MILLENIAL, GEN Z MOVE-HOMES DOING CALIFORNIA A FAVOR

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “MILLENIAL, GEN Z MOVE-HOMES DOING CALIFORNIA A FAVOR”

 

        All those Millennials and adult Gen Z’ers who have moved back home to live with parents after going off to college or to work in other places turn out to be doing a big favor for other Californians.

 

        Their willingness to return to their old bedrooms, perhaps with changed posters on the walls and better quality beds, is one big reason homelessness has not climbed above the current 181,000-odd persons who are unhoused here every night.

 

        It’s also been a large factor in holding down the so-called “California exodus” of the last few years, which saw about 750,000 Californians leave the state in 2021 and 2022, for a net population loss of about 300,000.

 

        Many, too, also are helping their parents hang onto homes they’ve lived in for a generation or more by contributing part of their pay toward mortgage payments and other household expenses.

 

        At the same time, by declining to find multiple roommates and not moving into new apartments erected in the current building boomlet, they are keeping vacancy rates high in all but the most affordable buildings, something that might eventually drive market prices down and possibly then lower vacancy rates.

 

        There has rarely been a larger or more dramatic housing migration than the return-to-the-womb movement, according to statistics compiled by the RentCafe website, which finds huge percentages of Millenials, and especially adult Gen Z’ers staying with family late into adulthood.

 

        First, some definitions. The usual birth years for those considered Millenials are 1980 through 1996. This means most are aged 28-44. Gen Z is composed of folks born between 1997 and 2012, its adult component now aged 21-27. There is some variance in these definitions.

 

        But there’s little doubt at least one-fourth of all Millenials in California now live with parents or other family, or that the Los Angeles metro area has the largest move-home contingent, at 35 percent of all Millenials in the region. The Riverside area has the same percentage of move-backs, while Millenials living at home in the San Francisco and San Jose areas are somewhat less prevalent, at 23 and 24 percent. The trend holds in the Central Valley, too, with 35 percent of Sacramento Millenials living with close relatives and 30 percent in Stockton.

 

        Among Gen Z’ers, moves home are far more pronounced. Many are recent college graduates starting out in various professions, but paid enough to live on their own in apartments that often rent for $3,000 per month and up. Fully 80 percent of those in the Los Angeles region are with parents or parent-like figures; 89 percent in Oxnard live similarly.

 

        The Gen Z figures are only slightly lower in San Francisco (72 percent), Stockton (77 percent), San Diego (70 percent) and San Jose (74 percent).

 

        This is really all about affordability for young adults who current earn salaries that would be adequate to provide them comfortable housing in most other states – but not in much of California.

 

        Actual numbers are almost as staggering as the percentages. Metropolitan Los Angeles is home to about 3 million Millenials, with some 1.3 million in childhood nests. San Diego is about the only area bucking this trend, with only about 18 percent of Millenials living in childhood homes.

 

        One big question is how long this can last. Will many Millenials eventually marry and move to states with far cheaper housing, like Texas, Idaho and Florida? Or will more of them find roommates and begin to share new housing now going up under California’s recent pro-density, pro-development laws?

 

        No one can reliably predict how this will play out over the next 10 years. But in multi-child families, there may be a limit on how many return-home children a childhood home and the parents who live there are willing and able to accommodate.

 

        This implies there may be coming trends toward younger marriage ages, and the concomitant problem of more divorces, as marital splits are most common among those who marry youngest.

 

        The bottom line: No one knows exactly where this trend will lead, but adult children living with parents has never been a formula for long-term stability.         

 

 

 

-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

IS THE BIG HOUSING CRUNCH MOSTLY FICTION?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 10, 29, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

     “IS THE BIG HOUSING CRUNCH MOSTLY FICTION?”

 

        In some parts of California, there is definitely a housing crunch: small supplies of homes for sale, prices that escalate even when population has apparently stabilized and high prices that exclude most Californians as buyers.

 

        But a massive, multi-million-unit shortage? Maybe not. At least, so suggests a scathing springtime report from the non-partisan acting state auditor.

 

        “The (state) Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) has made errors when completing its needs assessments because it does not sufficiently review and verify data it uses,” the report deadpanned.

 

        Maybe that’s why as he campaigned in 2018, Gov. Gavin Newsom insisted California would need 3.5 million new housing units within 8 years just to keep up. That would have been more than 400,000 homes, condos and apartments every year, all supposedly getting snapped up as increased supply caused prices to fall.

 

        None of this has happened. Housing construction never has topped 110,000 units per year during Newsom’s tenure, and a good share of those stand vacant. Newsom’s administration now says California needs 1.8 million new homes by 2030, a huge drop in his needs assessment after less than four years. What happened to the other half of what Newsom said was needed? Maybe the need never existed.

 

        Those earlier numbers stemmed in part from expert estimates that California’s high growth would continue indefinitely. We now see that is not automatic. Fewer newcomers mean less need for new homes.

 

        But the auditor’s report suggests even the 1.8 million housing units Newsom now says are needed by 2030 may be a gross exaggeration. One look at all the vacancy signs on apartment buildings and condominiums in major cities informally suggests this. But HCD does not lower its estimates of need.

 

        The department’s regional need figures, in turn, produce threats of lawsuits from appointed state Attorney General Rob Bonta against city after city, demanding they grease development permits for hundreds of thousands of new units. The demand against Los Angeles, for example, is that it immediately OK about 250,000 new units. It’s as if Bonta has not seen the auditor’s report indicating the figures he uses are flawed. If he hasn’t read it, he is incompetent. If he has, he is dishonest.

 

        How real are the numbers on which the estimates and the resulting legal threats rest? Here’s a bit more of what Auditor Michael S. Tilden reported in a dramatic document so far studiously ignored by politicians:

 

        “HCD does not have adequate review processes to ensure that its staff members accurately enter data that it uses in the needs assessments.”

 

When means leading state officials continually spout unsubstantiated, possibly phony, estimates of housing need. This should discredit any lawsuits Bonta threatens against cities.

 

        For the auditor’s finding means the state housing agency estimates have no proven basis.

 

        All this is vital to California’s future because the estimates are already forcing cities to approve much more housing than they need, reacting to lawsuit threats and the possible accompanying loss of millions in state grant money.

 

That, in turn, could produce future slums, or at least thousands of future short term rental and temporary corporate housing units. But it won’t help prospective home buyers get into markets where the median price now tops $800,000, in part because construction of just one average California unit costs more than $500,000.

 

        The auditor in effect says that when Newsom and Bonta cite housing need figures, they essentially spread fake news.

 

        For sure, when the state bases policy on unreliable or imagined information, it can do great harm. Just that appears likely soon, as passage of laws like the densifying 2021 measures known as SB 9 and SB 10 rested completely on HCD’s unsound information.

 

        Far better would be for the state to concentrate instead on making housing out of converted office space vacated during the pandemic. That, at least, would not ruin any current neighborhoods.

 

        In short, California will suffer irreparable long term harm if it keeps basing housing policy on false or unreliable information.

 

   -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

BET ON IT: CALIFORNIANS WON’T WILLINGLY GIVE UP CARS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2019, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

   “BET ON IT: CALIFORNIANS WON’T WILLINGLY GIVE UP CARS”

          Since the early 1970s time of ex-Gov. Jerry Brown’s first term in office, California officials from the top down have tried to coax Californians out of their cars.

          It began with Brown’s installing as his highway czarina the highly touted “transportation genius” Adriana Gianturco, a Harvard Graduate School product whose first step was to turn two existing lanes of the world’s busiest roadway – the I-10 Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles – over to carpools only.

          This won her the determined enmity of most local motorists, who soon hounded Gianturco from office and away from California, while the lanes went back to general use and the “Giant Turkey” became a cautionary tale for bureaucrats who followed.

          This 44-year-old lesson appears all but forgotten today, as state and local governments obsess over the notion that mass transit and dense development can somehow lessen traffic gridlock.

          That’s one rationale behind all the bicycle lanes appearing in cities large and small today, often at the expense of traffic lanes and parking spaces. It’s also the reasoning that drives efforts to force dense housing near light rail stations and heavily used bus routes, on the presumption that new occupants will not add to traffic, using mass transit instead.

          The problem: Among California cities, only San Francisco has anything like the comprehensive public transportation system needed to accomplish this. As a result, gridlock is now worse than ever in most cities, including San Francisco, where one recent study showed ride-sharing vehicles from outfits like Uber and Lyft make up 30 percent of all traffic.

          Which means some residents have indeed been driven from their cars – right into other cars. There is no reduction in smog from this; in fact, narrowed streets produce more greenhouse gases than before as cars idle far longer at stoplights because of slower traffic flow caused by transformed traffic lanes. The current profusion of sport utility vehicles doesn’t help, either, as they take up significantly more space than sedans and slow things even more.

          Even the presence of new rail lines doesn’t guarantee more mass transit riders. Last year, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Southern California (MTA) found opening the new Expo Line from downtown Los Angeles to the beach increased train ridership – but bus occupancy on parallel routes was down by similar amounts. A net of virtually no cars were taken off the road by this huge investment, leaving the I-10 as congested as ever.

          But the anti-automobile campaign persists. In San Diego, city officials voted to eliminate parking requirements in new construction, even large apartment and condominium projects. Their theory is that residents will use buses, ride-sharing and bicycles if they don’t have their own parking spaces. This ignores the reality that in cities with parking shortages, a lucrative rental market already exists for what spaces there are.

          Meanwhile, state government, spurred by the same unproven theories, pushes cities to dedicate more and more land for new housing, even where developers have expressed little or no interest in starting new projects.

          Local governments which know the preferences and needs of their residents best are taken to task for failing to report progress toward the state’s housing goals. One recent state report singled out 31 Southern California cities for failing to file such reports. The same study showed that 100 out of 539 cities statewide filed no such reports over the last five years.

          At the same time, MTA directors ordered their staff to write a regional analysis of so-called “congestion pricing.” That’s a concept used in a few cities worldwide – London among them – which sees drivers charged either a per-mile use tax or an entry fee for heading into the most congested areas. The study will also try to determine what might happen if for-hire ride-share vehicles had to pay fees for using city streets.

          The politicians pushing all these measures ought to heed some of  California’s political history and see for themselves what happened to Gianturco, who pioneered in their mode of thinking. Along with her boss, then-Gov. Brown, she learned painfully that letting unproven theories or ones known to be false determine public policies and actions can prove personally and politically disastrous.

     -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

EXPECT SENATE RACE TO GET FAR FIERCER

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 10, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “EXPECT SENATE RACE TO GET FAR FIERCER”

          In more than a year since state Attorney General Kamala Harris declared she’s running for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by retiring Democrat Barbara Boxer, Harris’ poll numbers have not changed much.

She pulled about 31 percent in the first public poll on the contest; she got 27 percent and 33 per cent in the two latest surveys, leaving her still the clear leader less than two months before the June 7 primary election.

          So far, no one has laid a glove on her, but her numbers are static.

          And very few seem to care. The latest California Field Poll found fully 48 percent of likely voters undecided in this contest as of early April. So most were not interested, many unaware there’s even a Senate contest underway.

          “Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have sucked all the air out of the room,” opined Democratic Orange County Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez the other day, referring to the presidential nominating races on the same June ballot.

          Sanchez polls second in the race, at 15 percent in early April, up from about 8 percent a year ago. Three Republicans in the race, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz and former state GOP chairmen Tom Del Beccaro and Geoge (Duf) Sundheim, had a combined 11 percent, splintered three ways.

          If the undecideds eventually break in the same proportion as those who have already made up their minds, the November runoff contest will feature two Democrats and no Republicans, under the top two primary system that puts the two leading June vote-getters into a November faceoff.

          But this so-far-sleepy race will soon become more heated. Harris has taken criticism in the last two weeks for having her office represent Gov. Jerry Brown in his effort to keep secret more than 65 emails between him or his staff and the state Public Utilities Commission from 2013 and 2014, when the PUC was deciding who would pay for blunders and disasters at Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison Co. that saw the 2012 closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and the deadly 2010 San Bruno natural gas explosion.

          Consumer groups claim it’s a conflict of interest for Harris to represent Brown when he or his chief of staff, former PG&E lobbyist Nancy McFadden, might become witnesses in Harris’ ongoing criminal investigation of apparent PUC collusion with the big utilities.

          Outside ethics experts agree it’s a conflict, and you can bet Sanchez will hit Harris on it soon. Harris refused to comment, but her office released a statement claiming there’s an “ethical firewall” between lawyers investigating the PUC and those representing Brown.

          Sanchez, meanwhile, will take fire in this mostly liberal state for voting to give gun makers immunity from lawsuits when their products are used in crimes.

          But Sanchez is not shy about answering her critics. To those who blasted her for saying between 5 percent and 20 percent of Muslims would like to see a world-wide caliphate a la the terrorist Islamic State, she says, “Those are the numbers. No experts give a number under 20 percent. I’ve spent 20 years on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and visited many foreign Muslim leaders and they say it’s a huge worry for them. I was just at West Point and they talked about this. It’s in congressional testimony.”

          But Sanchez says she, like many voters, knows little about the three Republicans in the race. “I don’t know them and the voters don’t, either,” she said. So she believes she will survive past June and move on to a hot challenge of Harris and the Democratic Party establishment in the fall.

          “I think the San Francisco Democratic Party establishment clearly told people other than the San Franciscan to stay out,” she said, referring to Harris. That city’s establishment has dominated California politics in recent years, giving the state leaders like Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sens. Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney.

          Meanwhile, the three Republicans each hope to make it past June, but none has nearly as much campaign cash as either Harris or Sanchez.

          It adds up to a potentially fascinating race, and one sure to become fiery as mail balloting begins in mid-May.

         

-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

IMMIGRATION CHANGE VITAL FOR GOP, BUT NOT ENOUGH

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“IMMIGRATION CHANGE VITAL FOR GOP, BUT NOT ENOUGH”

          Last fall’s overwhelming, more than 3-1 Latino vote for President Obama has at last gotten leading Republican politicians to realize they can’t permanently treat all 11 million undocumented immigrants like criminals.

          Gradually, too, from possible presidential candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to former presidential candidate and Arizona Sen. John McCain, they are coming to accept the notion that any significant plan to change American immigration policy must include some path to citizenship for illegals who have lived and worked many years in America.

          They are still far from convincing all their party mates that shifting to this stance and abandoning their far more hard-line past positions favoring mass deportation is suicidal for the party in a nation where Latinos are the fastest-growing population element and voter bloc.

          Tony Quinn, a former Republican political operative and now co-editor of the California Target Book guide to state politics, calls GOP leaders favoring changes in their policy “Republicans who can count.”

          They are, he said, “moving to take over the party with a mission to stop alienating the fastest growing parts of the American electorate.”

          Changing immigration law to create a doable path to citizenship, of course, will not be enough. (And there is some doubt that the 13-year waiting period included in the immigration reform package now before the U.S. Senate fits into the doable category.)

The GOP will also have to convince Hispanic voters its candidates are the best choices on the other issues salient to Latinos – the same ones at the top of other Americans’ agendas. Those include job creation, education reform and health care, according to the latest survey by Latino Decisions, whose polling of Latinos before last November’s election correctly forecast an Obama margin of about 75 percent to 25 percent among Hispanics.

          But without significant retreat from the GOP’s longstanding hardline stances, Republicans will simply not get much more than 2012 candidate Mitt Romney's 22 percent of the Latino vote anytime in the near future, the poll shows.

          “There is a swing vote of about 30 percent among Latinos,” said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington professor and a principal in the Latino Decisions firm. “In our polling, only 13 percent of registered Latinos are definite Republican votes, but 44 percent say they would give Republican candidates a strong look if they took leadership in getting a pathway to citizenship.”

          Barreto adds that his survey “proves the alarm clock is ringing loud and clear for the GOP. Latinos oppose the ‘no-citizenship, but work permit’ approach some Republicans have proposed, because it would create a permanent underclass. A half-baked solution without citizenship at the end is no solution at all and will leave Republicans without the Latino votes they need to get elected.”

          This creates a quandary for some GOP politicians, since much of the GOP base adamantly opposes any sort of citizenship for anyone currently in this country illegally. Wrote one conservative blogger, “The immigration restriction base for the GOP is like public employee unions are for the Democrats in California. They’re the strongest faction.”

          But Republicans who want to soften the party’s stance plainly think those voters – like the conservative Republicans who often said they could never vote for Romney for president – would eventually come back to the party because they would have nowhere else to go.

          And with about one-fifth of the 10 million Latino U.S. citizens who are currently unregistered widely expected to register in time for the 2016 election, it’s clear the GOP needs more appeal to Latinos to have a shot at winning any future national vote. Fully 58 percent of the 800 registered voters surveyed by Latino Decisions said immigration change is the decisive issue for them and another 30 percent rated it second only to jobs.

          That makes this is a gateway issue. “It’s a matter of fundamental respect or disrespect for us,” says Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union. “In the last election, Latinos felt the Republicans were being disrespectful. They can get back to the level of about 40 percent among Latinos if they show that respect.”

          The GOP will need to do more than just shift on immigration, but without opening that gate, the party will surely continue to lose ground, both nationally and in California, where Latinos are expected to be the single largest ethnic group within the next year or two.     

-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

CRONYISM ADMISSION REVIVES LONGTIME ARNOLD QUESTIONS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MAY 10, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CRONYISM ADMISSION REVIVES LONGTIME ARNOLD QUESTIONS”

There were a lot of questionable actions and policies during the seven years Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, many at least bordering on outright corruption. All the suspicions about one of the last of those acts have now been confirmed by the man who once gleefully adopted the sobriquet “governator.”

This move came only moments before Schwarzenegger was termed out of office, departing with a legacy of failure in his avowed aims of restoring both fiscal integrity and public faith in state government.

At the 11th hour of his term, Schwarzenegger commuted the prison sentence of Esteban Nunez, convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the 2008 stabbing death of a San Diego State University student, reducing his term from an already light 16 years to seven.

Nunez, the son of former Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, who often seemed like Schwarzenegger’s lapdog while they hobnobbed across the state, had bragged to his co-criminals that his daddy would get them off easy. The younger Nunez caught a major break when he was charged with manslaughter, not murder.

All he did, his lawyers argued, was hold the victim – 22-year-old Luis Santos – while others knifed him. Is that all?

At the time he cut the sentence, Schwarzenegger said nothing about it. Now he has. In a remarkable interview with Newsweek magazine, the ex-governor and onetime muscleman (muscles much reduced these days, seemingly diminishing in concert with his reputation) blustered that Esteban Nunez was right. His daddy did get him off easy.

“I feel good about the decision…I happen to know the kid really well,” Schwarzenegger said. “There’s criticism out there…because of our working relationship and all that. It maybe was kind of saying ‘That’s why he did it.’ Well, hello! I mean, of course you help a friend.”

There it was, Schwarzenegger’s first outright admission of a gubernatorial decision made strictly out of cronyism – a longstanding form of political corruption. This longtime actor made it plain he believes government should run like show-business, where children of stars and directors (examples: Gwyneth Paltrow, daughter of director Bruce Paltrow, and Kate Hudson, daughter of Goldie Hawn, and Liza Minnelli, daughter of singer Judy Garland and director Vicente Minnelli) often get first crack at becoming stars on their own. Who you know helps greatly as they showcase their talents before others get a chance. By contrast, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution requires government to treat everyone equally.

Schwarzenegger’s admission immediately raised questions about his seven years at California’s helm. Among them, two are the most relevant: What other friends did he help? What did it take to become a Friend of Arnold?

For sure, the Nunez commutation was far from the first Schwarzenegger move that looked corrupt on its face. There was his reduction of the vehicle license fee on his first day in office, a move that vastly benefitted car dealers who largely bankrolled his 2003 recall election campaign and still costs the cash-strapped state about $5 billion a year. A payoff? There were moves favoring developers, casino Indian tribes, oil and chemical companies and many other big money contributors to his political funds. Sure, Schwarzenegger spent some personal money on his campaigns, but others put in more and were often rewarded. Schwarzenegger had virtually promised they would be, observing while he declared for office that political donors expect significant returns on their investments.

It was just the kind of behavior that led to the recall of ex-Gov. Gray Davis, but Schwarzenegger did it with far more style, so he still hasn’t paid a price. Even now, after his Nunez admission, he’s an honored guest at conferences on the environment and immigration and gets movie project offers.

The lack of consequences is reminiscent of his time as governor. He promised to hire a private investigator to look into his acknowledged longtime womanizing, exposed just before the 2003 election. He never did, and paid no price.

When newspapers exposed a million-dollar contract that had his campaign consultant, Mike Murphy, helping promoters of a proposed Ventura County liquefied natural gas receiving terminal that would need Schwarzenegger approval, neither Schwarzenegger nor Murphy paid any penalty.

When this column exposed how his appointees approved huge price increases for a water company owned by the Chevron oil company – one of his largest donors – nothing happened.

Now Schwarzenegger acknowledges only that the lack of prior notice given the victim’s family in the Nunez commutation violated state law. “My office definitely made a mistake…,” he conceded.

Chances are there will be no consequences for that either.

All of which leaves strong implications of frequent and serious wrongdoing throughout Schwarzenegger’s administration. Unless he willingly answers questions about all this, those implications should forever stain the ex-muscleman, ex-governor’s reputation and legacy.

-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