More Redevelopment Befuddlement By Dick Jones
Some people are determined to talk. They just can’t help it. They believe that the more stuff they say the more informed they appear. Even if it’s just babble to the rest of us.
Take our own Councilman Dick Jones. If we didn’t mine so much pure gold out of this bonehead’s blathering we really would beg him just to shut up – if only to soothe our agitated synapses.
One of his favorite reasons for promoting Redevelopment expansion is that the money can be used to satisfy low-income housing mandates, imposed by the evil bastards in Sacramento, or Karakhastan, or Tanganyisha, or whatever mythical countries exist in his febrile imagination.
The fact is that housing objectives come from SCAG – the Southern California Association of Governments – a bureaucratic local government consortium made up of people like Jones and guided by public employees. The housing targets, by income classification, are contained in the RHNA (pronounced “reena”) – the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, and are divvied up among local jurisdictions. These numbers are merely “goals,” not mandates. The whole thing is a bureaucratic paper chase and hardly anybody takes it seriously except far lefties.
Which brings us to the point of this post. We wonder what Jones’ Republican backers like Ed Royce and Dick Ackerman think about Jones actively promoting the quasi-socialist RHNA objectives in Fullerton. He is sounding more and more like Sharon Kennedy with each passing meeting. So we have to wonder who’s coaching him on housing issues (well, no we really don’t).
Finally, Jones doesn’t talk about the real mandate; it comes from Redevelopment law itself: the 20% property tax increment set-aside for “affordable” housing, a requirement created to help compensate when city planners and pols rip up lower income neighborhoods to gentrify them. The new expansion area includes little if any residential housing, so no housing stock is going to be displaced. But sooner or later that 20% set aside will start to accrue, and it will have to be used somewhere in Fullerton.
Somewhere in Fullerton. But not in Dick’s zero sub-prime neighborhood in the hills, you can bet the family farm on that. The buck will certainly stop there.
Ed Royce’s name keeps popping up. Does this blog need an Ed Royce category? C’mon Congressman, wake up!
Good question. Ed?
Quasi-socialist? How about just plain socialist?
TFH, technically of course you mean in some part of Fullerton’s First Amended Merged Redevelopment Project Area. So Marty, how is your poor old late grandmother’s house ever gonna get fixed-up?
knew a person whose mother-in-law lived in a practically a shack house in the truslow part of fullerton. fullerton redevelopment overpaid contractors to perform minor repairs on the shack. when the old woman passed her family lost her house to the city of fullerton because the shack was used as collateral for the repairs. the shack was worth 60,000 and the city backed home repair loan was 60,000. family zero, fullerton zero as shack was in blighted area. but there is a happy ending to this story. the area is no longer blighted because low-income, ugly apartments now sit where the shack once stood. moral ofthe story is private enterprise would have gotten a better deal for home repairs and the old woman’s family would have kept the home in the family instead of being considered a financial loss and bulldozed under to allow tenements with pretty facades
van, if you’re talking about SOCo Walk – those aren’t low-income (well, they weren’t when they were built!).
But you’re right about one thing – they sure are klowny-looking. Especially those giant styrofoam pineapples on the corners. Way to go RDRC!
Mr. Sipowicz, my hubbie and I live in SOCO and trust me they still aren’t cheap.
Metro Chick, we’ve been meaning to do a post about SoCo Walk and what it’s like to live there. Would you be interested in writing it?
I have to catch a train, l’ll think about it and get back to you.
Why do you try to make Jones look bad? He’s a good guy and stands up for raising sales tax revenue to pay all our great city employees. I don’t understand any of this redevelopment stuff either, but if the City Manager and the professionals say we need it then it’s okay with me.
Sorry, Star Man, we don’t make Jones look bad. Jones makes Jones look bad. We don’t prise open his jaws and pull idiotic words out of his mouth. We don’t tie his hands to invisible filaments and create those wild, crazy gesticulations. Our hand does’t extend up the back of his plantation jacket to a stick that controls all those grimmaces and wild-eyed facial expressions.
Jones gets all the credit for being Jones. We just like to point out all the stuff that the shills and lackeys are thinking, but are afraid to say.
“I don’t understand any of this redevelopment stuff either”
Congrats. You’re qualified to be on the City Council. Wanna run?
OK. If I could expand couple of redevelopment areas, and get $500 million dollars for the city over 40 years, what is wrong with that. The Norb has his head up his ass if he won’t support his own city.
What’s wrong with it is there’s no blight – a legal requirement to create a Redevelopment project. The tax increment is sequestered from other agencies that have a claim to tax revenue (including Fullerton’s General Fund – is there a pass through agreement with the City? ), and it obligates the City to spens 20% of it on wasteful government “affordable” housing programs. It creates intrusive and/or incompetent design review by bureuacrats and political appointees on the useless RDRC.
Shall I go on?