The Census Bureau estimates that 23 percent of state residents meet its alternative definition of impoverished. A 2011 study done by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, which also took into account cost of living, put L.A. County’s poverty rate at 27 percent. With the cost of rent ballooning since then, that figure may be low. But the established data suggest that at least 2.7 million of the county’s 10.2 million residents are in poverty. That’s about the same number of people as the population of Chicago — America’s third-largest city.

Now a new study by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, with the help of public opinion research firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, has come along that puts a face on this poverty and what it means to have so little money in a place as expensive as Los Angeles County. (Here’s the UCLA summary; here’s a slideshow.) It’s based on interviews with 1,401 county residents.

Perhaps the harshest finding was the extent of economic insecurity among Latinos, the largest ethnic group in the county. Some 44 percent of Latinos, and 54 percent of Latino men (including those of all incomes) worried about going hungry, more than double the rate of any other ethnic/racial group. Also, 44 percent of Latinos worried about going homeless, much higher than any other group, including a majority of men.

Economic fears extend to households making $90K

Other findings:

• 29 percent of all those surveyed feared becoming homeless and 31 percent worried about not having enough money for food. Almost one in four households making $60,000 to $90,000 a year — 24 percent — worried about going hungry.

• Latinos were far more concerned about the cost of living, especially housing, than any other ethnic group. Satisfaction with housing costs was highest among people over 65.

• Unhappiness with the quality of life is highest in the inland area stretching from the San Fernando Valley south through central Los Angeles to the communities surrounding Interstate 5 in south Los Angeles.

Former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told the Los Angeles Times that the survey findings were a stark reminder of “the clear differences by class, by economic standing, even more so than the racial divide. … Economic differences seem to be the fault line in our county. It really paints a picture of a Los Angeles that is two worlds.”

Blacks, whites most likely to be upset with public schools

On racially tinged questions, the UCLA study had some results that may surprise.

• Despite years of reports about problems with English-language learner programs, Latinos were far less likely than African Americans to be upset about the quality of public schools. Blacks, whites, college graduates, people with post-college degrees and people with household incomes more than $150,000 were most consistently critical. High school dropouts were most satisfied with public education.

• Despite a perception of racial gaps on the state of race relations, the UCLA study showed, on a scale of 1 to 100, “almost total agreement … [among the] county’s whites (78), Latinos (75), African Americans (77) and Asian-Americans (74)” about the quality of their relations with other ethnic and racial groups.

• African Americans and whites are most worried about the negative effects of immigration.

Now a new UCLA study finds that of the 4 million adults in California who are 65 or older, 1.11 million struggle to make ends meet — an effective poverty rate of 28 percent. That’s more than triple the number of California elderly who were considered impoverished under standard federal measures. This is from the KPCC/PBS report:

More than 770,000 seniors in California aren’t making enough to get by but aren’t considered poor by the federal government, according to a UCLA health policy study that is challenging the definition of poverty. …

 

According to the study, about 340,000 Californians 65 years or older are considered poor based on the Federal Poverty Level, which makes them eligible for public assistance programs.

 

But in an analysis of 2009-2011 U.S. Census data, the researchers concluded that about 772,000 more seniors in the state could use the help but aren’t considered poor enough. She calls this group the “hidden poor.”

 

“They don’t have enough income to meet a minimally decent standard of living,” said study lead author Imelda Padilla-Frausto, a graduate student researcher at the Center for Health Policy Research.

‘Hidden poor’ in trailer parks fight for rent control

As with the jump in overall poverty rates in the 2012 alternative Census Bureau statistical review, elderly poverty rates are much higher than previously thought because of the high cost of living. UCLA explains its approach in its study:

Economic security requires that older adults have sufficient income to pay for basic housing, food, transportation, health care, and other necessary expenses. The Elder Index is an evidence-based approach that identifies the actual costs of those basic needs at the county level for renters, homeowners with a mortgage, and homeowners without a mortgage. …

 

Of the 4 million older adults age 65 and over in California in 2011, one out of three (38.4 percent) was part of an older couple living alone, one out of four (27 percent) was a single elder living alone, one out of 20 (5.5 percent) was part of an older couple housing adult children, one out of 30 (3.6 percent) was a single elder housing adult children, and less than 1 percent were grandparents raising grandchildren without the parents present.

A primary cause of economic insecurity among the elderly is their reliance on fixed incomes that can’t handle sudden increases in housing costs. This explains why trailer park communities with rent controls — and many renters among the “hidden poor” — are often involved in intense political fights in local governments.

California has nearly 5,000 trailer parks with nearly 1 million residents, according to a 2011 TIME report about trailer park owners’ war on what cities call “rent stabilization agreements.”

According to a website that offers resources to trailer-park residents in disputes with their landlords, 97 local governments around California put limits on how much rates can go up each year, from Alameda County to Yucaipa.

Elderly trailer-park voters are often eagerly courted by local politicians. They vote at higher rates than younger residents and form coalitions with other groups that have lost favor with city hall. In Oceanside, for example, trailer park residents and public safety unions have long fought with business interests and conservative Republicans for control of the City Council.

As the New York Times opined in a full-throated editorial, the hike “challenges Congress and other states, particularly New York. In Congress, the latest Democratic proposal calls for a federal minimum wage of $12 an hour by 2020. That would be adequate, if a bit on the low side, and a huge improvement from the current $7.25 an hour, the level since 2009.”

Regulating the future

Yet pro-hike analysts have already begun to make the case for further increases by downplaying the relative significance of the $15 benchmark. According to FiveThirtyEight, for instance, “$10 is a more accurate reflection of what low-wage Angelenos will actually experience,” thanks to inflation and cost of living.

“Los Angeles’s minimum wage won’t go up to $15 tomorrow,” FiveThirtyEight observed. “Instead, the hike will be phased in over the next five years. Assuming inflation holds more or less steady, $15 an hour in 2020 will be worth the equivalent of about $13.75 today.”

“But the bigger issue is that $15 doesn’t go as far in Los Angeles as it does in most of the rest of the country. Not even close. According to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research, it costs workers about 40 percent more to live in Los Angeles than in the average American community. That means that $15 in L.A. is the equivalent of less than $11 in the U.S. overall.”

In fact, however, the City Council’s vote has made such waves because it ratchets up the minimum wage “not just once but forever, with automatic annual hikes starting in 2022,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

That has city business owners on edge, the Times added. “The requirement aims to ensure that wages keep pace with cost-of-living increases, but business advocates say it could cripple entrepreneurs’ ability to adjust wages to unpredictable economic conditions — effectively enshrining automatic annual layoffs when times get tough.”

Going national

For labor advocates, however, the L.A. vote represented a capstone achievement in California, where minimum wage increases were recently passed at the municipal level throughout the Bay Area. Well aware that the $15 mark was first established by activists on the other side of the country, labor organizations quickly set their sights on the rest of the U.S., as one official told the Washington Post:

“How L.A. got to that number is rooted in the activity generating from the East Coast, where New York fast-food workers raised this as a demand, starting their first strikes two years ago,” says Laphonza Butler, president of the Service Employees International Union’s home care workers unit in Los Angeles. “It has just become the vernacular of the workers movement. And when Mayor Garcetti introduced his proposal at $13.25, we all knew that wasn’t enough.”

To begin consolidating the California gains that could launch a nationwide effort, local activists have turned their sights on the L.A. metro area as a whole.

“Campaigners for a $15 minimum wage are targeting Los Angeles County and a cluster of nearby cities to swiftly cement and expand their victory,” the Guardian noted. “The coalition of organised labour, civic activists, religious leaders and ordinary workers hopes to create a domino effect by persuading L.A. County and incorporated cities such as Long Beach, Santa Monica, Pasadena and West Hollywood to follow the city of L.A. and increase their minimum wages to $15 an hour too.”

Political alternatives

Under pressure to offer up a constructive option, as opposed to simply digging in against the hikes, business leaders have begun to consider pushing an increase in the so-called earned income tax credit. “The process is simple: You file a tax return, and the government sends you a check,” wrote Warren Buffett in the Wall Street Journal. “In essence, the EITC rewards work and provides an incentive for workers to improve their skills. Equally important, it does not distort market forces, thereby maximizing employment.” As wage-hiking activism continues, however, one question will be whether Americans wind up supporting both higher mandated wages and bigger tax credits.

This week we saw a perfect example dealing with a San Francisco law so extreme it seems, well, un-American. Here are the key details from the Pacific Legal Foundation’s website:

Today U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer sided with Pacific Legal Foundation’s (PLF) lawsuit and struck down San Francisco’s Tenant Relocation Ordinance, as unconstitutional.

Under the ordinance, rental property owners who want to reclaim use of their own property must pay a massive sum to their tenants – a sum that the tenant doesn’t even have to use for relocation purposes.

PLF’s lead clients are Dan and Maria Levin, who live in the upstairs unit of their two-story home.   They would like to use the lower unit for friends and family, but they would have to pay their tenant $118,000 to withdraw it from the rental market.

The ordinance ‘fails on its face’

This is from Breyer’s decision:

In July 2014, the City and County of San Francisco enacted an Ordinance that requires property owners wishing to withdraw their rent-controlled property from the rental market to pay a lump sum to displaced tenants. The 2014 Ordinance requires that property owners pay the greater of a relocation payment due under a 2005 Ordinance or the new, “enhanced” amount: twenty-four times the difference between the units’ current monthly rate and an amount that purports to be the fair market value of a comparable unit in San Francisco, as calculated by a schedule developed by the Controller’s Office. Plaintiffs, who are property owners now obligated to pay amounts that range to hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit, allege that the Ordinance on its face is an unconstitutional taking in violation of the Fifth Amendment. …

… fundamentally, the Ordinance fails on its face because it requires a monetary exaction that is not roughly proportional to – indeed, does not even share an essential nexus with – the impact of the property owner’s proposed change in use. That is to say, it seeks to force the property owner to pay for a broad public problem not of the owner’s making. A property owner did not cause the high market rent to which a tenant who chooses to stay in San Francisco might be exposed, nor cause the lower rent-controlled rate the tenant previously enjoyed. The Ordinance’s constitutional infirmity being one inherent in the nature of what the monetary exaction is intended to recompense – a dislocation that necessarily arises in all of the Ordinance’s applications – it fails on its face to survive Fifth Amendment scrutiny.

Breyer, like his brother, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, is a moderate on business and regulatory issues. He didn’t see this as even close to a close call. Oral arguments were held Oct. 6. His decision came out all of 15 days later.

In the federal court system, that’s hardly common.

The takeaway: Property rights live.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Silicon Valley is entering a fifth year of unfettered growth. The median household income is $90,000. The average single-family home sells for about $1 million. The airport is adding a multimillion-dollar private jet centre.

But the river of money flowing through America’s tech mecca has also driven housing costs to double while wages for low- and middle-skilled workers are stagnant. Now the widening income gap between the wealthy and those left behind is sparking debate, anger and sporadic protests.

Some even with jobs get supplies from a food bank. Rants against the 1 per cent are spray-painted on buildings in wealthy towns. Security guards rally outside Apple Inc. demanding better wages with a banner that reads: “What’s the matter with Silicon Valley? Prosperity for some, poverty for many. That’s what.”

Here’s a bit from local media, specifically an Oakland Tribune reporter who writers for the Bay Area News Group, from February:

“The wage distribution gap is actually growing,” Hancock said. “We are losing our middle class in Silicon Valley.” …

In 2006, 21 percent of the households of Silicon Valley had yearly income levels of less than $35,000, 40 percent — the middle class — had income ranges from $35,000 to $99,000, and 39 percent had annual income levels of $100,000 or more.

By 2012 … 20 percent of households had incomes less than $35,000, 35 percent were in the $35,000 to $99,000 range, and 45 percent had incomes of $100,000 or more … .

High poverty? Let them eat microchips

So how do the liberal Democrats who control local politics across Silicon Valley propose to deal with this? By making the problem even worse. This is from a story in Sunday’s Mercury-News:

SAN JOSE — Hoping to preserve scenic parklands, wildlife habitat and farmland around Silicon Valley, the board of the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority is scheduled to vote Thursday on placing a $24 per-parcel tax on the November ballot.

The tax, which would require a two-thirds majority for approval, would raise $120 million over the next 15 years to expand the agency’s network of open space preserves, currently located around Henry W. Coe State Park, Calero Reservoir and the hills east of San Jose.

“We need to pick up the pace of conservation in Silicon Valley,” said Andrea MacKenzie, general manager of the agency, which is based in San Jose.

Picking up “the pace of conservation” is code for blocking new construction and growth. Without new housing stock, Silicon Valley’s working class will remain impoverished or close to it by default. The main reason California has by far the highest poverty rate in the nation is the high cost of housing.

And now politicians in the Silicon Valley want to make that problem even worse. And the party they’re affiliated with claims to care about social justice.