03/29/2024

News

The High Costs of Affordable Housing

San Francisco already has built or conserved over 20,000 units of affordable housing of various types, which is about 5% of all units in the city. Also, about 40% of housing units citywide are rent controlled, making them more affordable than market rate units. With its high land acquisition costs, expensive labor and complex regulation, […]

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LA City Council Proposes Yet Another Fee That Will Make Housing More Expensive

On October 23, the Los Angeles City Council will consider approving a 1,000% increase in their Street Damage Restoration Fee (SDRF) ordinance. This is a fee that companies or utilities pay when they must cut in to a street in order to fix or build new infrastructure like internet cables, gas lines, or water pipes. […]

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PAGA Cost Wal-Mart 65 Million Dollars

If you are not familiar with PAGA, it stands for the Private Attorney General Act, a law referred to as the “sue your boss law”. It was enacted in 2004 and California is the only state in the union that has such a law. When the law was created there was a budget deficit in […]

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Housing Crunch is Discriminatory

A NIMBY group may be satisfied with stopping a housing project in their neighborhood but I wonder if they realize that their efforts are discriminatory – creating displacement and relegating people of color to areas of greater poverty. According to a recently released study, that’s exactly what those efforts produce. The study, conducted by the […]

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When Will the Madness End?

CEQA strikes again! This time, sponsors of the CEQA litigation plan to take down a model urban development – 242 residential units surrounded by office buildings and retail space in Rancho Peñasquitos in San Diego County. But, the issue of the lawsuit provocateurs isn’t about the affect the development will have on the environment. Not […]

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Why Gasoline is Going Higher in California

It has become raison d’etre to blame President Trump for everything wrong with California; including higher gasoline prices plaguing our state and contributing to a slowing statewide GDP. But in today’s world that is connected via air, land, sea and increasingly cyberspace; globalization and policies knit countries and states together like never before. Many times […]

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Business Continued to be Plagued By PAGA Lawsuits

I hear from business owners and managers daily and these lawsuits are life changing experiences and could be compared to the stress of a divorce or the death of a spouse. Most of the stories are the same, their employee teetering on the edge of being fired, and the employer trying to help them. Final […]

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Just How Much Money Might CalPERS Have to Collect in an Economic Downturn?

How would a downturn affect all of California’s public employee pension systems, the agencies they serve, and the taxpayers who fund them? In a CPC analysis published earlier this year, “How to Assess Impact of a Market Correction on Pension Payments,” the following excerpt provides an estimate: “If there is a 15% drop in pension […]

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California an Economic Model? Not Quite

A significant sub-theme of Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate change conference in San Francisco this month was that California is a living model of how a nation-state can go green while experiencing economic prosperity. Some Californians take it a step further, contending that going green is itself an economic spur. Certainly California’s current economy is, at […]

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The Looming Apocalypse at LAUSD and Beyond

In two recent posts, I detailed the United Teachers of Los Angeles contract demands on the school district and reported that a strike was likely. And of late, the situation has gone from bad to dire. Perhaps the biggest issue revolves around the union’s demand for a 6 percent pay hike – retroactive to last […]

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Behind the Green Curtain

California’s role as a global climate leader will take center stage during the international climate conference hosted by Governor Jerry Brown in San Francisco this week. The world also needs to know that California is our nation’s housing crisis, homelessness, and poverty leader. We have highest percentage and highest number of homeless and poor people […]

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LA’s Liability Claims Are Out of Control

Liability claims against the City of Los Angeles have caused continuing nightmares for the City’s budget mavens. Over the last five years, the total payouts and settlements for legal actions totaled $541 million, an average of $108 million a year, double the amount for the previous five years (2009-2013) of $264 million, an average of […]

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Is Middle-Class Housing Obsolete in CA?

Recently, California homebuilders delivered to the state Legislature a healthy dose of reality. At a special hearing of the Assembly’s Select Committee on Housing Affordability (the Committee), representatives of the California Building Industry Association (CBIA) illustrated why housing in the state is so expensive. In fact, CBIA may have made a case at the mid-August […]

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The Great Schools Squeeze

Don’t squeeze your kids too hard as you send them off to another school year, because the state of California is already squeezing your kids hard enough to hurt their future. Call it The Great California School Squeeze. The state is stuck in a nasty school funding paradox: Even though our school districts never have […]

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How Much California Water Bond Money is for Storage?

Californians have approved two water bonds in recent years, with another facing voters this November. In 2014 voters approved Prop. 1, allocating $7.1 billion for water projects. This June, voters approved Prop. 68, allocating another $4.0 billion for water projects. And this November, voters are being asked to approve Prop. 3, allocating another $8.9 billion […]

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