INSURANCE COMMISH SETTING UP ANOTHER CONSUMER BURDEN

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“INSURANCE COMMISH SETTING UP ANOTHER CONSUMER BURDEN”

 

While writing up his biography on the website of the California Department of Insurance back in early 2019, the newly elected Commissioner Ricardo Lara informed all comers that “I ran for (this) office to make a difference in the lives of Californians.”

 

He has certainly done that, but not quite in the manner he claimed elsewhere on his department's site website, where he declared he would “protect Californians’ futures.”

 

In fact, Democrat Lara has made a difference in the lives of most Californians, not by protecting them, but rather by enabling the insurance companies he regulates to take advantage of almost everyone in this state.

 

That’s all happened via his going along with vastly increased insurance rates for both vehicle and property insurance, even for Californians who live nowhere near areas endangered by wildfires.

 

Those fires are the excuse insurance companies from the largest, like State Farm, down to the very smallest, have used to jack up prices at the same time they’ve made homeowner insurance hard to get, and not only in areas that border on wildlands subject to brush and forest fires.

 

Under deals that Lara sanctioned, insurance companies will soon be able to use “black box” secret formulae to predict where risks will be highest, with no one looking over their collective shoulder. If they did not get this privilege, the companies threatened, they would stop writing new policies in California and cancel many that are already in force.

 

To stymie this blackmail, all Lara had to do was revive the concept of linkage: If you want to write one type of insurance in California, you must write all types. If you won’t offer all types, you can’t sell any (including, for one example, hugely profitable life insurance).

 

That was the rule about earthquake insurance here until the 1990s, when the later-disgraced Republican Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush bowed to pressure from the industry (his largest campaign donor) and ended such linkage. Instead, Californians now have the high-priced California Earthquake Authority, which might or might not have enough money to cover damage from the next major urban quake.

 

Like Quackenbush, Lara could have played hardball with the industry, but also like Quackenbush, he was cowed. For example, he is offering little or no resistance to State Farm’s announced plan to raise its rates soon by 30 percent or more. He’s even resisting the idea of holding public hearings on this and other planned rate increases; the industry hates being subjected to such hearings.

 

Now Lara has quietly announced a plan that could make customers everywhere in California liable for paying billions of dollars if the state’s Fair Plan, the last-resort insurer for property, should go broke in a huge fire or other disaster.

 

Currently, if that should happen, the insurance industry would have to make up whatever funds the Fair Plan lacks. But Lara would shift that risk to consumers. The Fair Plan, whose policies are more expensive and offer less coverage than most others, now insures about 420,000 homes, many in wildfire areas where private companies routinely refuse coverage. Many of these are luxury properties in scenic areas.

 

Essentially, Lara and the industry he serves ("regulates") want to put all other Californian (even renters, whose payments could rise if their landlords must pay higher insurance costs) at risk in order to subsidize those who build or buy in beautiful locations they know are dangerous. But it’s insurance companies, not consumers, whose business has long entailed taking risks in order to make profits.

 

So Lara is trying to make life less risky and more comfortable for this industry, at the same time he makes financial life less secure and more expensive for almost every insurance customer in California – without actually informing each customer of their new risk.

 

That’s not exactly living up to the promise of protecting Californians’ futures, but it may be a way to “make a difference” in people’s lives.

 

The question now is whether consumer advocates or anyone else can go to court and drag out this process until 2027, when Lara’s term in office will end. If not, get set to write even higher checks for insurance coverage.

 

    -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

PROP. 13 GETTING BLAMED FOR SLOWING STATE’S HOME SALES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“PROP. 13 GETTING BLAMED FOR SLOWING STATE’S HOME SALES”

 

The election is well under way, even if results are not yet in. Meanwhile, the always controversial Proposition 13 is far from finished with absorbing criticism.

 

The landmark 1978 property tax-cutting initiative took plenty of heat and also saw multitudes rise to its defense this fall as voters considered Proposition 5, aiming to reduce the vote needed to pass most local bond issues from the current two-thirds to just 55 percent. Prop. 13 had already been altered early in this century to allow school construction bonds to pass on 55 percent margins.

 

That has raised property taxes considerably wherever such local bond issues passed.

 

Meanwhile, Prop. 13 continues to stand for tax stability. This very attribute now creates new gripes about the measure, also known as the Jarvis-Gann Initiative, for two longtime anti-tax gadflies of the 1970s, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann.

 

Among real estate brokers, Prop. 13 gets much of the blame these days for the low volume of existing homes now up for sale and their relatively slow movement – spending an average of about a month on the market even when sales stock is minimal.

 

The reason Prop. 13 takes heat over this is simple: it stabilizes property taxes. This in turn can cause longtime owners to hang onto their residences much longer than they otherwise might.

 

From the time it passed, Prop. 13 has held property taxes at one percent of the latest purchase price, plus annual increases limited to just 2 percent of the last previous tax bill. Homeowners who bought before June 1975 were awarded tax limits of one percent of their 1975 assessed value, with the same 2 percent limit on annual increases.

 

That sees many owners of homes now valued at $1 million or more paying annual levies of $2,000 or less, while new buyers of virtually identical properties pay at least $10,000. It’s an inequity that no politician in the last 46 years has seriously challenged. And it’s a major incentive for longtime homeowners to stay put.

 

Also affected is today’s market, according to realtors all around California. Sales stock of existing homes is slim in Los Angeles, County, the San Francisco Bay Area, Orange County and San Diego, the four largest and most expensive major market areas in this state. It’s also true that non-cash-only buyers must be equipped both to cope with monthly payments that often top $20,000, plus that big new tax bill.

 

With sales stock down, potential buyers now outnumber sellers in all those areas by a fair margin, realtors report.  How low is the stock? In the San Francisco market, covering the entire Bay Area, fewer than 20 homes out of every thousand have changed hands this year.

 

In Los Angeles County, it’s just 15 of every 1,000. Both are major drops from the pre-pandemic year 2019, when for-sale housing stock was more than 30 percent higher.

 

Similar figures are reported for both San Diego and its North County suburbs, while no current figures were obtainable for current stocks in Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield. Those areas, though, have seen sales price increases of about 10 percent over last year, but new property tax bills there don’t skyrocket the way they do in the higher-priced markets. That's because the average price in Fresno stands at about $338,000, which produces a tax bill of almost $3,500 in the first year of occupancy, far less than in higher-priced areas.

 

Sales stock of attached homes, including condominiums and townhouses, is significantly higher than among detached single family houses, standing at about 19 per 1,000 units in San Francisco and slightly less in the other big markets.

 

It all translates to a seller’s market, with an asterisk for Prop. 13’s limits, which cut down what’s available but stabilize the tax bill any new homeowner will pay now and in future years.

 

Anyone wanting to change this will have to deal with the powerful lobby that has made the essence of  Prop. 13 politically untouchable.

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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

GOP MISSING SO FAR IN GOVERNOR’S RACE

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“GOP MISSING SO FAR IN GOVERNOR’S RACE”

 

It’s easy to criticize the field now running for California governor, an office now occupied by perhaps the ultimate lame duck – Gavin Newsom.

 

One thing for sure, Newsom will not have much influence over the race to replace him. He’s certainly not positioned to name his successor, the way President Biden did when he quit his reelection run and anointed Vice President Kamala Harris.

 

Instead, the ultra-liberal Democrats who dominate every major office in California and run both houses of the state Legislature will be glad to see him go.

 

After all, Newsom is the man who vetoed state-funded home loans for undocumented immigrants and immediately afterward forced legislators to come back to Sacramento earlier than they wanted for a special session aimed at preventing sudden large gasoline price spikes.

 

No one in the field to succeed him has come close to doing some of the things he’s done: debate a governor from another state who seems to delight in taunting California and doing the opposite of whatever this state does, from allowing almost all abortions to keeping schools and businesses open during the Covid 19 pandemic.

 

Instead, we have the likes of Toni Atkins, longtime legislator who pushed through a lot of laws, very few of which are on the tip of anyone’s tongue. There’s also Betty Yee, the termed out state controller. And Tony Thurmond, two term state school superintendent who can’t point to many ways he’s improved public education during eight years in the office. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who has done about has much in her current office as Newsom did while he held it – virtually nothing – is also running. Add in ex-Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, beaten handily by Newsom when he ran in 2018. There will possibly be Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, best known for tough enforcement of state laws mandating huge amounts of dense new housing.

 

And there could be outgoing U.S, Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, defeated in her quest for the Senate last spring. 

 

None but Porter is exactly a household name. Yet. All are Democrats, with nary a Republican in sight. The closest thing to a GOP candidate is Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, now being sued for claiming his deputies prevented an assassination attempt when they arrested a man with guns and ammo in his car outside a Donald Trump presidential rally in Coachella.

 

In that way, the gubernatorial race looks a lot like this year’s run for the U.S. Senate did before former baseball player Steve Garvey got into it.

 

In short, the state GOP’s extreme lack of a bench – to use a baseball term – is painfully obvious.

 

The party not only holds no statewide offices, but it will not for at least another two years, and there’s no clone of Arnold Schwarzenegger waiting to pounce on Democrats as the muscleman actor did to ex-Gov. Gray Davis in a 2003 recall election.

 

Schwarzenegger is proof the Republican label does not have to be poison in California. But where are Republicans with experience in public policy who could govern as a bit of a counterweight to the big majorities held by legislative Democrats?

 

One big reason the state GOP has no significant bench is that so much of the party drank the MAGA Kool-Aid of Trump, who threatened to “primary” any Republican officeholder opposing him on almost anything, and then did so repeatedly.

 

But the “Make America Great Again” tag has been pure anathema in California. When 2018 GOP candidate John Cox adopted it while running against Newsom in 2018, he lost by the widest margin in almost 70 years. Running again in the 2021 attempt to recall Newsom, Cox drew just 4.4 percent of the vote. 

So much for MAGA in California, which Trump has never come close to carrying.

 

The reality is that there are not many differences among the current corps of candidates to take Newsom’s place in the state Capitol’s “horseshoe” executive area in 2027.

 

It’s doubtful that any of them would oppose many ideas the Legislature has been itching to pass, like those home loans for the undocumented.

 

That’s what California gets for having a Republican Party almost fully impotent at the state level.

 

    -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.

 

FALSELY BLAMING THE UNDOCUMENTED WON’T SOLVE HOUSING PRICE CRISIS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

1720 OAK STREET, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90405
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“FALSELY BLAMING THE UNDOCUMENTED WON’T SOLVE HOUSING PRICE CRISIS”

 

No one who has looked at multiple listings of homes for sale anywhere in this country can doubt there’s a price crisis. That’s especially true in California, where the median price of homes sold in the last year topped $900,000.

 

This means almost half the homes sold here went for more than the mystical million-dollar figure. Five years ago, the median price was about $600,000. That is major league price inflation, which began while Donald Trump was president and continued steadily under Joe Biden.

 

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance says we should blame much of this on undocumented immigrants. They are, the Republican vice presidential candidate claimed in his debate with Democratic counterpart Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in this country.”

 

He was taken seriously when claiming with a straight face that illegals, most of whom arrive at the southern border penniless or nearly so, are competing heatedly with American citizens for homes that cost, at a minimum, well above $100,000. It was an absurd claim, but has gone largely unchallenged.

 

“You’ve got housing,” Vance added, “that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

 

That’s a tad hard to believe if you’ve ever seen undocumented immigrants living eight to a room in low-priced motel rooms in virtually every part of California.

 

Similarly, Vance claims the handling of undocumented children at the border became sloppier after Trump's term, insisting that more than 320,000 illegal immigrant children are now unaccounted for. Many, he claimed, are used as “mules” to carry drugs for Latin-American cartels. He offered no evidence for any of this.

 

In fact, the government says the actual figure is more like 80,000 untracked children. The rise in unauthorized immigration of unaccompanied children began in 2014, with its growth continual ever since. During 2023, more than 113,000 such children were released to sponsors (statistics from the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute include all counties receiving at least 50 children per year), while in the first quarter of this year, the number was about 61,000, suggesting a doubling of undocumented children going to American sponsors in just one year.

 

By comparison, when Trump held office during 2019, more than 320,000 cases involving unaccompanied undocumented children were referred for resolution hearings. That number oddly coincides with the quantity of kids whose whereabouts Vance claimed are now unknown.

 

The figures are clearly rising, even though this phenomenon has received little publicity, and Vance gave no indication where his number originated. Regardless, unaccompanied immigrant children are not bidding on many homes.

 

The Vance claims were part of a politically motivated drive to make illegal immigration an even more potent issue than it long has been. Linking illegal immigrants to increased housing prices was an attempt to combine two serious issues.

 

But it totally contradicts past Republican claims that any significant presence of the undocumented in a neighborhood will drive housing prices down. Vance did not explain how the same people can simultaneously drive real estate costs both up and down. This is about as plausible as arguing that dirt-poor illegal immigrants can somehow compete to buy homes at current prices.

 

Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, told a reporter that “Immigrants do add to overall housing demand, (but) they cannot be blamed for the…surge in home prices and rents that took off in 2020 and 2021, when (overall) immigration reached its lowest levels in decades due to the pandemic.”

 

Plus, because they lack funds to buy at today’s prices, the undocumented are almost exclusively renters, not buyers.

 

“They are not the people who are buying homes,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for the Redfin online real estate service, confirmed to a reporter. He noted that to get a home loan, buyers need documentation, precisely what illegals lack…”They are more likely to seek out family members who already have a home, and double up.”

 

So this was a phony combination of issues from the moment Vance asserted it. One very real question is why almost no one called him out for it.

 

 

    -30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

CONFUSION, CONTRADICTION ON GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING

 CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “CONFUSION, CONTRADICTION ON GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING”

 

At every level of government, there are times when it seems the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing. Nov. 8 might become one of those confounding times.

 

That’s the date – just three days after the presidential election – reserved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for a decision on whether to toughen state rules on the carbon intensity of fuels. The fuel of concern here is gasoline.

 

The more carbon oil refineries bake into the gas they produce, the more greenhouse gas emissions most car engines will spew, thus increasing smog. It has been CARB’s fervent mission since the 1960s to reduce smog in California’s air. That function is even enshrined in the federal Clean Air Act of 1970, signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon.

 

The problem is that toughening up California’s low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) will make gasoline more expensive. No one knows just how much more expensive, though, and CARB says it is not equipped to analyze what the effect will be on retail gasoline prices.

 

Most estimates, however, suggest a 65 cent per gallon increase if the LCSF is made a lot stricter, as proposed. That would come on top of California’s already high gas prices, which consistently run about $1.20 above the national average.

 

Nobody wants this, especially as California and the nation recover from a strong bout of general inflation.

 

At the very same time, the special legislative session called by Gov. Gavin Newsom this fall to counter gasoline price gouging by refiners has finished its work.

 

Newsom, not incidentally, appoints all CARB board members, and he can fire them anytime. But as he supposedly seeks to lower prices with one hand at the legislative level, an agency he can absolutely control may adopt a tactic guaranteed to increase prices.

 

If that’s not a confused contradiction, it’s hard to see what might be.

 

Newsom has taken heat from several members of Congress from both parties and from the governors of Nevada and Arizona (one Republican, one Democrat), for his plan – passed by the state Assembly and Senate – forcing refineries to maintain significant new reserves of gasoline for use at times when they shut down for maintenance or occasional emergencies.

 

Nevada and Arizona both get most of their gas from California refineries, and their governors fear creating a large reserve will drive pump prices up in those states, both now featuring a host of California emigres.

 

They’re probably wrong, because the reserve would not appear instantly, but gradually. Gas would be pumped into it at times of surplus, not when supplies are tight.

 

While the other governors’ concern is probably groundless, the new reserves are proving politically useful for some in this era of fearmongering politicos. Meanwhile, there is no doubt whatever that a severely lowered LCFS would raise prices.

 

So it’s high time Newsom tells his appointees to hold off on a stricter LCFS. Since he appoints the board members scheduled to vote on this, he can easily and properly tell them at least to delay their action until they know exactly how much it will cost consumers.

 

It's true that CARB does not usually worry about consumer costs, as it is supposed to deal almost solely with air quality and not what it costs. But for CARB to raise gas prices at the very moment Newsom seeks to steady them legislatively makes no sense at all.

 

Besides, there is no great urgency, no public pressure, to lower the LCFS just now, at least nothing like the urgency of the 1960s and 1970s, when banks of smoggy brown air hung over entire regions like Southern California, the Central Valley and (to a lesser degree) the San Francisco Bay Area. Ambient air is cleaner here now. Electric cars produce no smog, hybrids produce only a little and even gasoline engines spew much less than they once did, causing the browned clouds to become much more rare.

 

So it’s time Newsom stays his left hand while his right hand works on preventing gasoline price gouging. To proceed as now scheduled borders on insanity.

 e

 

 

 

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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

THE STRONG FACULTY LINK TO PRO-HAMAS DEMONSTRATIONS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

 

“THE STRONG FACULTY LINK TO PRO-HAMAS DEMONSTRATIONS”

 

More than 80 percent of Americans favor Israel over the Palestinian Hamas terror group in their ongoing conflict. Among college-age Americans, more than 57 percent favor Israel.

 

That’s according to a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll reported by the Center for American Political Studies.

 

Which raises the question of why pro-Palestinian protestors have dominated the campus scene in California and nationwide, staging far more rallies, setting up all encampments, occupying buildings and threatening and committing far more violent acts than their pro-Israel counterparts.

 

Now the AMCHA Initiative, a Santa Cruz-based group that has tracked campus antisemitism since the earliest years of this century, has found at least a partial explanation: It’s the faculty.

 

More specifically, it’s an on-campus group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), whose collegiate chapters and membership ballooned just after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas incursion into Israel that massacred more than 1,200 persons and took 251 hostages, many of whom Hamas killed in captivity.

 

FJP exists to further activities of the Hamas-linked college group Students for Justice in Palestine, whose anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations mushroomed on Oct. 8, 2023, just one day after the massacre and more than one week before any Israeli troops entered Gaza in their current war with Hamas.

In a detailed study of protests at 100 universities, AMCHA found the number of demonstrations, the time encampments lasted and the number of incidents involving death threats and threats of violence against Jewish students was vastly higher on campuses with FJP chapters than those without.

 

This was true nationally and in California, where FJP and its affiliates have UC chapters at the Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses, as well as at Stanford and USC, most of which saw lengthy encampments and building takeovers.

 

The study found incidents involving violet physical assaults of Jews on campuses were 7.3 times more likely at schools with an FJP chapter than those with none, like Santa Clara University and many Cal State campuses.

 

Death threats against Jews labelled “Zionists” were 3.4 times as common at colleges with FJP chapters, whose membership at California schools ranges from seven to 40 professors per campus.

 

FJP formally has two main purposes: to promote the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement designed to isolate Israeli universities and their faculty, and to purge all Zionist expression from their campuses.

 

Here’s some of how that played out at UC Santa Barbara, in a student’s description of one of many campus meetings about the Israel-Hamas war:

 

“For the Jewish students in that room, the betrayal in what a Black speaker said was palpable. (Jews) were framed as oppressors, even though it was their people who had been slaughtered just weeks before, over 1,200 lives, most of them Jewish, lost in the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” they said.

 

“The reality of that horror was ignored. Instead, the speaker, president of (an) organization that…celebrated the Oct. 7 invasion, portrayed Palestinians as the only victims, as though the grief of the Jewish students…was offensive. (His) narrative left Jewish students stunned. They were grieving, heartbroken, and terrified, and now they were being painted as aggressors in a story where they had just buried their dead. This was soul-crushing.”

 

That experience, multiplied many times over, is one reason many Jewish students have transferred away from campuses they attended last year.

 

In a way, their leaving is a victory for FJP, one of whose stated goals is to squelch all disagreement with its views. Another stated goal is to dismantle many schools’ foreign study programs linked to Israeli universities.

 

Administrators at UC, Stanford and other campuses this fall adopted some of AMCHA’s suggested safeguard and enforcement mechanisms aimed at keeping politics out of classrooms, while leaving campuses open to peaceful expression of all views.

 

It's too early to know how this will play out, but an official FJP statement said “the work to educate and organize (students) will grow in new ways.”

 

One big question: How many students will be willing or able to risk their grades and futures by defying the views of some of their professors and how many will go along to get along?

 

    -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”

SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2024 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“SOLANO COUNTY PLAN COULD HAVE CHANGED HOW CALIFORNIA DEVELOPS”

 

A measure allowing voters in Solano County this fall to approve – or not – a vast new development about 45 miles northeast of San Francisco just might have been the most influential local ballot proposition California has seen in decades. If it had gone forward.

 

This measure would have allowed a brand-new full-scale city to be built by a corps of billionaires as a partial solution to the housing shortage that has wracked the state’s lifestyle and politics for years, threatening both the nature of many neighborhoods and the independence of city governments.

 

But the billionaires pulled their proposition from the ballot at midsummer because they thought it might lose.

 

Instead of piecemeal infill developments and replacement of mini-malls and other relatively small buildings with huge high-rises containing hundreds of apartments and a few stores, this plan could have seen an entire new city plopped down on open space and farmland.

 

Land for this already belonged to an outfit called “California Forever,” which quietly spent years buying up pieces of property south and west of Suisun City, Fairfield and Rio Vista, eventually aggregating 50,000 acres. The billionaires, who did this gradually in order not to drive the price of land to forbidding levels, include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, Lauren Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and former Goldman Sachs trader Jan Sramek, with Sramek now the project CEO.

 

Their purchases at one point had federal officials suspecting foreign agents might be angling for access to intelligence about the nearby Travis Air Force Base, a key facility for military flights to the Far East.

 

But this was no spy adventure. Rather, it’s a land use gamble, with the investors banking on the 259,000 registered voters of a medium-sized county about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento to okay a gigantic new kind of development. It won't go forward this year; but maybe next time.

 

The proposed new city was to be completely walkable and bikeable and might eventually house as many as 400,000 persons. So large a development by itself could put a sizeable dent in the state’s housing shortage, promoters say. They said they had arranged with a dozen potential employers to provide at least 15,000 jobs for residents in fields from retail sales to robotics.

 

Instead of parks and schools going in gradually while new residents filter into a raw development, all 17,500 acres in this one were to be ready almost simultaneously – stores, homes, apartments, parks, schools and offices all opening about the same time.

 

The billionaires also promised a $500 million fund to help new residents make down payments on homes. They planned a new sports stadium (are you listening, former Oakland A’s, now that Las Vegas shows signs of stadium hesitation?). Public transit would exist from the get-go.

 

It all would be a huge contrast with the way other cities – even master-planned ones like Irvine in Orange County – arose, with their sometimes haphazard placement of buildings, homes, parks, schools and other services.

 

The notion of using currently open land contrasts sharply with the trend of the last 10 years, stressing ever-greater urban density and the remaking of cities under threats of state legal action or funding cutoffs for services like police and sewers.

 

If the Solano County plan eventually happens, some of the vast desert spaces north and east of Los Angeles might also eventually find themselves hosting large new developments.

 

That’s the way much of California was built, long before politicians like Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco successfully campaigned to make urban sprawl political anathema.

 

But voters in Solano County apparently were set to say no to all this. Now no one is quite sure what happens next in a high-stakes story that could eventually affect not only Solano County but the entire state, whose development priorities could stand some major changes.

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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

A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“A SUPREME COURT-ENABLED ATTACK ON CALIFORNIA’S HOMELESS”

 

It’s been largely obscured by the mainstream media’s justifiable and almost continuous focus on the ongoing presidential election. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s  summertime decision allowing cities and counties to take down and remove encampments erected by homeless persons has expanded into a growing campaign to virtually ban them from public spaces.

 

If the misery index of the homeless, 186,000 strong in California’s last semi-official count, was already nearing intolerable levels, new tactics authorized by local governments around the state seem about to turn the homeless into the hopeless.

 

This applies even in some cities once well known for their steadfast kindness toward and tolerance of the unhoused, including Berkeley and Santa Monica.

 

Just last month, on the same Tuesday evening Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debated in distant Philadelphia, Santa Monica’s city council voted 4-3 to eliminate a section of its anti-camping ordinance that has allowed homeless individuals to use pillows, blankets and bedrolls while sleeping outdoors. This includes sleeping bags, which church and charity volunteers have often distributed free at seasonal homeless shelters.

 

So the ultra-poor homeless populace – once able to get regular meals served on the lawn of the Santa Monica City Hall – now may be compelled to rest their heads on curbs while sleeping uncovered except by cardboard boxes in driving, near freezing January rains. Unless they are simply forced to keep moving along.

 

Local police say the revised law won’t change how they enforce the anti-camping measure, claiming they mostly use it to regulate encampments in public spaces.

 

But no one will likely know the full impact of the change until winter, when rains in recent years have flooded many of the homeless out of what little shelter their tents and tarps could provide.

 

Remember, this is a populace composed in large measure of the mentally ill, drug and alcohol addicts, persons suffering from PTSD and women driven from their homes by domestic violence, few of whom would be involved if they had enough money to avoid the situation.

 

Santa Monica is far from alone. In just over three months since the Supreme Court ruling, at least 17 other California locales -- and counting -- have taken similar actions. The new laws allow police to arrest homeless individuals apparently violating anti-camping laws, which vary only slightly from place to place.

 

They raise major questions: If the unhoused can’t camp on sidewalks or in parks, where are these virtually penniless folks to go? How long can they survive?

 

“Our residents are demanding a solution,” said the mayor of Vista, in northern San Diego County. His city has reactivated a 1968 ordinance banning encampments in the city.

 

In Berkeley, some local merchants don’t care where the homeless go, so long as it’s away from them.

 

A group of businesses filed suit this fall against the city government over homeless encampments near them. They claim financial harm from encampments due to unsanitary conditions, safety issues and “increased criminal activity,” as some encampment denizens threaten or intimidate potential customers.

 

Berkeley officials did not comment on the litigation, but its city council adopted a new policy allowing city officials to take down tent cities even when all indoor shelter beds are occupied if an encampment is a fire or health hazard.

 

No one knows where the tent residents might go if this should be enforced. Businesses and courts offer no solution.

 

Neither does anyone else. The city of Los Angeles this fall issued a report saying it would take ten years and $20 billion to solve its homeless problem. That would involve building 36,000 permanent housing units for homeless persons with chronic health conditions and 25,000 more apartments for very low-income residents.

 

The plan, not yet adopted by city council vote, assumes the city would continue operating shelters with 17,000 beds for several more years while all that is built. No one knows where funding might come from, especially now, with a major homeless housing operator having recently gone broke without accounting for millions of public dollars it received.

 

It’s an almost intractable problem, with few proven villains in sight, but plenty of very visible victims about to see their situation become much more difficult.

       

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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com