Elections here and there
There's such a shortage of affordable housing including rental units in Riverside that when one housing project is being built, it makes the pages of the Press Enterprise. Riverside doesn't meet the standards for the availability of low-income housing set by the state. The situation here has attracted the attention of experts of this issue and those who do evaluations of different cities to see where each stands in terms of providing such housing.
(excerpt)
The 101-unit complex will double the number of low-income four-bedroom apartments in Riverside and increase three-bedroom apartments by 50 percent, Kulpa said.
"There isn't a lot geared toward larger families," said Rose Mayes, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Riverside County. "Families are moving in together to get ahead, and kids are coming back to live and take care of mom and dad."
The project cost $25 million. The majority of funding came from Union Bank, which received a $20 million tax credit in exchange, Kulpa said.
The government provides tax credits as an incentive for companies to help fund affordable housing projects. The remaining funds came from the city, donations and loans.
The complex will bring the city one step closer to meeting affordable housing targets set by the state, city officials said.'
"With the housing market the way it is, it is always a challenge to provide enough affordable housing for everyone that's looking for it," said Eva Yakutis McNiel, a city housing official.
What remains daunting is that the article stated that the addition of the six four-bedroom apartments doubled the number of such sized apartments in this entire city. That's pretty pathetic in a city of 300,000 that is close to having about 44% of its housing consist of rental units.
Most city officials have treated rental housing as a four-letter word and affordable rental housing, doubly so. Projects like these as Councilwoman Nancy Hart said, are critical, but there needs to be more of them, and they need to be spread out through the city rather than concentrated in one place, as Rose Mayes, the director of Fair Housing for Riverside County has always said.
As long as we have elected leaders who believe that certain neighborhoods are "special" in that they can't be considered candidates for construction of affordable housing for low-income families, then most of the housing will be built in one place. After all, when several of the housing projects were brought into one of those "special" areas, the downtown, they originally included about 15% of units set aside for lower-income families, but they were shuffled out of these projects, by the Development Committee. The members of that committee said that other housing projects outside the downtown would have about 30% of the units set aside for lower-income housing. But they didn't seem to know where they'd be built.
There are many accounts of individuals and families' experiences trying to find affordable housing including rental units in Riverside, a city which seems mostly geared towards building higher-density housing including condominiums geared towards higher income people. The following is one that I had heard from several different people living near the local state university several years ago.
Some rental properties including many of those built to accommodate UCR students during the 1980s were built with 20 year bonds including those which provided tax breaks if the property owners adhered to requirements that 15% of their units had to be set aside for lower-income families, in most cases those making less than the median income level for the city of Riverside who were not college students.
As the 21st Century came, many of these bonds were approaching the final years until the standards could be relaxed without the property owners being penalized. However, a couple of apartment complexes both owned by out of state real estate corporations thought that they could stretch the rules earlier and hired local attorneys to find ways to get around these rules without being forced to pay stiff financial penalties.
So these complexes began to raise their rents up to 30% at a time, several times within six months to a year, which is legal in this city if proper notification is given to the tenant ahead of time. Currently, Riverside has no rent control laws, one of the obstacles faced by those who advocate for affordable housing for lower-income individuals and families. In one complex, the tenants who were in the lower-income bracket found that rules were enforced against them that weren't enforced against other individuals.
Fortunately, the bond companies audited these apartment complexes and either levied heavy fines or threatened to do so if they didn't bring the percentage of low-income tenants up to the required levels. However, in response, the complexes began evicting month-to-month tenants who were students rather than renting to lower-income tenants to bring their percentage up and even operated at a lower vacancy rate for a while until the bonds expired. Actions that were not really fair to either university students or lower-income families when the only responsible and ethical action to take was to honor the conditions of the bond until its expiration.
Given that several apartment complexes in that area have either been or will in the future be converted to condominiums, that leaves a shortage of affordable housing for students in that neighborhood although UCR is using state funding to build more housing on its campus with the goal that about 50% of its students will eventually have access to housing on or around its campus. The condominiums will likely be bought as investment properties and/or rented out unless there are prohibitions against renting them out for a designated period of time. That condition has been placed on at least one other project but the city found out soon enough that advertisements abounded where these properties were being rented out by their owners even with prohibitions in place and it clamped down.
It's not like university students will remain in Riverside after graduation because there's not a lot of jobs available. They'll move out of the city and more university students will come in to take their places.
Higher rents in this area also prevent a hardship for lower-income individuals or families and provides less housing for them.
Housing's been an issue in this election but the impact of it on the upcoming city elections is not easy to predict. And there are elections elsewhere to consider as well.
In San Bernardino, the city attorney's election is heating up as incumbent Jim Penman has asked his opponent, Marianne Milligan who once worked for him to waive confidentially regarding her personnel records according to the Press Enterprise.
(excerpt)
Since you have decided to seek election to a public office, I am sure you will want your employment history to be as available to the public as is my own employment history," Penman writes in a note to his campaign challenger, Marianne Milligan, who once worked in Penman's office. "I am sure you will agree the voters deserve to know as much about you and your background as they know about mine."
But Milligan said Friday she won't sign Penman's waiver, which expires Election Day, as a matter of principle.
"I can meet you at human resources and you can look at my personnel file. There's nothing in there," she said.
Milligan, who oversees enforcement of city building codes, said she suspects Penman "has something up his sleeve" regarding her records.
"I am not going to give him carte blanche to release that without any liability," she said.
Even Mayor Patrick Morris suspects that Penman is up to no good as he said that he suspected that Penman might plant something that's false in her record to make her look bad. Apparently, Morris had his own experiences in this area while running for office.
(excerpt)
"In my experience with this kind of destructo-derby conduct, if he is given a release of liability he will just go wild," Morris said.
Penman was up in arms at allegations that he would even consider such a thing and said that the mayor was violating his fiduciary duties and all that.
You might find such discourse unbecoming to the political election process or you might sit with a bowl of popcorn and a beverage of choice to watch it all play out. But it's pretty clear either way not much has changed in San Bernardino.
Also playing out, are elections in Redlands where the candidates' campaign donations are the subject of this article in the Press Enterprise. Things seem more quiet there so far though Redlands' politics are often unpredictable as well.
Not all elections coming up involving city officials.
In Riverside, one of the police unions, the Riverside Police Officers' Association is also electing its president in December. Current President Ken Tutwiler is apparently planning to run again, and he brings to the process increased community involvement from his union and attendance at community meetings during the past two years. Whether he faces any competition remains to be seen, but during his term, he's definitely made his mark in a year which saw intensive contract negotiations and an attempt to bring "at-will" positions into the police department's upper management. Both of these developments led to appearances by the union's members at City Hall to speak out successfully on or against these issues.
After seeing the follies involving the marriage between "at will" positions and political agendas put on display in an unflattering way by the Riverside County Sheriff's Department this month, another perspective has come into play regarding the near-decision of those in the halls of power in this city to create those same positions.
Was a similar crisis narrowly avoided in Riverside?
In related news, the police department will be getting 20 new squad cars from the city council.
A Los Angeles Police Department officer who was videotaped choking a teen aged Latino male resigned from the department after pleading guilty to related charges, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Sean Joseph Meade won't be facing time in jail but received 200 hours of community service, three years summary probation and time spent in an anger management class as part of his sentence for two misdemeanor charges of fighting.
(excerpt)
The videotape appears to show Meade locking the teenager's neck in a chokehold for several seconds, according to sources in the department who have viewed it.
Moments later, Meade allegedly removes the boy's handcuffs and challenges him to a fight, say the sources, who spoke on condition that they not be named.
Police Chief William J. Bratton ordered the officer's immediate arrest, saying the attack was "without any physical provocation" and some the LAPD would not condone or tolerate.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at the time called it a "grave violation of the trust we place in law enforcement and an insult to the values of the brave men and women of the LAPD who put their lives on the line to keep us safe."
The teenager had been arrested on suspicion of a curfew violation in Chinatown after been seen walking on a street in Chinatown with a teenage girl. LAPD officers pulled over and questioned them, authorities said.
The officers called the girl's parents, who came to pick her up. The boy was arrested.
Meade allegedly attacked the boy in the juvenile holding room that faces out to the detective room, where the camera was positioned. The sources said the grainy video shows the alleged chokehold. Then commotion occurs off camera. The video lacks audio, so it is unclear whether a verbal altercation sparked the alleged attack.
Another officer in the area heard the disturbance and reported what he had heard to his commander. That sparked an internal affairs investigation.
Officers were unaware that the hidden camera had been set up in the detective room.
Also in Los Angeles, the following meeting notice has been published.
The department will present its report on the May Day incident at MacArthur Park in the City Hall Public Works Board Room on Tuesday, October 9, 2007, at 8:30am.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the labor negotiations between the Orange County Sheriff's Department and the labor union have been broken down for a year and now are headed to court.
(excerpt)
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Superior Court by the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, alleges that the county's Board of Supervisors is guilty of "withdrawing its original wage offer and replacing it with one that is significantly worse . . . reneging on an agreement regarding the cost of retiree medical costs . . . insisting on contract demands that will foreseeably make agreement . . . impossible, and failing to vest its negotiator with authority to reach agreement."
"We've been at an impasse for a while and have reached a level of frustration with no end in sight," said Mark Nichols, general manager of the 1,800-member deputies union.
"We're just not going to have an equitable resolution, so we're asking the courts to have the county comply with bargaining in good faith."
Board Chairman Chris Norby said he was surprised by the lawsuit. "I think it's grandstanding on their part," he said.
"They say that we've taken certain things off the table, but what we offered them they rejected in the first place.
"It's a curious lawsuit; the courts aren't going to resolve this; we have to resolve it by sitting down."
Oh and if you're in Arizona or vacation there, there's a warning about a brain-eating amoeba living in some lakes that's killed several people so far. It's very rare to be infected by them but they get in through the nose, go to the brain and victims are dead within two weeks.
(excerpt)
The 101-unit complex will double the number of low-income four-bedroom apartments in Riverside and increase three-bedroom apartments by 50 percent, Kulpa said.
"There isn't a lot geared toward larger families," said Rose Mayes, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Riverside County. "Families are moving in together to get ahead, and kids are coming back to live and take care of mom and dad."
The project cost $25 million. The majority of funding came from Union Bank, which received a $20 million tax credit in exchange, Kulpa said.
The government provides tax credits as an incentive for companies to help fund affordable housing projects. The remaining funds came from the city, donations and loans.
The complex will bring the city one step closer to meeting affordable housing targets set by the state, city officials said.'
"With the housing market the way it is, it is always a challenge to provide enough affordable housing for everyone that's looking for it," said Eva Yakutis McNiel, a city housing official.
What remains daunting is that the article stated that the addition of the six four-bedroom apartments doubled the number of such sized apartments in this entire city. That's pretty pathetic in a city of 300,000 that is close to having about 44% of its housing consist of rental units.
Most city officials have treated rental housing as a four-letter word and affordable rental housing, doubly so. Projects like these as Councilwoman Nancy Hart said, are critical, but there needs to be more of them, and they need to be spread out through the city rather than concentrated in one place, as Rose Mayes, the director of Fair Housing for Riverside County has always said.
As long as we have elected leaders who believe that certain neighborhoods are "special" in that they can't be considered candidates for construction of affordable housing for low-income families, then most of the housing will be built in one place. After all, when several of the housing projects were brought into one of those "special" areas, the downtown, they originally included about 15% of units set aside for lower-income families, but they were shuffled out of these projects, by the Development Committee. The members of that committee said that other housing projects outside the downtown would have about 30% of the units set aside for lower-income housing. But they didn't seem to know where they'd be built.
There are many accounts of individuals and families' experiences trying to find affordable housing including rental units in Riverside, a city which seems mostly geared towards building higher-density housing including condominiums geared towards higher income people. The following is one that I had heard from several different people living near the local state university several years ago.
Some rental properties including many of those built to accommodate UCR students during the 1980s were built with 20 year bonds including those which provided tax breaks if the property owners adhered to requirements that 15% of their units had to be set aside for lower-income families, in most cases those making less than the median income level for the city of Riverside who were not college students.
As the 21st Century came, many of these bonds were approaching the final years until the standards could be relaxed without the property owners being penalized. However, a couple of apartment complexes both owned by out of state real estate corporations thought that they could stretch the rules earlier and hired local attorneys to find ways to get around these rules without being forced to pay stiff financial penalties.
So these complexes began to raise their rents up to 30% at a time, several times within six months to a year, which is legal in this city if proper notification is given to the tenant ahead of time. Currently, Riverside has no rent control laws, one of the obstacles faced by those who advocate for affordable housing for lower-income individuals and families. In one complex, the tenants who were in the lower-income bracket found that rules were enforced against them that weren't enforced against other individuals.
Fortunately, the bond companies audited these apartment complexes and either levied heavy fines or threatened to do so if they didn't bring the percentage of low-income tenants up to the required levels. However, in response, the complexes began evicting month-to-month tenants who were students rather than renting to lower-income tenants to bring their percentage up and even operated at a lower vacancy rate for a while until the bonds expired. Actions that were not really fair to either university students or lower-income families when the only responsible and ethical action to take was to honor the conditions of the bond until its expiration.
Given that several apartment complexes in that area have either been or will in the future be converted to condominiums, that leaves a shortage of affordable housing for students in that neighborhood although UCR is using state funding to build more housing on its campus with the goal that about 50% of its students will eventually have access to housing on or around its campus. The condominiums will likely be bought as investment properties and/or rented out unless there are prohibitions against renting them out for a designated period of time. That condition has been placed on at least one other project but the city found out soon enough that advertisements abounded where these properties were being rented out by their owners even with prohibitions in place and it clamped down.
It's not like university students will remain in Riverside after graduation because there's not a lot of jobs available. They'll move out of the city and more university students will come in to take their places.
Higher rents in this area also prevent a hardship for lower-income individuals or families and provides less housing for them.
Housing's been an issue in this election but the impact of it on the upcoming city elections is not easy to predict. And there are elections elsewhere to consider as well.
In San Bernardino, the city attorney's election is heating up as incumbent Jim Penman has asked his opponent, Marianne Milligan who once worked for him to waive confidentially regarding her personnel records according to the Press Enterprise.
(excerpt)
Since you have decided to seek election to a public office, I am sure you will want your employment history to be as available to the public as is my own employment history," Penman writes in a note to his campaign challenger, Marianne Milligan, who once worked in Penman's office. "I am sure you will agree the voters deserve to know as much about you and your background as they know about mine."
But Milligan said Friday she won't sign Penman's waiver, which expires Election Day, as a matter of principle.
"I can meet you at human resources and you can look at my personnel file. There's nothing in there," she said.
Milligan, who oversees enforcement of city building codes, said she suspects Penman "has something up his sleeve" regarding her records.
"I am not going to give him carte blanche to release that without any liability," she said.
Even Mayor Patrick Morris suspects that Penman is up to no good as he said that he suspected that Penman might plant something that's false in her record to make her look bad. Apparently, Morris had his own experiences in this area while running for office.
(excerpt)
"In my experience with this kind of destructo-derby conduct, if he is given a release of liability he will just go wild," Morris said.
Penman was up in arms at allegations that he would even consider such a thing and said that the mayor was violating his fiduciary duties and all that.
You might find such discourse unbecoming to the political election process or you might sit with a bowl of popcorn and a beverage of choice to watch it all play out. But it's pretty clear either way not much has changed in San Bernardino.
Also playing out, are elections in Redlands where the candidates' campaign donations are the subject of this article in the Press Enterprise. Things seem more quiet there so far though Redlands' politics are often unpredictable as well.
Not all elections coming up involving city officials.
In Riverside, one of the police unions, the Riverside Police Officers' Association is also electing its president in December. Current President Ken Tutwiler is apparently planning to run again, and he brings to the process increased community involvement from his union and attendance at community meetings during the past two years. Whether he faces any competition remains to be seen, but during his term, he's definitely made his mark in a year which saw intensive contract negotiations and an attempt to bring "at-will" positions into the police department's upper management. Both of these developments led to appearances by the union's members at City Hall to speak out successfully on or against these issues.
After seeing the follies involving the marriage between "at will" positions and political agendas put on display in an unflattering way by the Riverside County Sheriff's Department this month, another perspective has come into play regarding the near-decision of those in the halls of power in this city to create those same positions.
Was a similar crisis narrowly avoided in Riverside?
In related news, the police department will be getting 20 new squad cars from the city council.
A Los Angeles Police Department officer who was videotaped choking a teen aged Latino male resigned from the department after pleading guilty to related charges, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Sean Joseph Meade won't be facing time in jail but received 200 hours of community service, three years summary probation and time spent in an anger management class as part of his sentence for two misdemeanor charges of fighting.
(excerpt)
The videotape appears to show Meade locking the teenager's neck in a chokehold for several seconds, according to sources in the department who have viewed it.
Moments later, Meade allegedly removes the boy's handcuffs and challenges him to a fight, say the sources, who spoke on condition that they not be named.
Police Chief William J. Bratton ordered the officer's immediate arrest, saying the attack was "without any physical provocation" and some the LAPD would not condone or tolerate.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at the time called it a "grave violation of the trust we place in law enforcement and an insult to the values of the brave men and women of the LAPD who put their lives on the line to keep us safe."
The teenager had been arrested on suspicion of a curfew violation in Chinatown after been seen walking on a street in Chinatown with a teenage girl. LAPD officers pulled over and questioned them, authorities said.
The officers called the girl's parents, who came to pick her up. The boy was arrested.
Meade allegedly attacked the boy in the juvenile holding room that faces out to the detective room, where the camera was positioned. The sources said the grainy video shows the alleged chokehold. Then commotion occurs off camera. The video lacks audio, so it is unclear whether a verbal altercation sparked the alleged attack.
Another officer in the area heard the disturbance and reported what he had heard to his commander. That sparked an internal affairs investigation.
Officers were unaware that the hidden camera had been set up in the detective room.
Also in Los Angeles, the following meeting notice has been published.
The department will present its report on the May Day incident at MacArthur Park in the City Hall Public Works Board Room on Tuesday, October 9, 2007, at 8:30am.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the labor negotiations between the Orange County Sheriff's Department and the labor union have been broken down for a year and now are headed to court.
(excerpt)
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Superior Court by the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, alleges that the county's Board of Supervisors is guilty of "withdrawing its original wage offer and replacing it with one that is significantly worse . . . reneging on an agreement regarding the cost of retiree medical costs . . . insisting on contract demands that will foreseeably make agreement . . . impossible, and failing to vest its negotiator with authority to reach agreement."
"We've been at an impasse for a while and have reached a level of frustration with no end in sight," said Mark Nichols, general manager of the 1,800-member deputies union.
"We're just not going to have an equitable resolution, so we're asking the courts to have the county comply with bargaining in good faith."
Board Chairman Chris Norby said he was surprised by the lawsuit. "I think it's grandstanding on their part," he said.
"They say that we've taken certain things off the table, but what we offered them they rejected in the first place.
"It's a curious lawsuit; the courts aren't going to resolve this; we have to resolve it by sitting down."
Oh and if you're in Arizona or vacation there, there's a warning about a brain-eating amoeba living in some lakes that's killed several people so far. It's very rare to be infected by them but they get in through the nose, go to the brain and victims are dead within two weeks.
Labels: business as usual, City elections, labor pains, public forums in all places
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