Los Angeles

California Governor Newsom's Energy Policies Biased Against Those Who Voted For Him

Ronald Stein — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 20:29:58 -0400

It has been a tough year for everyone during the pandemic, but more so on the lower income portion of the population. As we emerge from an emotionally and financially challenging year, we are seeing that the wealthy and middle-income folks have mostly recovered. The bottom half remain far from it.

This dichotomy is evident in many facets of the economy, especially in employment. Jobs are fully back for the highest wage earners, but fewer than half the jobs lost this spring have returned for those making less than $20 an hour, according to a new labor data analysis by John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University and co-director of Opportunity Insights.

California’s dysfunctional energy policies have already made the state’s electricity and fuel prices among the highest in the nation. Those high California energy costs have been contributory to the rapid growth of “energy poverty”, and some of the highest unemployment, overcrowding, homelessness, and poverty rates in America, right here in the Golden State. The bottom half, many of which voted for Gavin Newsom, are the ones disproportionally suffering from some of the highest energy costs in the nation.

Many of the folks that voted for the Governor can least afford more expensive energy in perpetuity. Those exorbitant energy costs make California’s economic recovery from the pandemic even more challenging for the 18 million (45 percent of the 40 million Californians) that represent the Hispanic and African American populations of the state. The median income for Latino households in 2016 was $56,200, $55,200 for African American households, and $96,400 for white households. According to several studies, as many as 40 percent of all Californians cannot regularly meet basic monthly expenses.

In 2019, 57 percent of Black families and 50 percent of Latino families with children were poor in terms of net worth, lacking enough financial resources to sustain their families for three months at a poverty level, finds new research from Duke University.

Newsom continues to perpetuate the state’s dysfunctional energy polices and continues to do everything possible to further INCREASE the costs for energy for its 40 million residents which does not bode well for the bottom half making less than $20 an hour.

Vehicle transportation is the survival mechanism for low-income people. If you try to increase the cost of automobiles and the costs of fuel, you hurt low-income people. Some of the taxes and climate policy costs hidden in the all-in posted price of fuel at the pump are federal tax, excise tax, state tax, local sales tax, cap and trade program compliance costs, low-carbon fuel standard program compliance costs, and renewable fuels standard program compliance costs. The wealthy and middle-income folks may tolerate these non-transparent costs. Those less fortunate financially, constantly need to make decisions with their limited income to pay for rent, utilities, food, schooling for their kids, or gas for their vehicle.

The Governor is proud of California, through its dysfunctional energy policies imports more electricity than any other state– currently at 32 percent from the Northwest and Southwest, and being the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil energy from foreign countries, And dysfunctionally HOPES that other states will continue to be able to generate enough power to meet the demands of the state.

California’s dependency on foreign suppliers has increased imported crude oil from foreign countries from 5 percent in 1992 to 58 percent today of total consumption. The imported crude oil costs California more than $60 million dollars a day, yes, every day, being paid to oil-rich foreign countries, depriving Californians of jobs, careers, and business opportunities.

The Governors latest moves to further reduce oil production and require larger setbacks for existing oil production wells will further decrease in-state production and require the State to increase its monthly imports resulting in expenditures approaching a whopping $90 million EVERY DAY for foreign countries to support the states’ fifth largest economy in the world.

It is mind boggling that the Governor continuously perpetuates the racial biasing of greater energy costs onto those that can least afford “energy poverty” as anyone can see the direct correlation between high energy costs for electricity and fuels, and poverty, homelessness, and a housing affordability crisis already impacting the Golden State.

The growing homelessness and poverty populations in California gives the Governor more to talk about, while he fuels (no pun intended) energy poverty onto the California residents. The accelerating costs for electricity and fuels are also fueling (again, no pun intended) the exodus of businesses and residents out of the once Golden state.

As Governor Newsom faces a recall election, he continues to do absolutely nothing to REDUCE energy costs for the state’s residents that can least afford more expensive energy. To heal the “wound” that is causing homelessness and poverty to be on the rise, Newsom needs to DECREASE the cost of energy, not continually increase it.

The wealthy and middle class have more tolerance for expensive energy, but poverty kills and having Newsom racially biasing more expensive electricity and fuels onto the less fortunate, that voted for him, will worsen poverty. Poverty, not global warming, remains the biggest challenge. To survive the recall, Newsom needs the votes of those that he is racially biasing high energy costs upon.

This piece first appeared on CAPoliticalReview.com.

Ron Stein is an engineer who, drawing upon 25 years of project management and business development experience, launched PTS Advance in 1995. He is an author, engineer, and energy expert who writes frequently on issues of energy and economics.

Trust the Science: The Blue State Surge is Real

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 20:28:58 -0400

For months the conventional wisdom among Democrats, amplified by their obliging claque in the media, was that lockdowns played an essential role in containing COVID-19. The great heroes, in addition to Anthony Fauci, were hardline governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California’s Gavin Newsom and, most of all, New York’s Andrew Cuomo.

Yet now, more than a year later, the lockdown states—starting with New York and New Jersey—are again leading the nation in coronavirus infections and deaths per capita.

By contrast, some of the states with Republican governors who were routinely castigated for unlocking things and supposedly killing their residents, most notably Florida, Georgia and Texas, did indeed suffer an increase in fatalities last summer. But since then, even after opening their economies, these states continue to suffer fatality rates per capita well below those of the locked-down Northeastern states and about equal to California, which has maintained one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns.

What emerge from these trends are some clear issues with transmission that transcend lockdowns, mask mandates and other punitive measures. However justified, such actions have not addressed the fundamental reasons why some geographies and populations have suffered so much more than others. That’s to say that while the blue state governors aren’t necessarily to blame for the surges their states are experiencing, it’s clear that the economically and personally disruptive measures did not have the expected impact.

What did make a big difference, it turns out, is not so much the severity of lockdowns but pre-existing conditions. The likely cause here can be best identified as “exposure density” brought on by crowded housing, transit, and office environments.

That helps explain why, after New York City’s suburbs were hit hard in the first wave, the current surge has hit the outer boroughs, where a much higher share of workers have had little choice but to continue taking the subway or other transit.

Nationwide, urban exposure to the pandemic also reflects their greater inequality. Higher rates of poverty and overcrowded housing accentuate the worst effects of the pandemic, which tore through impoverished parts of New York, Houston, Los Angeles County, Chicago’s poor south side, and similar areas. The Bronx, for example, has suffered an 80 percent worse death rate than denser yet wealthier Manhattan, while Brooklyn’s rate is 50 percent worse than Manhattan’s.

This can be seen also in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, whose sunshine-blessed and auto-dominated society suffered a fatality rate 60 percent below that of transit-oriented metro New York. Yet while fatality rates have been very low in affluent areas with fewer crowded households, such as west Los Angeles and Irvine, they have been much higher in areas like east and south Los Angeles. In Orange County, the fatality rate in affluent, single family dominated Irvine is 22 per 100,000 compared with 195 in neighboring Santa Ana, which is heavily Hispanic, poor and suffers crowded housing conditions.

This is an international phenomenon seen across the world’s great urban areas. During the first lockdown, almost 20 percent of the Parisian population fled to the countryside, accelerating an escapist trend that had been underway for years: the core city of Paris has lost 700,000 residents (nearly 25 percent of its population) since 1954, while millions of new inhabitants have swelled the suburban population. Meanwhile, the densely packed Department of Seine-Saint-Denis, a place synonymous there with inner ring suburban poverty, had a staggering 130 percent excess mortality rate when the virus first hit last year.

Read the rest of this piece at The Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Photo credit: Matryx via Pixabay under CC0 1.0 License.

The California Economy vs. Sacramento

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 04 Apr 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Over the past few years California’s plight has taken on mythic proportions — a cautionary tale of progressive woe among conservatives, but a beacon for a future enlightened capitalism among its woke supporters. The current battle over the potential recall of the preening governor, Gavin Newsom, likely will enhance these extreme interpretations on both sides, but likely will not be sufficient to make the changes needed to restore the state’s legendary promise.

Outside observers, and many in the deep-blue California media, have trouble comprehending the perplexing dilemma posed by the state. In recent years California’s relative economic strength in many fields, notably manufacturing, has ebbed, and it suffers the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate. The pandemic has driven unemployment to the highest level in the nation outside Hawaii, devastating the state’s vast pool of generally low-wage hospitality and service jobs. Future job prospects are not bright, as evidenced by declining new job postings measured by Indeed, which ranks California worse than any state except the tourist-dominated Aloha State. According to the state’s own outlook, California is not supposed to get back to 2019 levels till 2025.

Yet despite all this, California cannot be easily dismissed as a rusty bucket like Illinois, or an aging legacy economy like those of the Northeast. It is not facing imminent bankruptcy, and its rate of net out-migration, though rising, is not nearly as bad as those of New York, Illinois, and New Jersey. Yet according to U.S. Census Bureau data, only twelve states have done worse in this category than California during the 2010s: The number of people exiting for other states exceeded the number moving in by more than the population of San Francisco. Those states lack anything like California’s technology sector, whose bounty has allowed the state to sail through the pandemic with an expanded budget surplus (though the overall long-term prognosis is not so rosy). This is critical to funding its endlessly expanding welfare state.

Before the social-media era, California boasted a remarkably diverse economy, with a job base that included many high-paying blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Climate policies, as even some green groups admit, have made these gaps wider. Due largely to overly restrictive land-use regulations, some tied to the state’s obsession with climate change, total residential building permits per 1,000 population were 40 percent below the national average in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Soaring energy prices, also brought on by green policies, have kept industrial job creation well below national averages.

Even as the state mints large numbers of new billionaires, conditions for the working class deteriorate. Over the past decade, the California economy has been divided, Janus-like, between a rising innovation economy, based largely in the Bay Area, and the overall state economy, where 85 percent of all new jobs pay below the median income of $66,000, and 40 percent under $40,000. Middle-income jobs actually declined; for every high-end job, the state created five low-wage ones.

Even with the recent Silicon Valley boom, growth in high-wage jobs has been faster in competitor states such as Texas, Utah, Colorado, and Washington. For those without a college education, as even the New York Times notes, California does worse than virtually anywhere else in the country. State politicians, of course, talk about the promise of “green jobs,” but the reality is that they generally are less permanent, pay less, and are far less unionized than established blue-collar work.

No state is more fervent in its theoretical embrace of people of color than California, so much so that the state now requires the teaching of woke racial theories at the state’s already underperforming schools. There’s less interest in fixing California’s miserable record of educating its poorer residents (largely Latinos and African Americans), with performance near the bottom among the states, including states such as New York, Florida, and Texas.

Now even technology is losing its allure. In the past year numerous major tech firms — Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, McAfee, Tesla, Dropbox — have moved all or part of their key operations from the Bay Area, mostly to sprawling Sun Belt suburbs. Perhaps more revealing: Three-quarters of venture capitalists and tech-firm founders, notes one recent survey, expect their ventures to be totally, or mostly, operating online, while last year’s largest gains in tech workers, according to a study by Big Technology, were in places such as Madison, Wis., with a net loss in workers coming to the Bay Area.

Read the rest of this piece at National Review.

Photo credit: Ken Lund via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Reasons People Are Moving From Los Angeles to Dallas — More Important Than Escaping Higher Taxes

Douglas Newby — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 20:28:58 -0400

Californians escaping high taxes dominate the real estate news. Yes it is true, leaving California because of high city, county and state income tax for Dallas and Texas, with no income tax, is a motivation, but last on my list of seven reasons why people are moving from Los Angeles to Dallas. People will pay more to live where they like living, whether that means higher taxes, higher home prices or higher cost of living. People will leave a place they do not enjoy if they can afford to. This is the case with Angelenos. Residents have found Los Angeles increasingly unpleasant.

For generations California offered sunshine and blue skies, opportunity and greater freedom. The skies became grayer, opportunities became increasingly restricted and basic freedoms curtailed. Subtle regulatory incursions like delaying construction of a home for a few years, to the overt oppression such as shutting down schools and restaurants long after other parts of the country successfully reopened breed discontent. A trickle of clients moving to Dallas became a wave. The pandemic brought everything into hyperfocus. Californians now want to live in Dallas, a city their family would enjoy. Now the skies in Dallas are bluer, the grass is greener, the parkway trees taller, freedom more profound and opportunities more robust.

Dallas Is Drawing People from Los Angeles to Dallas for These Seven Reasons

Nonpartisan Elected Officials Draw Angelenos From Los Angeles to Dallas

When political divisiveness is at an all-time high, Dallas has nonpartisan elections for the Mayor, City Council, and DISD school board, all held six months away from partisan elections. In California too local officials are officially non-partisan but in reality they generally identify and act as progressive Democrats. In contrast, this November, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson made no partisan election endorsements out of respect for his nonpartisan office. This allows the city and public school policy to be debated in nonpartisan terms.

Dallas Mayor Calls for Lower Taxes and More Employment Attracting People From Los Angeles to Dallas

While across the country city tax rates and growing financial obligations are going up, crushing the future of cities, the tax rates in Dallas have gone down and the Dallas mayor is pushing to make the tax rate still lower. Mayor Eric Johnson grew up in a low-income West Dallas neighborhood and understands the need for jobs in a city and a healthy business climate to generate jobs.

Dallas Supports Law and Order and Reduction in Bureaucracy

When cities are struggling with lawlessness and an exorbitant increase in murder rates, many have called for defunding or lowering the funding the police. Mayor Johnson has spoken out forcefully to maintain overtime pay for police and lower the pay for city bureaucrats and administrators. The Dallas mayor also advocates for increased transparency and efficiency in city government. This creates a sense of urgency for Dallas to get better, not to be satisfied with Dallas just being better and safer than other cities.

Dallas Health and Prosperity

The pandemic has made most cities the most vulnerable to both COVID and the shutdown.
Dallas has been very respectful of the pandemic and the health of the city. Dallas has also been very respectful for the need to be as open as possible in order to preserve the incomes of minorities and low-income residents. Opening schools as quickly as possible for the benefit of children was also a priority.

One of the reasons Dallas has had higher survival rate outcomes than New York or California is because of a more thoughtful public policy and the most incredible talent and efforts of some of the best medical personnel in the country. Dallas leaders’ communication with the citizens convey the seriousness of the situation, but have not come across as punitive. Vaccines have been rapidly distributed with increasing efficiency to all segments and areas of Dallas.

Big Business and Small Business Connectivity is Magnet For Move From Los Angeles to Dallas

Dallas business has always taken a civic and political leadership role. The pandemic inspired business leadership, with the encouragement of the Mayor and City Council, to double down on its mission for business connectivity. Every day there has been a concerted effort by big business to connect and impact small businesses, which are primarily minority or female owned or have a majority of minority employees. Large Dallas businesses have collaborated with entrepreneurial nonprofits to provide both money and coaching to small businesses to help them fight through the pandemic and come out even stronger. Dallas business and political leaders along with the Dallas Chambers realize a majority of people are employed by small business. These leaders know if the small businesses in Dallas are strong, Dallas will remain strong.

Neighborhoods and Homeownership are the Heart and Soul of Dallas

Single-family zoned neighborhoods are still revered in Dallas. While high-density developments spring up across Dallas, there is still a desire by Dallas citizens to be able to have homes with a front porch, tree-lined streets and curbs free of parked cars and heavy traffic.

The mayor, growing up in Dallas in an inexpensive neighborhood, advocates home ownership for low-income minorities because he understands homeownership creates wealth, which is far more important than subsidizing expensive apartments for minorities.

During the pandemic, people are fleeing from cities. In contrast, Dallas is thriving because Dallas neighborhoods provide delightful environments to shelter in place. Because of this environment, people are moving from Los Angeles to Dallas.

Moving from Los Angeles to Dallas Makes One Feel That They Can Buy a Home for Free

I guess I should mention that many people have said to me over the last five years that they can move from Los Angeles to Dallas and virtually buy a home for free for what they are saving from not having to pay in city, county and state income tax.

I have left for last this tax advantage, which is the most obvious economic reason Fortune 50 companies and individual families are moving from Los Angeles to Dallas. A fourth generation Angelenos family who belongs to the most prestigious Los Angeles beach club, have their children in the finest preparatory schools, and live in a beautiful home told me they will enjoy escaping the high taxes, but it is the quality of life Dallas offers that they are really seeking. They are excited about schools that are open, restaurants they can go to, friendly, optimistic neighbors, blue skies, a sense of freedom and robust opportunities.

The pandemic brought everything into hyper-focus. Californians who a few years ago were tempted to leave for economic reasons decided to leave now to live in a city their family would enjoy. Those arriving in Dallas are not coming here with doubt or trepidation, but with excitement and enthusiasm to begin life in Dallas that offers so much of what California offered families moving there a generation or two ago.

For the next 30 years Dallas will be the city that leads the way in Organic Urbanism and the aesthetic and economic opportunities it provides. The pattern of migration to and from cities has evolved for 200 years. Technology increases the fluidity of where people live and simultaneously allows a greater intimacy and connectivity with neighbors and the community.

The recent rapid evolution of migration patterns and a heightened sense of how technology changes our living patterns put many cities in peril and reward other cities that make people a priority over outdated policy.

Welcome to Dallas!

Douglas Newby is a national award-wining real estate broker who writes about real estate, cities, architecture and Organic Urbansim. He gave the TEDx Talk Homes That Make Us Happy. You can read more about him and his work on his website Architecturally SignificantHomes: DougNewby.com and on his blog DouglasNewby.com.

Photo credit: Douglas Newby, the author.

Why More Americans Should Leave Home and Move to Other States

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 20:28:58 -0400

America has been lazily divided by pundits into red and blue states, as if there weren’t constant movement of people between them. Fortunately, reality is a lot more purple — and hopeful — as immigrants, people of color and millennials reshape parts of America by voting with their feet and moving.

These demographic groups are migrating from the big coastal cities to the suburbs, the interior cities, the South and even parts of the Midwest. And in the process, these newcomers change both their new homes and are also changed by them.

Throughout most of the last century, the migration of Black Americans and immigrants was largely to the big cities of the Northeast, and, in the later decades, to the West Coast as well. Yet over the last decade there has been an accelerating shift of these populations out of those traditional havens to locales that have seen relatively little in-migration in the past.

In his analysis for Heartland Forward, a nonprofit research group, demographer Wendell Cox found that among the largest metropolitan areas, the fastest growth in the foreign-born population over the last decade took place in Dallas, Houston, Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, where their numbers went up between 25% and 40%. In contrast, foreign-born populations are either stagnating or dropping in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, the nation’s traditional immigrant centers.

Ironically, the fastest growth has taken place in the states that supported Donald Trump while declining in those that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Rather than cluster in a few places, immigrants are increasingly following the earlier patterns of the 19th century, spreading out into the middle of the country.

This movement is already transforming and reenergizing some regions in surprising ways. Nashville may be the country music capital — stereotyped as the epitome of white American culture — but it is also home to a Little Kurdistan, a Somali population and a growing Latino community. Even a place like Fargo, N.D., which was more than 90% white in 1990, has seen newcomers and more foreign-born residents create a more diverse city. When I was there in the summer I happily stumbled upon a Thai ice cream parlor.

A similar pattern of movement away from traditional hubs can be seen among African Americans. Black populations are stagnant or even declining in places such as New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland, Ore. In the city of San Francisco, the African American community has declined from 13% in 1970 to roughly 5% today. Although that community dates to the 19th century, it has become so small that there’s even a 2019 movie called “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.”

So where are African Americans headed? Places such as Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Las Vegas, as well as a host of smaller metro areas such as Boise, Idaho; Fayetteville, Ark.; Provo, Utah; Portland, Maine; and Scranton, Pa. For African Americans and other minorities, the prime motivation seems to be economics, as shown in a recent report for the Urban Reform Institute.

Median household income for African Americans in Atlanta, adjusted for cost of living (in which housing costs are a big component), was more than $60,000, compared with $36,000 in San Francisco and $37,000 in Los Angeles. The real household median income for Latinos is more than $65,000 in Columbus and St. Louis, compared with $43,000 in Los Angeles, $47,000 in San Francisco and $40,000 in New York.

One critical economic factor is homeownership. Property remains key to financial security: Home equity accounts for roughly two-thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans, according to the Census Bureau. Yet in some parts of the country, notably coastal California and the Northeast, homeownership is often out of reach. Some 50% of Black residents own their homes in places such as the Atlanta and Oklahoma City metro areas compared with barely one-third in the metro areas of Los Angeles and Denver. Among Latinos, El Paso and St. Louis stand out as high homeownership metro areas, while homeownership is much lower in Boston and San Jose.

Even before the pandemic, the Brookings Institution noted, millennials were already leaving big cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and headed toward less expensive metro areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and Houston. The pandemic — in part, by allowing people to work remotely — has further hastened the move among younger tech workers from San Francisco, New York, Boston and Chicago to places such as Sacramento, Madison, Wis., and Cleveland.

The movement of socially liberal millennials, minorities and immigrants is seen by some progressives as a way to build a permanent Democratic majority in parts of the country that lean conservative. This certainly could be seen in the Georgia Senate races, where African American and Latino voters helped push two progressive Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to victory.

Conservatives fear that left-oriented newcomers will overturn the politics of their strongholds. But we should also consider the potential long-term effects when historically marginalized people are able to buy homes and start businesses. In the past, these changes tended to make people somewhat more conservative.

In Texas, where Latinos generally do better economically and are more able to buy homes than in California or New York, they also tend to split their votes more evenly between the parties, with almost 40% voting for Trump.

Even in big cities such as New York, Trump managed to improve performance in minority and immigrant neighborhoods, perhaps in part a reaction against the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 restrictions on businesses that employ more workers of color. American communities, according to a new study by The Times and the Reality Check Insights polling firm, are largely more middle of the road than their representatives, with moderates being the biggest group in cities, rural areas and suburbs across the country.

This movement toward centrist politics through migration potentially offers a way out for our toxic and highly polarized political environment. These demographic trends, which are unlikely to go away, may turn out to be the unifying force the country needs.

This piece first appeared at Los Angeles Times.

SoCal Desalination Plant Inches Towards Approval

Ed Ring — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:28:58 -0500

In a rare and commendable display of political courage and common sense, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been working to finally grant permits to construct a second major seawater desalination plant on the Southern California Coast.

But don’t count on this new water source just yet. Despite clearing major hurdles, self-described environmentalists and their allies in the media haven’t surrendered.

The Los Angeles Times is doing everything it can to derail the project. In a February 26 article, the Times reports that “environmentalists” have serious concerns about the proposed plant, set to be constructed in Huntington Beach and using a design similar to one already successfully operating about 60 miles south in Carlsbad. There’s just one thing: in a supposedly objective look at the Huntington Beach plant, the only sources quoted are self-declared environmentalists opposed to the plant.

Here are some of the problems those purported environmentalists have with the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Quoting from the LA Times article:

“Though the Huntington Beach facility meets the state goal of diversifying California’s water supply, it would undermine other environmental policies. The plant would require large amounts of electricity; it would sit next to a rising sea; and it would continue the use of huge ocean intakes harmful to microscopic marine life.”

These objections are easily answered.

First, the construction of anything in California, though approved by one agency, will be opposed to multiple others. This is the dystopian nature of California’s self-contradictory and destructive regulatory environment.

Second, every drop of water that is produced by the plant is water that does not have to be transported from reservoirs in Northern California, at an energy cost that rivals that of desalination.

Third, even the most aggressive projections of sea-level rise would not affect operations of the Huntington Beach plant, and even if some adaptations eventually were necessary they would be part of a larger project to protect the Southern California coast.

Fourth, as for “intakes harmful to microscopic marine life,” the design of these intakes prevents any significant wildlife impact. The intake filters are huge, which disperses the negative pressure over a very large surface area, and the pressure is periodically reversed, freeing the filter surfaces of microorganisms.

Everythings’s a Trade-off

Concerns about desalination along with the responses could occupy volumes, and have. But the notion that there is any sort of consensus among environmentalists that seawater desalination is a bad choice is false. Every option to supply the resources required to sustain urban civilization is fraught with tradeoffs. With Californians possibly facing yet another drought, desalination offers a way to take pressure off countless stressed upstream ecosystems.

Economic arguments offer a more credible case against desalination, but can fail to acknowledge the variability of the market price for water. In drought years, municipal water purchasers and farmers with perennial crops have paid well over the price for desalinated fresh water, which for San Diego’s Carlsbad plant comes in at around $2,000 per acre foot. To be sure, this price is well in excess of the wholesale price for water in wet years, which can drop well under $500 per acre foot. But for an urban area such as Los Angeles, situated on an arid desert located 500 miles or more from its sources of water, adding the expensive but certain option of desalinated water to a portfolio of water procurements is a prudent bet.

Read the rest of this piece at California Policy Center.

Edward Ring is a cofounder of the California Policy Center, and a contributor to the California Globe where a version of this article first appeared.

Photo credit: via pxhere under CC Public Domain.

Tale of Two Middle Classes in SoCal

Jerry Sullivan — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 20:28:58 -0500

Anyone who’s not concerned about the state of the middle class in SoCal should consider recent public notices on a pending auction of the Plaza Mexico retail center in Lynwood a wake-up call. Yes, Lynwood—one of those relatively small cities in southeastern LA County that so often get lumped together and dismissed as scenes of municipal corruption with Latino overtones.

Those cities are, indeed, mostly Latino in terms of population—and there have been cases of corruption in some of them. But please note this column’s reporting on a culture of corruption at LA City Hall that is brazen and pan-ethnic in its nature, with everything from White and Latino-American public officials, Black service providers, a Korean-American lobbyist and a Chinese-American political appointee in the mix.

Also note that Plaza Mexico is a well-conceived reflection of the many blue-collar, middle-class Latinos who populate Lynwood and neighboring cities. They are tradespeople and service providers and entrepreneurs who generally provide for their families in ways that are moral, ethical and good for the community. They make up a crucial segment of the local consumer economy that is distinct from the white-collar middle-class Latinos who work as professionals, public employees and creative types, among other jobs, and are more readily found in places such as Downtown LA, the Eagle Rock district or Pasadena.

Plaza Mexico offers a logical nod to the ethnic roots of its local customer base, with a Mexican-themed design that comes off as homage rather than kitsch. Its lineup of tenants ranges from a Curacao department store to Chuck E. Cheese and a Don Roberto’s jewelry shop. Parking is plentiful and free. It’s all well-merchandised with an eye on claiming a share of the disposable income from the bedroom communities it serves.

It’s unclear what the overall trouble is for Plamex Investment, listed as the owner of Plaza Mexico. Here’s guessing the intermittent Covid-19 shutdowns have something to do with a lender pressing the outfit for payment of a $14 million balance on a loan.

Stay tuned to Plaza Mexico’s fate in any case—it might be a leading indicator on the financial health of the blue-collar half of SoCal’s middle class, an unheralded segment of the region’s economy.

The recent move by the Korean-focused H Mart chain to replace two Albertsons grocery stores in Irvine offers a counterpoint from SoCal’s white-collar middle class. That’s a segment characterized by a significant Asian-American representation and heavy doses of middle-management types, entrepreneurs and academics in the central OC city.

Indeed, H Mart’s expansion could be an example of how the effects of Covid-19 are splitting the center of our socioeconomic scale. Plaza Mexico’s pending auction points to the middle-class economy shrinking in blue-collar Lynwood while H Mart’s expansion sheds light on a business anxious to grab new opportunities in white-collar Irvine.

Jerry Sullivan is the founder and chief columnist of SullivanSaysSoCal.com.

The New American Judaism

Joel Kotkin and Edward Heyman — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 20:28:58 -0500

Ever since God chased Adam and Eve from Paradise, the Jewish experience has been defined by constant movement. In the past 3,000 years Jews shifted from a small sect escaping exile in Egypt to a national Temple-based model, then to a Talmudic diaspora, hunkered down in European ghettos and shtetls. That was followed by waves of migration at the turn of the 20th century that inaugurated a new promised land in America and over 100 years of Jewish American advancement organized around what became a lavish institutional Judaism.

Today American Jews are in the midst of another epochal shift. In short, the classic 20th-century archetype of American Judaism as a culture concentrated in big metropolitan regions and organized around major institutions has come to an end. The saga that began with Ellis Island is giving way to a new Jewish identity in which the internet now plays the role that urban neighborhoods once did as a hub of communal organizing and religious teaching.

The changes reshaping Jewish identity in America have been accelerated by the current pandemic on three critical fronts. The first is dispersion from traditional centers, notably inner cities like New York, to faster growing regions in the South and West. This pattern has seen the fastest growth among Jews both on the urban periphery as well as primarily suburban, sprawling, car-dependent cities such as Miami, Los Angeles/Long Beach, Houston, Atlanta, and Denver.

Even before COVID, sociologist Stuart Schoenfeld discovered that while Jews may be “city dwellers” who are “disproportionately concentrated in metropolitan areas,” the majority do not actually live in the urban city core. Indeed, he finds, “urban Jews are a minority among Jews and a minority among other urbanites.” In Miami, only 7,000 (5%) of the city’s 123,200 Jews live in urban core areas while in Los Angeles, they are 13%, and 17% in the Bay Area. Judaism after COVID is likely to continue its movement away from dense city centers.

A second major change has been the growing use of telecommunication technology, a phenomenon again hastened by the pandemic, which has forced synagogue doors to close.

In a process reshaping other religions as well, the ritual and intellectual observances of Judaism are going online. Arie Katz, founder and chair of Orange County, California’s Community Scholar Program, built a structure to bring world class Jewish scholars, writers, artists, and musicians to Southern California so he could learn from the best by crowdsourcing the cost. Since Katz, the child of South African immigrants, moved his programs online in March in response to COVID, average program attendance has increased threefold, and he has been able to increase the number of unique offerings from two a month to four or more per week. Moreover, his member base, once restricted geographically to Southern California, now has global reach with participants in New York, Boston, Seattle Europe, Latin America, and Israel.

The third factor has been the emergence of ad hoc or “fluid” religiosity. This is a trend seen in other religions as well, where people, particularly millennials, increasingly seek to navigate their own paths to spiritual fulfillment outside denominational and synagogue loyalties. Broadly speaking, the Reform and Conservative movements—vital for first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who wanted to honor their traditions while fully assimilating into American culture—are now on the decline. In some sense they are victims of their own success. By providing a version of Jewishness that accommodated the demands and pulls of America’s modern commercial culture, they became less essential to subsequent generations that were already successfully assimilated.

The flip side of this story is the growth of American Orthodoxy in the 21st century. While their secular counterparts are shrinking, the Hasidim and other more traditionally observant Jewish communities in America are experiencing a surge of growth. But it’s not just organizations like Chabad that are flourishing. There also is the rise of diverse unaffiliated and independent minyanim, and an explosion of what can be termed “special interest Judaism,” ranging in focus from environment and social justice to cooking and spiritualism. There’s even a successful Boulder, Colorado-based program called “Adventure Judaism” where the rabbi frees people from their synagogues and video screens to encounter their Judaism as they “climb mountains, go skiing, play the guitar, and sing around a campfire.”

Beneath these structural changes are deeper existential realities that American Jews will have to face. Younger Jews turning away from the traditions and institutions of their faith cannot be written off simply as spoiled millennials. Many are responding to the legitimate failures of the American Jewish establishment to address their communal and spiritual needs. The postwar configuration that served upwardly mobile baby boomers has not adapted to a new world in which young people are less economically secure, and face a harder time starting families and a disintegrating social consensus and loss of community.

Another challenge facing American Jews will be the loss of their position at the center of the Jewish story. Over the past 72 years Israel has reemerged as the world’s largest and most consequential Jewish community. America’s Jewish communities are still among the most secure and powerful in history of the diaspora, and will likely remain so well into the future. But the relative diminishment of America’s role as Israel consolidates its status as the undisputed capital of world Jewry, will continue as well and will require a new conception of the relationship between the two nations.

Our aim here is twofold: to describe the major forces shaping the future of American Judaism and to draw attention to the challenges that threaten the continued thriving of American Jewish religious practice, community building, and family life.

Read the rest of this piece at Tablet Magazine.

Edward Heyman is currently active as a volunteer and consultant in the Orange County, California, Jewish community, following a career as a partner in a software development firm serving the defense and intelligence communities.

Photo credit: Ted Eytan via Unsplash under CC0 2.0 License.

‘Call Your Mother’ Sitcom Is Coastally Out of Step

Dale Buss — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 20:29:01 -0500

Call Your Mother is lame enough as it is. But a major extra shortcoming of ABC’s latest sitcom, which recently debuted with a pilot episode, is that one of its foundations is a banal juxtaposition of Flyover Country with the coasts.

Get this: A central premise of the show is that an empty-nester widow moves to Los Angeles from Iowa to be near her two adult kids who like living in California right now. In that important regard, Call Your Mother is so, well, 2019 – and so heedless of the current zeitgeist.

It’s amazing the network just launched a drama that is so tone-deaf to new realities even after ABC had all of Covid to decide whether to pull the lever. But its decision shows, among other things, what Hollywood still thinks of us out here in the “sticks.”

Call Your Mother stars Kyra Sedgwick as Jean Raines, a helicopter mother who bolts for California when she can’t get her son on the phone for four days. Hilarity is supposed to ensue when she surprises her son and her daughter, who have moved to California to pursue careers – or is it to escape her?

In any event, Sedgwick’s character in no way threatens the achievements of other classic TV moms such as All in the Family’s Jean Stapleton (playing a dimwitted and innocuous Edith Bunker) and Everybody Loves Raymond’s Doris Roberts (playing a not-so-dimwitted and definitely not innocuous Marie Barone).

Nor does Call Your Mother hold a candle to more recent sitcoms whose central conceit is that geography dictates a certain dull charm, as in The Middle, which was fabulously anchored by Patricia Heaton as Frankie Heck and set in mythical Orson, Indiana. The Conners, set in Pittsburgh, had promise until Roseanne Barr stuck her political neck out too far.

In any event, besides its lackluster execution, another big problem with this sure-to-fail new sitcom is that it asks us to believe a mother, however lonesome, would be eager not only to visit her adult kids in LA right now but also to leave Flyover Country permanently to move there. The graphics for the show’s opening leave no doubt about this when they show a corn-stalk icon, an airplane flying from right to left on the screen, and palm trees.

So much is so off about this plot line that Call Your Mother begs you to excuse it by mistakenly believing it is set just before the pandemic. And, to be clear, there is absolutely no social distancing.

For example, why would anyone these days move to California voluntarily, where you still can’t even eat outdoors at a restaurant? The reality is that thousands of people are leaving Los Angeles and San Francisco because of how California government has treated them during the pandemic and because, now, they can seek a much lower cost of living elsewhere, likely working remotely in their current jobs -- especially in the heartland.

Read the rest of this piece at Flyover Coalition

Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.

California and Urban Cores Dominate Overcrowded Housing

Wendell Cox — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 20:29:01 -0500

Concern about overcrowded housing has been heightened by its association with greater COVID-19 infection risk. As a disease transmitted by human proximity, exposure is increased by being in overcrowded and insufficiently ventilated spaces where sufficient social distancing is not possible. Exposure density for a person is intensified by the amount of time spent in such circumstances. In this case, overcrowded housing is a particular worry.

Overcrowded housing is largely an issue of insufficient income. People tend to live in overcrowded housing only when they cannot afford more spacious accommodations.

This article reviews the latest data on housing overcrowding for the 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) in the United States, with data provided for all households, homeowners, and renters. Data is also provided for urban cores, suburbs, and exurbs, using the City Sector Model.

Overcrowding: All Occupied Housing

Out of the 53 major metropolitan areas, the five with the largest share of overcrowded housing are all in California (Figure 1). Los Angeles has by far the worst overcrowding, at 10.7% of households. This is more than 2.5 times the national rate of 3.9% and 30% more severe than San Jose, which has the second most severe overcrowding rate. San Jose, which is the most affluent (median household income) among the 53 metropolitan areas, and an overcrowding rate of 8.3%. San Jose is the core of the world’s leading technology hub, Silicon Valley. The third worst overcrowding is in Riverside-San Bernardino, at 7.8%. San Diego is fourth worst, at 6.8%. San Francisco, which includes the balance of Silicon Valley not in San Jose, has the fifth worst overcrowding, at 6.7%. New York, the sixth worst, is the only other major metropolitan area with a greater than 5% overcrowding rate.

The least overcrowded metropolitan areas were Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and St. Louis, with the top ten ranging from 0.9% to 1.6% (Figure 2). On average, the ten metropolitan areas with the highest overcrowding rates have about five times the rate endured in the lowest 10 metropolitan areas among all households.

Overcrowding: Home Owners

The same five California metropolitan areas have the worst housing overcrowding among homeowners (Figure 3). Los Angeles, again, is the worst, at 5.0% and is followed by adjacent Riverside-San Bernardino at 4.8%. San Jose has considerably less overcrowding among homeowners, at 3.4%, but still ranks third worst. San Diego and San Francisco have overcrowding rates of 3.1% among homeowners.

Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo had the lowest homeowner overcrowding rates, with the top ten ranging from 0.5% to 0.8% (Figure 4). On average, the ten metropolitan areas with the highest overcrowding rates have about five times the rate of the lowest 10 metropolitan areas among owner households.

Overcrowding: Renters

Among renters, the same five California metropolitan areas have the worst overcrowding rates among the major metropolitan areas (Figure 5). Again, Los Angeles has the worst rate, at 16.1%. San Jose is second worst, at 14.7%, followed by Riverside-San Bernardino, at 13.0. San Diego and San Francisco (both at 11.1%) are the only other major metropolitan areas with an overcrowding rate among renters of 10% or more.

The ten lowest renter overcrowding rates range from 1.9% to 3.1%. The lowest overcrowding rates are in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo (Figure 6), On average, the ten metropolitan areas with the highest overcrowding rates have about four times the rate of the lowest 10 metropolitan areas among renter households.

The Demographia City Sector Model

Demographia City Sector Model analysis is now in the seventh year of publication. Improved data from the American Community Survey made it possible to separate demographic data based on lifestyles and functions within metropolitan areas. Before that, nearly all urban, suburban, and exurban analysis within metropolitan areas was based on municipal or county jurisdictions. The problem was, however, that nearly all new development since World War II had been lower density, principally single-family houses, while the automobile quickly replaced much of the commuting that had been previously been on transit or on foot.

The Demographia City Sector Model classifies zip code residents based upon their population density and extent of automobile commuting into four functional classifications, which are indicated in Figure 7. The intent is to separate the pre-World War II city from the very different city that has developed in the intervening three-quarters of a century.

Overcrowding by Metropolitan Sector: All Households

Among the metropolitan area sectors, the highest overall housing overcrowding rate (owners and renters) is in the Urban Core: Inner Ring, that includes the higher density residential areas directly adjacent to the downtowns, at 6.4%. This is nearly two-thirds higher than the overall rate of 3.9%. Overcrowding in the Urban Core: Central Business District (downtown) is a 5.2%, one third above the overall rate. The Earlier Suburbs have an overcrowding rate of 4.6 %, while the Later Suburbs and Exurbs share a 2.6% rate, one third below the overall average (Figure 8).

Overcrowding by Metropolitan Sector: Owners and Renters

Again, the Urban Core: Inner ring has the highest overcrowding among owning households, at 3.2%, two-thirds above the overall rate of 1.8%. The Urban Core: Central Business District overcrowding rate for owners is nearly as high, at 2.9%. The Earlier Suburbs have a rate of 2.1%, approximately 15% higher than the overall rate. The Later Suburbs (1.4%) and the Exurbs (1.5%) have lower owner overcrowding rates than the average (Figure 9).

Among renters, the Urban Core: Inner Ring has the highest overcrowding rate, at 8.5%, nearly 20% above the overall renter rate of 7.2%. The Earlier Suburbs have the second highest overcrowding rate among renters, at 8.1%. The Urban Core: Central Business District has an overcrowding rate of 6.0% among renters, which is well below the overall rate of 7.2%. The Later Suburbs (5.3%) and Exurbs (5.4%) have renter overcrowding rates a quarter below the overall average (Figure 9).

Owning, Renting and Overcrowding

There is a strong relationship between rental housing and higher overcrowding rates. The renter overcrowding rate among the major metropolitan areas is 7.2%, 55% higher than the overall household rate. Among homeowners the overcrowding rate is 1.8%, 55% below the overall household average (Figure 10).

Where Housing Overcrowding is the Greatest

In each of the categories of all occupied housing, owned housing, and rental housing, the five major metropolitan areas with the highest overcrowding rates are in California. This includes the four large coastal metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and San Diego, as well as inland Riverside-San Bernardino. Moreover, greater overcrowding is associated with higher population densities, which occur in the Urban Cores.

Overcrowded housing has long been a problem, especially for low-income households. The nation’s “affordable housing” programs established to aid household unable to afford market rate housing costs have routinely fallen far short of political promises. It is a problem that needs to be effectively addressed.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photograph: aerial view of the urban density of Los Angeles (by author).