SB 51: the California politics thread

U can blame my public school education I guess.

the rapacious antigovernment likes of bill and melinda gates?

reading lab reports is better than this

the smaller districts in LA country all have significantly better public schools (and much fewer charter schools) than LAUSD. so if you're saying that lessons learned in LAUSD aren't applicable statewide then 1) sure 2) but public schools are _even better_ in the small districts near us and 3) LAUSD is where i live and i care most about it, so that's the way i think about the statewide SPI race.

and yes, i'm starting from an ideological place. my broad criticism of charter schools is that they literally should not exist. source: i come from the UK which, to a great extent, gets by without them (state-funded religious schools notwithstanding, ha!) and gets better, more uniform results than local school districts, states or the country of the USA.

obviously that's a glib and unfair comparison, and i'm still learning though. i assume the fact that california fund its schools less per student than pretty much any other state is part of the deal. that's not an argument for or against charter schools, but it's a confounding variable.

i don't think charter schooling is (always) a parasite motivated by money. (except the for-profit ones. those should get fucked.) but yes. my prior is: public money should go to schools run directly by public agencies. not independent charities or non-profits. anything else diverts resources from the schools we should focus on, and empirically doesn't yield better results on average. if that's ideological i'm fine with that.

as a non-ideological matter though: based on our research (we're ~4 years out from enrolment) LAUSD's magnet schools test better (fwiw) than LAUSD's charter schools. admission is lottery based (with points for siblings, underrepresented races in that school, etc.), except the gifted/highly gifted programs. they also don't shut down a week into the semester (see the "NEWS" section of this school https://www.pucschools.org/iprep/. can you imagine being a parent at that school?!) wasting public money and time and causing huge disruption.

caek when did u reproduce?? Did u post abt it?

Tell us abt your anchor baby is what I’m saying

public schools are not even better in the small communitiies
around you unless you are only talking about LA beach cities

ha! my anchor baby rules. he is 14 months. he has passports for the world's two most insane democracies.

fwiw our list of school districts to move to in LA county if we leave LAUSD for school is 25 long, 8 are beach.

we send our kid to an LAUSD public school which has a lot of extra programs only because it's a school with a fair number of affluent parents and a lot of fundraising going on. they have some excellent programs but it's not perfect. results vary by community w/public schools, South Pasadena's are great and Pasadena's are not, ours is great and one down the road a mile away is not.

we're considering a magnet in the future.

the couples we're closest to send their kids to a) an expensive private school, and b) a charter.

it's very tough, sometimes i kinda envy my parents, they just shoved me out the door to the bus stop and i went to the one option i had in a ten mile radius.

i think one benefit to our school is we live one block away

the story with pasadena's public schools is insane. i asked friends at caltech and jpl and couldn't find anyone who sent their kids there. they all deliberately lived in south pas or la canada, or went private.

It looks like you mean “La Cañada”

si.

charter schools obviously did not cause the situation in pasadena, but afaict they're a big reason it has persisted http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pasadena-schools-201707-story.html

You mean “sí”

So much fucking pressure around schools these days. My kids go to an SF public school that gets like a 2/10 on greatschools, and guess what? They’re going to be fine (and I love their school, teachers, and administrators!). If you are engaged enough to care about what school they go to, it doesn’t really matter what school they go to.

I’m not reflexively anti-charter. It seems ok to me to try our new ways to teach. Obviously they should be monitored, and if there is shadiness/corruption, they should be shut down.

It does seem that our public schools get saddled with so much. They're ground zero for the culture war as people fight over what gets taught. They're among the first thing to be cut when taxes are cut (CA after prop 13, states like Kansas more recently). It does seem like there's a substantial effort to sabatoge them, so they can no longer serve their original purpose.

Perhaps I do have this all wrong. But I am very skeptical.

I love my kids' SF public school as well.

outic thanks so much for that PG&E breakdown, very relevant to my work

in my case two of my chartering bodies were a) the university of calfornia and b) the public library

what do you make of that, hmm? it’s like public teat inception

― the late great, Wednesday, November 14, 2018 7:31 PM (yesterday)

lol, yeah, it's uh a complex issue, and thanks for calling out the rest of us who are just posting based on our knee-jerk biases. and speaking of knee-jerk biases:

public money should go to schools run directly by public agencies. not independent charities or non-profits

Uh, I disagree. As someone who has dealt with public agencies and worked for independent charities and non-profits, I am biased against a lot of public agencies.

But it's a bit complicated, in that there are plenty of educational programs/services in public schools that are subcontracted to independent charities/non-profits, so one could argue that the charter school is on a continuum as opposed to one side of an either/or

the story with pasadena's public schools is insane. i asked friends at caltech and jpl and couldn't find anyone who sent their kids there. they all deliberately lived in south pas or la canada, or went private.

ha, up here we have "the Piedmont surcharge" -- people will pay at least $100k more for a house in the small town of Piedmont than for the same house blocks away on the Oakland side of the city boundaries. My aunt and uncle did so, at least. It is seen as financially prudent, as you could save money sending the precious offspring to Piedmont public schools vs. paying for private schools and living in Oakland.

right. there are situations like that all over. the weird thing with pasadena though is that it's home to some of the best academic institutions (caltech! jpl!) and the richest white liberals in southern california.
apparently it dates back to supreme-court mandated bussing in the early 1970s. the white people of pasadena responded by withdrawing their kids from public school the following year, and the school district has never recovered from the reputational and financial hit.

Uh, I disagree. As someone who has dealt with public agencies and worked for independent charities and non-profits, I am biased against a lot of public agencies.

― sarahell, Thursday, November 15, 2018 1:45 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

public agencies like school districts would be better if they weren't underfunded in california relative to the rest of the US, which underfunds them relative to the rest of the world. like i get that america has a cultural hostility to the idea that government can be not only competent but optimal, but ... it can be.

the underfunding aspect is probably key to the potential for competence and optimality

back next year:

We’re working hard to re-tool #SB827 - legalizing apartment buildings near public transit - as we approach 2019. Governor-elect @GavinNewsom is a housing champion. I look forward to working with him & my colleagues to create a bright housing future for CA. https://t.co/R7W8edPcAw

— Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) November 15, 2018

cool, I liked that the first time around. It's just so inconvenient that California's transit-rich areas ripe for high-density redevelopment have such incredible historic and cultural value. At least we can mitigate by having licensed anthropologists take photos of the buildings to be demolished, and having our city planners conduct proper AB 52 consultations with tribal governments to discuss how cultural resource monitors will be on-site to dig through any disturbed soil.

caek, I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

In defence of the spirit of that legislation, the goal is make apartment buildings legal near transit, not to make them compulsory.

Why is it…not legal…

Having read the article it seeks to overrule nimby local governments blocking densifcation around transit.

It overrules that, but not the California Coastal Commission, which limits residential structures to a height of something like 50 feet within the "coastal zone," the boundary of which can vary anywhere up to something like 2 miles from the actual coast, depending on how the zone is defined by local municipalities' Local Coastal Programs (which of course have to be approved by the Coastal Commission). But the intent of Wiener's bill would be to leave it up to the state to decide, and limit local control over density in these state-defined high-density areas.

Why is it…not legal…

sheepish ellipses warranted! it's a good question

it's not that multi-family residential is illegal near transit. it's that multi-family residential is illegal (i.e. forbidden by local zoning) almost everywhere.

the argument for 827 goes like this afaict.

1. california is not building enough homes. in raw numbers (population growth vs new homes, affordability of housing relative to cost of living, number of homeless people) the problem is worse here than anywhere else in the US. i think this is pretty uncontroversial.

2. it's important to build homes! 827 argues that it's so important that, in the same way the state regulates education at the city level, it should regulate housing at the city level to provide some baseline level of service.

3. the social, economic and environmental cost of long car commutes is enormous. for this reason, we need to build houses not out in the desert, but near jobs and, failing that, near transit.

827 is kind of a blunt instrument though: i'm sketchy on the details, but the version they tried last year would immediately upzone everywhere within 1/4 mile(ish?) of transit (light rail and express bus, not local bus) to require cities to permit somewhere between 4 and 8 story residential (depending on details of transit, etc.), subject to other zoning restrictions (e.g. the various insane requirements about parking etc. still apply).

i'm very sympathetic to the view that the effect of 827 would have had on south LA (which would pretty much all have been upzoned by this), in combination with the 2028 olympics, would have been catastrophic. these are the poorest people in the city of LA.

i am totally unsympathetic to the protests of cities like berkeley, which refuses to build apartment buildings near their three bar stations, at the same time as building 8 story parking lots https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/5/18065382/berkeley-new-parking-garage-housing-nimby-cars-homes.

i'm interested to see what carve outs and changes and pork the 2019 attempt has.

three *bart stations

i added this sentence to paul koretz's wikipedia page in a fit of pique btw:

"In 2018 he campaigned successfully against SB 827 with a goal of preventing new development. He stated that the bill would "have a neighborhood with little 1920s, '30s and '40s single-family homes look like Dubai 10 years later".[14] He later revealed that he had not actually read the bill, which sought to place 45-85 feet limits on building height.[15]"

i've linked this before, but it's worth reading

https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_architect_in_la_specializing_in_multifamily/

Yeah, although SB827 upzones almost all of San Francisco (inckuding my little single-family-house neighborhood), I am massively for it. Also my family rarely drives, so I know it can be done.

The California GOP’s collapse in Orange County wasn’t limited to House races. Right now Gavin Newsom is losing the county by 1.2 points, and may end up winning it. Jerry Brown lost it by 11 points. https://t.co/YlrxaMjB1S

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) November 17, 2018

It overrules that, but not the California Coastal Commission, which limits residential structures to a height of something like 50 feet within the "coastal zone," the boundary of which can vary anywhere up to something like 2 miles from the actual coast, depending on how the zone is defined by local municipalities' Local Coastal Programs (which of course have to be approved by the Coastal Commission). But the intent of Wiener's bill would be to leave it up to the state to decide, and limit local control over density in these state-defined high-density areas.

― del griffith, Friday, November 16, 2018 6:45 PM (yesterday)

I would think that if the party in power/interests of gov't leadership are pro-density, that they will appoint people to the Coastal Commission that share those interests. my grandfather was on the CA Coastal Commission in the 80s/early 90s -- initially a lot of their work/policy (iirc) was about things like preventing offshore oil drilling and corporate luxury hotels and things like preserving public access to the coast (rather than selling it to private interests/investors). At some point their meetings became almost 90% about rich person A wanting a ruling against rich person B adding a story onto their mansion that would reduce rich person A's view of the beach. Then he got unappointed by Willie Brown because he refused to support some corrupt douchebag's re-election campaign in his district.

it's not that multi-family residential is illegal near transit. it's that multi-family residential is illegal (i.e. forbidden by local zoning) almost everywhere.

is your definition of "almost everywhere" based on square footage or ...? because that seems a bit of an exaggeration, but I could, uh, research that.

And zoning in CA isn't that black or white, in practice. There are things that aren't permitted, but you can apply for conditional use permits, which are then subcategorized as minor and major. You can also go for variances, again minor and major. Though, these present a lot of time-consuming and expensive hoops to jump through (time and price vary, obv).

i mean based on sq ft in the state of california, sure MFH is not permitted almost everywhere.

but presumably you mean in urban california.

here's a map of MFH zoning in SF. 26.5%. https://sfzoning.deapthoughts.com/ this is as good as it gets in CA. in LA:

Just under two thirds of land in the city of Los Angeles is now zoned to allow residential construction, according to the Department of City Planning. Of that total, more than 75 percent is reserved for single-family homes or duplexes.

so that's 16.5% of the city of LA zoned for MFH.

the rest of the the bay area, LA county and SD are worse even than this.

so not permitted "almost everywhere" is maybe a bit strong, but not very, given the magnitude of the housing crisis.

as you say though, local variances complicate the picture. but they don't generally complicate that picture in a way that makes it *easier* to build. e.g. SF has hundreds of vacant parcels that are, in principle, zoned for MFH and nothing is getting built on them. clearly simply upzoning is not sufficient. but it's a start.

the reason I brought up variances is that Capital can find a way -- enough political and financial capital, most regulations can be worked around. Of course, that reinforces inequality big time. And SF is great example of using political and financial capital to block construction.

One of the big political issues here, is the conflict between those that support pretty much all housing, and those who want mainly affordable housing. In practice, you get affordable housing advocates siding with the anti-growth people to block high-density market rate projects.

So yeah, I think we agree that it "is not sufficient, but it's a start"

"i am totally unsympathetic to the protests of cities like berkeley, which refuses to build apartment buildings near their three bar stations, at the same time as building 8 story parking lots https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/5/18065382/berkeley-new-parking-garage-housing-nimby-cars-homes.";

Berkeley is fucking nuts about this shit and I've lived here for over 20 years. I really gets on my fucking nerves. I keep hoping the worst of the people who are like this are going to die off soon but they seem to keep hanging on andmoving slowly through the fucking grocery store with their carts and annoying me.

lol u at Berkeley Bowl?

! Dem hold on CA grows, with potentially big policy effects. GOP ended Dem supermajority in June by recalling a senator over a gas tax hike. But in Nov., voters refused to repeal that hike, and Dems regained all-important supermajority.

It now looks like a 29-11 (+3 Dem) Senate. https://t.co/Y9XrBKBYTt

— Taniel (@Taniel) November 20, 2018

And Dems' majority will likely be even larger in CA's Assembly; it stands at 60-20 (+5 Dem) based on the current leads in each district. (In fact, Dems already picked-up a seat in June when the GOP was shut out of the Top 2 in a GOP-held district.)

— Taniel (@Taniel) November 20, 2018

cautiously excited about this with newsom as gov tbqh

those supermajorities are not even thaaat close, which hopefully minimizes the amount of bullshit/pork/timewasting necessary

we'll see how well Newsom navigates the legislature. Jerry Brown he is not.

That’s what makes me optimistic: he seems like a blank slate. Although admittedly I don’t know whether Sacramento’s equivalent of Chuck Schumer is worth much.

Also one of the reasons the supermajority is a big deal is because the leg can now overrule the gov’s veto. They didn’t do that for brown but newsom just gives off this “overrule me” vibe.

he also gives off this "i will feed a cat into an ATM and stab someone over a business card with superior minimalist design" vibe

heh

Nobody will remember this but Umberg lost to Nguyen about 10 years ago for the OC BoS special election that turned really nasty & toxic. Nice little bit of karma.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/29/california-gov-elect-gavin-newsom-faces-pressure-to-cut-77b-rail-plan.html

"There's no way there's going to be a profit on this thing, so there's not going to be private interest in it," said Baruch Feigenbaum, an assistant director of transportation Policy at Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. He believes the project was designed to go through the Central Valley for political reasons and won't be competitive with air travel.

What are the "political reasons" this dude is referring to?

I really want to like this project, but all the fiscal conservatives in my life have left me feeling fairly terrified about it. Should a Californian feel terrified about it?