California
Related: About this forumState Legislature should have a special session on poverty, too
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article31173206.htmlIn contrast to the Legislature’s budget bill, passed only the day before the deal was reached, the final budget retreated from commitments to those struggling against deep poverty. It included some accomplishments, such as the new earned income tax credit, but that will not reach most of those in deep poverty.
The final budget stripped out provisions that would have relieved the most impoverished Californians, including a repeal of the racist maximum family grant rule in CalWORKs and the first cost-of-living adjustments in 10 years for CalWORKs and the state-funded portion of Supplemental Security Income....
There should be a special session to tackle deep poverty as well. That would not only bring attention to how serious the situation is, it would create an opportunity to develop solutions outside the rigid timelines of the normal legislative process.
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daredtowork
(3,732 posts)Last edited Tue Aug 18, 2015, 03:04 AM - Edit history (1)
The real estate industry has lobbyists writing sponsored bills, but no one is there to balance from a poverty perspective.
Right now real estate moguls are plotting State legisltion to relieve themselves of the requirement to provide parking. The Mayor of Oakland is on board. Doesn't that sound like good green social engineering that will save developers tons of money?
However, people in the community will lose an important bargaining chip that they can use to get affordable housing or other needs addressed.
Let's talk about Costa-Hawkins: that law totally undermines cities with rent control. It's basically long-game subversion of rent control. We're in a housing crisis now, and cities should be able to decide for themselves what to about it.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)That's supposed to make it easier to do transit-oriented development (TOD) in places like the gigantic surface parking lot at North Berkeley BART, which could be replaced with a garage with as many spaces and quite a bit of affordable housing.
daredtowork
(3,732 posts)Market-rate developers are using it as a shield for mostly luxury projects: they get it approved through a lot of green-washing, but the project actually isn't that green when the density involved turns out to require massive water requirements (usually without rain recycling), wind issues, shadow issues, fire hazards, allergy issues - basically the only green thing is they built densely around transit and raised the rent of everything in the area while the developer laughed all the way to the bank.
The subject is infuriating because anyone who tries to stop is represented as getting in the way of housing somehow. I will grant that the issue may be different in other cities where "demand" is more related to supply. Since Berkeley is a University town (constant supply a students), near San Francisco (luxury locale and tech boom), and land-delimited, the trickle down housing theory doesn't work here no matter how many good little developer-bots claim that it will. The only way we get affordable housing is if we make it affordable in the first place.
I was just at a meeting with a developer who had skipped over the community process to insert a luxury apartment building into an area where the entire community has been demanding affordable housing. The only thing the community has to bargain with is the parking issue. It's nuts to take that away.
