The program has its roots in a plague of gun violence in Richmond a decade ago. Forty-seven murders in 2007 made the city, per-capita, the sixth-most dangerous city in the United States.

Leaders of the mostly African American city in west Contra Costa County were desperate to break the cycle of violence. They seized on a proposal from a city official, DeVone Boggan, and established a city Office of Neighborhood Safety. Here’s an account from the Washington Post’s March 26 story:

Boggan, who had lost a brother in a shooting in Michigan, came up with the core of the program after reading about a paid business school fellowship. He wondered whether troubled young men couldn’t be approached the same way and be paid to improve their lives. But he had to raise the money because he couldn’t persuade officials to give tax dollars directly to violent firearms offenders.

 

He hired men who had served time across San Francisco Bay at California’s San Quentin State Prison, often for their own gun crimes on the streets of Richmond.

 

Boggan and his streetwise crew of ex-cons selected an initial group of 21 gang members and suspected criminals for the program. One night in 2010, he persuaded them to come to City Hall, where he invited them to work with mentors and plan a future without guns. As they left, Boggan surprised each one with $1,000 — no strings attached.

 

“No cop had ever handed them money without asking for something in return,” Boggan said. “And it had the intended effect. It sent a shock wave through the community. People sat up and began watching.”

According to Boggan, who runs the Office of Neighborhood Safety, 84 of the 88 at-risk men who have participated in the program are still alive. While some Richmond City Council members are skeptical, the current mayor and the last two police chiefs have come around to Boggan’s initiative. They credit it with removing Richmond from the list of most dangerous cities. There were just 11 murders in 2014, though numbers went up significantly in 2015, as they did in many U.S. cities.

D.C. mayor hints Richmond is exaggerating its success

Washington is one of those cities, which is why the Post is interested in the Richmond program. D.C. officials are fighting over whether to implement the same or a very similar program, except using taxpayer funds. Council members are more enamored of the idea than Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Cathy Lanier. They are so skeptical that they hint that Richmond is inflating its success.

“There’s never been a real evaluation of the program,” Lanier told the Post. “They didn’t design the program to allow it to be evaluated,” a Bowser aide told the newspaper.

In a 2014 story about Richmond’s plunging murder rate, city officials interviewed by the Contra Costa Times credited a variety of reasons for the drop — never mentioning that potentially violent young men are actually paid to keep peaceful.

On the police side, [Police Chief Chris Magnus] has reformed a long-beleaguered department with an infusion of young officers, a focus on data-driven resource deployment and an emphasis on building community trust.

 

“We don’t cast a wide net or move into hot spots like an occupying force, which fosters distrust among community partners,” Magnus said. “We are surgical; we concentrate on people that need to be focused on.”

 

At the same time, the ONS employs agents who build relationships with more than 60 young men and teens, identified through criminal records and other data as potential violent offenders. The program includes educational, counseling and job-placement support.

 

Operation Ceasefire, a volunteer campaign, helps give former gang members and violent offenders job training and counseling.

This sort of coverage, with its omission of any reference to the anti-crime payments, may well have come to Bowser’s and Lanier’s attention. If Richmond officials brag about the success of the payments to non-local media, but not to local media, that suggests a fear of scrutiny.

Photo Credit: HUD.gov

Rent control is on the march in California, addressing years of leases that have increased to as much as 43 percent over the national average for a one-bedroom apartment.

In the last year, rent has increased 6.5 percent in the state.

Is Rent Control the Answer?

The answer for local politicians is rent control; 16 cities now have such policies, but it had been 30 years since the last time any municipality enacted such a thing until Richmond did so August 6.

The state is one of the most expensive for both buying and renting, and more cities across the U.S., mostly on the coasts, are dealing with rent increases that are taking up to a third of some tenants’ annual salary.

In Richmond, rents have jumped an estimated 30 percent since 2011. To cover the administrative costs of the new rent control program, which begins Sept. 4, a fee will be imposed on all owners of rental properties.

But a review of reports and testimony surrounding a bill pending in the statehouse indicates that fees levied on developers is how we got to the ever-rising rents in the first place.

“Pay to Play”

The first report, which now reads as a road map to rent hike disaster, was released in August 2001 by the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Titled “Pay to play,” the report dug into the residential development fees that are now being noted as the primary cause of rent increases:

“California’s high residential development fees significantly contribute to its high housing costs and prices,” the report stated. “Among our sample of California jurisdictions, fees account for an average of 10 percent of the median price of new single-family homes. Fees account for a lower share of housing prices in more expensive housing markets and a higher share in less expensive markets.”

The report also included a simulation, calculating what would happen if development fees were cut. Using Santa Clara County as an example, a 50 percent reduction in development fees at a 45-unit apartment building would take down monthly rent by 4 percentage points, still allowing for a 10 percent return.

It’s hard for a lot of the public to be sympathetic to developers; over the years they’ve been portrayed as desecrators of open woodlands and the ruin of tradition. At the same time, without them, housing would be a mess. And stopping them, even worse.

Plethora of Fees

There are a dozen fees that can be leveled on developers. They include environmental documentation fees, school mitigation fees and something called a plan check fee, which involves a review of a planned building or development. In Long Beach, that can cost up to “85 percent of Building Permit fee per plan check, but not less than $112.58,” according to city documents. In Roseville, a plan check can involve as many as seven city departments for a multi-family project. If time is money, and it is for most developers, that can be a costly delay.

State Sen. Janet Nguyen, R- Garden Grove, introduced Senate Bill 341 in February that would, in part, address the state’s outsized development fees by requiring a periodic assessment of the various fees being charged by municipalities on developers.

Nguyen said in a May hearing of the Senate Standing Committee on Appropriations that the average local development fee in the state is over $22,000 as opposed to $6,000 in other states. And when adjusted for cost of living, California’s property tax rate is the highest in the U.S.

She noted that the last evaluation of the various development fees was done in 1998, “and it is time to update these numbers to find out what effect these fees have on current housing prices.”

But of course there’s a cost to the proposed periodic assessments; a Department of Finance representative said it would be around $300,000 each time.

If passed, Nguyen’s legislation would make California one of the rare states with a regular assessment of developer fees, said Clancy Mullen, vice president of Austin, Texas-based Duncan Associates, which advises municipalities on impact fees.

“Unless there is a push in a legislature to clamp down, these are not looked at with any regularity in states,” said Mullen, whose group compiled a 2012 survey on developer fees in the U.S. “States may pass an enabling act then tweak it from time to time, but there is no regular review. This would be a first.”

On the heels of a recently approved $15 minimum wage in Seattle, advocates for dramatically increased hourly wages sensed an opportunity to select a fresh target. That’s where L.A. comes in. Organizations including the Los Angeles Workers Assembly and Peoples Power Assemblies have begun drafting a measure that would put a $15 wage on November’s city ballot.

Activists’ experience in Seattle suggests that once a city votes in a mandatory wage boost, reversing the policy can be an extreme challenge. That even appears to be true during the time before increased wages are implemented. A business-led effort to repeal that city’s wage ordinance called Forward Seattle has run aground, failing to collect enough signatures to put a repeal plan before voters. That marks an end to organized opposition to the increase in wages, which takes effect gradually until topping out in 2017.

Hotel politics — and union gamesmanship?

Activists in L.A. had already singled out hotel workers for a planned hike in wages, almost doubling the rate to $15.37 an hour. Industry and business organizations reacted predictably. Lynn Mohrfeld, president and CEO of the California Hotel Association, observed that the scheme would only affect non-union hotels — stoking speculation that unions hoped businesses would encourage unionization to avoid the sudden leap in costs.

Mayor Eric Garcetti, who had been cagey about singling out hotels when his primary opponent Wendy Greuel called it a “living wage,” now supports the idea. Garcetti has said he would sign an ordinance bringing large hotels’ minimum wages to $15.37, but is only “reviewing” the current, broader proposal for a blanket $15 wage, according to a spokesman.

One reason activists looked to Los Angeles after Seattle is simple: California has already been successfully targeted for blanket minimum wage hikes. On July 1, Assembly Bill 10 went into effect, raising the state minimum wage to $9 an hour. On the first of the year in 2016, that figure will rise again to $10. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill last fall, giving activists a substantial amount of lead time in planning their next move.

L.A. isn’t the only city where minimum wage increases are on the march. Just this month, San Diego skipped over voters entirely and opted to raise wages through its City Council. Todd Gloria, the council president, initially wanted to put the matter on the ballot, but ended up deciding to impose it directly on a 6-3 partisan vote, with all Democratic members voting yes and all Republican members voting no. San Diego will hike the minimum wage to $9.75 on the first of the new year, to $10.50 at the start of 2016, and to $11.50 as 2017 rings in. Starting two years later, the minimum wage will rise along with inflation.

Powerful coalition builds in S.F.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco an overwhelming coalition of labor, interest and some business groups succeeded in placing on their city ballot a gradual wage increase to $15 by 2018. Although even San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce has lent its symbolic approval to the measure, restaurateurs and hospitality industry leaders expect the hikes will hit them hard.

Finally, East Bay mayors have recently hatched a plan to coordinate their minimum wage increases. A wage proposal on Oakland’s upcoming ballot is poised to trigger a round of hikes that would end up reaching from Richmond to Berkeley to Emeryville and beyond.

Liberals, union leaders and labor activists were disappointed when Congress opposed a national minimum wage hike — a marquee initiative drummed up by high-ranking Democrats to shift attention away from Obamacare’s then-humiliating struggles. But the subsequent shift to state and local activism has demonstrated the effectiveness of politics practiced closer to the ground.

With momentum behind them, L.A. organizers have settled on an accelerated timetable for phasing in the hikes. Small businesses and nonprofits would get less than two years to prepare for the increase, while large businesses would be hit immediately.

Prices are soaring in the blue-collar Bay Area suburb. The Zillow.com home price index is up 33.7 percent this past year in the city, reducing the number of homeowners who owe more on their loans than their homes are worth. And some homeowners have already gotten help. Twenty percent of all Richmond homes with underwater loans have had the principal on their loans reduced as of January 2013.

Nevertheless, on July 1, the Richmond City Council voted 4 to 3 to use eminent domain to seize 624 underwater mortgages it has identified from private mortgage lenders so as to prevent future foreclosures.  But to pursue condemnation of the mortgages, the council needed a two-thirds majority, or five votes, making the 4-3 vote symbolic, not binding.

The Richmond council members want their city to partner with another city to form a joint powers authority to reduce the legal and administrative costs involved. But other cities appear wary for many reasons, starting with the fact that San Bernardino and North Las Vegas abandoned using mortgage eminent domain after concluding it would severely harm their real estate economies because lenders would stop making home loans.

Most knowledgeable eminent domain experts don’t believe mortgage eminent domain will meet the legal tests required that such actions can only be undertaken for a broad, necessary public purpose — such as seizing land to build a dam or a police station.

The four council members say they are trying to help constituents who can’t get help from the state or federal governments.

A double-whammy on property taxes

Zillow.com reports that 27.8 percent, or 7,584 homes, in Richmond had negative equity as of March 31, 2014.  The median home price during the mortgage bubble was about $444,000 compared to $314,250 today.  That $129,750 gap could mean nearly $1 billion in negative equity in homes, reflecting a potential property tax decline of $10 million a year.

To compound Richmond’s loss of property tax revenues from over-mortgaged homes, its school districts lost 14.61 percent of their property tax revenue this past year due to the August 2012 Chevron refinery fire, and the city lost $6.1 million in revenue.

“Richmond’s decline was driven largely by the change in the refinery’s valuation. County Assessor Gus Kramer said his office valued the Richmond refinery at about $2.75 billion in 2013-14 compared with around $3.75 billion the previous year. The city as a whole was given a net assessed value of $10.89 billion, a decline of more than $1.86 billion; every other city in the county saw an increase in assessed value,” the Contra Costa Times reported in July 2013.

Chevron paid $2 million in fines after the city sued Chevron for costs of fire, police, environmental clean-up costs.

By Joseph Perkins

Well, that didn’t take long. No sooner did Chevron douse the fire this week at its Richmond oil refinery before a couple thousand folks, claiming some sort of personal injury or another, started looking for a way to get paid.

More than a thousand “victims” of the Richmond fire, complaining of coughs, nausea, scratchy throats and even “psychological trauma,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle, somehow managed to make it to the law office of Nick Haney, despite their supposed debilitating ailments.

Why Haney? Because the all-too-opportunistic Richmond trial lawyer placed two large signs in his office windows urging prospective plaintiffs, “File Chevron Claims Here.” So many folks qued up outside his office he sent five of his assistants out into the streets to handle paperwork.

Of course, the fire at the Chevron refinery’s crude distillation unit (CDU) was not quite the public health catastrophe it was made out be in some news accounts.

While there were scary reports of “toxic fumes,” of public warnings issued to residents of Richmond and neighboring cities to stay indoors, of some 1,700 people visiting emergency rooms (but almost none actually admitted to the hospital, the San Francisco Chronicle noted), the Bay Area Air Quality Management District determined that air quality was safe following the Richmond fire.

It wasn’t Chernobyl, where the 1986 meltdown of the Soviet nuclear plant killed as many as 50. It wasn’t Bhopal, where a 1984 gas leak at a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary caused the deaths of 4,000 to 8,000 thousands (according to who’s counting).

It wasn’t even Marin County, where South San Francisco construction company JMB damaged a sewage line in 2010, spilling 2.5 million gallons of wastewater. No one died. But it sure did smell pretty foul.

So why, then, skeptics ask, did Chevron set up shop this week in a downtown Richmond storefront to handle the 1,000 or so people complaining of fire-related ailments who contacted the San Ramon company directly?

Because Chevron hoped to head off Haney and other contingency-fee lawyers who view  the Richmond refinery fire as an opening to round up potential plaintiffs with which to extort a payout from Chevron.

Indeed, in no other state does a deep-pocket corporation like Chevron face a greater risk of being hit with a class action lawsuit than here in the Golden State. It is one the biggest reasons why corporate CEOs consider California one of the worst states in the country in which to do business.

In 2010, to cite an especially disquieting example, a Los Angeles County Superior Court jury returned an astronomical $208.8 million judgment against CertainTeed Corporation, a manufacturer of building materials.

The plaintiff in the case said her husband worked at the L.A. Department of Water for 20 years cutting pipe made by CertainTeed that contained asbestos. Her claim was that, by washing his clothes, she became ill from indirect exposure to asbestos fibers. Never mind that hubby, himself, remains very much alive and well after years of direct exposure

Now if an L.A. jury saw fit to award a single plaintiff more than $200 million on a rather questionable claim, what might a jury in the no less liberal San Francisco-EastBay award 1,000 plaintiffs?

That’s why Chevron just might be willing offer a few hundred bucks to those who show up at itsRichmondstorefront claiming fire-related medical expenses.