Palo Alto, CA Proposes $250,000 Limit For Subsidized Housing

People earning $250,000-a-year should qualify for subsidized housing in Palo Alto, California, according to a new proposal. It comes after a plot of land (pictured) sold for almost $1 million in the well-heeled city.

[From article]
People earning $250,000-a-year should qualify for subsidized housing in Palo Alto, according to a new proposal.
City officials have outlined an eight-year affordable housing plan - with 587 units for reserved for the area's uniquely wealthy middle class as real estate prices balloon.
The well-heeled California neighborhood, where a plot of land recently sold for $2.7 million, is home to some of America’s richest entrepreneurs who work a few miles away in Silicon Valley.
With house price averages an eye-watering $3 million, even those earning $250,000-a-year are spending two-thirds of their monthly salary (around $14,000) paying off their mortgage.
It means workers such as teachers, janitors, firefighters, social workers, police officers and more are not paid enough to afford the local rent, driving up congestion as they commute in.
Now the City Of Palo Alto has outlined a proposal to combat the issue - with price guidelines unlike any other in the country.
[. . .]

$20 MILLION: This eight-bedroom home in Palo Alto has a tennis court and an attached guest house.

'In most other areas of the Country, this income level would be associated with "above moderate" or market rate housing, rather than affordable housing,' the proposal says.
But in Palo Alto, this section of society - earning anything from $127,000 to $250,000 a year - is struggling.
The plan, tabled at a council meeting on Monday, suggests building apartments as small as 200 square feet with bathrooms and kitchens shared between neighbors.
Other options include co-housing communities that share kitchens and dining areas, and special exemptions for property developers who set aside at least 25 per cent of new-builds for low income families.
[. . .]
The city's biggest problem is that low-income workers cannot afford to live nearby, 'indicating in a large unmet need for worker housing in the City,' the plan explains.
There are far more jobs in the city than there are employed residents.
And the impact is crippling.
'Since many of Palo Alto’s workers cannot afford to live in the City, the imbalance creates negative impacts such as long commutes for workers both inside and outside the region, increased traffic congestion during peak commute periods, and increased air pollution end energy consumption,' the proposal warns.
In total, the proposal suggests building 1,988 new units for anyone earning less than $250,000 a year.
The average area income is $106,300. The subsidized housing plan includes people earning 120 per cent of that ($127,000) and 'above' - which would include those earning $250,000.
But implementing the proposed measures will be tough, according to Professor Norm Miller, an expert in real estate at the University of San Diego's School of Business.
'The only solutions to make housing more affordable are to add density, more units per acre and generally you need to add a lot of density like you have in New York City or to make units smaller as proposed,' Miller explained to Daily Mail Online on Wednesday.
[. . .]


$15 MILLION: The city has become a hot spot for Silicon Valley executives, pushing up demand for luxurious mansions like this one, which was listed for a cool $15 million.

'What is interesting in California is how hard it is to do either of these. People here oppose smaller units and density on grounds of adding traffic, the evils of all development foisted on neighbors who keep having babies that will have no place to live.
'Even a hospice center if proposed to be higher density than other housing nearby would probably be accused of driving up traffic to insanely high levels. Go figure.'
Miller, the Hahn Chairman of Real Estate Finance at San Diego's real estate center, last year published a paper that boldly declared Palo Alto was in the midst of a housing bubble that is set to burst.
There could be some reprieve for residents, he claims, will be 'when' (not 'if') the tech bubble bursts.
'This stick wealth has directly supported the housing market and let it escape the normal bounds of income only driven demand,' he told the Mail on Wednesday. 'These tech markets are thus more vulnerable to a setback.'
But ultimately, he says, 'the problem of historically low densities, large units and a NIMBY culture opposing all new development especially of any real density' will linger as long as Californians resist high-density housing plans.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3507025/Palo-Alto-residents-earn-250-000-year-qualify-SUBSIDIZED-housing-new-affordable-housing-plan-teachers-cops-janitors-forced-city.html

Palo Alto residents who earn up to $250,000 a year to qualify for SUBSIDIZED housing in new affordable housing plan as teachers, cops and janitors are forced out of the city
House prices average $3m in Palo Alto, CA; a plot of land sold for $2.7m
Even those on $250,000-a-year drop two-thirds monthly wage on mortgage
It means low-income workers like teachers cannot afford to live in the city
In a bid to tackle the issue, the city has launched a new housing plan
The plan reserves 587 units for people earning more than $127,000-a-year
By MIA DE GRAAF FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 20:44 EST, 23 March 2016 | UPDATED: 05:24 EST, 24 March 2016

New York City Council A Situation Comedy

Among my ideas was to write a television comedy called City Council using video tape from councils throughout the country. But I could never have made up some of the real actions taken by New York City Councilors described in this article. Cambridge City Council is sane compared to this. 

[From article]
de Blasio came into office with an advantage that his recent predecessors lacked: overwhelming support in the city council, whose members, as one lawmaker put it, are like a “cult of true believers,” eager to follow their leader. In New York, the mayor makes most of the news, and it’s easy to ignore the city council. That would be a mistake. Not only did de Blasio himself come from its ranks, where he spent years building alliances; New York’s next mayor may well be a sitting council member today—and, if so, judging by the views of some of the council’s leading figures, the de Blasio years might be ironically remembered for how moderate they were.
[. . .]
Insiders had considered Mark-Viverito a long shot for the speakership. She grew up in privilege in Puerto Rico, where her ophthalmologist father, who owned his own dual-engine Cessna, founded a hospital that, after his death, sold for $165 million. She and her family own properties in San Juan and along the coast that provide them with a stream of rental income. Under the auspices of a program aimed at middle-income, first-time home buyers, Mark-Viverito purchased her current home, a three-family structure on East 111th Street, for $350,000, and paid off the mortgage after only ten years. The property is now estimated to be worth $1.2 million. Despite appearing at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street sit-in and announcing on camera that she belongs to the “99 percent,” Mark-Viverito has the real-estate portfolio of a 1 percenter.
[. . .]
Melissa Mark added her mother’s maiden name, Viverito, after graduating from Columbia University.
[. . .]
Including Mark-Viverito as speaker, the caucus, with 18 seats, now makes up more than one-third of the 51-member council and dominates the council politically, holding all leadership posts and most key committee chairmanships. Its members are unremittingly left-wing.
[. . .]
As a council member, Chin lifted the protective-landmark designation on an early-nineteenth-century wood-framed building on the Bowery, one of the few such historic structures remaining in Manhattan. The 1817 building, owned by a Chinese-American bank that contributed generously to Chin’s campaign, was quickly torn down to allow for the development of a generic, eight-story brick-and-glass structure. Chin defended the erasure of a remnant of New York’s Federal-era past, saying that the new building would offer below-market “affordable office space.” “Affordability” in reference to housing is a legal term pertaining to residents’ income. There is no equivalent term for commercial real estate, so Chin concocted the phrase to give cover to her donors.
[. . .]
Rather than condemn the violence, [Letitia] James instead chided the restaurant’s owners for “irresponsible” management in holding their promotion on the eve of a school holiday, when the teenagers would be more likely to go out for the evening. “I want this Tuesday restaurant promotion stopped, or the lease of this business revoked,” she demanded.
[. . .]
Council Member Jumaane Williams of Brooklyn [. . .] sponsored a resolution calling on police to “stop arresting people for committing minor infractions in the transit system.” According to the text of the resolution, being arrested for littering, gambling, or urinating in the subway can be “very disruptive” to the arrestee. Moreover, being arrested is “overly punitive and unfair” and can even cause “financial hardship.” Clearly, Williams’s policy priorities don’t include protecting subway riders from disorderly or violent behavior.
The only reason that Council Member Inez Barron isn’t a Progressive Caucus member is because the group’s politics aren’t radical enough. In January 2014, Barron, a former state assembly member, assumed the seat formerly held by her husband, Charles Barron; he, in turn, will succeed her in Albany this year. A former Black Panther, Charles Barron was known during his time on the council for never standing during the Pledge of Allegiance, for inviting Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe to City Hall, and for saying that he wanted to go up to the next white person and “slap him, just for my mental health.”
[. . .]
Few council members have much experience of professional life outside politics. Many worked as staffers to council members before becoming council members themselves. One, Progressive Caucus member Richie Torres of the Bronx, said in an interview with The Nation, “Do I look like a politician to you? I’m a 25-year-old college dropout who grew up in public housing. I’m gay. I’m Afro-Latino. I hardly have the characteristics people associate with a politician, but here I am.” Council Member Torres had previously served on the staff of a council member from an adjoining district. He was essentially selected by the local machine to fill a vacancy. So when he asks, “Do I look like a politician to you?” the answer, more or less, is yes.
[. . .]
The quirky personalities and often zany ideas of New York’s progressive council members can make for amusing reading, but the job of governing a city of 8 million people is no joke.
[. . .]
In short, the city faces serious challenges and needs serious leaders to meet them. Based on the quality of its political bench, New York could be in real trouble soon.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_new-yorks-progressive-council.html

SETH BARRON
Council of Crackpots
New York City’s far-left lawmakers are out of touch with reality.
Winter 2015

Resident of North Andover, MA Senior Housing Charged With Triple Homicide

[From article]
All three men lived in a two-story,four-unit building in the elderly/handicapped complex on Foulds Drive. All three victims were found separately in their own units, according to authorities, victims of blunt force trauma, mostly to their facial areas.
The man who lived in the fourth unit in the building, Salvatore Guglielmino, 57, was taken into police custody on Tuesday morning, and will be arraigned on murder charges on Wednesday morning in Lawrence District Court, according to Blodgett.
[. . .]
Blodgett, who called the crime “horrific,” would not comment on a possible motive. He said Guglielmino had no recent history with North Andover Police.

http://patch.com/massachusetts/northandover/updated-three-elderly-men-killed-triple-homicide-one-man-custody

UPDATED: Three Elderly Men Killed in Triple Homicide; One Man in Custody
North Andover Police Chief Paul J. Gallagher assured the community that they are safe.
By Linda Bock (Patch Staff)
January 6, 2015 at 12:42pm

Affordable Units Separated From Market Rate Tenants in Luxury Building

Erin McFadzen and her boyfriend, Erik Clancy, are literally caged in on their terrace. 
Photo: Brigitte Stelzer


[From article]
“Every time someone comes over, I have to explain why the fence is there . . . and tell them we’re rent stabilized, like it’s a badge I have to wear,” she said.
McFadzen’s boyfriend, Erik Clancy, who also lives in the two-bedroom pad, is outraged, too.
“I can’t imagine them saying [to market-rate tenants], ‘You get this beautiful view of Manhattan behind a giant metal fence,’ ” he said.
[. . .]
“It has come to our clients’ attention that you are exceeding your area of usage,” attorney William Slochowsky wrote on Oct. 28 — days after Q41 held a ribbon-cutting attended by Comptroller Scott Stringer, Rep. Carolyn Maloney and others.
The terrace is part of the building’s sixth-floor pedestal, with wooden dividers providing about eight units with private decks.
[. . .]
Once a stalled condo project, the 17-story building was revived by the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Housing Asset Renewal Program. The city doled out $7.6 million in subsidies and, with Bank of America, provided $28 million in low-interest construction loans to Queensboro.
All but eight of the 117 units in the 41st Avenue tower are “affordable” middle-income pads, with $1,103-a-month studios and two-bedrooms costing as much as $2,186 a month.
The fenced terraces have drawn comparisons to “Poor Doors,” separate entrances for low-income tenants living in luxury buildings.

http://nypost.com/2014/12/07/luxury-bulding-fences-off-rent-stabilized-tenants-terraces/

Luxury building fences off low-rent tenants’ terraces
By Kate Briquelet
New York Post
December 7, 2014 | 1:24am

Bronx Was Worse Off Than Detroit, and Turned Around Its Decline

[From article]
The South Bronx has become much safer—to an extent barely imaginable a generation ago. In 2013, the 41st precinct suffered just two murders, compared with more than 100 each year during its Fort Apache days.
[. . .]
In 1985, under Mayor Ed Koch, New York launched a major housing initiative that would spend $5 billion on renovations and new construction, with the South Bronx being a prime location for the investment.
[. . .]
The area’s 40.2 percent poverty rate is only slightly better than Detroit’s 41.5 percent. And 60 percent of households with related children are headed by single mothers, a figure that hasn’t budged in 30 years. Sixty percent of South Bronx residents are on Medicaid. Though the teen pregnancy rate has declined, drug addiction remains entrenched.
[. . .]
Detroit may not have hit rock bottom yet
[. . .]
The most important lesson that Detroit can derive from the South Bronx’s experience is that things can get better. Many despaired over the South Bronx’s future during the 1970s out of conviction that New York City was ungovernable. How could a city incapable of preventing 14-year-olds from defacing subway cars be expected to revive a neighborhood resembling post-World War II Berlin? But the skeptics were wrong, as more effective government—as opposed to simply less or more—proved central to New York’s epic crime decline and many other municipal improvements.

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0930se.html

Stephen Eide

Lessons from a Catastrophe

The South Bronx came back—can Detroit?

30 September 2014

Government Assistance To Black People Is Not Helping

[From article]
Back in the heyday of the British Empire, a man from one of the colonies addressed a London audience.
"Please do not do any more good in my country," he said. "We have suffered too much already from all the good that you have done."
That is essentially the message of an outstanding new book by Jason Riley about blacks in America. Its title is "Please Stop Helping Us."
[. . .]
When it comes to affirmative action, Jason Riley asks the key question: "Do racial preferences work? What is the track record?" Like many other well-meaning and nice-sounding policies, affirmative action cannot survive factual scrutiny.
[. . .]
in response to claims that blacks don't do well academically because the schools use an approach geared to white students, he points out that blacks from foreign, non-English-speaking countries do better in American schools than black, English-speaking American students.
[. . .]
Asian students do better than whites in schools supposedly geared to whites. In New York City's three academically elite public high schools — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — there are more than twice as many Asian students as white students in all three institutions.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell070814.php3#.U93eDt0--yN

Jewish World Review
July 8, 2014 / 10 Tammuz, 5774
A Primer on Race
By Thomas Sowell

NJ Official Lives In Low Income Housing Earning $100,000

[From article]
Michael Razzoli, who runs the city Department of Public Works, says he resides in one of the co-op’s College Drive buildings. But an application to College Towers says a resident’s household income must not exceed $64,000.
Razzoli, whose name is misspelled on the apartment’s doorbell, makes $117,048 as the DPW director, in addition to a $65,085 annual pension as a retired firefighter.

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2013/11/jersey_city_with_six-figure_salary_claims_residence_in_affordable_housing.html

Jersey City official with six-figure salary claims residence in affordable housing
By Terrence T. McDonald
The Jersey Journal
November 17, 2013 at 2:21 PM, updated November 18, 2013 at 11:58 AM

City Council Focused On Net Zero Buildings and Subsidized Tenants

"Simmons’ policy order to develop a contingency plan to ensure that Cambridge residents receiving fully or partially subsidized rent from federal grants would not see their housing jeopardized in the event of another federal government shutdown." City has a budget surplus, and President and Fellows of Harvard College has $32 billion. The City Council should pass an order to appropriate the surplus and Harvard's endowment to pay rent for all persons who can't pay their rent, including  those without subsidies, e.g. unemployed persons.  Maybe the IRS can pay the rents from the fines collected for not joining Obamacare?

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/22/council-discusses-net-zero/#

Net Zero Crowds Out Shutdown at Council Meeting
By ANJA C. NILSSON,
Harvard CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
October 22, 2013

Harvard Spin Doctors in Action

Harvard University is a great institution even though it may have lost its way from its founding as a training school for minsters. Their spokespersons  have a standard response whenever someone wants Harvard to honor its obligations, its promises, it contracts. 

“Harvard’s buildings are intended to support its core mission of teaching, learning and research, and that involves maintaining living space for students and faculty, labs and research facilities, classrooms and library spaces, as well as space for administrative and support services,” a spokesperson from Harvard said in a prepared statement. 

No one can doubt that is true. Harvard's mission is as stated, focused on education and support for education. However in previous activities when Harvard was advancing its core mission of education and support thereof, they encountered some law or ordinance. In order to be allowed to ignore the laws and/or the ordinances, Harvard offered a concession, a trade. "We will give you this consideration if you let us violate that law or ordinance." In City government it is often called a variance. They can vary from the rules of the ordinance without penalty. Previously Harvard made many promises at hearings before various city boards and commissions. After a few years pass the people who attended those meetings are dead, moved or no longer attend the meetings. Harvard representatives also change. They seldom are aware of the past. If they know of it they do not include it in their discussions. 

As in this case they pretend that anything outside of their core mission is a burden and unjustified obligation imposed on them by uncaring selfish members of the dreaded "community" (the term Harvard has for those awful people who have no Harvard affiliation).

When the earlier promise, consideration given in trade for a variance, becomes inconvenient, Harvard just changes the focus to make it appear as if they are the offended party, the victim of outsider avarice. This is an example. 

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x930803810/Cambridge-residents-councilors-wary-of-Harvard-s-plan-for-senior-housing#axzz2Lhs1JKut

Cambridge residents, councilors wary of Harvard’s plan for senior housing
By Erin Baldassari ebaldassari (at) wickedlocal.com
Cambridge Chronicle
Posted Feb 22, 2013 @ 11:49 AM

Man Shot in Elderly Housing Project

This gunman was a resident in an elderly subsidized housing building in Boston with licensed guns. After shooting a man in a wheelchair who later died, he allegedly opened fire on uniformed Boston police officers. Was anyone watching this gunman? Meanwhile in Cambridge, criminals employed by local police, next town police, Boston police, FBI informants, university campus cops and the landlord conduct a brutal campaign of harassment, 24/7 surveillance and character assassination for personal and political reasons. Is this a rational use of taxpayer funded police resources?
[See also this biased report on WFXT-TV FOX25 Boston at
http://enoughroomvideo.blogspot.com/2011/08/fox25-wfxt-tv-boston-ma-bias.html

http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1357772

One dead after Brighton standoff
By Marie Szaniszlo, Natalie Sherman And O’Ryan Johnson
Boston Herald
Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Beggars Can Be Choosers in New York


http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/recession_influx_takes_advantage_B6FOZmNkTNo87CFaFuXZfO

Recession influx takes advantage of 'welfare magnet' NY
By SUSANNAH CAHALAN
Ne York Post
Last Updated: 12:15 PM, November 15, 2009
Posted: 3:42 AM, November 15, 2009