The San Francisco Chronicle has some key details:

Video taken of the confrontation showed Woods starting to walk away from police when five officers opened fire with at least 15 rounds. Critics of how police handled the incident say there’s no indication on the videos that Woods was lunging at or otherwise threatening the officers.

 

The district attorney’s office, police and Office of Citizen Complaints are investigating whether the officers either committed a crime or violated department policy. On Monday, Lee asked the federal Justice Department to look into the Woods killing and other police actions.

 

Also on Monday, the Police Officers Association sent the supervisors a strongly worded letter deriding the Woods Day resolution. It cited several police officers and firefighters who were killed on the job, and said the city hadn’t designated a day in their honor.

Unlike N.Y. mayor, leaders don’t try to placate police

The parallels with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s relationship with his police force are plain. In December 2014, when de Blasio spoke at a ceremony for two murdered officers, hundreds of officers turned their backs on him, furious over the mayor’s comments broadly condemning how minorities are treated by police in New York and elsewhere. Union leaders said de Blasio had “blood on his hands.”

A week later, de Blasio criticized their behavior. “Those individuals who took certain actions the last two weeks, they were disrespectful to the families involved. That’s the bottom line,” he said. “They were disrespectful to the families who lost their loved ones. I can’t understand why anyone would do such a thing in the context like that.”

But by May 2015, de Blasio and police union leaders had patched up their relationship with the mayor, with credit given to de Blasio’s handling of the killing of another officer, his support for getting officers new and better bulletproof vests, and his opposition to a proposed ban on police chokeholds.

In San Francisco, by contrast, leaders are taking a much sterner tone, describing police criticism of their actions as ominous and deplorable:

Supervisor David Campos, who authored the Woods Day resolution with Supervisor John Avalos, told his board colleagues, “By standing up to the bullying and intimidation we have seen, you are not only standing up for yourself, for your family, but you are standing up for an entire city.”

 

“We won’t be intimidated by the POA,” board President London Breed said. “This is a victory, but we have so much more work to do.”

That’s from the Chronicle.

Super Bowl may face protests over police killing

Meanwhile, the SF Weekly, the city’s alternative paper, has consistently likened Woods’ shooting to a police execution. It reports activists are considering protests during Super Bowl 50, which will be played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on Feb. 7, as well as disruptions at game-related events:

Something major is afoot, and public officials know it. They’re just not exactly sure what it could be — or where and when it’s coming.

 

Already, marches and demonstrations are planned and advertised on Facebook. But the “real” show — the equivalent of a blocked Bay Bridge or a takeover of a BART train, except seen by a worldwide audience of more than 100 million viewers — is a closely held secret known only by its organizers (if something like that is even in the works).

 

None of the members of black.seed, who organized the Bay Bridge protest, responded to queries from SF Weekly. Organizers from the Mario Woods Coalition, which made Lee do the offstage shuffle, declined to speak with SF Weekly as well.

 

But opportunities abound. Buses ferrying fans to the game could be blocked. The NFL owners’ dinner, in a public place, could be made ugly. …

 

“There’s gonna be some funny s— going on here,” a veteran media consultant speaking on background told SF Weekly. “It makes me sick to see this coming.”

Only about one-third of Californians can afford to realize the American dream of owning their own home. The homeowners’ property tax exemption of $7,000 (worth a $70 deduction on your property taxes) has not been increased since 1972 when the median priced home sold for $28,660. Currently, an average home is selling for nearly 10 times that amount, and yet the homeowners’ exemption remains unchanged.

Increasing the homeowners’ property tax exemption from $7,000 to $32,000 will save every homeowner in California an additional $250 per year. This will help to mitigate the heavy financial burden placed on homeowners from property tax increases to repay local bonds, and provide some relief from excessive utility fee and charge increases.

By increasing the renters tax credit, this act will provide tax relief to renters, who also face severe housing affordability problems.

Details on the renters’ credit can be found on page 5 of this PDF.

Spotlights on existing CA programs

At a time when affordable housing and poverty are emerging as big issues in California, the Howard Jarvis measure is likely to have little trouble gathering signatures. The cost of housing pinches everyone.

But the measure is also likely to put the spotlight on existing affordable housing programs in the state. A 2003 report by the Public Policy Institute of California on those programs was not flattering, depicting them as helping relatively few people and as being inefficient and ineffective. I have cited this report on CalWatchdog.com and in U-T San Diego editorials. Here’s a previous summary:

The study cited profound flaws in the state’s primary affordable-housing law. It forces cities to plan for needs that are much more appropriately addressed on a regional level. It emphasizes process — laborious long-term planning — over results — more housing units.

The PPIC analysis identified high-cost states with similarities to California that had significantly more success with affordable housing. In New Jersey, the “builder’s remedy approach” gives developers concessions in return for helping a community meet its affordable-housing obligations. Giving developers a profit motive has yielded “far more housing units” than previous policies. California’s version of this approach is much more constrained.

In Massachusetts, the state radically simplified the approval process for residential projects in which at least one-quarter of the units had “long-term affordability restrictions.” To limit NIMBYism, developers can appeal permits rejected at the local level to a state board.

Assembly speaker wants to ramp up approach PPIC knocked

But instead of heeding the PPIC, Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, seeks to double-down on the approach the think tank criticized. She’s calling for hundreds of millions of dollars in new state subsidies to create a few thousand new units across California.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, by contrast, argues that housing prices will only come down in a significant way if there is much more housing stock. He’s seeking to add 240,000 units in his city.

The Howard Jarvis proposal is less ambitious than de Blasio’s, but it would also offer broad benefits. As the PPIC report laid out, the current California approach of providing affordable housing to a few lucky families is more comparable to a lottery than to a program offering help to a broad category of residents.

The PPIC report can be read here.

In the 1990s and early 2000s [it was] common knowledge that most Seattle-based startups had only two viable exit strategies: go public, or get acquired by Microsoft.

This led to a lopsided startup ecosystem, with a very small number of tech titans, and a large number of relatively tiny startups, with very little in between. …

The last 10 years have seen a sea-change in this dynamic in Seattle, caused by two forces.

The first part of the change has been the rise of a new breed of large Seattle-based tech companies – companies that are still smaller than the two local titans, Microsoft and Amazon, yet large enough to fill out the middle tier of the tech ecosystem.

This group includes public companies such as Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, and Zulily, as well as very large acquisitions such as PopCap Games, Isilon, Big Fish Games or Bluekai. Along with older companies such as Adobe and Real, the home-grown tech industry in Seattle now has a sizeable number of companies not only at the $100 billion valuation, but throughout the $10 billion, $1 billion, or $100 million valuation ranges. …

The second force has been the increasing appearance of Silicon Valley engineering offices in the Seattle metro area. Google was one of the first major Silicon Valley offices to open an engineering office in Seattle, and in fact Google now has two engineering offices – one downtown in Seattle, and one in the suburb of Kirkland, WA. …

A decade after Google set up shop in this city, Seattle has seen an explosion of Silicon Valley companies setting up their second engineering office. Seattle is now home to engineering offices for Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Salesforce, eBay, Dropbox, Uber, SpaceX, Taser, Palantir, Groupon, Hulo, Electronic Arts, Yahoo!, Pivotal Labs and many others …

Seattle’s secret weapon: relatively cheap housing

That’s a striking list. Virtually all Silicon Valley tech giants have a Seattle wing. But at some point, the dynamic may change from Expedia and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton’s characterization of Seattle as the “blond, scruffy-haired little brother of the star quarterback (Silicon Valley).”

That’s because the Seattle area has a huge advantage: housing is relatively affordable. Finding affordable housing in California isn’t just a problem for poor people. Many well-paid professionals are unable to afford to buy their own homes and start families.

According to bizjournals.com, in 2013, the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley had the highest average salary ($111,885) for software engineers of any U.S. city. The Seattle area was second at $103,196 per year.

In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, that much money doesn’t get you much in the way of housing. The National Association of Realtors says the median cost of a home in San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale was $855,000 in the fourth quarter of 2014. In San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont, it was $742,900.

The housing outlook is grim for renters as well. A new Forbes magazine survey finds that the Bay Area and Silicon Valley have arguably the nation’s worst housing shortage, allowing landlords to constantly push up rents. The average monthly rent in the greater San Francisco area is now $2,802.

CA pols stick with same affordable-housing approach

A $100,000 salary buys a lot more creature comforts in the Seattle area.  The median cost of a single-family home in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellvue was $352,000 over the last three months of 2014. The average apartment rent in March was $1,615 in all locations within 10 miles of Seattle city limits.

In New York City, housing costs are also sky-high, and Mayor Bill de Blasio is heeding economists who say the best way to make homes and apartments more affordable is to increase housing stock. De Blasio wants to add 240,000 housing units.

In California, however, the politician who has focused most on the affordable-housing issue — Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego — instead wants to ramp up the traditional California affordable-housing policy of having the government subsidize some homes. Atkins’ proposals haven’t focused on the regulatory reforms that developers say are the easiest way to spur more housing construction in the Golden State.

Corporations have been known to up and leave California for many reasons. Being able to retain your engineers and coders by guaranteeing them they will live in an area where they can afford the American dream of a single-family home would appear to be a powerful incentive for a company to move to Seattle, especially now that there is such a huge concentration of tech firms in the Seattle region.

So far, this has led many state politicians to call for doubling down on conventional means of providing affordable housing: using government subsidies to build homes for a relative handful of residents. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, however, believes the biggest impediment to affordable housing is the lack of new housing stock. He backs a plan to repeal regulations and allow 160,000 new dwellings to be built in his city.

Now there’s another prominent East Coast liberal weighing in with a similar view: Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, among the most influential policy wonks in liberal circles. Yglesias’ comments come in a discussion of Thomas Piketty’s ballyhooed book “Capital in the 21st Century” and the criticisms of it by MIT graduate student Matt Rognlie, which centered on Piketty not grasping the relevance of extreme housing costs to income inequality. Yglesias’ key point:

Yet if labor’s falling share of national income is entirely accounted for by the increased returns to housing capital, then it seems we should be looking at housing-specific trends to explain the problem. Rather than robots [taking away jobs], the problem is almost certainly snob zoning rules that prevent the construction of new affordable housing in expensive areas.

Rognlie cites work by economists Ed Glaeser, Joseph Ryorko, and Raven Saks to argue that exclusionary zoning practices have contributed greatly to lack of housing affordability and that this should be more central to the wealth inequality debate. Lawrence Summers, likewise, argued in a review of Capital that “an easing of land-use restrictions that cause the real estate of the rich in major metropolitan areas to keep rising in value” should be an important element of the policy agenda to address Piketty’s concerns.

East Coast vs. West Coast policy gap on housing as well as schools?

It is nothing new for Yglesias to make the point that more housing stock is badly needed. He’s been doing it for years, most notably in his book, “The Rent is Too Damn High.” But what’s interesting is how in this case he explicitly links income inequality to the modern regulatory state.

By contrast, many California Democrats argue that the impact and cost of regulations is exaggerated, starting with leading environmentalists.

When it comes to housing policy, we could see stark regional differences that amount to a replay of the education reform debate. East Coast liberals have been far more receptive to school reforms like teacher competency testing and use of metrics in measuring student and teacher performance than West Coast liberals. Massachusetts arguably has the best-run public education system in the nation, and its landmark education reform measure was adopted in 1993.

There’s also a long history of East Coasters understanding that union interests are not aligned with student interests. In Woody Allen’s 1973 movie “Sleeper,” about a New Yorker in suspended animation who wakes up 200 years in the future, the lead character learns that America was destroyed when “a madman named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear weapon.”

The joke was aimed at New Yorkers, many of whom loathed a teachers union leader named Albert Shanker who led a 55-day citywide teachers’ strike in 1968. This New York Times obit of Shanker reflects on the strike’s rancor and mentions the “Sleeper” reference.

The prime cause of the strike was Shanker’s objection to a pilot program in which local communities were allowed to take over three struggling schools in minority neighborhoods. Nearly a half-century later, similar issues are at play in the Vergara case involving Los Angeles schools. The lawsuit centers on the plaintiffs’ claim that union-backed state laws protect teachers and hurt struggling minority students.

This is no surprise. California was home to the largest protest over police brutality in U.S. history: the 1992 riots after a Simi Valley jury mostly cleared four LAPD officers for their videotaped beating of Rodney King.

But do the Democrats these Californians elect to office ever do anything about it? Do they pass laws cracking down on police misconduct or encouraging outside investigations when there are credible examples of a police department treating minority communities with hostility?

I know of no substantive policies of this kind enacted by the Democrat-dominated Legislature in the past 20 years. After a 2006 court decision (Copley Press v. Superior Court) further insulated law enforcement officers from accountability, activists attempted to get the Legislature to rewrite state law. They got nowhere. The result:

An investigation by ColorLines and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute has found that the decision, combined with state laws that protect police privacy, has blocked the public from knowing whether local police officers have engaged in misconduct, or a pattern of misconduct, even when such misconduct involves officers inappropriately shooting civilians. …

“Now, you don’t have to worry that your dirty laundry or allegations about your dirty laundry will be on the front page of the newspaper,” the attorney representing the local Deputy Sheriff’s Association, Everett Bobbitt, said at the time. In her dissent, Justice Kathryn Werdegar argued in a dissenting opinion that the ruling “overvalues” police officers’ privacy concerns, and “undervalues the public’s interest in disclosure.”

Combined, Copley and the Bill of Rights mean California has the tightest restrictions on public access to police disciplinary information in the country. “Copley differs greatly from laws in the rest of the country,” said Philip Eure, the head of the District of Columbia’s Office of Police Complaints and a former president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Copley, Eure said, is “rather extreme” in its public records restrictions and has “caused alarm in the oversight community.”

Issue a focus of elected Dems in New York

Now of course not just Democrats but Republicans and independents should be worried about police misconduct or mistreatment of minority groups. But in California, it is Democrats who have the political power and Democrats who have a strong hold on the support of African-Americans and Latinos — the groups most likely to cite systemic police mistreatment.

So why don’t elected Golden State Dems do anything about this issue?

One reason is plain: The huge political power of police unions, which are courted by both parties.

One reason should be plain but isn’t: The assumption of California’s elected Democrats that African-Americans and Latinos will always vote for them, so they don’t have to tend to their concerns about cops.

Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York after a campaign in which he directly addressed the concerns of black voters about police behavior. He may not be following through on his rhetoric, but he at least he brought up the issue. It remains a big issue with the progressive bloc on the New York City Council.

Will an elected California Democrat take the issue and run with it? We shall see.

On Thursday, it became clear that this vision was straight out of the California Democratic Party playbook: side with the interests of veteran, mostly white teachers over the educational needs of struggling, mostly nonwhite students.

This isn’t inspiring. It’s not even progressive. It’s reactionary, racially charged interest-group politics.

Fox News has the details:

“New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took off the gloves in his battle with education reformers, rescinding an agreement for the city to share space with several public charter schools.

“The move undercuts educators, parents and some 700 students at four schools, including Harlem Success 4, one of the public charter school movement’s top success stories, and two set to open in the fall. While agreements at those schools were rescinded, expansion of a fourth school was also blocked. … De Blasio … is an unabashed critic of charter schools and won election with full-throated support of the United Federation of Teachers.”

Minority kids better served by charters than status quo

In California, the biggest charter success stories are usually in heavily minority areas. Why? Because they’re served so poorly by a union-enforced status quo that makes adult jobs more important than student progress at regular public schools.

The same is especially true in New York City, which has an odd and highly controversial system of funneling white and Asian students into elite schools that get more resources, a system that white New York liberals would see as outrageous if their kids didn’t benefit.

De Blasio is one of such hyprocites. His wealthy contributors’ kids can go to top schools. But the kids of the minority voters who overwhelmingly supported him?

No charter schools for you!

“Katherine Bathgate, of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, called the [mayor’s] decision ‘outrageous.’

“’This is an unjustified attack on the city’s most vulnerable youth — 93 percent of students in charter schools in New York City are minorities and 73 percent are low-income,’ Bathgate said. ‘These children and parents don’t deserve to have the rug pulled out from under their feet.’

“De Blasio’s administration previously pulled $210 million in building funds from public charter schools and diverted it to pre-K expansion at traditional schools.

“The teachers union hailed the decision.”

Of course it did.

Will Latino Dems ever object to CTA domination of schools?

I talked to a respected pollster the other day and asked him when fissures finally would open in the California Democratic establishment between the elected Dems who are subservient to the CTA and CFT and the largely-Democratic Latino community, which can’t be happy with the California public school status quo, which is dictated by the CTA and CFT.

He said when a prominent and polished Latino Republican started making the case, then the screwiness of backing Dems would start to sink in with Latinos. May that happen soon, because otherwise nothing will ever change in California’s adult-first public school system.

As for de Blasio, just wait for him to actually voice an inspiring new vision of New York City, much less America. He may look and seem different than Anthony Weiner, Charley Rangel, Mark Green, Al Sharpton and other New York “progressives.” But actions speak louder than height or family history.

“The mayor has a remarkable opportunity to make real many progressive policies and prove their merit,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, who as mayor of San Francisco introduced a form of universal health care and allowed same-sex couples to wed.

“De Blasio matters,” Mr. Newsom said. “A lot of us are counting on his success.”…

His administration could be a redemptive moment for a national left whose policies were often blamed for the crumbling of urban centers in the 1960s and 1970s, yet has now started to reassert itself in smaller jurisdictions with bold new approaches on issues like income equality and poverty….

The stakes are high for Mr. de Blasio, who entered politics as an aide to former Mayor David N. Dinkins and has seen firsthand the consequences of a failed left-leaning administration.

The waves of crime and racial tensions that plagued Mr. Dinkins’s tenure nudged Democrats into the city’s political wilderness for two decades, as the lengthy tenures of Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg ushered in an era of hard-nosed, business-minded executives in City Hall.

Assuming Newsom ends up running for governor in 2018, by then the evidence will be in on whether or not de Blasio brought Nirvana to the Big Apple and boosted the fates of Newsom and other like-minded pols. Or whether the city returned to the Dinkins era of soaring crime and fleeing businesses.