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.

 

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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

TIRED OF DECLINISTS? SOME ENDURING NEW CALIFORNIA POSITIVES

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2023 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “TIRED OF DECLINISTS? SOME ENDURING NEW CALIFORNIA POSITIVES”

 

        California has taken a beating lately, with (mostly Republican) governors of other states blasting many aspects of life here, not to mention the state’s biggest-name politicians.

 

        They cite everything from weak public schools to an upcoming ban on gasoline-powered cars and high state income taxes as reasons to desert this state.

 

        And yet…No state has recovered faster from the COVID-19 pandemic and its blows to employment, California unemployment having dropped in each of the last 11 months. Firefighters got the upper hand on last year’s ration of wildfires quicker than ever, too. And for the 12^th straight year, California teams were in the Major League Baseball playoffs. Two teams, to be sure. Not to mention the fact that a California school, USC, seems to have adjusted faster and better than almost anyone else to the new financial scene in college football.

 

 

        Now come two new realities that make this state look even better, despite having one less member of Congress and one less electoral college vote than it did for the last 20 years.

 

        One is verifiable economic information. While some forecasters see troubled financial times ahead, and possibly a recession, the latest figures seem to belie that pessimism.

 

        This state saw huge gains in leisure and hospitality revenue in 2021, whose figures have only lately been reported, along with growth in industries like health care, social services, technology, construction and defense spending.

 

        This does not even mention agriculture, where California remains America’s No. 1 food-producing state.

 

        Despite headwinds caused by lingering aspects of the pandemic that hurt tourism, California posted America’s second-highest growth in gross domestic state product (GDSP – the total of all goods and services produced in the state) in the last quarter of 2021. Its 6.3 percent growth between pre-pandemic 2019 and the first quarter of 2022 was beaten only by Washington state’s 6.9 percent.

 

        By contrast, Florida and Texas, whose governors often joust verbally with California’s Gavin Newsom, all with an eye toward future White House possibilities, checked in with GDSP growth of 5.3 percent and 3.9 percent respectively.

 

        For California to better its prime challengers so soundly represented an unexpected achievement, especially coming while it lost a small percentage of its populace to each of those other two states.

 

        California’s natural advantages are one reason it does so well. No place enjoys a better climate, with the ability to pursue a huge variety of activities in close proximity to one another all year ‘round.

 

        This makes for strong tourism. The latest ranking from the home maintenance website lawnstarter.com places California first among the states in the number of scenic drives, from Highway 1 through Big Sur to state Highway 120 over Tioga Pass into Yosemite National Park from the east to Redwood Highway 101 in the state’s northwestern corner and the Monterey Peninsula’s 17-mile-drive.

 

        California is also No. 1 in number and scenic quality of national parks, including many sizes and types from Lassen Volcanic to the southern desert’s Joshua Tree.

 

        It’s also first in attractions, including the likes of San Diego County’s Sea World and Legoland, Anaheim’s Disneyland and San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. This list does not even include Lake Tahoe and the Gold Rush country in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

 

        All those places, drives and phenomena – and others too numerous to list – guarantee large numbers of tourists each year there’s no major pandemic or world war. That, in turn, ensures a healthy travel sector in the economy, with all the jobs and tax revenue hotels, restaurants, airlines and car rental companies can generate. Yes, California can have recessions and does, but it also boasts lasting features that guarantee swift recovery from economic problems.

 

        Then there’s the big surprise in the lawnstarter.com rankings, supervised by faculty at two major Eastern universities: California now ranks just 45^th in wildfire risk, and not because everything has already burned, but because places like Idaho and Texas and Alabama are not as well prepared to handle fires when they start.

 

        It’s not perfection, but it does put the lie to declinists who have said for many years that California is headed downward in almost all regards. In fact, in most ways the very opposite is true.

       

-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

BIG WATER YEAR LEAVES HUGE DEARTH OF INFORMATION

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2017, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “BIG WATER YEAR LEAVES HUGE DEARTH OF INFORMATION”

          In this remarkable water year, which ended more than five years of severe drought in California, there are still plenty of noteworthy water questions to contemplate and act upon.

Here’s the central one: Three years after California passed what’s often called a landmark groundwater regulation law, no one knows how much under-surface water remains accessible to wells and no one has a clue to how much replenishment the state’s supplies actually got from last winter’s massive storms.

          It’s easy to see that once-depleted reservoirs are back at peak levels, again drowning abandoned towns, buildings, corrals and other structures sacrificed decades ago to the need for water storage.

          But groundwater remains a mystery.

          Things may not be quite as mysterious as years ago, but one thing for sure: supposed new information the state now possesses about ground water basins is essentially common sense stuff understood long ago by anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about California rainfall, lakes and rivers.

          Example A is a somewhat breathless mid-winter report from the  California Department of Water Resources called “Water Available for Replenishment,” showed demand for local water and imports from other regions is highest in the Tulare Basin of the southern San Joaquin Valley.

The same report says “runoff, natural recharge and outflow are highest on the North Coast.” And we were told the estimated water available for replenishing ground water basins is highest in the Sacramento River region (about 640,000 acre feet a year, enough to satisfy the needs of 1.4 million families).

          This is all the stuff of common-sense: Virtually no one familiar with California’s water world doesn’t know that farms in the Tulare Basin consume a lot of water, both from the Central Valley Project and from wells. Who doesn’t know it typically rains more on the North Coast than anywhere else in the state? And who doesn’t know the Sacramento River watershed contains some of California’s largest reservoirs, from which water could be shifted to replenish aquifers?

          So this was essentially a useless report, telling interested Californians little they didn’t already know. There is still no way to tell how much water remains in easily reachable aquifers around the state. For example, no one has a clue how much water lies in most California underground lakes. We do, for example, know golf courses in the Coachella Valley portion of Riverside County, including Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage and the aptly-named Indian Wells, always remained green even as the state Capitol lawn and many others went brown in the drought.

          Drought or not, the vast underground lake beneath the Coachella Valley keeps water shortages there at bay year after year. Plus, much of the water sprayed onto the valley’s myriad greens and fairways eventually filters back down to the aquifer.

          Far more important would be to know the extent of aquifers and their winter replenishment in the Central Valley. During the drought, farmers spent heavily to deepen wells and reach new, lower levels of underground supplies, but no one had the foggiest notion how long that could persist. Winter storms at least partially replenished supplies, but it’s still anyone’s guess how much water rests there or how long it might last.

          Water meters, reported Leon Szeptycki, executive director of Stanford University’s Water in the West program, could help a bit with this. He told a university magazine that “If everyone had a meter on their well and you knew how much everyone was using, you could sort of calculate everyone’s contribution to aquifer depletion. But if you don’t know any of those things, they just become things to fight about.”

          That’s pretty much where we are today, more than 12 years before the new state law’s eventual deadline for controlling and measuring use of ground water as thoroughly as surface water is managed now.

          The bottom line: We know that after a winter of heavy rain, there is no more drought in California. Even Gov. Jerry Brown admitted that.

We also know at least some Californians want controls on ground water use, but that’s many years off. All of which means that we know startlingly little more now than before the groundwater law passed three years ago, and that’s a crying shame.

         

         

-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

A FEW PIECEMEAL IMMIGRATION CHANGES LIKELY

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “A FEW PIECEMEAL IMMIGRATION CHANGES LIKELY”

          The grand compromise on immigration passed by the U.S. Senate 10 months ago is now all but history, despite talk from President Obama and other Democrats about “comprehensive reform.”

          For comprehensive immigration reform, as it’s understood in Washington, D.C., means granting undocumented immigrants some kind of pathway to citizenship. Only a very few Republicans are willing to allow this, no matter how arduous and long the path would be.

          Despite the common GOP rhetoric, this has little to do with humane concerns or fairness, and everything to do with politics. Republicans have seen what the 1986 immigration reform bill signed by then-President Ronald Reagan did to their party in California. Legalizing many previously unauthorized residents combined with a sense of threat engendered by the 1994 Proposition 187’s draconian rules for the undocumented – since thrown out by the courts – made California a Democratic stronghold, where previously it was up for grabs in most elections.

          Republicans fear the same kind of thing could happen nationally with any new “amnesty” bill, so as long as they hold a majority in either house of Congress, they won’t let it happen.

          But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t do other things. A new “guest worker” program a la the old bracero plan that began in World War II and stretched into the late 1960s is a possibility. Concessions are also possible for undocumented immigrants brought here as small children.

    Some family unity measures might be okayed, too, so long as they don’t spawn new citizens.

          And despite their current obdurate talk about accepting only comprehensive reforms, it would be unrealistic to expect either Obama or Democrats in the Senate to block these moves.

          For one thing, they’re all parts of the wider-ranging Senate bill. For another, each of those measures would improve the lives of at least some of the undocumented, essentially legalizing many even if not allowing them citizenship and voting rights.

          Many Latinos who have steadily cast ballots for Democrats and against Republicans principally because of immigration would be mightily offended if Democrats suddenly became purists and rejected measures that may not be wide-ranging or comprehensive, but would nevertheless improve the lives of some immigrants.

          It’s possible this picture could change a bit as the primary election season moves along and Republicans in “safe” districts whose biggest worry is a primary challenge from the right get past the point where new opponents can emerge.

    "For many members, they’d be more comfortable (with immigration bills) when their primaries are over,” observed Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of north San Diego County.

    But those same GOP members of Congress also know conservatives often have demonstrated long memories. If they back anything like amnesty today, they realize they may face challenges from their right in 2016.

          As with the Democrats, their principal concern is not with what will do the most for America or be the most humane, but what stands the best chance to preserve them in office.

          That’s why, for example, a group of 16 House Republicans including ultraconservatives like Michelle Bachman of Minnesota and Lamar Smith of Texas wrote to Obama in late winter rejecting any bill that “would permanently displace American workers.”

          Even though there is no proof any guest worker program or other legalization tactic has ever displaced American workers or decreased wages, belief that immigration changes will do this remains strong in many parts of America.

          Meanwhile, other Republicans realize that they’ll have to make adjustments on immigration if they ever hope to make inroads on the Democratic domination among Latinos, the fastest-growing bloc of voters.

          Democrats, meanwhile, relish watching the GOP sweat over all this. They know that as long as citizenship is off the table, Republicans won’t threaten Latino loyalty to them. They also know that the less the GOP does, the less happens, the better their own electoral prospects.

          Which is why it's unrealistic to expect immigration changes this year other than a few desultory, half-baked measures improving things for businesses wanting to pay low wages.

         

    -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