Californians have gone down in history as leading a nationwide charge to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

“Voters on Tuesday approved Proposition 64, making California the most populous state in the nation to legalize the recreational use of marijuana,” the Los Angeles Times confirmed. “The approval of the ballot measure creates the largest market for marijuana products in the U.S. It comes six years after California voters narrowly rejected a similar measure. Activists said passage would be an important moment in a fight for marijuana legalization across the U.S.”

Among California ballot issues, Prop. 64 took shape as one of the most straightforward and likeliest to pass. While others boasted dramatic political expenditures, shared space with contradictory measures, or brought in high-profile outside officials to rally for their passage, Prop. 64 simply gathered support as Election Day neared. 

Laboratories of democracy

Nor was the Golden State alone in the trend. Massachusetts and Nevada voters followed the same path, opting to embrace legal weed. “Leading up to the election, recreational marijuana use was legal in four states: Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, along with Washington, D.C.,” the New York Times recalled. “With the addition of California, Massachusetts and Nevada, the percentage of Americans living in states where marijuana use is legal for adults rose above 20 percent, from 5 percent.”

“The federal government’s ban on the drug precludes the interstate sale of cannabis, even among the states that have approved its use. But Tuesday’s votes created a marijuana bloc stretching down the West Coast, and Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, said he saw an opportunity for the states where recreational marijuana is now legal to ‘coordinate and collaborate’ on the issue, including applying pressure in Washington to relax the federal ban.”

And while pot advocates in a few states considering similar moves faced a higher hurdle, still other states took smaller strides toward looser regulation: “Local outlets in Maine are declaring victory for that state’s legalization measure, but with 91 percent of precincts reporting just a few thousand votes separate the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ columns,” the Washington Post noted. “A similar legalization measure in Arizona did not gain sufficient support to pass, with 52 percent of voters rejecting it. On the medical side, voters in Florida, North Dakota and Arkansas have approved medical marijuana initiatives. Voters in in Montana also rolled back restrictions on an existing medical pot law.”

Culture shift

A complex combination of factors has contributed toward growing uncertainty over the status quo around marijuana regulations. “Public opinion about marijuana has been steadily shifting during the past decade, and the laws have been steadily changing,” as the Christian Science Monitor observed. “One concern is that too many Americans were serving prison terms for a drug many consider less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. Legalizing the drug, they say, can also provide tax revenue and reduce black-market crime.” Concerns around legalization have centered around its potential impact on children, public health and smaller, traditional growers and merchants. “The number of calls to poison control centers involving Colorado children has gone up, as has the number of children who’ve been taken to the hospital for treatment due to unintentional marijuana exposure,” CNN noted. “There have also been more school suspensions, marijuana-related traffic deaths, pet poisonings and lab explosions.”

But although attitudes toward marijuana use have gradually relaxed over the decades since modern-day pot culture arose during the 1960s, the drug’s popularity and mainstream positioning emerged late in the game. “The number of adults who have smoked weed has nearly doubled in three years,” CNN added, citing an August Gallup survey. “It is the No. 1 illicit drug of choice for Americans, according to the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use, although only one-third of users reported an addiction to the substance, unlike most all the other illicit drugs used.”

When real estate developer Forest City began construction on a new apartment complex at 2175 Market St., it announced that it would build more affordable units than required by the city — 20 percent instead of 12.

The response was overwhelming. Forest City put a booth in the lobby of the building — chosen because it is centrally located, near public transit and well-recognized — and handed out more than 6,800 applications.

For 18 apartments.

Despite the odds, 2,595 individuals and families completed and returned the eight-page application. Their names were put in a lottery to draw 400 finalists.

Four hundred names for 18 apartments, 11 of them one-bedrooms.

CA’s piecemeal approach to affordable housing can’t work

This article bridles with barely disguised journalistic anger over the failure of local and state government to deal with affordable housing concerns.

Doug Shoemaker, president of the California branch of Mercy Housing, an affordable housing nonprofit, says this is the worst market he’s ever seen. Mercy just opened a 100-until affordable housing building for families at Fourth and Channel Streets. There were 2,995 applications.

“The demand is just intense,” he said. “It was a horrifying reminder of just how hard it is. I’ve been in this field for 20 years and for people looking for apartments this is the most depressing market I have ever seen. It is painful to watch any of it, but what horrifies us most is the homeless families.”

Sara Osaba, a single parent, can’t get over the irony. A former UC Berkeley student, she moved back to San Francisco from Vermont, where she was working for nonprofits, helping low-income immigrants.

“I’ve worked 30 years helping immigrant families find housing,” she said. “Now I’m one of those families. I’ve gone from being a contributing member of society to being essentially homeless.”

State emphasizes process, not results

But any anger should extend to California’s government beat reporters for the complete absence of context in their coverage of this issue. The starting point for understanding why the state is so bad on this big issue is a 2003 Public Policy Institute of California report. I wrote about it last year when analyzing a San Diego affordable housing policy fight with the same dumb dynamics as San Francisco’s:

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.

We say heed the PPIC instead of embracing a failed status quo. It’s foolish for the city to try to address a problem that needs a regional approach and a much smarter conceptual framework. Instead of a massive increase in the “linkage fee,” the City Council should pass a resolution imploring the governor and the Legislature to fix state law — one so flawed that it gets in the way of fixing the problem it is supposed to resolve.

Wouldn’t it be nice if sabermetrics of a sort came to public policy reporting, complete with analytics examining what the effects of well-meaning laws actually were? If this did happen, the idiocy of state affordable housing policies would be obvious and maybe then they would be changed.

Instead, in California, we have affordable housing dealt with in the worst possible way — by individual local governments that obsess with process, instead of with a coordinated, sophisticated state-run program, as seen in New Jersey and Massachusetts, that emphasize results.

Do reporters ever mention this? Nope. They’d rather be indignant than get to the bottom of why they’re indignant.

By John Seiler

Silicon Valley scored the top spot on the Milken Institute’s “Best-Performing Cites 2012″ list, which looked at 200 metro areas.

That’s a great accomplishment. But what about the rest of California? You have to drop way down to No. 19 for the next California city on the list, Bakersfield-Delano; then down to No. 36 for San Francisco; then No. 66 for Santa Barbara; then San Diego at No. 73.

Los Angeles-Long Beach is way back at No. 95, near Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine at No. 97.

And the Golden State’s cities bring up the rear: Modesto No. 199, Stockton No. 189, Sacramento No. 182. They’re down there with Detroit’s No. 190.

Here’s the full Top 10:

1. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
2. Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos TX
3. Raleigh-Cary NC
4. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown TX
5. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria DC-VA-MD-WV
6. Salt Lake City, UT
7. Provo-Orem UT
8. Cambridge-Newton-Framingham MA
9. Charleston-North Charleston-Summerville SC
10. Fort Worth-Arlington TX

Again, it’s great that Silicon Valley is on top. But note that Texas has three in the top 10 and Utah has two. Low taxes and a friendly business climate matter.

Massachusetts has one area, Boston; but “Taxachusetts” actually has fairly low taxes.

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria means the gigantic government complex known as the U.S. government. It’s been growing as a parasite, sucking the life blood out of the rest of us. That will end soon when the federal government goes bankrupt.

To round out the list, business-friendly North Carolina and South Carolina make the Top 10.

Of the Top 10, five are in the South, which likes business; three in the West; one in the North, Massachusetts; and one is the vortex of tax slavery, D.C.

For California, this is great news if you’re a digital nerd with a 180 IQ. Otherwise, not so good news.

Editor’s note: This is cross-posted from our friend Larry Sand. The NEA is the parent union of the powerful California Teachers Association.

July 24, 2012

By Larry Sand

The teachers union uses bogus numbers to con the public into believing that education needs more funding.

The National Education Association is relentless in its quest to raise taxes. In its latest gambit — “Massive Budget Cuts Threaten America’s Children” — the union claims that “…America’s schools have added 5.4 million students since 2003.” The only documentation for this outlandish number – an 11.1 percent increase – is a link to another article where they state the same fiction.

However, the National Council for Educational Statistics, an organization without an agenda, tells a far different story. NCES says that in 2003-2004 there were 48,540,375 K-12 students enrolled in the nation’s pubic schools. In 2010-2011, that number climbed to 49,484,181, an increase of just under 944,000 students – a 1.9 percent gain.

NEA also tries to convince us that severe spending cuts are dooming our children to an inferior education. But Mike Antonucci offers a realistic look at spending data culled from the U.S. Census Bureau. He came up with a chart which shows that between 2004-2005 and 2009-2010 per student spending increased 22 percent nationwide (9.3 percent after correcting for inflation.)

However, as Antonucci points out, the spending flattened out toward the end of that five year period. And in all likelihood we will be in for a decrease in the near term. But, what must be determined is how spending correlates to student achievement.

Compared to other countries around the world, we are fourth in spending after Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway. Yet,

“The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.”

Not much of a correlation there. What about individual states? A recent study about the U.S. failure to close the international achievement gap released by Education Next finds nothing at all convincing.

“No significant correlation was found between increased spending on education and test score gains. For example, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey posted large gains in student performance after boosting spending, but New York, Wyoming, and West Virginia had only marginal test-score gains to show from increased expenditures.”

Class size

The spendthrift teachers unions and their fellow travelers insist that we need more teachers because small class size is an essential component to a good education, but there is no evidence to back up this assertion. In fact, in a wonderfully contrarian op-ed, Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson makes his case that “America Has Too Many Teachers” and other school employees.

“Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.”

Referring to the NAEP tests, also known as the nation’s report card, Coulson says that in spite of the increased workforce,

“These tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.”

Ah, but what about the kids who do get lost in larger classes? A story in the Huffington Post addresses this, focusing on a sweet eight year old girl in New York City who is having a tough time in school because, due to budget cuts, her 3rd grade class now has 32 students. To be sure some students are hurt by being in bigger classes. But despite the appeal to sentiment, it is hardly a universal truth.

Teacher-pupil ratio

Hoover Institution senior fellow and economist Eric Hanushek has devoted much of his time studying this issue. In 1998, he released the results of his impressive research.

“Examining 277 separate studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement, he found that 15 percent of the studies found an improvement in achievement, while 72 percent found no effect at all—and 13 percent found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that in some cases, children might benefit from a small-class environment, there is no way ‘to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.’”

In our fiscally tough times it is more important than ever not to be swayed by emotion, demagoguery, and plain ol’ BS. Americans must do their due diligence and not be conned by the hucksters. And be especially wary of the teachers unions; the snake oil they sell is particularly venomous.

About the author: Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network  — a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.

When Republicans in Wisconsin and Ohio took away some collective-bargaining rights of government-worker unions, we were warned that freedom was over; that the workers’ democratic rights had been suppressed. Supportive demonstrations were held all across the country, including California.

In February, 2,500 California workers rallied in Sacramento in support of the Wisconsin union members.

But now the Democratic House of Representatives in Massachusetts has voted to deny most collective bargaining rights to government-union workers. Yes, that Massachusetts, home of the late Sen. Teddy “Spend Until America’s Bankrupt” Kennedy. The state where Republicans are as rare as uplifting dialog in an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick.

Reports Boston.com:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The measure still might lose in the state Senate.

But the point is that even Democrats are starting to realize that union pay, perks and pensions are bankrupting governments. That if government union pensions, especially, aren’t curbed, all the money in a state or local budget will go to union retirees, with nothing left over for anything else. Nothing.

That realization will happen to California Democrats, too, eventually.

It’s also amusing to hear the unions complain that the politicians they backed aren’t keeping campaign promises. I’m shocked, shocked! that any politician would take campaign cash, then stab the donors in the back.

The reality is that government unions have become so all-powerful that their only possible future will be to lose power.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, said Lord Acton.

Absolute power also never lasts long.

April 27, 2011