April 8, 2011 – Daily Brief

Regarding AB 438 and its sponsor Das Williams, the Daily Sound paper quotes “Joe Armendariz, a member of the Carpinteria City Council, feels strongly about the proposal.” Councilman Armendáriz further says: “It’s a piece of legislation with one purpose: pay back the union-ocracy that elected him,” he wrote in an email.”

Joe Messina’s show, The Real Side, covers multiple interesting topics. Today for instance among other issues, Tony Bell will provide his opinion on the Library Special Assessment funding, which should be interesting. I do not find Joe to be “the Glenn Beck of the SCV” at all although he does address the Constitution and related issues. Joe Messina may appreciate the comparison, I do not know, but I personally find Glenn Beck a bit overly dramatic so I do not watch his shows. Besides, I believe Beck does not usually have folks with opposite viewpoints on his show. Joe does nearly every show and usually makes sure both sides of an issue are fairly represented.

“I personally find Glenn Beck a bit overly dramatic” You have a flair for understatement!

Anyone interested in the problems caused by marauding gang members wielding baseball bats needs to read the “Housing Element” in the current draft of the One Valley, One Vision plan: http://www.santa-clarita.com/ovov/_pdf/Draft%20Elements/GeneralPlan/8-HousingElement.pdf The City staff has picked out 25 locations throughout all areas of the city, except Valencia, which are suitable for 4000 new low income and very low income housing units to be built. The only location in Valencia which I saw mentioned as a potential site for low and very low income housing is a vacant area of the Valencia mall’s parking lot. I say this in all honesty as a person who spent 5 years working for a non-profit development company which built “scattered site” low and very low income housing throughout New York State, over the vehement objections of neighbors and the cities where our projects were located: There was not a single “HUD housing” project built by our company which did not increase the crime rate in the surrounding neighborhood. Despite Article 34 of the California Constitution (which the OVOV Housing Element doesn’t bother to mention) requiring the City’s voters to approve building of such “projects”, the City staff members and consultants who wrote the OVOV Housing Element want Santa Clarita’s taxpayers to (1) subsidize the construction of 4000 low and very low income housing projects (that’s 4000 apartments, not people) over and above the mandatory set-aside of redevelopment funds for that purpose, and (2) adopt an “inclusionary housing ordinance” taxing buyers of new condos and homes and builders of market-rate apartments in the city to directly subsidize low and very low income housing construction by paying additional fees for its construction or including low and very low income housing “units” in market rate projects. Other communities in California which find that kind of text in Santa Clarita’s OVOV Housing Element offensive have used Article 34 and other tools to avoid having to both subsidize and put-up-with the ruination of their community by just these sorts of provisions. Perhaps it’s the City staff’s willingness to have you taxpayers pay to subsidize building housing for 12,000 to 16,000 low and very low income people which is the reason that the Attorney General’s letter disapproving the Santa Clarita’s otherwise destructive One Valley, One Vision general plan update has been “lost in the mail”. And no, under current low and very low income housing programs, occupancy cannot be limited to people who already live in Santa Clarita, or to children and grandchildren of Santa Clarita’s homeowner/taxpayers. To quote long-time residents of Tehachapi, Lancaster and Palmdale, the rules of the Section 8 housing voucher programs have ruined their communities and it will ruin yours too.

Do developers get density bonuses (i.e., more houses than zoning or general plan calls for) when a portion of the project is low-income? Is there any way this plan is a vaguely-hidden attempt to really allow higher density than we are being told in OVOV?