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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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As real life continues to contain a lot of stuff, my posting continues to be more occasional, so this is a twofer.

First, Ben Christopher for Calmatters, "Los Angeles’ one weird trick to build affordable housing at no public cost". (Part of an itinerant series on housing, mostly in California. Also at TheSchism.)

"Affordable housing" in California generally means deed-restricted subsidized housing, discussed in depth here. It involves specialized nonprofit developers, a "layer cake" of various granting agencies, a web of everything-bagel requirements from union-only labor to LEED Platinum that really add up.

In December of 2022, the Mayor of LA, Karen Bass, signed Executive Directive 1, which put a sixty-day approval timeline on 100% below-market rate project and skip the discretionary and environmental review processes, but without adding the usual everything-bagel requirements. These projects also get so-called "density bonus" concessions, which allow them to ignore or soften a variety of local restrictions on setbacks, density, height, and so on.

As a result, no public subsidy is needed, and the market just... produces these things.

Though publicly available data on financing is sparse, an early analysis of the program by the pro-housing advocacy group Abundant Housing LA estimated that roughly three-fourths of affordable units proposed through the policy are doing so without any public money.

More details from Benjamin Schrader here and from Luca Gattoni-Celli here. It's especially important because the Bay Area is planning on shoveling enormous amounts of public money at the problem (meme form here), and maybe there's another way.

The key thing here is to Voltron together "ministerial approval and sixty-day timeline" with "unlimited waivers and super density bonus", without sandbagging it somehow. As one of the developers in the article puts it: “To go from acquiring a lot to putting a shovel in the ground in less than a year is kind of unheard of.”

However, nothing good can last; this was accidental, kind of like the time Rhode Island legalized prostitution. David Zahniser for the Los Angeles Times, "Faced with community complaints, Mayor Karen Bass retools her affordable housing strategy".

But ED1 also sparked a backlash from some community groups. Tenant advocates said too many ED1 projects are triggering the demolition of rent-controlled apartments, upending the lives of renters. Homeowner groups complained that ED1 projects have been proposed in historic preservation districts, raising the specter of six-story apartment buildings sprouting up next to stately Victorians and rows of Arts and Crafts bungalows.

The changes would exclude sites with twelve or more rent-controlled properties (regardless of residents' incomes), historic districts, and very high fire hazard severity zones (which might make sense, but you can still build everything else there). Everyone wants to dip their beak.

Pete Rodriguez, Western District vice president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, said any permanent ED1 ordinance should include provisions that create “more middle-class jobs,” such as requirements for a prevailing wage.

Cindy Chvatal, co-founder of the group United Neighbors, which has pushed back against proposals to rezone lower-density neighborhoods, was far more upbeat. She credited Bass for working with an array of community groups over several months to address concerns about ED1, including the encroachment into historic districts.

(United Neighbors is closely related to Livable California, one of the state's preeminent NIMBY organizations.)

It's unclear how much of an actual effect this will have. Much will depend on whether the policy is expanded or curtailed, going forward.

It’s still far from clear how much of an effect the latest changes will have. Of the more than 200 project applications filed so far, 10 were proposed in historic districts, according to the mayor’s team. Fewer than 10 were proposed on sites with 12 or more rent-controlled apartments, they said.

Also, this week in Berkeley, land of the historic homeless encampment, remember the sacred parking lot, last seen in 2021 where the developer won a ruling?

Ally Markovich for Berkeleyside, "Berkeley will buy Ohlone shellmound site, return it to Indigenous land trust". In March, the city bought the property (mostly with money from one of the indigenous-activist groups) and gave it to the tribe.

The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance today authorizing the purchase, making Berkeley among the first in the country to outright return land to Indigenous people. The city will purchase the property with $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and $1.5 million from the city’s general fund.

How, might you ask, did the Sogorea Te' get twenty-five million dollars, which seems like a lot for a local band of busybodies?

The money for the purchase comes primarily from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Bolstered by a $20 million contribution from the Kataly Foundation, a family foundation funded by Regan Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel chain and her husband Chris Olin, Sogorea Te’ appears to be the best-funded organization in the nationwide land-back movement, based on tax records reviewed by Berkeleyside.

The city has, in total, spent five and a half million dollars on this.

Berkeley is still on the hook for $4 million for mishandling the application to build housing on the site. In February, an Alameda County Superior Court judge fined Berkeley $2.6 million for violating the Housing Accountability Act when it denied Ruegg & Ellsworth’s application for a housing project on the site. Berkeley was also ordered to pay $1.4 million for attorney fees.

(This may seem like a lot, but Berkeley's annual city budget is over half a billion dollars, or about five thousand dollars per resident.)

The people who now have the land are celebrating.

“We set down a prayer here when we danced just now,” said Gould. “We are using our bodies to put down those prayers because underneath this asphalt our ancestors still hear us and they are calling on us to continue. This is not the end of it. This is the beginning of a new chapter.”

As noted in the 2018 EIR, this is not actually a shellmound or burial ground, but the Ohlone believe that it is, and everyone here is respecting their beliefs. (This is not noted in the article. I've requested a correction.) I remember, but cannot find, some initiative to use "indigenous ways of knowing" or the like in public policy. This is what this looks like in practice.

Deregulation to increase housing development feels like the biggest bang for your buck pro growth policy out there.

Just ease the regulations and let private investment handle the rest. Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.

Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.

More than fair, considering that's what the environmentalists wanted in the first place.

It's doubtful that most environmentalists want to help the environment at all.

If we look at their actual actions and proposals, many are quite harmful to the environment. Therefore, environmentalism is best modeled as an aesthetic movement that prefers naturalistic forms to technological ones, and decay over growth.

That’s like saying Nazis didn’t really want Germany to succeed. No, it was just an aesthetic movement that preferred jackboots to street wear?

Environmentalists also have the excuse of being a big tent. “Buy organic” doesn’t come from the same philosophy as “fuck coal plants,” but they both get called environmentalism because of that aesthetic overlap.

You should be more specific about which proposals you’ve got in mind.

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