Tag: California

Million Dollar Public Restrooms, 600k Affordable Housing Units – High Costs in California

The project in question is for the Noe Valley neighborhood, which wants a public toilet for its Town Square. The problem is the price tag: $1.7 million.

State funds will not be forthcoming for the project, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office told the San Francisco Chronicle this week amid mounting controversy. Republicans have hammered Newsom, a Democrat, over the state’s homelessness problem, with San Francisco a prime example.

“A single, small bathroom should not cost $1.7 million,” Erin Mellon, the governor’s communications director, wrote in a statement. “The state will hold funding until San Francisco delivers a plan to use this public money more efficiently. If they cannot, we will go back to the legislature to revoke this appropriation.”

A public toilet ‘should not cost $1.7 million.’ Why California’s governor is wading into a San Francisco neighborhood’s ‘inexplicable’ plan

Six years later, neither the mandate nor the money has proved to be nearly enough. In 2016, Los Angeles had about 28,000 homeless residents, of whom around 21,000 were unsheltered (that is, living on the street). The current count is closer to 42,000 homeless residents, with 28,000 unsheltered. Prop HHH has built units, but slowly, and at eye-popping cost. The city says that 3,357 units have been built, and the most recent audit found the average cost was $596,846 for units under construction — more than the median sale price for a home in Denver. Some units under construction have cost more than $700,000 to build.

The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane’

Arnold Schwarzenegger donated $250,000 to build 25 tiny homes intended for homeless vets in West LA

GovSchwarzenegger

Thank you for sharing.

I hope this reminds all of you that each of us has the power to make somebody else’s day a little better. I’m going to issue all of you the challenge I gave in my newsletter this month because I hope each of you spread some positivity before the end of the year:

I see so many people post on social media, “I wish I could help,” or, “It’s too bad I’m just an average person.” Let’s analyze that. Do you really wish? Because you can make that wish come true today. And don’t beat yourself up for being ”average”, or “normal” or a “nobody.” We all have something to offer. You might just be “average” but let me tell you something, a marathon isn’t run in one shot. You take the first step, then the second step, and then about 55,000 more steps. You can take the first step to help someone else today.

Do you have an extra blanket at home you can give someone today? An old jacket you aren’t using? A few dollars for a meal? 15 minutes for a human conversation? We all have something to offer. You don’t have to count on city officials. You can stop wishing you can help and start helping right now. You have power. You can be useful in some way, no matter what it is.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Go make someone smile today, don’t wait!

Homelessness in California

It should never have gotten this bad. Homelessness is solvable. Its primary driver is housing unaffordability (not a sudden recent increase in mental illness or substance use disorder, despite claims to the contrary), and so the solution has always been more housing, particularly for those who don’t currently have it. But California has allowed homelessness to metastasize over the past few decades. As the humanitarian crisis has gotten worse, it has become a political crisis. Homelessness is one of the major themes in this year’s campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a growing number of commentators have cited it as evidence that the “California dream” is dying.

…

Because Bay Area cities have failed to produce enough supply to keep up with population increases, lower and middle-income residents now have to compete for housing with the super-wealthy, whose ability to outbid everyone else continually forces prices up. As a result, homes in Berkeley sold for about 19 percent above asking price on average in the first three months of this year, the highest citywide average in the nation.

It’s Hard to Have Faith in a State That Can’t Even House Its People
Ned Resnikoff

From the comments:
Nate
Denver
@Talbot The entire country’s population has boomed from 1970–up from 200MM to 330MM. Somehow other parts of the country have been able to keep up with the growth while California, one of the richest states in the courtly, can’t manage to build new housing. I’m an attorney who makes $350K a year, and I left the Bay Ara because felt like I couldn’t afford to live there anymore. It’s that bad. I would have gladly lived in a high rise condo if an affordable one were available, but local zoning laws didn’t allow them to be built. People in CA are stuck in the 1950’s mentality that density equals poverty. It’s as though they have never seen Europe or Manhattan.

Evan
Florida
I was visiting my son in LA about 3 weeks ago. The numbers of homeless people is my greatest takeaway from that trip. I’ve been to LA many times, but this was almost dystopian in breadth and scope. Whether it has anything to do with capitalism I’ll leave to other thinkers, but eyes don’t lie, and there is something radically wrong with a place where million dollar homes are 100 yards from homeless camps under almost every highway overpass.

That Lost Golden Age – How Real Was It?

There’s a moment in “The End of the Golden Gate” that seems to encapsulate all three things, penned with a light hand and probing eye by comedian W. Kamau Bell:

“I once did a show at Vesuvio Cafe with Allen Ginsberg opening with a new poem. Margaret Cho dropped in to try out some new material. Kirk Hammett from Metallica and Jerry Garcia played folk songs on acoustic guitars. Annie Sprinkle did a visual history of porn. … Armistead Maupin sat in the back writing a book that ended up being ‘Tales of the City.’ And unbeknownst to all of us, Willie Mays and Rick Barry were in there the whole time.”

In his essay, Bell acknowledges: “Um, I don’t think that timeline works” of the fictional gathering he conjures above, only for his friends to reply, “You missed it, man. It was so cool.”

San Francisco is forever dying
Michelle Robertson
SFGATE

Article discusses this book:
The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco

Skid Row Los Angeles

Andy Bales, the CEO of the Union Rescue Mission, requested a security guard accompany himself and host Tonya Mosley during their interview. And as the interview started, they came across a person agitated by their presence.

Bales says this happens just about every day, especially during the pandemic. The lack of sidewalk space in front of the Union Rescue Mission demonstrates that Skid Row is “the worst it’s ever been,” he says.

“This whole street was completely clear. But now it’s rare that you can find a sidewalk that you can pass,” he says. “It’s packed with people devastated by homelessness.”

Legal Minds Clash On How To Fix The Homeless Crisis On LA’s Skid Row
Here & Now

Quentin Tarantino – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Novel Review, NYTIMES

Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is, to borrow a phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage.

It’s his novelization of his own 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (the book’s title omits the ellipsis). It’s been issued in the format of a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of book you used to find spinning in a drugstore rack.

It’s got a retro-tacky tagline: “Hollywood 1969 … You shoulda been there!” If it weren’t so plump, at 400 pages, you could slip it into the back pocket of your flared corduroys.

Quentin Tarantino Turns His Most Recent Movie Into a Pulpy Page-Turner
Dwight Garner
NYTIMES

How Homelessness Became a Crisis in California

There are many contributors to the problem. The horrors of childhood trauma and poverty, mental illness and chronic drug abuse surely add to the likelihood that someone lives on the streets. But Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says the primary cause of the crisis is simple: Housing has gotten way too scarce and expensive.

A few years ago, a team of economists at Zillow found that once cities cross a threshold where the typical resident must spend more than a third of their income on housing, homelessness begins to spike rapidly. When incomes don’t keep pace with the cost of rent, a cascade effect ripples through the housing market: High-income folks start renting places that middle-income folks used to rent, middle-income people start renting places that low-income folks used to rent, and low-income folks are left scrambling.

“It’s sort of a game of musical chairs,” Roman says. “And people who have a strike against them — because they have mental illness or a substance abuse disorder or a disability — are the least likely to get the chair.”

Homelessness wasn’t always this bad. “In the 1970s, there was an adequate supply of affordable units for every low-income household that needed one — and we really didn’t have homelessness,” Roman says.

How California Homelessness Became A Crisis
Greg Rosalsky
Planet Money, NPR