Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is honored for his courageous civil rights efforts. He advised, “The forces of good and evil are always in play.” He warned it’s not what bad people do, but the silence of good people.
Like the dark days of 1968, when both King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and the Viet Nam war raged on, we face new challenges: COVID, wild inflation, escalating homelessness, and Sacramento legislators’ efforts to eliminate local control.
At the CO$TMarin webinar on “Clifornia’s New Housing Laws: Truth AND Consequences” Sen. Mike McGuire, co-author of SB9 stated that the law allowed cities to deed restrict properties ‘in perpetuity’. On November 1st at the Mill Valley City Council meeting, Mayor John McCauley challenged McGuire to prove his claim.
The 6th episode of Catalysts in California Times pulls key points from elected officials and community leaders. Individually and collectively they make the point: These bills fail to meet the needs for affordability, increase the cost of housing, ignore water and environmental safety, and take away local control.
Elected officials Lydia Kou and Peggy Huang talk about the impact of misguided state legislation on cities. Whether in northern California or southern California, the overreach of regional and state laws is taking its toll on cities’ capacity to serve the constituents who elected them.
Rick Johnson spent 40 years with the San Francisco Water Department and retired as Senior Water Inspector, overseeing the work of ten other water inspectors.
Johnson describes the growing water emergency in the context of Sacramento’s push to build housing. Johnson sums it up like this: “If you don’t have water, you’re not going to have housing.”
Hydee Feldstein Soto, candidate for Los Angeles City Attorney 2022, and John Heath, president of the United Homeowners’ Association based in Los Angeles, describe their efforts to get solutions-based housing policy from Sacramento legislators.
Feldstein Soto says, “Dictating from on high will not work.” Heath adds. “Sacramento is facilitating a massive transfer of wealth from low-income communities to Wall Street.”