CITY-STATE RELATIONS AT AN ALL-TIME LOW

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2023 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

        “CITY-STATE RELATIONS AT AN ALL-TIME LOW”

 

        In California’s 172 years as an American state, relations between its government and the more than 400 cities within state boundaries have never been as contested and hostile and litigated as now.

 

        Dozens of cities in most parts of the state are out of compliance today with a 1960s-era law signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan requiring them to file housing plans every eight years with the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), which can reject any blueprint it does not like.

 

        Meanwhile, the state is trying to use the longstanding law to force construction of dense new housing everywhere, no matter how it might change the nature of any community.

 

        In places that have either filed no plans or had them disapproved and missed deadlines for revisions, developers can use a previously obscure and unused provision of the old law known as the “builders’ remedy” to build even where cities have previously stopped them, so long as they include enough low-income or affordable units.

 

        What’s affordable or low-income varies by location.

 

        All this appears to some to conflict with the concept of a charter city – and more than one-fourth of California’s cities have charters. State law gives charter cities “the power to make and enforce all laws and regulations in respect to municipal affairs, subject only to such restrictions and limitations as may be provided in…the (state) Constitution…”

 

        But both Gov. Gavin Newsom and his hand-picked state attorney general Rob Bonta say statewide law overrides city charters, letting legislators mandate whatever they wish wherever they wish.

 

        Today’s focal points in this classic conflict are two very dissimilar cities, one in coastal Orange County and the other on the San Francisco Peninsula – Huntington Beach (sometimes known as “Surf City”) and Atherton, usually listed as the wealthiest city in America.

 

        It would be hard to fine places more different in many ways than these two. Huntington Beach, besides its surfing orientation, hosted some of the first and largest anti-masking and anti-vaccine rallies of the coronavirus pandemic period.

 

Atherton features stately residences, most on lots of one acre or more, and has been home to the likes of athletes from Y.A. Tittle to Stephen Curry, financiers like venture capitalist Tim Draper (an early investor in outfits from Skype to Hotmail and Tesla) and politicians like former gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman, a Republican, and Steve Westly, a Democrat.

 

        With just over 7,000 residents, Atherton has been told by the state to allow almost 350 new housing units by the end of this decade. Curry objected to one proposed new development, and city officials at one point suggested the city could meet its quotas if every property owner added an additional dwelling unit (sometimes known as ADUs or granny flats).

 

        Local residents at one town council meeting told elected officials they want their officials to be more aggressive in fighting off the state. “If you’re not comfortable fighting for us, then you should step down,” said one.

 

        Huntington Beach residents and officials take a similar attitude, despite being Bonta’s first and best-publicized target, with millions of dollars in state grants at risk in their defiance.

 

        “We have no problem doing our fair share, but with fair numbers,” Mayor Pro Tem Gracey Van Der Mark said during a public meeting. “I do not believe the benefits of building outweigh the consequences of destroying our city.”

 

        It’s not actual destruction of any city that’s in prospect, merely destruction of the ambiance in some places.

 

        Numbers are key here. The state uses quotas generated by HCD, whose estimates of the state’s housing need have never accounted for homes vacated by the hundreds of thousands of Californians who moved elsewhere in the last six years, costing this state one seat in Congress. Housing need estimates have varied widely since 2017, from 3.5 million in 2018 to 1.8 million more recently.

 

        Nor, according to a 2022 state auditor’s report, has HCD properly vetted documents on which it bases its estimates.

 

        Both Bonta and Newsom ignore the varying estimates and the city charter issue.

 

        Which leaves the entire matter far from decided, no matter what state officials may claim at any given moment.

       

 

    -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.

 

DENSITY ADVOCATES IGNORE PANDEMIC’S CHANGES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 2020, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
       “DENSITY ADVOCATES IGNORE PANDEMIC’S CHANGES”

          Listen to California’s leading advocates of housing density and you have to conclude that, like ostriches, they kept their heads deep in sand through the state Legislature’s two-month coronovirus shutdown and the statewide lockdown.

          They’re like soldiers fighting the last war, rather than preparing for the next one. That is always a losing proposition.

          “Our work (for more density) has only intensified,” said Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu as he offered new pro-density bills. “People recognize the root cause of California’s housing mess is a shortage of housing,” added his state Senate counterpart, fellow San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener.

          Their talk reflects one view of pre-pandemic reality, when Wiener pushed hard for a failed measure called SB 50, aiming to force every city in California to encourage high-rise building near light rail stops and along so-called “major transit corridors,” defined by the number of buses running along their streets.

          These so-called solutions could have all but eliminated single-family zoning and changed the character of many neighborhoods and entire cities, giving developers a bright green light. It was no wonder builders and construction unions strongly backed SB 50.

          A key question Wiener, Chiu and their allies always ignored was this: Who was going to buy or rent the apartments and condos created by all the purported new building? Pre-virus, the state’s inventory of unsold homes was near peak levels because there weren’t enough qualified buyers for available properties.

          With millions of new unemployed and others working for vastly reduced pay, the corps of qualified buyers has been reduced from even its prior levels.

          Wiener, Chiu and other advocates of unbridled high-rise construction consistently ignored these realities, including the fact that before the coronavirus, the price of an “affordable” unit averaged about $360,000. How many low-income folks who qualify to buy affordable units possess the $70,000 or so needed for a 20 percent down payment on those places?

          Now, the pandemic has changed things dramatically. As destructive and deadly as it’s been, it also presents California with an obvious housing solution: Convert much of the soon-to-be-vacant space in the state’s myriad office towers into housing units.

         

          Many companies like Twitter and Dell Computer and hundreds of others that sent employees home to work during the virus lockdown have now told them to keep working there forever, if they like.

          This is the new post-pandemic reality confronting high-rise owners: With millions of white-collar employees “distance commuting,” businesses that lease millions, perhaps billions, of square feet in tall buildings suddenly need far less office space.

          A new study from the San Diego-based firm Global Workplace Analytics concluded that “25-30 percent of the workforce will be working from home multiple days per week by the end of 2021.” That will very soon leave huge amounts of office space empty.

          This translates to huge amounts of available, eminently livable space soon to be available for apartments and condos. There will be 30^th-floor units with magnificent ocean, river or mountain views, along with second- and third-floor studio and one-bedroom apartments for rent at much lower prices.

          It will take little more than plumbing, electric and drywall work to convert current office space to these new and needed uses, carving the existing space into different arrangements. Memo to unions, contractors and realtors: The conversions will create many thousands of new jobs for several years.

          One advantage of all this is that since the buildings exist, construction costs will be a fraction of what they might be under plans pushed by the likes of Wiener and Chiu, lowering the price of new housing. Neighborhoods and cities won’t be sullied. In fact, new high rise denizens will cause less traffic than current commuters. Plus, many existing buildings already sit in job centers near mass transit.

          This housing solution, driven by market forces and not politicians, can create more housing at lower costs than Wiener and Chiu dream of. It will also get high-rise owners off the hook for their massive investments in buildings that will otherwise become obsolete.

          The wonder is that folks like Wiener and Chiu show no sign of seeing any of this, even as early phases of the new housing phenomenon take place before their very eyes, mere blocks from where they live.

     -30-       
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

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CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS ICONIC JOSHUA TREES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2017, OR THEREAFTER

           

 BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

  "CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS ICONIC JOSHUA TREES"

           

          Only four units of the entire 417-part system of national parks, monuments, seashores and historical sites carry the names of remarkable plants and trees. California hosts three of these – Redwood, Sequoia and Joshua Tree national parks.

          But by the end of this century, there could be little reason for the Joshua Tree National Park just east of Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. That’s because its namesake cactus-like namesake shows signs of  gradually dying out due to changes in the local climate.

          This appears true despite denials of man-made climate change coming regularly from President Trump and the men he’s put in charge of agencies charged with protecting threatened plants, animals and fish, the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. (Joshua trees don’t yet have formally endangered status.)

          The latest moves from these agencies indicate they will become even more enviro-skeptical than they’ve been in their first several months working for Trump: In mid-May, the EPA under Administrator Scott Pruitt – a longtime oil industry advocate who was formerly attorney general of Oklahoma – dismissed half the members of its key scientific advisory boards. At the same time, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke suspended more than 200 advisory panels on everything from invasive species to oil drilling.

          This means the ethereal Joshua trees can expect little help from federal agencies, despite their main habitat’s promotion from national monument to national park status in 1994.

          And they will apparently need some help – or a major shift back to old climate patterns – if they’re to survive into the next century.

          That’s because the species shows signs of flagging in the ever warmer heat of the Mojave Desert. The plants, actually huge lilies and cousins of the far more common yuccas whose flowers dot much of California during the spring, depend on ground water to survive. Their extensive root systems can reach 35 feet underground and they also take in atmospheric moisture through their leaves, trunks and branches.

          But Joshua tree saplings are not so hardy. With much shallower root systems than their mature relatives, they are far more vulnerable to hotter and drier weather. That’s exactly what scientists project for the national park and the rest of the Mojave, where average temperatures are expected to rise four degrees by 2050, while rainfall drops by 2.6 percent in the same time.

          For the saplings to survive, they need to grow an average of about three inches in each of their first 10 years, then another 1.5 inches yearly after that.

          It’s apparently not happening for them in this mostly dry period, despite the heavy rains of the past winter. In the first year of a projected 20-year survey of Joshua tree population and growth both inside and outside the park, scientists from nearby UC Riverside found few or no young trees on about 30 percent of the species’ normal range. If that continues through the end of this century, Joshua trees could eventually exist only in about 10 percent of their current habitat. Essentially, new Joshua trees are not replacing older, dying ones fast enough for the species to survive much longer.

          The outlook can only get worse under current trends, which have seen nighttime low temperatures in Twentynine Palms, nearest significant town to the national park, rise by 8 degrees over the last 40 years.

          The great preponderance of scientists worldwide, with little to gain from lying about it, maintain human activity has caused much of that change in the local climate, part of a worldwide phenomenon. But Trump and his allies hotly deny this. Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, an avid backer of both Trump and Pruitt, insists this represents “rigged science,” saying the latest firings and suspensions at both Interior and the EPA mean that government will now “start dealing with science, and not rigged science.”

          The current supposed stewards of the national park system and its multitude of plants and animals do not appear serious about that duty, though, as indicated by shutting down their advisory panels or loading them up with representatives of industries that contribute to climate change.

          They also are in no mood to heed any advice that contradicts their beliefs. Joshua trees, beware.

          

    -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, go to www.californiafocus.net

BEAM US UP, SCOTTY; DROUGHT SPURRING IDEAS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 2015, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “BEAM US UP, SCOTTY; DROUGHT SPURRING IDEAS”

          Ideas come fast every time California endures a drought of several years. Each time, some of them are accepted and put into use, thus making the next drought a bit easier to handle.

          Back in the 1970s, the last time this state saw as protracted a dry spell as today’s, snickering and cries of “yuck” ensued when some environmentalists proposed reusing water from dishes, baths, showers and more to irrigate grass and shrubbery rather than merely disposing of it as sewage.

          This idea is now called “grey water,” and it is required of much new industrial and multi-family construction like apartments and condominiums, along with low-flow faucets, shower heads and toilets.

          During that same drought, which ended abruptly with a huge storm season starting in December 1977, the late Kenneth Hahn, a longtime Los Angeles County supervisor who fathered both a Los Angeles mayor and a current congresswoman, suggested snagging icebergs as they calved from Antarctica and dragging them north to become drinking water.

          That idea has not yet taken, even as the same global warming trend that some believe responsible for the severity of California’s latest dry period now sees more icebergs than ever dropping from Antarctic cliffs.

          The modern drought is also producing new ideas, including several proposed methods for desalinating sea water far more cheaply than via the current reverse osmosis filtering technique.

          It’s also seeing rehashes of old ideas. One of the most prominent is the notion of building pipelines to bring California water from faraway sources plagued by more precipitation than they need.

          This one gets its most recent push from actor William Shatner, the Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame. Shatner, 84, proposes building a pipeline on the scale of the Alaskan oil pipeline to bring water south from Washington state, where he says there’s an excess. Shatner proposes a Kickstarter campaign to raise the approximate $30 billion this one would cost to build.

    Trouble is, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee this spring declared a drought in 13 of his state’s river basins. Any visitor to the Evergreen State will see swaths of once-green conifers turning brown. So it doesn’t look like Shatner will be able to beam this one up anytime soon.

    Like the Antarctic icebergs, a Pacific Northwest water pipeline was also a Kenny Hahn pipe dream, this one during a somewhat shorter but still severe drought in the early 1990s, a time when then-Gov. Pete Wilson, an ex-Marine, asked all Californians to save water via “Navy showers,” turning the water off while they soaped down.

          Hahn found a political partner for the pipeline idea in then-Gov. Walter Hickel of Alaska, who traveled to Los Angeles to pursue the notion of selling ice water to California in huge quantities. As in Antarctica, some Alaskan glaciers were then calving icebergs steadily, and still are.

          Hickel proposed fabricating this pipeline of plastic on a giant barge as it was being laid on the ocean floor from southern Alaska to Southern California. Plastic, he and Hahn believed, would be far cheaper and more flexible than the usual steel and concrete used for oil pipelines. Plus, any leakage of pipeline water – unlike oil – would be harmless.

          Some thinkers today hear of flooding and record blizzards in the East and Midwest and propose building a water pipeline from there. “You wouldn’t have to worry about leakage, like with oil,” one Google engineering manager said recently, echoing Hickel. “If water leaked, it would do no harm.”

          Drought in the Northwest (several Oregon counties also are in official states of drought now, too) makes it unlikely California will soon get water from there. But a water pipe from the Midwest is conceivable under two circumstances: 1) the price of water rises enough to pay for construction, the same pre-condition needed for new desalination plants, or 2) California is able to extract enough natural gas from the Monterey Shale formation to free up one of the three major gas pipelines bringing that fuel here from Canada, Texas, Oklahoma and the Rocky Mountain region.

          These ideas may sound far-fetched today, or even silly to some, but if gray water could become a reality, why not a water pipeline from someplace very wet?

         
    -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

PROP. 1-A LOSS A NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE ON STATE POLS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 2009, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
"PROP. 1-A LOSS A NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE ON STATE POLS"

Call the Tuesday election results a resounding vote of no confidence against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the entire cadre of politicians who run California state government.

For sure the polls don't lie when they say 82 percent of voters rate the Legislature's performance poor or worse. Or when they report that Schwarzenegger gets almost the same dismal marks.

We also know from the failure of Proposition 1-A that voters will not willingly put up with prevarication by elected representatives. And prevarication is the mildest way to describe what legislators and their backers tried to pull in omitting from all ballot arguments on Proposition 1-A that it would extend from two years to four the duration of increases in sales, vehicle and income taxes.

Voters repeatedly okay new taxes when they think the money will go to causes they like and if they think backers of such proposals are honest. That's why the great majority of school construction bond issues - which amount to property tax increases - have passed in local elections since the two-thirds threshold for passage dropped to 55 percent nine years ago.

But when unpopular politicians try to foist tax increases on Californians via dishonest means without detailing the consequences of defeat for their propositions until the last moment, that defeat is almost certain.

Similarly, the fate of propositions 1-A through 1-E shows it doesn't pay when politicians try to switch money the voters have approved for one cause to something completely different. That's what was attempted here with funds from the state Lottery and tax dollars levied for specific causes like children's mental health and preschool education.

When politicians think the real wishes of the voters are something other than what they originally voted for, those politicians are often wrong.

Another way to look at the outcome is that it demonstrates phenomenal ineptitude by California's highest elected officials.

This outcome, then, amounts to as definite a vote of no confidence as a state government can get, short of recall. By itself, defeat of the first five measures on the ballot would have sent that message. But the overwhelming, simultaneous passage of Proposition 1-F, forbidding raises for government officials when they can't balance a budget, left no doubt.

And now there will be consequences. For the defeat of Propositions 1-C, 1-D and 1-E means at least $6 billion will be lacking from the budget approved in February. Add another $8 billion to $9 billion in expected tax money lost to the recession and California this summer faces a new $15 billion budget hole, at a minimum, with larger figures possible in the future after expiration of two years of increased sales, vehicle and income taxes.

The few Republicans who voted for the February budget compromise that led to this special election make it as clear as they can that they won't be okaying any more new taxes, that any shortfalls will have to be made up via program cuts.

First to face the ax will be public education. Since schools on the elementary and high school levels are entitled to 39 percent of the general fund budget, they also are likely to absorb 39 percent of the new cash shortage.

This could mean larger class sizes, fewer arts and advanced placement courses and less support for athletics, among other items. Look for individual schools to put the bite on parents for private contributions to make up at least part of this. Some public schools already dun parents up to $1,000 per student to keep things going. Those fund-raising efforts will only go up, and as they do, differences between schools in wealthy and poor areas will surely become starker.

There will also be cuts in medical aid to both the indigent and children, not to mention immigrants, both legal and illegal. Park closures can be expected, at both state and local levels. The list will be long and painful. And it will have consequences: When public health programs are cut, the risk of contagion and epidemics necessarily rises.

Once again, blame the ineptitude of public officials. They didn't advertise the consequences of defeat for these propositions either widely or convincingly until it was too late. Just as they tried to hide the true content of Proposition 1-A, they also didn't do much to let people know what a loss could mean.

All of which ought to produce serious consequences for those politicians. But for most, it won't. Today's thoroughly gerrymandered legislative districts virtually guarantee reelection for everyone who's not termed out.

Which means the real solution will have to be effective use of the new redistricting process okayed by voters last year and passage of an open-primary proposition that's set for a vote in June 2010. These two measures are about the only hope voters have of getting some wholesale change in Sacramento, where new faces and ideas have never been needed more urgently.

-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net