EVIDENCE MOUNTING OF MARKET SOLUTION TO HOUSING

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2020, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “EVIDENCE MOUNTING OF MARKET SOLUTION TO HOUSING”

          New evidence arrives almost every day backing the concept of a market-based solution to California’s housing shortage, one that does not have to involve politicians at all.

          Of course, that offends politicos like San Francisco’s Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, who persists in the notion that high-density, high-rise apartments and condominiums are the answer.

          In a sense, he’s right. For the market-based solution that’s fast taking shape does involve high rises and high density – just not in new buildings. Rather, housing will almost certainly occupy space now leased by insurance companies, law firms, venture capitalists, bank headquarters – almost every kind of white collar business.

          Lease holders who once clamored for more space in office towers rising above areas like Century City in Los Angeles, downtown San Diego and San Francisco’s financial district are now looking for ways to escape the commitments they still have. “For lease” signs proliferate in urban areas.

          Some tenants refuse to pay rent, having sent their work forces home to work safely and virtually at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. They’re not being evicted yet, because of state emergency rules allowing tenants huge leeway on delaying payments during the health crisis. But if they don’t either pay up when the rent delays expire or work out deferred payment deals with their landlords, they will pretty soon find themselves ousted.

          They will leave gigantic amounts of current office space empty. It’s not that white collar businesses won’t need office space; merely that they will need much less. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have told their workers to keep operating from home as long as they like. Others are asking workers to come in one or two days per week.

          As California reopened haltingly after the initial crisis phase of the pandemic, when unusual caution was taken to prevent hospital overloads that could have cost many lives, it became clear vast numbers of workers will opt to stay home most of the time.

          In many cases, that’s not mere preference, but necessity. State guidelines for reopening public schools, for example, create a need for continued virtual commuting. By staggering start and stop times, reducing class sizes and using a mix of in-person and online instruction, the schools are telling millions of working parents they’ll have to flex their work hours.

          Some like it that way. This reality is visible in recent home pricing figures from San Francisco and some of its suburbs. Demand for housing is up in Marin, Napa, Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, but down in San Francisco itself. One result is that a house which sold for $1.89 million 15 months ago in the city’s Sunset District is now listed on the Zillow real estate site at $1.78 million – down $101,000.

          At the same time, realtors in suburban counties are seeing steady demand. They report many would-be buyers are the same people who long worked in office towers, but lately operate from home. As their bosses tell them they can keep doing this, some are seeking more spacious quarters and a less urban environment.

          In short, many want the very urban sprawl that’s anathema to Wiener, who has sponsored bill after bill aimed at bringing density to the same areas so attractive right now to folks leaving dense neighborhoods.

          The same thing is happening in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas, where prices in outlying areas are rising, while real estate near the urban cores remains stable.

          The next phase figures to see entire floors of high-rise buildings go vacant, and then remain empty for significant periods. Once building owners realize that new lessees won’t be forthcoming in droves, they’ll opt for other ways to monetize their buildings: converting much of the empty floor space to condos and apartments.

          These will likely come in all sizes and price levels, from large ocean-and mountain-view units to small apartments on the lower floors. Some buildings will have mixed use, with stores on the ground floor and other levels shared by offices and dwelling units. Zoning changes are inevitable.

          That’s how market forces will solve the housing shortage, creating vast numbers of units within the next five years, many of them very affordable.

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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

REMEMBER THE ENERGY CRUNCH? SAY NO TO REGIONAL ELECTRIC GRID

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 24, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “REMEMBER THE ENERGY CRUNCH? SAY NO TO REGIONAL ELECTRIC GRID”

          Way back in 1990, when Californians overwhelmingly voted to impose term limits on state officials, critics warned about the loss of “institutional memory” the move would inevitably bring with it.

          This summer, we may see just how much damage that can do. For there’s virtually no one now serving in the California legislature who was there in 1998, when previous legislators and then-Gov. Pete Wilson opted to deregulate the state’s electric grid.

          Their action allowed any electric user to buy power from any seller. It encouraged California’s three big privately-owned power companies to sell off older power plants whose construction expenses had long ago been completely written off. It allowed out-of-state players to manipulate the California’s electricity market and led to the energy crunch of 2000 and 2001, complete with rolling blackouts, frequent brownouts and eventual criminal convictions for executives of companies like Texas-based Enron.

          People now holding office in Sacramento should remember all this, if only because everyone there was at least six years old during the power crisis.

          But this summer, many are acting as if they don’t remember a thing. As if they have no memory of the last time California allowed people in other states to tinker with its electricity supplies.

That’s about the only plausible explanation for the so-far steady progress through the Legislature of a bill that would make this state part of a Western electricity grid with a governing board whose makeup is yet to be determined.

Essentially, it could place California’s power fate in the hands of people from Utah and Idaho who know little about this state’s needs and wants. It could make a joke of California’s own laws governing renewable energy, which dictate that a massive share of the state’s energy must come from solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal or other sources that can never be completely exhausted, as oil, coal and natural gas can.

          California has avoided problems for the last 15 years largely because it has its own agency overseeing the grid, the so-called Independent System Operator, run by appointees of the governor, who would suffer political consequences for any blunders they might commit.

          Not so the proposed new Western regional board, which would be appointed largely by electric industry stakeholders. That’s like letting Enron or its modern equivalent run the grid. The fox would run the henhouse.

          But the plan, known in the Legislature as AB 813, has strong backing from Gov. Jerry Brown, whose term expires Dec. 31, meaning he can never suffer politically for whatever it might produce.

          It passed the state Senate’s Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee on a 6-1 vote earlier this summer, with only Republican Andy Vidak of Hanford dissenting.

          One who voted for the bill was Democratic Sen. Robert Hertzberg, a rare bird in Sacramento who was around to see the ill effects of deregulation and therefore should have known better. Hertzberg, speaker of the state Assembly during the energy crunch, told a reporter “I generally like the notion of regionalization,” noting that it gives California utilities a chance to sell excess solar energy produced during the daytime into other states. That, some suggest, could lead to lower power rates for Californians.

          But Hertzberg said the current bill doesn’t include enough assurances of protection for this state’s clean energy policies, already threatened by the pro-coal, pro-pollution policies of the Donald Trump administration, to whom the new grid’s officers would ultimately be responsible.

          Hertzberg said he only voted for the bill in committee to give its author, Democrat Chris Holden of Pasadena, a chance to fix it.

          But there is no sign Holden wants to do that.

          And there is also no answer in sight to the ultimate question every legislative bill should answer before becoming law: Do we need this?

          In the case of a regional electric grid, we clearly don’t. We don’t need to get mixed up with states like Utah that draw much of their electricity from coal. We have excess power now, and that’s just fine, so why risk shortages if folks from other states choose to send California-generated electricity elsewhere?

          The answer is there is no reason to do this, and it likely would not have gotten this far if legislators had any sort of institutional memory.

  

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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

VACCINATION VACILLATION SHOWS BROWN'S PRAGMATISM

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2015, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “VACCINATION VACILLATION SHOWS BROWN'S PRAGMATISM”

          “A foolish consistency,” the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted, “is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and no one has ever accused Gov. Jerry Brown of being small minded. So why be surprised when he completely reverses himself as he did the other day on vaccinations?

          Less than three years ago, Brown signed into law a plan allowing parents to place in public schools children who had not been vaccinated for diseases like polio, measles, mumps, smallpox and whooping cough. These once were plagues that killed thousands of children yearly, but by the end of the last century they had been virtually eradicated from industrialized countries. Vaccinations did that job.

          The bill Brown signed in 2012 required parents not wanting to meet schools’ vaccination standards to present written proof they had heard from a health professional the pluses and minuses of getting the shots, which are often dispensed free, at public expense. But he attached a signing message that essentially negated the law he had just helped create: it ordered public health officials to craft a form where parents could simply claim vaccinating their children violates their religious beliefs.

          Never mind that no organized or even quasi-organized religion, from Roman Catholicism to Christian Science to Orthodox Judaism to Hinduism, Scientology and Wiccanism, opposed vaccination then and only the black Muslim Nation of Islam does now.

          The next 30 months saw two outbreaks of pertussis (whooping cough) and one – much more publicized – burst of measles that allegedly began at Disneyland, which has no vaccination rules.

          No one blamed Brown for those disease flare-ups. But there’s no doubt he keeps track of the news and realized that if a similar outbreak ever reached epidemic proportions, he would be blamed. Disease, not construction projects like bullet trains or water tunnels, could become his most prominent legacy.

          So when a much tougher public school vaccination law reached his desk this month, he signed it instantly. It takes effect next year.

          “The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases,” went his latest signing message, “…the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community.”

          Where in 2012 Brown spokesmen rationalized his move by saying he aimed “to take into account First Amendment religious freedoms through an extremely narrow exemption,” this time there was no mention of either religion or an exemption, other than for home-schooled kids and children with medical reasons not to be vaccinated.

          No form this time where parents too lazy or too fearful to get their kids vaccinated can easily lie by checking a box saying they are religiously opposed to the shots.

          No foolish consistency here from Brown, who has not just vacillated, but completely reversed himself in the space of three years. It’s not the first time he’s done that, the most famous prior occasion coming after the June 1978 passage of the Proposition 13 property tax limits. Back then, Brown had spent the spring as the chief opponent of the initiative, sponsored by anti-tax gadflies Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann.

          When it passed – by a margin of about 30 percent – Brown instantly became its most active proponent, quickly meeting with Jarvis and Gann and signing enabling legislation that still plagues the state with nonsensical definitions of what constitutes a change of ownership.

          Back then, there were no crazies to dog Brown’s path toward embracing Proposition 13. This time, there are plenty of misinformed parents still determined not to vaccinate their kids. They may qualify a referendum for next fall’s ballot, trying to cancel the new law. They’re still staging vocal protests.

          But don’t expect Brown to change his mind again. He’s far too practical (some call it opportunism). He knows, as he did when he issued his signing message in 2012, that opposition to vaccination is based primarily on the widely circulated myth of a link to autism, since recanted by the British academic whose flawed study is at its base.

          Also, don’t expect Brown ever to acknowledge his signing message of three years ago was a big-time error. While he’s prone to reversing himself, public mea culpas are not a habit for this former seminarian.

          This reversal was strictly a practical matter, and as Jarvis and Gann discovered long ago, Jerry Brown can be pragmatism (or opportunism) personified.

         

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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 

THE GREAT CALIFORNIA EXODUS: MOSTLY A POLITICAL MYTH

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2009, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"THE GREAT CALIFORNIA EXODUS: MOSTLY A MYTH"

The tale of a great exodus from California has traveled from the cover of Newsweek magazine to the opinion pages of the great (if nearly bankrupt) Eastern newspapers and has even snuck onto the op-ed pages of some California newspapers and into some so-called news reports on California TV stations.

There's just one problem with this big national story: it's mostly a myth, largely a fiction useful only for political purposes.

Sure, some Californians have moved to other states over the last few years, 275,000 more leaving the state than moving in from other states between 2004 and 2007. Those who leave often tell reporters they left to avoid heavy traffic or a wave of illegal immigrants or high taxes.

But the real motive for many has been clear to anyone who cares enough to follow the money: Most were cashing out houses at or near the height of the California real estate boom and buying new and larger homes in nearby states like Arizona and Nevada and Idaho and Washington for far less. The balance went into their bank accounts or investments, some of which have since tanked.

That's reality, but reality often is less politically useful than myth. So the tale of a miserable business climate driving away jobs is pushed endlessly. This fable was used successfully - if untruthfully - by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger during the recall campaign when he won election in 2003 and it's constant fodder for the Republican minority in the state's Legislature which can never become a majority unless it can convince a lot of voters that Democrats are exclusively behind the state's many demonstrable problems.

Not the least of those difficulties is a seemingly perpetual budget impasse. California highways, once the envy of the nation, now are pitted and potholed, often hazardous to tires and other automotive parts. School dropout rates are officially reported at about 30 percent, while they're actually much higher. Hospitals are perpetually in financial trouble. And there's more. But go to other states, and the problems look quite familiar, everything from recessionary budget cuts and impasses (Arizona, Pennsylvania and Indiana) to large numbers of illegal immigrants (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and more).

So yes, plenty of former Californians have emigrated to other states in recent years. Many are retirees; a relative few are still productive workers. But who bought the high-priced homes they left behind? Most likely productive, middle-class working families.

The related myth, that California's environmental laws drive away businesses in droves, is equally false. Sure, some businesses leave, attracted by offers of several years of property tax exemptions and other benefits, offers California would be foolish to match. But a thorough study by the Public Policy Institute of California conducted just after Schwarzenegger exploited this theme ad nauseum in 2003 found no such flight. In fact, the PPIC now says there are so many thriving businesses here that there's an impending shortage of college-trained workers to fill the jobs they now offer or will create over the next few years.

Then there are the latest population figures, somewhat startling. Against the myth of population loss comes the reality of an actual 400,000-plus population gain over the last year, just about the same pace as most of the last decade.

At the same time, Californians who formerly moved an average of once every seven years - with a lot of that movement in and out of the state - are now staying put.

One result is that the state will soon have a home-grown majority, as more than 70 percent of Californians aged 15 to 24 were born here. Yes, there are some children of illegal immigrants in that group. But they total just 14 percent, meaning the vast majority of adolescents and young adults here today were born here to parents who were either U.S. citizens or legal immigrants. Even that percentage will be dropping soon, as the illegal immigrant wave wanes amid hard economic times.

For the sake of those young people, and for the sake of the many businesses that will suffer from any shortage of competent, college-trained workers, it's vital to spare schools and universities from any more of the budget cuts they've suffered in the past year.

Perpetuating those cuts can only create an even greater need for highly skilled immigrant labor than is now forecast, at the expense of home-grown talent.

The bottom line: When tales of a mass population and business exodus emerge from the mouths of Eastern pundits or California politicians, laugh. For these are mostly myths and lies, not worthy of being taken seriously.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net