Will Redevelopment Borrow $50 Million for Affordable Housing?
Have you ever been robbed? Some robberies are violent and involve weapons or threats of force. Others are of a white-collar nature. Don’t be fooled, you are robbed either way. One robber let’s you know he is taking your money while the other is much more insidious and calculating. Our Redevelopment Agency is the latter.
Item 10 on this week’s council agenda deserves some attention.
According to the staff recommendation signed by Ramona Castaneda, for our illustrious Land Czar Rob Zur Schmiede and Charles Kovac, these fine public employees would like to sell a bond. They say that their autonomous agency could net between $26,900,000 and $32,000,000 in proceeds. That sounds like a great idea if you like to squander public money. The Staff report states that the debt service payments over a 17-year term would be approximately $2,900,000 per year starting September 20100 and ending September 2027. Okay, so check my math: $2,900,000 x 17 years = $49,300,000.
That’s a cost of nearly $50 MILLION! We are cutting staff hours, cutting services and rethinking the way we do business… at least everyone else is. Our Land Czar wants the money so he can build MORE affordable housing. That’s laughable since his agency has single-handedly destroyed and displaced more homes than any other in Fullerton. Oh, but wait! What’s that Doc? Oh, he says it’s that law, we just gotta do it! No we don’t.
Of course missing from the discussion about this venture seems to be the little matter of the lawsuit that Friends for Fullerton’s Future has filed against the Redevelopment Agency’s expansion plan. Is Zur Schmiede counting on tax increment from the proposed expansion area to pay off his bonds? Better hope not.
Don’t believe that increasing “affordable housing” is the goal of the Fullerton Redevelopment Agency actions. Keeping Staff looking busy is the real goal. The truth is that decreasing “affordable” housing is the real intention. Zur Schmiede and the “Board” just have to pretend that they are spending the 20% money on “affordable housing”. It’s so easy to fool the two gals who would want to believe that they truly are increasing “affordable housing”.
True enough. The actual numerical and categorical “targets” are just RHNA quotas assigned by SCAG. It’s the 20% that’s the law (despite HeeHaw’s feeble grasp).
The amount of subsidy oper unit of ‘affordable” housing is staggering. And of course Zur Schmiede doesn’t care how high the subsidy is – just so long as there’s something to do for his cohorts.
Yikes! the ghost of Ralph Kennedy. I hope not. Ghost Kennedy what is your version of affordable housing in fullerton? abandoned school buses, section 8 housing or house payments made by foster care checks received for immoral persons?
Every new ‘affordable’ unit these kooks have put up were far more expensive than the affordable units that got ‘dozed to make room. Also, multi-unit development has replaced a lot of single family residences.
As said a thousand times before, it’s all just make-work projects for the redevelopment staff to look like they have a purpose.
Slightly OT, but I saw this a while back and couldn’t help but laugh at Zur Schmiede playing the preservation/conservation role for a change. It’s fine to pillage everything in sight as long as it isn’t in precious Laguna Beach?
http://www.dfg.ca.gov/MLPA/pdfs/comments/rzs_092709.pdf
Despite my personal love for Ralph Kennedy, I could never understand the rationale, or Ralph Kennedy’s love for government-provided affordable housing.
Every time that you draw a line and provide taxpayer money to subsidize housing for one individual on the lower side of that line, are you not taxing and lining out the individual on the higher side of that line who may have worked harder and was more deserving to buy a home on his own? Would not this individual have found it easier to buy his own home if he were not taxed and if the home market had not been artificially skewed?
I have never understood how public subsidies and even Habitat For Humanity can be more efficient in distributing housing that the open market.
steve, it is unbecoming to throw your love around. the core issue is who decides who deserves affordable housing? the question is inherently discrimminating for it sets up an arbitrary panel of persons who personally judge others based on their subjective opinions. Ralph Kennedy loved government subsidized housing, welfare and food stamps because it got him off the hook for supporting his family. I believe because I personally knew Ralph and his family for many years. His daughters sharon, Cathy and Roxanne raised their families at the public trough of welfare checks and food stamps. Ralph’s noble public motives were motivated by personal desire to have those who earn their money pay for his family’s immorality.
Ralph’s work in helping remake society dates back to the beginning of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society”, if not before. In 1964, the girls were 11 to 15. I’m sure that Ralph’s goals for his kids were not to be on public assistance. That was to be to uplift the downtrodden.
Problem is, when you teach people to look to a progressive government for answers, and create systems that allow them to do so, it is no surprize that they will.
fast forward to the 1970’s and all three of them sharon cathy and roxanne were young women , so you only knew Ralph Kennedy before he was laid off from his areospace engineer job?
No, I remember Ralph from when I was 4 years old in 1960. I have evidence that I met him when I was 2, but don’t remember it. I did attend his funeral, and one of the greatest conversations I ever had with him was six months before his death when he knew he was dying.
I did know that he was on the team that designed guidance and control of the Apollo spacecraft. Although he never said so, I am of the opinion that before he was involved trying to get astronaughts to the moon with pinpoint precission he was involved with trying to get payloads to within a few hundred feet of the Kremlin.
It was a cliche in those years that if we can get a man to the moon, why can’t we…(insert goal here). Like, why can’t we cure poverty. So is it a surprize that one of the men who actually got a man to the moon would acutally devote the rest of his life to trying to cure poverty?
I did not think that he was laid off from North American, I thought that he left by his own volition and obtained a doctorate in urban planning from USC. But I could be wrong.
So fast forward to 2010. Sharon is publisher of the newspaper her father founded, Cathy is a high school math teacher, and Roxy is a vintner in northern California and an author.
Where are we in this conversation. Are you stuck in the ’60’s?
By the way, Roxy’s book is on raising children with bipolar disorder, so it might be a must-read for bipolar skank
Steve, your impressions are limited to a few childhood memories in the 1960’s. My uncle also worked as an aerospace engineer for North American; he was promoted not laid off. Though in charge of many projects related to NASA space exploration, he never called himself a rocket scientist. Sharon Kennedy calls herself an editor and artist, the apple did not fall far from the tree, yet her paper is full of grammar and syntax errors and fail to adhere to journalistic standards that in essence it is just a opinion forum for those who work on the Fullerton Observer. I am relieved cathy finally has a job now she wont be living off of welfare and maybe our taxes may go down a penny this year due to this fact. As for roxanne Kennedy’s book, it is a vanity press publication and the connotation for vintner implies someone who has studied enology in collge that qualifies him or her to be employed outside of his or her own home as a vintner. raisn, stompin, bottlin your grapes does not a vintner make. Gosh, steve if you associated with genuine people instead of ersatz rocket scientists you would know “astronaught” is spelled astronaut.