Tags
[Note: Likely to be of limited interest to those outside of California or, in some cases, Berkeley.]
Politicians
Governor: Gavin Newsom. I really really wanted to vote for Gavin Newsom because as San Francisco mayor he illegally let a bunch of gay people marry and I feel like that’s the kind of person we need in politics these days. Unfortunately, I am a single-issue voter on housing, not a single-issue voter on one’s history of civil disobedience. Fortunately, Gavin Newsom has a moderate position on housing. He supports rent control and other protections for tenants, but also supports expanding housing production, including by withholding transportation funding from communities that don’t build enough housing. Cox appears to have no detailed policy proposals on housing, and also supports building a border wall between the US and Mexico and repealing California’s sanctuary state law. So fuck him. (Was it that hard to find a libertarian, guys?)
Lieutenant Governor: Eleni Kounkalakis says good things about housing, with a strong position in favor of building more homes. Ed Hernandez didn’t even bother to have a page about housing on his website.
Secretary of State: Alex Padilla. If the Republicans want me to vote for a Republican to run elections, they should spend less time trying to disenfranchise black people.
Treasurer: Fiona Ma. I have no strong opinions about this race and am just voting for the Democrat.
Controller: Betty T. Yee. Roditis appears to be running mostly on the issues of repealing the gas tax and defunding high-speed rail. BOO. HISS.
Attorney General: Xavier Becerra. Steven C Bailey is running on an anti-undocumented-immigrant, pro-prison-industrial-complex platform. Xavier Becerra, conversely, has a strongly pro-immigrant record, including taking a leading role on opposing the Trump administration, and seems at least reasonable on criminal justice reform.
Insurance Commissioner: Steve Poizner. Poizner has apparently been endorsed by every California newspaper that made an endorsement. Lara is focusing his campaign on how opposed he is to Trump. I don’t know a heck of a lot about what insurance commissioners are supposed to do but I am pretty sure it doesn’t involve very much opposing Trump.
Member, State Board of Equalization, 2nd District: Malia Cohen. Mark Burns wants to protect and strengthen Proposition 13, which caps property taxes even if the value of your home has skyrocketed. Malia Cohen appears to be against establishing feudalism as California’s preferred form of government.
United States Senator: Kevin De Leon. It’s really an open question what Diane Feinstein’s worst position is– there’s really something about her to hate for everyone. She’s pro-DRM and a regular foe of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She’s a committed drug warrior who chairs the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. Until 2018, she supported capital punishment. She supported the Iraq War. She called for the extradition and arrest of Edward Snowden. She was the main Democratic sponsor of an amendment to make it unconstitutional to desecrate the flag. She was the original Democratic cosponsor of a bill to extend the Patriot Act. She’s a strong supporter of the NSA. She supports limiting the free-speech rights of animal advocates. She wants to de facto ban strong encryption.
Vote Kevin De Leon. He may not be perfect, but he has never sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration, and I’m proud of him for that.
United States Representative: Barbara Lee. Barbara Lee is great– she supports the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and is strongly in favor of criminal justice reform.
Member of the State Assembly: Buffy Wicks. Endorsed by East Bay for Everyone.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction: Marshall Tuck. Thurmond and Tuck agree on a lot, and both seem like reasonable choices; Tuck is pro-charter-schools while Thurmond is pro-teacher’s-union, and so it ultimately comes down to whether you’re optimistic about charter schools improving education.
Assessor: Phong La. Johnson wants to concentrate on giving people the lowest taxes legally possible, which seems like a pretty dubious thing to be doing. La wants to help the homeless, which seems like a nice thing to do, even if I’m not sure exactly what that has to do with being a property tax assessor.
Rent Stabilization Board: James Chang, Soli Alpert, Judy J Hunt, Maria Poblet, and John T. Selawsky. The people endorsed by the Berkeley mayor, minus one person who had a kooky statement about rent control in her candidate statement, which I replaced with someone endorsed by most of the city council.
School Directors: Ty Alper, Ka’Dijah Brown, Julie Sinai. People endorsed by the Berkeley mayor.
AC Transit District Director: Joel Young, because his opponent didn’t bother to submit a candidate statement. Whoops, no, I was totally wrong. Dollene Jones, because she has not committed domestic violence or spat on anyone or used her office to enrich herself.
City Auditor: Jenny Wong, because her opponent seems to be under the impression that the city auditor gets to veto any money the city spends, which I’m pretty sure is not true. Also, this is ranked-choice voting! Pretty cool. If only it were for an office people cared about.
Propositions
One: Yes. Bond authorization requested by the legislature because Californians have to approve bonds. I generally want to vote ‘yes’ on things requested by the legislature, because governing is literally the thing I hired them to do.
Two: Yes. Authorizes the legislature to allocate some money that was intended to be spent on mental health services on bonds for housing to prevent homelessness. Housing First programs seem to have robustly good evidence for them, and the legislature thinks it’s a good idea.
Three: No. Bond authorization not requested by the legislature? This seems pretty stupid. I am pretty sure the legislature knows what sorts of things it should spend money on.
Four: No? Newspapers generally seem to endorse it, but again if it’s so urgent that we do a bond authorization to help fund children’s hospitals then why didn’t the legislature ask for it?
Five: KILL IT WITH FIRE. Allows elderly and disabled homebuyers to transfer the tax-assessed value of their old home to their new home, regardless of the new home’s market value (?!?!?!?!). Prop 13 already crippled California’s property tax base; we do not need to make it worse. This is a conditional transfer of wealth from young to old. Don’t do it.
Six: NO. Lowers the gas tax, because it isn’t like we have any CLIMATE CHANGE that is HEATING UP THE GLOBE or anything. That is not something we liberals in California are concerned about, no sirree.
Seven: Yes. Grants the legislature more flexibility in deciding whether to repeal daylight savings time. Does not necessarily state that the legislature will repeal daylight savings time. Daylight savings time is an abomination that kills people and I see no downside to giving the legislature the ability to destroy it.
Eight: No. It’s a complicated policy that might be right or might be wrong– my friend Cliff Pervocracy, a nurse who has worked in dialysis clinics, has said he thinks it’s a good idea, while my instincts are against making the economics of the health care system even more complicated. You know who are the right people to pass laws about complicated policies? THE FUCKING LEGISLATURE.
Nine.
Ten. No. YIMBY groups are really divided on this one. Lots of people think expanding rent control will help tenants, while other people are concerned that it will lead to further distortions in the housing market. And you know who is totally capable of repealing Costa-Hawkins in a way that will let them put it back if it turns out to be a bad policy? THE LEGISLATURE.
Eleven. No, and also fuck you. The primary sponsor is retroactively trying to get out of paying people the wages THEY EARNED for having to work during breaks, because apparently these days when you steal money from people you can just get a ballot initiative to say that you’re allowed to steal money.
Twelve. FUCK YES. If you walk into the polling place on November 6th with the energy to vote for one thing, vote yes on 12. It bans the sale of products from veal calves, breeding pigs, and egg-laying chickens confined in very small spaces. Because California is a large meat market, Proposition 12 could conceivably affect the entirety of the United States. Chickens will be able to spread their wings. They will get nests, perches, and places to dust bathe. These requirements are so absolutely minimal that I don’t know why we’re still debating them as a society. Vote against animal cruelty. Vote for Prop 12.
Measures
I voted yes on O, P, R, and FF, per East Bay for Everyone’s recommendation; I voted no on Q because I think rent control is bad policy. I voted yes on E and G because I am broadly in support of new taxes.
Thing of Things 
Thank you for explaining your positions so clearly!
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For proposition five, it seems worth mentioning that the intent of the bill is to ameliorate some incentives problems caused by prop 13. The idea is that there are a lot of elderly and disabled people with more house than they need or would like to maintain, but they’re unlikely to move because even if the new house is cheaper than their current house, it’s probably not cheap enough for them to avoid a property tax increase when they downsize. Letting them move is good for them, and frees up the larger houses they leave behind for people with families or lots of roommates.
I don’t really know if that’s what it would end up doing, but it seemed worth mentioning anyway. Whether this would make the property tax situation worse depends on if you think it’s more likely that a lot of rich old people would buy more expensive houses than that a lot of not so rich old people would buy cheaper ones.
Also, I think “conditional transfer of wealth from young to old” thing is pretty much A-OK given that the condition is “the young person in question agrees to buy the house, knowing they’re going to have to pay taxes on it.” and it’s not as if the old person is paying any less than before
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huh, it looks like I might possibly have been thinking of the previous, more reasonable-looking proposition 60. So I’m not sure my comment actually applies…
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Well, how about elderly or disabled people who are on lower incomes now than they used to be? Because surprise, surprise, [not all](https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/oct/03/i-dont-think-employers-see-what-disabled-people-can-do) employers can or are willing to make accommodations for disabled people. And maybe they’re living mainly on a government payment like disability benefit. And maybe they’d like to move to a smaller, newer house or apartment, but they can’t afford to if the property tax is higher in the new place.
There seems to be an assumption here that we’re talking about rich retirees/boomers with good union-mandated pensions who are well able to pay the extra but are too selfish to do so. There are poor people who are on pensions or are disabled too, you know!
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I can understand not wanting to vote for someone who didn’t submit a statement, but also Joel Young sounds like a really terrible dude. Accused of domestic violence, and publicly spat in the face of a mayoral candidate’s campaign manager, and has been censured for improperly using his position to enrich himself at the public’s expense.
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Also, while we’re on it, Gavin Newson fucked his married aide and the reason that the GOP candidate is so awful is that Gavin Newson aired advertisements in his support in order to deliberately get a worst GOP candidate so as to win more easily.
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I… really don’t care about Gavin Newsom’s affair? I’m not evaluating his personal character.
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@ozymandias
Then why did you cared about Joel Young’s ? Anyway, airing advertisements in support of far-right candidates isn’t about his personal character.
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As a Brit I’m bamboozled by how many choices are in this ballot. Is this normal for midterms?
For comparison, over here, off the top of my head all we vote for are: local Councillors (council elections), local MP (general election, leader of winning party becomes PM), MEP (well, not anymore…), police and crime commissioners (though nobody cares), mayor if your city has one, and if there’s a referendum. Plus if you’re a member of a party you can vote for their leader and etc.
Seems like you guys do a lot more voting.
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First: because the executive and legislature are distinct in the US at the federal and state level, there’s often going to be at least one more election happening than someone from a parliamentary system would expect. The federal and almost all state legislatures are bicameral as well, and both houses are elected, so that’s often going to add another one (although Ozy doesn’t appear to be voting for a state senator this year). Some states also elect judges (see below on direct democracy) which is terrible but nevertheless a thing.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of the USA has three layers of government, rather than the two that I think is typical in Britain: we’ve got the federal government (for which there are congressional elections every two years), the state government (usually also every two years or so, may or may not sync up with federal elections depending on state), and the local government (timing varies wildly; elections often aren’t held on the federal/state election day either).
There’s also some historical stuff going on here: around the end of the 19th century there was a movement in the US to put a whole bunch of things directly in the hands of voters. Nationally, this resulted in the adoption of the 17th amendment establishing direct election of senators, but the movement also sought to introduce voter-initiated referendums and recall of state officers. It was very successful in the western part of the country, especially California, so ballots there tend to be pretty extensive. Bond issues also commonly go out to voters, even in states that don’t have voter-initiated referendums or California’s crazy budgeting rules.
And California specifically seems to elect cabinet members individually, rather than leaving the choice to the governor, which is odd but in keeping with the initiative and referendum movement. The same thing seems to be happening with the city government, where normally only the mayor, town council, and maybe AG would be elected directly. The local Board of Education is a separate body; it’s pretty standard for local Boards of Education to have three-ish seats up at a time in an at-large election, with the top three vote-getters taking them. There’s also the oddity of the state Board of Education, which is a structure that only a minority of states have; that’s why there’s two BoE-related votes there.
Counties also often have a few elected positions, of which the most prominent is usually sheriff, but I don’t know a lot about them because I’m from the mid-Atlantic, where counties don’t really do much. The county-town divide is often strange in urban areas as well; see New York and its boroughs. They matter a lot more in more rural states.
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“The other thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of the USA has three layers of government”
This isn’t uncommon in the UK. 19 million people, more than a quarter of the population, live with a devolved government, meaning they have three levels of government (Westminster, devolved, and municipal.)
One of the reasons there are so many things to vote on in American elections is that Americans tend to sync up their elections a lot more than the British do.
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Your characterization of the AETA is false and disingenuous. It explicitly contains a flause saying it does NOT limit 1st Amendment free expression, and the only areas of conflict are “intimidation” and the use of past speech to establish motive, neither of which are even slightly legally problematic. The former is basically a group-level version of assault (which, legally, means immediate and plausible threats of injury) and the latter is the same as any other criminal proceeding, in which prior statements can be used to show intent once an actual crime has been committed. Even the ACLU said it was fine, though it needed some clarification here and there.
And, frankly, this is needed. I do animal experiments, including terminal ones, and while I respect that people can have differing views, they do not have the right to damage my lab or property, threaten me or my family, or engage in violence against myself, my pets, or my family, ALL of which animal right people do. I personally know people who’ve been threatened, harassed, and had their labs damaged, and still worse occurs to people beyond my immediate acquaintances. People have a right to their views, but the US needs to take domestic terrorism more seriously, whether that’s alt-right, anti-abortion, or animal rights terrorism, and there needs to be a line in the sand. Actual violence and credible threats of violence are not protected speech.
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argh formatting
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withholding transportation funding from communities that don’t build enough housing
I suppose within an urban context that is not so bad, but from working in social housing this makes me wince. Part of the problem there is great, you have houses available outside the urban areas/in rural areas. Problem is, there is no transport infrastructure, so people who don’t have a car and would otherwise be reliant on public transport don’t want to accept a house there. That means they hold out for housing in the urban areas and so remain on the “waiting for housing” lists. This means that building more houses in those areas is not going to solve your housing problem since people don’t want to take up those houses without transport available to them.
So punishing a community.local housing for not building enough houses in a particular area by withholding funding for transport that will make living in those areas appealing is cutting off your nose to spite your face. A single mother with two young kids who needs to get to work and get the kids to school/childminder, who does not have transport of her own, is not going to live in a house outside the town where she has no means of getting in to town where her job, the shops, the schools etc. are, and with holding funds for “if we could get a bus service running, this would make housing in these areas more appealing” is not going to work.
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Also obvious disparate impact on poor and minority neighborhoods is obvious.
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Exactly. You can punish a poor neighbourhood a lot more than a rich neighbourhood, which will rely on private ownership of cars or being able to hire Uber/Lyft/taxis whenever they want to travel if they don’t have sufficient transport infrastructure in place already like buses or trains by this measure.
It’s putting the cart before the horse: to make a particular area attractive, you need to have (amongst other things) transport in place like bus/train/tram services already. Then people will take that into account and demand goes up so you can justify building more houses. Build thirty houses that will stay empty before you get the transport funding and you’ll have protests about “why didn’t you build those thirty houses in areas of demand that would have been taken up, instead of wasting money on houses lying idle in places nobody wants to live?”
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@Deiseach
I’m confused about why this policy is mainly backed by libertarians. The whole YIMBY thing is pretty Soviet.
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I don’t know why you’re assuming that Newsom is going to punish places that no one wants to live for not building housing. He is going to be punishing places where tons of people want to live– where, in fact, people are currently cramming in nine people into a three-bedroom house, where there are four tent cities within walking distance of my house– for not building housing.
I guess you’re maybe assuming that California is not incredibly stupid and it would occur to someone that if there was lots of demand for houses then maybe we should build more houses but unfortunately California is not nearly that well-run.
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@ozymandias
Not Deiseach, but what she (?) said was clearly that cutting transport would reduce the desirability of neighborhoods.
And I think you have an overly rosy view of central governments’ competence when messing up with local affairs. What the webpage you linked say is that he will “link transportation funding to housing goals to encourage […] growth”, which, if taken literally (a good rule of thumb when discussing politicians), does mean that he will cut transportation funding from poor undesirable neighborhoods if they don’t ruin themselves building useless houses.
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Again, this is not necessarily unreasonable. Over here during our Celtic Tiger boom, we had an overheated property market which turned into a bubble and then a crash. A “one size fits all” property tax was introduced, which meant that ordinary working/lower middle class people living in houses which had suddenly jumped in value were being taxed the same as people earning considerably more in salaries. It didn’t matter if you could pay the tax or not (even if you were unemployed, you were still liable), and the valuation was purely on “new value of property in current market” and not on “value of property plus capacity to pay”. This meant that at the time I was unemployed (which happened to coincide with the introduction of the property tax) I was assessed as able to pay the same tax as a neighbour earning a very very good wage, simply on where we were living and not taking circumstances into account. This did bite quite severely into my available “money to live on” to pay off.
There was a lot of controversy about this at the time, and I am not going to agree that “not charging people the full whack on the price of their house is equal to feudalism”, sorry!
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La wants to help the homeless, which seems like a nice thing to do, even if I’m not sure exactly what that has to do with being a property tax assessor.
Two: Yes. Authorizes the legislature to allocate some money that was intended to be spent on mental health services on bonds for housing to prevent homelessness.
You’re a smart person, Ozy, I’m sure if you think about it for a little bit you’ll see how A fits with B. Hmmm, property taxes and getting properties for the homeless? Now how could those work together? Maybe just maybe if there’s a reduced rate of property tax on properties used for the former homeless, landlords and vendors might be induced to provide housing for the homeless? 🙂
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I think you’re confused about what the job of a property tax assessor is. A property tax assessor figures out the value of homes so that the value of homes can be fairly taxed. A property tax assessor does not have the power to lower taxes for any specific group. That is the job of the legislature.
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An assessor who wants taxes on property to be as low as possible will find reasons to make the lowest assessment possible when people appeal their assessment. This is a process that disproportionately benefits the educated and well-off because less educated and poorly resourced people are much less likely to appeal their assessment, much less have the knowledge of how best to frame their appeal in order to get their desired result. In the Bay Area what you have then is an assessor who’s personally invested in the ongoing transfer of tax burden from the wealthy, white, older people who own the most expensive homes to younger new purchasers.
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The EU is trying to get rid of daylight savings after an online poll where mostly Germans responded. These results are now presented as the will of the people, which is a bit weird (especially since some nation states have many people without Internet, who can’t even participate in such polls).
They also want to do the change really fast, where countries are supposed to choose between winter time or summer time quickly and then abolish it for next year. This ignores the issue of consistency between nations. For example, The Netherlands really wants to have the same time as Germany, because they are important trade partners. Currently, the EU has three time zones and there has been no proper analysis or proper democratic decision process where the importance of few time zones has been considered. Furthermore, there has been no supranational process to find a limited number of time zones that are optimal. So the EU fails to do what it is supposed to do, manage supranational interests.
Another issue is that software updates may be needed or other changes that take time. The EU seems to not have studied that.
While I support getting rid of daylight savings time, the process so far is rather irritating.
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I’m confused about “do we want to get rid of summer time or winter time” because it makes a difference; if we go off Daylight Savings then we’ll (presumably) have winter time the whole year, but the mornings are still going to get bright earlier in the summer than the winter, so whatever time we pick we’ll have dark winter mornings and evenings.
I have a fear that if we do scrap the change, what the decision will be is to stick with the advanced hour of summertime so we’ll still be getting up at the same time by the clock every day for work, but that will make a big difference in winter.
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One argument against winter time is that it can result in workers not seeing any sun before or after their work day during a period in winter, especially in northern countries.
The Dutch Olympic Committee & Dutch Sports Federation opposes winter time as workers tend to do sports after work. So having more evening light allows for more outdoor sports during daylight. This is especially relevant for outdoor sports that are a lot safer & pleasant with daylight, like cycling, running & water sports.
On the other hand, the Scots prefer winter time because they want their children to be able to go to school more safely in the morning. Of course, due to Brexit the Brits can soon do what they want anyway.
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An interesting complication is that the current time zones already don’t match the geographical time zones. Basically, every country in continental Europe to the west of Germany is already about an hour ahead in winter and two in summer. Only the UK and part of Ireland are countries to the west of Germany that have the proper time. Note that this is actually partly a result of the two world wars, where German-occupied nations standardized on CET.
Picking winter time for all the EU countries would minimize the discrepancies with the geographical time zones, while keeping most countries in the same time zone. On the other hand, a 1-2 hour discrepancy doesn’t appear to be a problem, at least in summer.
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They listened to
mecritics and are taking their time.LikeLike
Why Buffy Wicks and not Jovanka Beckles? While Wicks’ campaign has certainly said that Beckles doesn’t care about affordable housing, further research seemed to show me that was untrue and that I agreed more with Beckles.
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(I also just got a phone ad saying Barbara Lee, Bernie Sanders, and East Bay Working Families endorse Beckles, and you mentioned liking Lee?)
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Beckles has said she thinks cities need *more* control of whether new buildings are built or not, which in the current environment is an extreme anti-affordability position, regardless of what lip services she pays to affordability:
https://www.kqed.org/news/11683139/heres-how-east-bay-assembly-candidates-jovanka-beckles-and-buffy-wicks-differ-on-housing-isssues
(Exact quote: “I really think that cities need to be able to have more control in terms of building, because they know best.”)
As much as I like Lee, Sanders, et al. I don’t think they’ve properly reckoned with the way that in California, superficial progressive branding is now used to carry water for multimillionaire landowners.
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If you don’t mind me asking, why are you a single-issue voter on housing?
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Ozy live in California, which is in the middle of an housing crisis.
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