CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY BULLETIN
The Learning Curve
Do you like to read? Us too! In an effort to help you stay on top of important news related to everything from housing to homeownership to economic justice and other important topics, here’s a summary version of the best and most interesting reads that have crossed our desks this past month.
CCB’s favorite articles & reports from the past month
4.6.23
Economy & Monetary Policy
ARTICLE — The Fed’s Fight Against Inflation Could Cost Black Workers The Most — “That racial gap in unemployment persists, too, at least in part because Fed policymakers have long tolerated lower Black employment as an intractable fixture of the economy, justified by Black Americans’ lower educational attainment and skill levels — even though there’s little evidence for that explanation, according to William Spriggs, a professor of economics at Howard University and chief economist for the AFL-CIO.”
BLOG — To Increase the Supply of Workers, Our Economy Needs Childcare — “As our nation moves to build things, it is important to remember that supporting families is essential to expanding the supply side. As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen argued in coining the term “modern supply side economics” in January 2022 to describe the Biden administration’s economic approach: “Labor supply has been a concern in the United States even before the pandemic . . . The lagging labor force participation rate is driven in large part by a combination of factors that disincentivize work, such as inadequate paid leave and high childcare costs.”
Homeownership & Housing Demand
BLOG — Housing Costs Have Californians Considering an Interstate Move - “Most people who move across state lines cite employment, housing, or family as the primary reason. Since 2015, California has experienced net losses of over 500,000 adults who cite housing as the primary reason, according to the Current Population Survey. About half of those who leave the state buy a house in their new state, whereas only one-third of those moving to California buy a house. Net losses among those who cite jobs as the primary reason totaled 309,000 and among those who cite family 307,000.”
Affordability & Housing Supply
ARTICLE — The big, neglected problem that should be Biden’s top priority - “Tackling the housing supply crisis will require big, industrial-level creativity on a scale comparable to what the administration brought to legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. So far, on housing, that’s been missing.”
ARTICLE — How California came to treat UC Berkeley students’ ‘noise’ as a dire environmental threat - “The concept of “social noise” is perfectly designed to block housing in existing neighborhoods. If this ruling stands, other demographic and individual behaviors could become adverse “environmental” impacts under CEQA. Because apartment residents are likely to be younger than their single-family homeowner neighbors, their “social noise” could come from a colicky infant, bickering siblings or bursts of rebellious teenage music.”
Racial Wealth Gap & Inequality
ARTICLE — What Policymakers Need to Know about Racism in the Property Tax System - “Part of the problem is that as long as race and class remain linked, facially neutral tax policies can have decidedly unneutral outcomes. In the case of property taxes, many states and localities impose restrictions by capping tax rates, assessment values, and year-to-year adjustments. Some of these policies were instituted with good intentions; others, like Alabama’s and those of some other Jim Crow states, were originally passed with the goal of protecting white landowners from funding public services and shouldering Black households with greater burdens. But with explicitly racist intentions or not, these types of policies tend to advantage wealthier homeowners with higher-valued homes, a group of people more likely to be white.”
ARTICLE — The High Cost of Being Poor - “This brings us to the third possible explanation for why we accept the current state of affairs: we like it. It’s the rudest explanation, I know, which is probably why we cloak it behind all sorts of justifications and quick evasions. But as the civil rights activist Ella Baker once put it, “Those who are well-heeled don’t want to get un-well-heeled,” no matter how they came by their coin.”
Our Communities
ARTICLE — The High Cost of Being Poor - “This brings us to the third possible explanation for why we accept the current state of affairs: we like it. It’s the rudest explanation, I know, which is probably why we cloak it behind all sorts of justifications and quick evasions. But as the civil rights activist Ella Baker once put it, “Those who are well-heeled don’t want to get un-well-heeled,” no matter how they came by their coin.”
Just for Fun
ARTICLE — America Doesn’t Know Tofu - “Pale slabs of bean curd shivered over a sputtering steel grill box. As their tops bathed in the cool summer air, their bottoms tensed and colored. When Auntie flipped over a piece, the tofu’s underside was purplish like a black eye, its thick skin waxy and crackly like a fried egg bottom. And then it started expanding.”
ARTICLE — Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain - “As anybody who has spent hours playing Tetris knows, it is an incredibly addictive game. Many people who play for extended periods of time have reported seeing Tetris pieces outside of the game, such as in their mind when they close their eyes, or in their dreams. It’s a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect.”
ARTICLE — Man, It’s a Hot One: The Oral History of Santana and Rob Thomas’ ‘Smooth’ - “It went through the, ‘Hey, this is a good, cool summer jam,’ and then the, ‘Hey, we’re all sick of this song and never want to hear it again,’” he says. “And then it went through the, ‘Hey, let’s listen to that song again. I remember it. That sounds good still!”
3.7.23
Homeownership & Housing Demand
BLOG — How Cities and States Can Increase Black Homeownership - Too busy to click the link? We get it. TLDR: 1.) Build more; 2.) Expand the affordable housing supply; 3.) Change our approach to credit scores; 4.) Create more down payment assistance; 5.) Target resources to families that need it.
ARTICLE — Their Retirement Plan Did Not Include Being Forced to Sell Their Condo - There has been a lot of discussion around investor acquisitions of single family homes. We think the issue is complicated and deserves as much analysis and discussion as possible, but we also think as much attention needs to be paid to the multifamily homeownership market since this is where the most naturally affordable homeownership opportunities exist. “Condos are the bottom rung on the housing ownership ladder, and they’re very important for that reason,” said Evan McKenzie, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies condominium associations. “This could be the affordable housing that a lot of people need, but they don’t have the institutional support to succeed.”
Affordability & Housing Supply
ARTICLE — Prices dip, but LA homes to remain unaffordable for many - Even with higher interest rates and an economy that is no longer roaring, affordability will remain tough in California’s high cost cities. “Jordan Levine, California Association of Realtor’s chief economist, does not think California’s and Los Angeles’ housing market is going to change much for the rest of 2023. The biggest reason was rooted in a basic supply and demand issue. “Even with business cycles that go up and down, we have an economy that is so underhoused, it means affordability is a persistent challenge.””
ARTICLE — For Many Homebuyers, It’s New Construction or Nothing - More news on our not-weird-very-normal housing market. “There are 85 million owner-occupied housing units in the US, so generally it’s easier to find an existing home to buy than a newly built one, particularly in the parts of the country that no longer do much in the way of building. But two things have changed over the past year. First, soaring mortgage rates have made homes less affordable, which has led to a slump in demand. And second, the millions of homeowners who locked in low mortgage rates over the last decade either can't afford or don't want to give up their cheap loans, which has led to a slump in the supply of houses for sale.”
REPORT — How States Are Incentivizing Local Housing Production: A Typology of State Pro-Housing Laws - From our friends at the Terner Center, here’s a great report on the diverse approaches toward getting needed housing built. Spoiler alert, the four policy levers they found are: 1.) Requiring localities to plan for the housing needs of their respective regions; 2.) Implementing state standards for local land use and planning regulations; 3.) Providing carrots for municipalities to incentivize some kind of production goal; 4.) Imposing sticks to penalize jurisdictions for failing to carry out their housing production obligations.
Racial Wealth Gap
WORKING PAPER — Wealth as Control of the Future - If you have some extra time, here’s a great paper on how to think of wealth differently than we have in the past. “For tradeable assets, the market price reflects the expectations that people other than the owner have about its future behavior. This highlights the social nature of wealth: the exact opposite of the archetypal pile of inert, objective, and durable gold coins, an asset’s value is nothing more or less than the dollar-weighted average of the beliefs other people have about the future payments it will yield. When events—changes in consumer tastes, a shortage of a particular commodity, a global pandemic—cause those beliefs to shift, the prices of assets, and the value of the wealth they comprise, will change accordingly.”
ARTICLE — The 19th-Century Roots of Trump’s Anti-Washington Politics - As we think about solving the racial wealth gap, let’s not forget the historic perspectives and attitudes that helped to create it. “White people prioritized local citizenship and resisted federal power because they believed themselves most free and most powerful at the local and state levels. Non-White people, in contrast, sought federal citizenship. Their rights depended on federal protection from the ravages of local White freedoms.”
Our Communities
ARTICLE — No, California doesn’t have a population crisis - We disagree! If you come from a working class community, then it actually is a crisis. “One commonality across the state — in rural, urban or suburban areas — is that low and middle-income Californians are most likely to leave. Those who move here tend to have higher incomes and more education, underscoring the state’s affordability challenges.”
ARTICLE — My Family Lost Our Farm During Japanese Incarceration. I Went Searching for What Remains. - As we think about land-use and housing issues, it can be very easy to become disconnected from the actual people impacted by policies and decisions made. Here’s an important story on California’s discriminatory treatment of the Japanese American community, told through the lens of one family’s farm. “The land never belonged to our family, but the house they left behind had been built lovingly with the help of the Japanese community in the area after a fire had destroyed their previous home. When they left home, the house was still relatively new, and they had been excited for the memories that would be made there. But many of the children they imagined raising in that house would instead grow up in incarceration camps.”