Tuesday, June 22, 2021

A soap opera for today...

 

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Sunday, June 20, 2021

The County's COVID survey

Sacramento County recently requested answers to their survey of COVID responses. Here are my answers:

Describe the issue facing Sacramento County:

"The" County's issue is sprawl. Sprawl alienates people, separating them, and requiring every significant trip be in an auto. It also makes transit nearly impossible since it builds at low densities. Among its many "features" is an absence of affordable housing, oppression of poor people, and increased homelessness.

Yet we do not have a shortage of resources driving these awful consequences. For one example, San Francisco has five times its homeless population in vacant homes. The degradation and de-funding of the public realm--the space accessible even by poor people--is another consequence of sprawl.

None of this is necessary, but it's part of the multi-generational, bipartisan war on the poor. "And my class is winning" says Warren Buffett. It's unsustainable at best.

See here for more.

How has this issue been impacted by COVID-19?

The impoverishment of the public realm asks us to believe resources are so limited we can't address the problems above. The truth is that we have enough food to feed everyone, and enough housing, broadband, health treatment, etc.

Depriving part of the population these goods and services is part of "labor discipline." That sends the message that you had better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or you'll suffer the indignities of poverty, ill health, perhaps even homelessness and starvation. And if you're extra ornery, we'll put you in a cage. It's the whip in the hand of the plutocrats.

Currently, the U.S. is the world champion at incarceration, caging people at roughly five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than the demographically-identical Canadians...and Canadian crime isn't worse than U.S. crime. It's expensive, and ineffectual.

All of these have been impacted by COVID. Government's payments to the population expose the myth that we can't afford to support people who need it. The public realm could be much nicer, but then it would deprive the plutocrats of the whip of labor discipline. Government's response has demonstrated the excuses traditionally offered are baloney.

How would you suggest the County address the issue?

 
1. Create public broadband, or make Comcast a "common carrier" that requires it to grant access to its infrastructure to competitors as a condition of access to Sacramento. Now it's in effect, a monopoly.  Competition would make service better (Comcast has won the "golden poo" award for bad service), and cheaper.

2. For infrastructure, homelessness and affordable housing, create a public bank that would lend for needed projects. Since half the cost of particularly large projects is typically financing, this could recycle our spending in the region rather than sending the money to Wall Street. California recently authorized such banks legislatively. And no, banks do not lend their deposits. They create money. The Bank of England validates this assertion.

3. Building pedestrian-friendly mixed use ("New Urbanism") would cut vehicle miles traveled roughly in half. Americans used to spend 10% of their income on transportation. Now, it's 20%...and 85% of spending on transportation leaves the community. Commutes make such spending higher, and requiring every driving age adult own a car is the most regressive tax we have. Viable public transit needs at least 11 dwelling units per acre to have enough riders within a walk of stops. Serving lower density requires subsidies.

4. Have the public bank finance multi-family dwellings in residential neighborhoods, as well as housing in shopping centers. Commerce and offices are suffering badly from online shopping which increased thanks to COVID, and "lifestyle" centers that include housing have per-square-foot sales that are as much as 50% more than sprawl, single-use commerce, so including housing would be an all-round win.

Citrus Heights already has a design like this for Sunrise Mall. The County could ensure such things are built there and elsewhere. A public bank could finance them.

5. Stop relying on law enforcement to solve social problems. Better to treat the cause: poverty. Poverty makes people desperate, if not crazy, and trying to handle a desperate situation after it's already reached its zenith puts our peace officers at risk. We don't need bigger jails, or more people "justice supervised." We've already proven that after impoverishing the public realm, punishment and threats don't work to increase safety in our communities.

One example of how we need to treat our problems: There's a school "reform" movement at large in Sacramento (Michelle Rhee's "Students First") that wants (union-busting) charter schools, merit pay (because teachers are so motivated by money!) and increased testing (to "measure" the schools' value added), saying such things would improve educational outcomes.

The reformers have even funded a propaganda film called "Waiting for Superman" (WFS). That film touts Finland's schools as the ones to emulate. And Finnish schools are very good indeed. Oddly, WFS omits mention that Finnish teachers are unionized, tenured and well paid.

Actual scientific studies validate none of the "reformers" tactics as improving educational outcomes. What does correlate with educational outcomes? Answer: childhood poverty. It's 2% in Finland, and 23% in the U.S. Addressing poverty rather than charters, merit pay and testing would be a different, wholistic approach.

Meanwhile, although crime, arrests and convictions have (long term) been trending downward, the County Jail is full. Why? It turns out that 50% - 70% of the inmates are there not because they have been convicted of anything. They are caged because they're too poor to afford bail. Yep, it's illegal to be poor in Sacramento.

The problems listed can be solved, but cannot not going to be solved overnight. They are typically systemic, rather than individual problems, too, so scolding the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is both cruel and ineffectual.

The County could do a lot to address these issues, but wholistically, systemically, is the way to go. Trying to pick off a single issue here and there won't do the job.

Finally, our current land use planning apparatus (the system not the individuals) is designed to fail, and working as designed. It unnecessarily hands lots of money to land speculators while doing something that could only be called "planning" if that word were synonymous with "ad hoc scrambling to solve problems by shoveling money to the speculators." See my editorial from 1993...and nothing much has changed since then.

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Thursday, June 17, 2021

Why today's media makes us despise one another

 Matt Taibbi provides one of the most interesting perspectives on recent media history.



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Sunday, June 13, 2021

Urban Design

My suburban sprawl-dwelling neighbors and I were chatting when they clucked their tongues at some new apartments going up nearby. "Isn't that awful!" ...is what they were saying.

And you can't blame them not being happy with sprawl apartments. These typically dump a lot of strangers in a neighborhood already straining to have public amenities like parks and good schools, without funding more amenities (and in our County, residences don't pay their own way in taxes). 

But starving the public realm--things like parks and schools available even to the poor--has been the bipartisan, multi-generational agenda for decades now. We don't need to give all the money to our billionaires, but that's what we've been doing. So what I'm about to say needs to add the caveat that a well-funded public realm is absolutely necessary to make it work.

So, instead of the ill-informed sentiment that government can do no good, we'll have to acknowledge that government can do much better than even the supposedly "innovative" private realm. After all, it was publicly funded research that produced lithium-ion batteries, flat screens, touch screens, the transistor, the integrated circuit, the internet, 75% of pharmaceutical innovation. A good portion of those innovations made the iPhone possible, not just Steve Jobs.


So let's grant at least the possibility that government can solve problems, not just create them.

Back to civic design:

Apartments provide more, desperately needed affordable housing, and at least the potential for enough residents to patronize neighborhood commerce within a walk, or transit stops made viable by enough customers. That might even cut the CO2 from commutes and shopping trips since mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods require roughly half the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) per person when compared to sprawl.

The hallmark of sprawl is that its design accommodates autos and little else. You must get in your car to shop, or work, or even to go to the park, typically. Pedestrians and cyclists are clearly a distant afterthough in the design. There's no mixed use (commerce, offices, residences in the same neighborhood), and the only thing connecting these different uses is a trip in an auto.

You might imagine relying on autos for all our trips pollutes, and is otherwise unhealthy--just 10 minutes of walking daily makes for significantly fewer late-life health problems. But the absolute requirement that every driving age adult own and use a car amounts to a regressive tax, one that falls most heavily on those least likely to afford it.

We all know "it takes a village to raise a child," but we stopped building villages in the '50s. No village exists where you can't shop or work, and that distance between uses is what defines sprawl. So sprawl continues to produce alienation, poor health, and it exaggerates the financial distance between rich and poor. My question is: How bad does it have to be before we do something different?

Pedestrian-friendly mixed use is a win for everyone. It's not unprofitably different from sprawl. In fact the market acceptance for traditional, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods is very high. The most valuable real estate in our region (McKinley Park) is a very old neighborhood, but one beloved because it supports pedestrian-friendly mixed use.

 I've written about this before (in 1993 and since), but the message appears to be lost to us suburbanites. Here are a few more videos to make my point.

Peter Calthorpe: 7 principles for building better cities


Jeff Speck: The Walkable City


 

Americans used to spend 10% of their income on transportation. Now, it's 20%
(85% of money spent on driving leaves the local economy)

4 Ways to make a city more walkable


 
Speck notes wide streets speed up traffic. Skinny streets are safer. In Sacramento County's legacy residential (tertiary) streets we have two 12' travel lanes, --as wide as freeway lanes--two 8' parking lanes. Twelve foot travel lanes are freeway lanes. This invites enough speeding that street standards require a bend every 1,000 lineal feet to slow traffic down. That's where we get the "spaghetti streets" in sprawl. It's a safety feature!

And no...wider streets don't cut congestion. People find out about the widening and start driving that street more. It's called "induced demand." So we'll spend $40 million widening Hazel, and within a few months the congestion will return to the old, high levels. And no, we don't get our money back.

What does cut congestion? The Southern California Association of Governments mathematically modeled every congestion remedy they could imagine, up to and including double-decking the freeways. Only one solution provided significant congestion relief: mixed use. It stands to reason that drivers will not clog the freeways if they can get everything they need in their own neighborhood, but everything else does not relieve congestion.

A bit of good news: the State of California now requires all new development contain "Complete Streets"--streets that accommodate pedestrians and cyclists as well as autos.

Personally, I'd like to see some of these commercial properties--the sprawl malls--start incorporating residences. Nearby Citrus Heights is already encouraging apartments amidst the (failing) Sunrise Mall brick-and-mortar commerce.

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Monday, June 7, 2021

Some quotes from Shankar Vedantam's latest

 I really loved his Hidden Brain book, and his latest, Useful Delusions yields the following:

p. 166 "I once asked a linguist what the difference was between a dialect and a language. "Languages," he quipped, "are dialects that have armies."

p. 200 Daniel Kahneman told Vedantam in an interview: "For me, it would be a milestone if you manage to take influential evangelists, preachers, to adopt the idea of global warming and to preach it. That would change things. It's not going to happen by presenting more evidence. That, I think, is clear."

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Sunday, June 6, 2021

Local Politics: Decarcerating and the County Budget

A request for public comment from Decarcerate Sacramento:

Send Emails before June 9th: BoardClerk@saccounty.net

*Click here to send automated email!

Find your supervisor: https://www.saccounty.net/SupervisorLookUp/Pages/default.aspx

Sacramento County’s Proposed Budget: https://bdm.saccounty.net/FY2021-22BudgetInformation/Pages/default.aspx

Decarcerate Sacramento's Budget Hearing toolkit:
https://bit.ly/BUDGET69

Sample Email Script: Public Comment on Item #3 - June 9th

Dear Board of Supervisors,

My name is ____ and I live in ____. [the more personal you make your letter the better!]

First and foremost, I want to highlight that the Public Safety & Justice Agency in its current proposed form does not include meaningful community involvement or health and racial equity experts. For years now, a community-led movement has been growing to demand better coordination and accountability on Mays consent decree compliance and jail population reduction. The agency as proposed does not sufficiently center impacted communities or public health needs. We support Decarcerate Sacramento's ongoing efforts to work with the County on sustainable solutions, and their proposal to create a committee with balanced representation of county employees and community members to create a Depopulation Plan together and work to improve jail conditions.

We recommend that the Board make a commitment that builds on your resolution that acknowledges Racism as a Public Health Crisis. This resolution should frame your process around building a plan that decreases jail populations, acknowledging what county department leaders have stated publicly: that racism is “baked into” the criminal justice system. To combat the inherent racism in this system, you must include impacted community members and groups at the decision-making table, and hire decision-makers who use a racial equity approach.

The assumption that Probation’s pretrial program is an appropriate strategy to decrease jail populations is concerning and exactly why you need community voices at the table. A true alternative to incarceration does not involve criminalization and surveillance that controls, punishes, and sets people up to fail—especially for individuals in the pretrial stage who have a constitutional right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

I strongly oppose the allocation of $5 Million to the “Probation Monitored Pretrial Release Program.” Budget committees of both houses of the state legislature just voted to stop the funding of these probation-led pretrial programs. Continuing this program goes against the will of California voters, who rejected Prop 25 last fall. Voters in 13 of 16 counties (81%) who had existing probation-led pretrial programs, including Sacramento County, rejected Prop 25, stating they did not want an expansion of SB10 probation-led pretrial programs and biased risk assessment tools.

Probation has yet to publish any racial demographic data on their pilot program, which they promised publicly on October 22nd, 2019. Expanding this program’s funding without data and transparency is a public safety and budgetary concern. It is fiscally irresponsible to expand pilots that lack a proven track record of effectiveness, quality review, and longer-term benefit. What does have a proven track record of success are community-based pretrial service models, like San Francisco and Santa Clara. Funding innovative, community-based pretrial service models that uphold the presumption of innocence will increase cost-savings from jail population reductions while ensuring public safety.

We are demanding a FY21-22 budget that invests in #CareNotCages. The budget that your staff is proposing does not reflect the values that our community holds, or this Board’s stated commitment to reducing the jail population. The Sheriff, Probation, and DA combined requested almost $17M in funding and over 80 positions, and they were granted the majority of what they requested ($13M and 68 positions). Can the same be said for the Public Defender’s Office, which is currently funded at a 1:4 ratio compared to the District Attorney? This is largely a status-quo budget that invests in harmful cycles of poverty and criminalization when we urgently need funding for health and human services, housing, community-based care and diversion. Public safety starts with meeting basic human needs for all in our community.

From a fiscal perspective, FY18-19 budget documents signaled an ongoing emergency: “It would be prudent over the next few years to focus on reducing costs and building reserves.” Instead, this budget continues to double down on cost-depleting departments like the Sheriff’s which have consistently shown to be a low yield county investment (i.e., squalid jail conditions leading to the Mays consent decree; revolving door of jail-homelessness; nearly $172/person/night cost). This high frequency Sheriff-DA-Jail-Probation contact further impoverishes impacted persons, their families and neighborhoods, causing additional strain to Human Assistance and Health Services, which are both facing budget cuts this year.

If public safety is truly the goal, then the majority of allocations will move toward equity and data-informed outcomes for supporting public safety by reducing the disparities in the social determinants of health.

Sincerely,

[Your name]


HELL NO‼️

Budget Cuts We Oppose:

  • The County is Defunding of Human Assistance Aid Payments by over $34 Million ($15M of Net County Costs)

    • “Due to projected decline in assistance loads”

    • Our community is most definitely in need of aid assistance. During the pandemic, accessing county aid became nearly impossible for many struggling families (with closing offices and long phone lines). So the number of people who got assistance this year does not necessarily reflect the number of people who are in need.

    • The Department of Human Assistance needs more funding for an outreach/accessibility plan to increase their aid distribution and ensure that everyone in our community is able to get their basic needs met

    • The County is really trying to defund aid payments during one of the worst economic crises we’ve ever seen.

  • The overall budget for Emergency Services is proposed to decrease by $5 Million

  • The overall budget for Economic Development is proposed to decrease by $26 Million

Budget Growth We Oppose:

  • $16.2 Million Overall Budget increase for Sheriff’s Department (⬆️ $7.5 Million ⬆️)

  • $5.9 Million for 30 new Sheriff’s deputies

    • $1.9 Million for 37 new Probation staff for Department of Juvenile Justice (Youth Incarceration) Realignment

    • $5 Million for “Probation Monitored Pre-trial Release Program”

    • There are currently 20,000 people on Probation in Sacramento County!

    • Both houses of state legislature just voted NO on $140 million expansion of these Probation programs

    • Probation’s Pretrial Program goes against the will of California voters.

    • Expanding pretrial pilot funding without data and transparency is a public safety and budgetary concern.

    • The presumption of innocence is a basic right provided by our Constitution. The County's proposed expansion of Probation’s pretrial pilot program is a threat to this fundamental constitutional right.

    • Probation failed to deliver on a basic promise: to fund community-based organizations.

    • Probation Department lies in public--NEVER published any data on race, or any demographics, two years after this pilot program started.

    • Probation is a driver of Mass (Re)Incarceration. Any missteps land us back inside.

    • Probation is working hard to position itself as a leader in “alternatives,” but in reality their practices hugely expand the net of who can be surveilled and detained.

    • Probation’s Pretrial Services costs $1 for every six cents for the Public Defenders’ Pretrial Support Program. And, the County isn’t even paying for the Public Defender’s Program. It’s funded by a grant.

    • The proposed new Management Analyst using $189,000 of AB109 Realignment funds. This person should work with but independently from the Criminal Justice cabinet, better yet under the Public Health Department, and have the following skills:

      • Understanding of social determinants of health

      • Demonstrated history of collaboratively engaging and doing systems change work with impacted communities

      • Racial, gender, economic justice, trauma-informed and restorative justice lens

HELL YES‼️

Budget Growth We Support:

  • $12 Million for Alternative Emergency Response to Persons Experiencing Mental Health Crises (reallocated directly from the existing Sheriff’s Department budget)

  • $1.2 Million for MORE Public Defenders--requesting 6 new positions but DENIED by County CEO. The DA has 401 employees (prosecutors) and only 140 Public Defender employees (who work to defend people accused of crimes).

  • $3.9 Million for Park Construction for ADA accessibility

  • $7.4 Million for “Homeless Encampment Initiative" must not involve police at all!

Our Funding Demands: (Feel free to choose 1 or 2 as good talking points!)

1. Redirect at least 65% (or $32 Million) of AB109 Realignment funds to community based reentry programs that serve at least 2,000 people per year and prevention services, outside of the Sheriff or Probation Departments. Community-based mental health out-patient treatment services outside of a jail/law-enforcement setting should be prioritized. An audit of counties’ use of past AB109 funding stated “weak oversight” led to ineffective spending of funds. Additionally, ensure that a detailed breakdown of AB109 allocations is publicly reported.

2. Utilize at least 30% (or $90 Million) of the American Rescue Plan Act to:

    1. Perform a post-Covid gaps analysis with a racial and neighborhood equity lens to advance supports for community based mental health, substance use treatment, jobs training, housing, violence prevention and restorative justice programs

    2. Fund community-based infrastructure to fill the identified gaps in what our community needs informed by a participatory budgeting approach.

    3. Plan to leverage State funding for mental health infrastructure and Homekey housing, and allocate local match funding as needed

    4. Invest in expansion of County capacity needed to take full advantage of newly funded Medi-Cal benefits, including housing supports, under CalAIM, particularly for people who are exiting incarceration, people with mental illness, and people experiencing homelessness.

    5. Swiftly administer funds to the most impacted residents and families who are in need of immediate and long-overdue direct cash assistance. Data shows that supporting residents in meeting basic human needs helps prevent unnecessary arrests and jail bookings.

3. Redirect at least $15 Million from the General Fund for a 24/7, permanent, Alternatives to 911 program for mental health and homelessness from the existing Sheriff’s Department Budget

4. Strengthen the analytical capacity of the Public Health Department through General Fund:

The most effective county governments have invested in and continue to grow their analytical capacity to ensure smart governance (Live Well San Diego, Get Healthy San Mateo, SF’s Program on Health and Equity and Sustainability, LA’s PLACE program, etc.) They have strong cross-sector assessment and evaluation teams that look at health, neighborhoods/place, and increasingly the impacts of over-criminalization; why does zip code drive how long a child will live and what can the county do to improve conditions? What zip codes over-represent the jail and probation department and why? The BOS should prioritize obtaining this data to inform how the county invests in some neighborhoods, at the expense of others. There is a glaring gap in the BOS interest in data for homeless services vs. data around the disproportionate impacts around arrests, incarceration, probation, etc.
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Wednesday, June 2, 2021

What if I told you there was a single intervention we could deliver in our cities that would cool them during heatwaves, reduce flooding, scrub pollutants from the air, boost biodiversity, improve public health, and even reduce crime?

  Worth reading the entire thread

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