juicy details’ instead of ‘Oh, get a life’ tells you everything you need to know about the transformation of sex into a crime, or at least a scandal.
Two journalists, Rupert Myers and Sam Kriss, were hounded out of the British media over what were in essence bad dates. Myers stands accused of saying to a woman he had a drink with ‘I want to fuck you’, while Kriss kissed a woman and bought her wine and invited her back to his house for sex. Hold the front page. It is a frankly terrifying climate in which such standard sexual fare can come to be discussed as sinister proof of the spread of a ‘rape culture’. And we wonder why police forces warn against snogging under the mistletoe. It’s because even non-criminal sexual advances are now talked about as offences against decency and female integrity.
It’s just as scary in the US. John Lasseter, head of Pixar, has taken a six-month leave of absence over ‘unwanted hugs’. Seriously. When will we recognise that a moral crusade that sweeps up even men who like a hug is a demented thing? One of the things that led to radio presenter Garrison Keillor losing his job – more than that, his life’s work – involved him accidentally putting his hand on a woman’s bare back. He went to comfort her after she told him she was unhappy, but he didn’t realise she was wearing a loose shirt, meaning his friendly gesture engaged her bare skin. He apologised. She accepted. But no matter: in the mad new war on human interaction, even a friendly male hand on a woman’s back is tantamount to a sex crime (never mind puckering up under the mistletoe).
That particular Keillor incident is really sad. For if we accept his account – which we shouldn’t, I know, because he has a penis, which means he’s a liar – then this instance of ‘predatory’ behaviour was in truth an act of warmth; a touch that had a human impulse, not a foul one. And yet it’s now lumped together with all sorts of behaviour, from the genuinely criminal to the flirty or friendly, under the dread title of ‘unwanted advance’ or ‘unwanted touch’ or ‘unwanted hug’. ‘Unwanted’. That’s the big word in all this stuff. And it captures perfectly how the new officious misanthropy views everyday human engagement as suspicious and twisted.
‘Unwanted’ – what this really means is unplanned, uncontracted, spontaneous, sparky, human. What the new moral panics really have in their sights is those free, casual forms of human connection, whether friendly or sexual, warm or debauched, that take place outside of the purview of the obsessive rule-makers of 21st-century public life. But here’s the thing: how are people supposed to know if their friendly arm around a shoulder or the offer of a drink or even the statement ‘I want to fuck you’ is wanted or unwanted until they have done it?
That’s the thing about human life: you take risks, physical risks and emotional risks, and some work out and others don’t. To freeze these engagements, to criminalise or demonise them, to encourage everyone to say ‘May I comfort you?’ or ‘May I now move to second base?’, instead of simply doing these things and dealing with the consequences, is to drain everyday life of the thing that makes it meaningful, or nice, or fun. It would intensify anomie, make workplaces even more soulless than they often already are, and make sexual experimentation history. The war on sex is a new species of anti-humanism.
So we have to rebel. And perhaps we should start by kissing under the mistletoe. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party views the ‘sex instinct’ with disgust while a Junior Anti-Sex League polices flirting and touching. And in such a sexphobic climate, ‘the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion’. Today, you don’t even have to go that far; today, we’re so messed up about sex and love and warmth and touch that even to hold mistletoe over a drunk colleague’s head and plant a smacker on his or her cheek is rebellion. So do it. Rebel. Be human.
CASA is the most powerful government committees that you have never heard of. It is a group of developers, politicians and NGOs that want to set housing policy for the entire Bay Area region of Governments (101 cities and towns). They do not videotape their meetings. A private citizen, Ken Burkowski of Emeryville has been videotaping meetings for several years and posts them at www.regional-video.com .
CASA is the most powerful government committees that you have never heard of. It is a group of developers, politicians and NGOs that want to set housing policy for the entire Bay Area region of Governments (101 cities and towns). They do not videotape their meetings. A private citizen, Ken Burkowski of Emeryville has been videotaping meetings for several years and posts them at www.regional-video.com .
Here is a clip of Zelda Bronstein addressing CASA for its lack of transparency.
Former ABAG economist Steven Levy complains about the lack of middle class housing.
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that a "quiet coup" has seized our local government power in favor of an unelected regional body, developers and NGOs. We must stand up for our local communities
and democracy.
-Not only do they not videotape their meetings; as I noted, they don’t document their proceedings with minutes. There is an audiotape, but it’s not posted. You’ve have to ask MTC staff for a link. I think the meetings of the CASA Steering Committee are taped—check it out. But the Steering Committee doesn’t steer. And, if you watched Ken’s video of last Wedneday’s Technical Committee meeting, you know that the extent to which that entity is going to be allowed to provide advice is unclear. Zelda
Quietwood Dr. Homeowner illegally removes trees in Marinwood Park. Seen above is the satellite photo showing a lush canopy of trees appearing on Google Maps behind the house.
Trees have been clearcut and illegally removed in December 2017
Eric Dreikosen, Marinwood CSD manager refuses to hold the vandal responsible because "she had no malicious intent".
A similar situation happened in McNears Park and the resident was charged with felony vandalism and threatened with civil action up to $80,000. See the story in the Marin IJ HERE.
The Marinwood Fire Department INSISTS they have a new "Martha Stewart Kitchen" makeover. The original estimate cost was $5000 but rose to $100,000 quickly as demands for luxury appliances ($5000 oven, $4500 Viking Range, Custom stone countertops) and Contractor's with ties to the Marinwood CSD and the Fire Service "competed for bids". The Marinwood CSD altered the contract to "reduce costs" but still the bid was way out of budget range. One very generous resident offered to DONATE THE ENTIRE COST of the Kitchen up to $25,000. The Marinwood CSD refused the gift. Now the CSD is insisting on using special "government contractors" at 4 times the original bid cost when a VERY SERVICABLE kitchen can be done quickly for well under $25,000.
It is absurd.
So, as a public service, I am posting this video for Marinwood CSD. This is how REAL PEOPLE innovate when budgets are tight. It may contain a few ideas they can use to freshen up the kitchen while awaiting their "Martha Stewart Kitchen" to arrive.
