TRAMPLED RIGHTS, LOST RESPECT: WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“TRAMPLED RIGHTS, LOST RESPECT: WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?”

 

America is now a country where lawful residents can be grabbed from streets and sidewalks by black-masked operatives for government agencies acting without warrants and sent to prisons in foreign countries.

 

It’s also where the voter-established California Coastal Commission, despised by the current president, can tell an oil company to cease making changes on ocean-bottom pipelines – and then see the order ignored. This is still playing out near Gaviota in Santa Barbara County, but for sure at least some respect for legal authority has been lost.

 

It’s a country whose president sought impeachment for judges whose decisions he does not like, while his appointees sometimes pick and choose which legal rulings to heed.

 

It’s also where a non-elected “official” heading a quasi-government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency could fire hundreds of workers from the Social Security Administration, making citizen dealings virtually impossible with an agency serving more than 70 million Americans until someone said “Oops” and a partial emergency fix followed.

 

At the same time, decades of formal assurances that tax filings will be confidential were reversed with no notice, to make deportations easier. Never mind that no one will ever trust the IRS in the same way again.

 

Any of these actions might normally draw equally or similarly forceful reactions of some kind under Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. That law, long fundamental in both physics and politics, says “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

 

California saw this in a big way during the Vietnam War, when for every draftee sent off to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia, at least one and often more persons took to the streets in myriad protests fueled by outrage.

 

There has been no similarly organized anger today, not even when millions of Americans lost trillions of dollars in value from their 401Ks and other investment accounts due to an on-again, off-again tariff war started by a president using powers many lawyers say he does not possess.

 

Several pundits postulate that when 3.5 percent or more of this nation’s citizens protest government actions, members of Congress from both major parties feel sufficiently threatened to begin opposing or at least questioning the policies drawing public ire.

 

That has not come near happening this year. Major cities saw large rallies in both early and late April, including one that stretched 20 blocks through lower Manhattan and another where Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drew more than 36,000 in Los Angeles.

 

But overall crowds numbered fewer than 2 million each day, according to most unofficial estimates. That was exponentially short of the approximately 13 million that would make up 3.5 percent of Americans.

 

Any rage voiced fell far short of what it took to drive ex-President Lyndon Johnson from office over Vietnam, for one example of impactful public outrage.

 

Some of the most angry now advocate a literal interpretation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, saying that whenever masked agents capture legal residents on city streets, beefy young men should physically accost those agents.

 

But answering violence with violence never works in this nation; even the wild demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago produced no policy change until years of nonviolent protests followed in myriad other locations.

 

To be effective this time, popular protests could be staged outside IRS offices, health clinics and research laboratories shut down by fiat even though their funding was supposedly guaranteed via acts of Congress signed by previous presidents.

 

Even these would not accomplish much unless they were constant and very large, perhaps closing down major streets for days or weeks at a time.

 

President Trump has loudly justified some of his most questionable moves this year as mandated by a significant national majority in the last presidential election. Yet, Trump won election by fewer than 1.6 percent of the total vote, falling short of an overall majority popular vote.

 

Which means that even if there were a mandate, it was given by fewer than half of American voters, scarce justification for the scale of changes now seen in the character of American life and public affairs.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

ABANDONED IRS SECRECY COULD COST U.S., CALIFORNIA BILLIONS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“ABANDONED IRS SECRECY COULD COST U.S., CALIFORNIA BILLIONS”

 

It seemed simple enough the other day when the Internal Revenue Service issued a brief statement saying it will now share addresses and other tax return data with immigration enforcement agencies.

 

This marked the first time the IRS has explicitly broken a promise of confidentiality (except when federal criminal warrants have been issued) for all tax information submitted to it.

 

It might cost the federal treasury billions of dollars, not to mention messing up longstanding sources of Social Security cash and state tax revenue.

 

For one of the dirty little secrets of undocumented immigrants is that millions of them have yearly filed tax returns just like U.S. citizens and other legal residents. They have also contributed billions of dollars over many decades to Social Security accounts they will never be able to access, as payments have never been available to the undocumented.

 

This means whatever they contribute goes toward paying everyone else, one factor that has staved off bankruptcy for the Social Security system many years longer than was predicted by some in the later years of the 20^th Century.

 

It’s not that illegal immigrants have always filed tax returns completely identical to those of citizens. For one thing, most of the undocumented file tax returns using individual taxpayer identification numbers rather than Social Security numbers, as most citizen taxpayers do.

 

California was home to about 1.8 million unauthorized residents in 2022. Those immigrants made up about 7 percent of the state’s work force and accounted for at least half of all farm workers, according to the Pew Research Center.

 

But immigrant rights groups say fear is rampant today among the undocumented – and even among many who hold valid visas. They have seen individuals seized on sidewalks and sent quickly to detention centers thousands of miles away.

 

Now many who have filed and paid both federal and state taxes wonder whether they should keep doing so. No one knows yet the precise number of unauthorized residents who let the April 15 tax deadline go by without responding.

 

If they all stopped filing, California would lose an estimated $8.5 billion in state income tax money that’s usually paid in simultaneously with federal taxes that go to the IRS. Losing another $8-plus billion from a budget that has been strapped for several years, as state general fund has gotten by partly with gimmicks and borrowing from funds earmarked for specific purposes, would likely cause major cuts to state programs from parks to public hospitals and schools.

 

“This will be detrimental not just to California, but in many other states,” said one pro-immigrant activist.

 

California’s senior U.S. senator, Alex Padilla, called the retreat from secrecy “a complete betrayal of the federal government’s decades-long commitment to never weaponize taxpayer information for political purposes…(It) could cost billions in lost tax revenue for states and the federal government.”

 

But some who considered not paying taxes this year out of fear soon realized that any information they suddenly withheld would not offer them much protection. That’s because the IRS has years of older returns on hand, most containing similar information.

 

Immigrant advocates say this led a healthy percentage of undocumented taxpayers to go ahead and file anyway, figuring they might use the filing in later immigration court hearings as proof of voluntary positive contributions to this country. Such an argument does not figure to spare deportation for those nabbed by federal immigration agents.

 

Then there’s the cost of the deportations themselves. The Washington, D.C.-based American Immigration Council said in a springtime report that the cost of a comprehensive mass deportation operation of 13 million of the undocumented would cost the federal government at least $315 billion. If deportations were conducted at 1 million a year, the group said costs would come to at least $88 billion per year.

 

Those costs are unrelated to lost income tax revenues, which may already be felt at the IRS itself, where about 5,000 agents have resigned or retired this year, while 7,000 probationary employees were laid off.

 

Nor does anyone know how many “mixed” families featuring both legal residents and the undocumented have opted out of paying taxes.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WINTER FIRESTORMS CAN GIVE HOUSING BILLS A FRESH START

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WINTER FIRESTORMS CAN GIVE HOUSING BILLS A FRESH START”

 

By almost any measure, the spate of housing bills adopted by California lawmakers over the last five years has failed.

 

But the January firestorm that swept through large parts of Los Angeles County may give them new life. Those fires, ranging across portions of a 40-mile stretch on the south slope of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, destroyed more homes and apartments than any fire California had seen before.

 

The preeminent goal of the new laws is to make housing in this state more dense. They have not done that on a large scale. But the fires essentially created large new blank canvasses where the aims of the new housing laws may receive a definitive test. If the sudden appearance of thousands of acres of eminently buildable land doesn’t create denser housing than ever before, it’s hard to see what might.

 

Taken together, the destruction of at least 10,000 homes and apartments across the heart of California’s largest urban area thus represents an ultimate test for the social engineering attempted since 2020. If the area isn’t densified now, proponents of that kind of housing will probably have to change their tactics.

 

Their aim has long been, as Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco puts it, to “end single-family zoning as we’ve known it.”

 

Noplace in California and possibly the nation was more devoted to sprawling single-family homes than the pre-January Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles city. The new state laws barely touched it.

 

No large new apartment buildings or condominiums ever rose along the area’s main street, the storied Sunset Boulevard. The largest apartment buildings there had two floors, with a few higher-rise condos slotted in spots invisible from that street. Almost no new multi-family buildings went up in the Palisades, no matter what requirements might have been imposed by new laws.

 

Here's the record to date of some of two such laws: The 2021 SB 9 allows homeowners to split their lots and build at least four units where formerly there was one. By mid-2024, the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley found that fewer than 500 homeowners had successfully applied for such lot splits. ​

 

The 2022 AB 2011 was supposed to let developers easily convert empty office parks and unused parking lots into housing, but by the end of 2024, very few such projects had been approved.

 

Similarly, the 2021 SB 10, allowing for multi-unit development near rapid transit stops had produced very little. 

 

So it looked as if Californians are not eager to densify, even if that’s what some Democrats who dominate in Sacramento want.

 

Now an entirely new urban opportunity exists. Yes, the majority of single-family homeowners will rebuild. But many homes in both Pacific Palisades and Altadena, the other January fire focus, had been owned by folks who purchased their properties in the 1960s and 1970s. Many are now well past 70 years old with little desire to rebuild, as most of their younger neighbors plan.

 

Significant numbers of former single-family properties are available to new buyers, including developers. Some fire-vacated lots have already been sold. They are eligible for at least four units each under SB 9.

 

Some two-floor apartment buildings in Pacific Palisades also burned. Many fronted on Sunset, where transit stops abound, so those properties could see multi-story development, despite an SB 10 provision letting local officials decide whether or not to upzone fire areas.

 

 

If such development does not happen there, it may never happen anywhere, as huge profits seem likely for opportunistic developers. If the January fires were truly 100-year firestorms, no similarly sized fire is likely there for many years.

 

This sets up a litmus test for major housing laws Sacramento has pushed on the rest of California, complete with demands for dense new building in every city as part of an attempt to meet the state’s housing shortage.

 

If it doesn’t happen in the January fire zones, lawmakers should change their priorities and begin paying attention to more rural vacant areas in deserts and other areas where land is cheaper even if it means commutes would be longer.

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

CAN NEWSOM’S TARIFF RESISTANCE REBOOT HIS CAMPAIGN?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CAN NEWSOM’S TARIFF RESISTANCE REBOOT HIS CAMPAIGN?”

 

At this peculiar lame duck period in the political career of Gov. Gavin Newsom, almost anything he does – even if it’s merely pursuing a routine duty of his current office – will be evaluated in terms of his obvious yet still unstated desire to become president.

 

But from the moment last summer when former President Biden exited last year’s race until this month, there was only one word to accurately describe Newsom’s putative campaign – supine.

 

Prior to Biden’s exit, Newsom was probably America’s second most prominent Democrat, the leading Biden surrogate and one who traveled the country trying to impress other national Democrats with both himself and Biden.

 

But once Biden handed off the Democratic nomination to Newsom’s longtime friend, fellow Willie Brown protégé and political stablemate Kamala Harris, the California governor seemed to disappear into a long sulk. He played virtually no part in the fall campaign, and for months did not lead any form of resistance to the sometimes dictatorial presidency of Republican Donald Trump, who cannot run for president a third time in 2028 but nevertheless suggests there may be ways for him to get another term.

 

Rather than oppose Trump, Newsom blasted his own party’s “toxic” attitudes – not necessarily inaccurate as national Democrats until lately had mostly sat by and watched Trump’s many moves.

 

Now Newsom may have a mechanism to re-launch himself into the national picture for 2028 while becoming possibly the prime Democratic spokesman for the remaining three years-plus of Trump’s current term.

 

It came via the mid-April announcement of a California lawsuit challenging the legality of Trump’s on-again, off-again, partially on-again tariffs, which could potentially cost California farmers, merchants and manufacturers tens of billions of dollars in sales.

 

Loss of that much income and the state taxes it produces would heavily impact future state budgets, cutting into virtually all programs from Medi-Cal to policing and fire protection, regardless of budgetary gimmicks.

 

Trump’s tariff actions, taken under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, set 10 percent baseline import taxes on virtually anything originating abroad, with higher levies on goods from China, Canada and Mexico. There are also specifically higher taxes on certain products like autos and aluminum.

 

Newsom’s lawsuit – the first of the 15 legal actions the state has taken against the new Trump administration that names him as lead individual plaintiff – claims the law Trump cites does not give him unilateral power to set up tariffs or take them down. That power, many legal scholars believe, belongs to Congress, which has shown even less fight than Newsom’s early campaign.

 

“No state is poised to lose more than California,” Newsom said. That’s not counting stock market losses resulting from Trump’s moves. “That’s why we are asserting ourselves..,” he added.

 

Newsom’s action made California the first state to formally challenge Trump’s tariffs, although other states have joined in on most other California lawsuits against Trump this year.

 

When Trump lawyers quickly petitioned to have the tariff case moved from California to an East Coast courtroom, Newsom immediately riposted “You scared?”

 

“We’re the first mover,” Newsom said. “That’s what California does.”

 

Official descriptions of the law Trump uses as his authority note that no other president has tried to claim it gives them such power. But Trump seems to operate on the theory that powers seized and not firmly resisted somehow become legitimized.

 

If Newsom’s lawsuit wins, it would very likely force a congressional vote to either adopt and legalize Trump’s tariffs or dump them. Either way, Newsom aims to put every member of Congress on the record about tariffs, rather than letting politicians of both parties moan about how powerless they’ve been.

 

Forcing such a vote would give Newsom a claim on being politically savvy and powerful enough to force changes in Washington, D.C. even as a lame duck.

 

It’s precisely the kind of political ammunition Newsom has sought as he blasted party mates while conducting dialogs with Trump supporters on his own podcasts. 

 

His clear hope is that this and subsequent moves to resist Trump will give him the staying power to remain prominent through nearly two years of political exile between the end of his term in early 2027 and the 2028 election.

 

-30-

 

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The   Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

OFFICE-TO-HOUSING CONVERSIONS NOW TAKING OFF

 

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“OFFICE-TO-HOUSING CONVERSIONS NOW TAKING OFF”

 

Conversions of billions of square feet of unused office space to dwelling units are starting to take off all around California. Except, that is, in the state’s densest city, San Francisco.

 

But that is likely to change soon, with Wells Fargo Bank’s longtime headquarters tower now for sale, along with two largely-unused office towers the federal government seeks to dispose of.

 

All three skyscrapers are among obvious candidates for repurposing in a local office market where more than one-third of existing space is currently unused. That’s in spite of moves by some high-tech firms to force workers back into offices fully five years after they were told to begin working from home during the depth of the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Moves to compel highly skilled white collar workers back into offices fulltime have not worked well because many workers found they like home offices better than cubicle-filled spaces that lack soul. Also contributing to resistance: the fact that a healthy share of workers took advantage of work-at-home edicts to move their homes to less expensive locations with more open space than Silicon Valley can offer. The net result has been a rash of resignations sending a message to executives, who backed off a bit, now usually only asking workers to come in at least one or two days per week, not fulltime.

 

Meanwhile, the office space conversion bandwagon appears to be gaining speed in many markets. Nationally, the number of apartments and condominiums converted from office space reached a record high of 70,700 units last year, up from about 20,000 the previous year. The newer figure was developed by the RentCafe website, which has tracked this phenomenon from its start.

 

Across California, 5,892 apartments of varying sizes were in the conversion pipeline as of March 1, this coming after about 4,000 converted units went on the market last year.

 

These units provide ongoing income vital to the bottom lines of real estate investment trusts that long concentrated on high-rise commercial properties. It’s vital because most REITs saw their share values drop precipitously during the pandemic and have not since come close to recovering from the lost or reduced leases they suffered during the main Covid years.

 

Now Los Angeles, which saw about 12,000 units converted in the first few years of this trend, has 4,388 apartments in the development pipeline, enough space for about 13,000 residents, given California’s average household size of 2.86 persons.

 

Smaller cities have also become active in conversions since state legislators passed a couple of laws in 2023 making it easier for such projects to get building permits.

 

Long Beach currently has 420 units permitted, double the number in San Francisco, where demand for apartments dropped when the city lost populace as sent-home workers moved to cheaper digs in distant suburbs like Tracy and Petaluma. But the soon-to-be-available office towers seemingly begging for conversion might spark interest from young professionals who fancy living in the city’s downtown.

 

Goleta, near Santa Barbara, now has hundreds of conversion apartments in its pipeline, outpacing San Diego, where the idea has not yet caught on.

 

It’s clear some major markets have not yet adjusted to the new state-mandated permitting processes, but when that inevitably happens in places like San Jose and Fresno, living in converted office space promises to become a Generation Z fad.

 

That’s because units converted from office space are far cheaper to develop than new construction, while also leaving the character of neighborhoods intact and traffic flowing at previous levels, rather than causing new crowding.

 

The number of units now completed or underway debunks naysayers who claimed when the idea first arose that conversions would be more difficult to get permitted than new buildings.

 

That was never true, but is especially false since passage of a 2023 state law making permits administrative, with almost automatic approvals.

 

The bottom line: Office conversions, first recommended by this column in April 2020, are now the wave of the present and future in California and many other places. They can also be a boon to first-time home buyers, renters and current building owners.

 

 

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

WHO COULD SOLIDIFY REEP VOTES IF RUN FOR GUV BECOMES A 2024 REPLAY?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHO COULD SOLIDIFY REEP VOTES IF RUN FOR GUV BECOMES A 2024 REPLAY?”

 

Almost a year and a half before the June 2026 primary election, California’s ongoing campaign for governor has begun taking on some overtones of last year’s Senate race.

 

Remember the early days of that one, when frequent candidate Eric Early, a Los Angeles lawyer and failed congressional hopeful, was the only Republican in a race involving three Democratic members of Congress? Those included eventual winner Adam Schiff, Orange County’s Katie Porter and Barbara Lee of Oakland.

 

The three Democrats assumed they were contesting for two slots on the November runoff election ballot, but were frustrated when former baseball great Steve Garvey entered as a Republican. Early, despite his quick entry, never had a shot at galvanizing virtually all Republican primary voters behind him. Star quality meant Garvey did, frustrating Porter and Lee, who gave up their congressional seats to run. Both now cool their heels in California while Congress votes on vital issues.

 

Similarly, the large corps of Democratic candidates for governor clearly now believes they are contesting for two runoff slots. They include the indecisive (but poll-leading) former Vice President Kamala Harris, former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, ex-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, ex-state Senate President Toni Atkins, state Schools Supt. Tony Thurmond, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, plus Porter.

 

Their common presumption is that Democrats will finish first and second in the primary. But the entry of Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco could toss one 2024-style monkey wrench into their vision of the primary. Bianco lacks the name recognition Garvey used to beat out Porter as the No. 2 Senate primary finisher, but he starts with plenty of public awareness among voters likely to support him.

 

It almost seems like Bianco seeks trouble for its own sake. In 2014, he briefly joined the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group. He later disavowed the group's violent actions, particularly those related to the January 6 Capitol riot.

 

During the pandemic, Bianco refused both to enforce state health mandates in his county and to get vaccinated, drawing criticism for undermining public health efforts.

 

Plus, under his leadership, Riverside County jails experienced a spike in inmate deaths, leading to civil lawsuits and investigations of alleged unconstitutional policing practices. And, Bianco has said the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests “always turned to riots” — while one study found 93% were peaceful.

​

In some ways, that background makes him almost the perfect GOP primary candidate. Rebellious GOP voters faced with having to choose a Democrat or almost no one might love voting for such an outspoken rebel.

 

If he ended up the only Republican on the ballot and performed credibly in debates during Spring 2026, there’s a chance he could pull a Garvey and win enough GOP support to beat out almost all Democrats running.

 

Loose cannon Bianco might turn into the “bad boy” of the spring 2026 debates, saying things no Democrat would dare and thus becoming a darling of Donald Trump voting devotees.

 

A potential GOP rival is Ric Grenell of San Diego, a Donald Trump favorite just different enough to appeal to many Trump backers during the primary.

 

Grenell briefly served as acting Director of National Intelligence in Trump’s first administration, becoming the first openly gay person to hold a U.S. Cabinet-level position.​

 

Trump also named him interim head of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., despite a lack of obvious qualifications.  And he carries out diplomatic missions for Trump as a special envoy. His Trump connection just might make him more formidable than Bianco at consolidating the GOP primary vote.

 

Grenell lacks major political experience in California. But both Schwarzenegger and Garvey clearly showed that experience is not a requirement to run for high office in this state.

 

This might be especially true if California Republicans are tired of seeing no one but establishment Democrats running their state.

 

All this gives the current muddled run for governor the potential for pulling a 2024 and turning into a simple Republican vs. Democrat matchup in November 2026. But so far, neither Bianco nor Grenell has emerged as a GOP solidifier. Of course, that didn’t happen for Garvey, either, until last year’s primary was almost upon him.

 

   -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

BERKELEY INNOVATES WITH PREVIOUSLY UNPERMITTED HOUSING

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“BERKELEY INNOVATES WITH PREVIOUSLY UNPERMITTED HOUSING”

 

Progress in solving California’s unquestioned housing shortage can often be measured by the number of permits issued for new construction or conversions of existing office towers.

 

But Berkeley, a college town that rarely fears trying approaches different from most other cities, now has a new wrinkle that might add as many as 4,000 new units to its housing stock: providing ways for owners of unpermitted secondary housing units to get them certified for the rental or sales market.

 

Many of these units were built to house adult children and other family members with a bit of separation from the property-owning families. Some have previously been rented out, but owners felt they were “burned” by irresponsible tenants. Many of these units have not been rented recently, some for many years.

 

Similar units exist in varying numbers in most California cities, which may watch Berkeley closely to see if its planned amnesty for owners will work. Essentially, many of these are “granny flats” dating to before California began easing construction of ADU’s (accessory dwelling units) with a series of laws passed starting in 2016.

 

Since then, about 80,000 permits have been issued for building ADUs behind or beside existing homes. Many newly-built homes come with ADUs, which owners can rent out to raise money for use toward mortgage payments.

 

A law passed last year will also allow ADU owners to sell them off, essentially subdividing their property even where local laws previously forbade it. The law was passed to provide a way for first-time buyers to begin gathering equity from their homes, even if they are small.

 

 

In many cases, owners have long felt they might be assessed heavy fines for building without permits or renting units not formally certified as up to current building standards.

 

Now Berkeley has activated an amnesty program due to last about four years, until early 2029. Owners will be encouraged to contact city planners and building inspectors to get their units legalized, if they meet today’s standards, or to learn what they might have to do to get them to that point and how much it might cost.

 

Berkeley will offer both certificates of occupancy, which tell renters or buyers that a unit is up to code, and certificates of compliance, which establish that a unit meets minimum fire and other life safety standards, even if it might not have sufficient insulation, central heating or other features required in new housing.

 

City officials, who sorely want more affordable housing both for students at UC Berkeley and others, insist their new program will not allow unsafe housing. So expect that some owners will have to eliminate exposed electric wiring and other fire hazards before they can legally rent their extra units.

 

But those expenses would almost always be made up for by rents received in the first few months of occupancy. So this is a way for longtime homeowners to gain income after getting little or nothing from extra units while keeping them off the rental market.

 

It's also a way for Berkeley and maybe other cities to help meet their state-mandated obligations to allow more affordable housing.

 

Knowing some longtime owners will be hesitant to come forward for fear of incurring large new expenses, Berkeley says it will aim to “make it easy” for them by having a staff of building officials available to work with anyone who who applies to get a unit legalized.

 

If the city lives up to its stated aims and other follow up, too, this could be a way to add thousands of units to a housing market that desperately needs them. It’s also a way to create housing without disrupting anyone’s environment or the character of any locale. The only real surprise here is that cities did not long ago jump to do something like this.

 

   -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net