Rumor has it that in order to expedite the construction of housing for the homeless – something 2/3 of “street people” don’t want – California officials say they as an emergency measure are going to waive some restrictive permitting regulations and policies. Top billing among the waivers will go to CEQA.

CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act and has been around since the early 1970’s, when it was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. Indeed, when it was being debated early in 1970, CEQA was to be the state’s premier environmental law.

Yet, today – instead of it protecting California’s vast environmental treasures – CEQA has become the first and last local land-use hurdle you have to clear if you want to build anything in this state. It can take years, and it costs. It’ll keep you in and out of court for years – all the while you are paying exorbitant legal fees.

To traverse the CEQA process a land user (developer) – before a project can be approved – must mitigate all of the impacts on the environment, loosely defined, including the areas that surround it.

For example, if the project has any impact… Read More

We don’t have enough things on our plates. We needed this. We have a Congress trying to impeach a president who is no longer president. We have a new president trying to set a world record for executive orders. We have people calling everybody either racists or white supremacists. Oh and then there is the pandemic. The good news is we have vaccines. The bad news is many of our state governments are too inept to get the vaccines into the arms of our citizens. Then along comes this story out of nowhere that rocks our stock markets and will certainly redefine our markets going forward.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Robinhood is a securities firm that was formed in 2013 and became active in March of 2015. Its purpose was to redefine the ability to invest in the stock market without charging for trades. In 1971, Charles Schwab redefined trading in the stock market by becoming a discount brokerage house. Slimmed down services with substantially lower fees. Forty-plus years later, two guys decided to redefine access to the markets.

Their no fee platform was immediately attractive to millennials. They were used to no fee platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The… Read More

As the article by Edward Ring below details, a city in Southern California — Placentia — has done the unthinkable. They terminated their firefighting contract with the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) and replaced them with an independent city firefighting agency.

Cost savings for the city of Placentia was the driving force. The average OCFA firefighter costs taxpayers $241,000 a year — not fully counting the unfunded pension liability debt. The city is saving millions annually while actually IMPROVING their service, based on firefighter metrics.

“According to the city’s ‘final quarterly update‘ on Placentia’s Fire and EMS Services, released on October 20th [2020], in their first three months of operation, the new independent fire… Read More

What’s the difference between today and a month ago?

Absolutely nothing. Except a lot of people have lost their jobs.

How about today and nine months ago?

Again, absolutely nothing, except today the Governor has backed off his lock down order. Nothing has changed again, from a public health perspective, but a lot of people have lost their jobs and income. They are struggling to pay for basic necessities like food, rent, heat, and gasoline.

The order, allegedly justified by the public health crisis created by the corona virus that started in China in 2019 (by the way, COVID 19 is a variation on the various strains of flu that we have experienced about every five to ten years throughout my life time), was supposedly based on “solid scientific evidence” that the lock down order would slow the spread of the disease. Either there was no such evidence, or the “solid scientific evidence” supposedly based on research from the supposedly finest public health experts was seriously flawed or totally false. Like the masks and the “social distancing” mandates, the lock down has not “slowed” the spread of… Read More

On Day 1 of his administration, President Joe Biden took a quantum leap toward reversing his predecessor’s efforts to reduce the role of government in the business of private enterprise. In doing so he put the expansion of the nation’s housing supply squarely in Washington, DC’s political gun sights.

This is trouble for California, and the nation.

“Homebuilder concerns about a changing regulatory landscape” may have already altered their plans for next year, says National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Chairman Chuck Fowke. Indeed, the latest sentiments of homebuilders “suggests somewhat softer numbers are ahead due to rising building costs and an uncertain regulatory climate.”

California is currently suffering from several calamities but none is bigger or more pernicious than the state’s chronic housing supply shortage. Despite faltering demand, due to COVID-19, prices and rents remain sky-high. And, while plenty of state and local constraints still exist, markets here nonetheless welcomed what former President Trump was doing in Washington.

Biden acted quickly to change Trump policies. In addition to curtailing action on over a… Read More

Note: This column was written on November 24th in anticipation of running today. It has one small change which is self-evident.

Joe Biden will soon fulfill his quest that has run for at least 33 years and probably more of becoming President of the United States. As loyal Americans we should fall in line and support him as our president. That is going to be difficult. Let me tell you why.

His pleas for unity within the country ring hollow. Starting with the death of George Floyd we had a series of riots that led to looting and murders across our country. Biden and his eventual V-P pick, Kamala Harris, refused to call them what they were – riots. They refused to call the Democrat-elected officials in charge of the areas and strongly suggest to them that they should put an end to it. While there were serious calls for defunding the police, which Biden had to know was heresy, he stood barely mumbling his displeasure with the idea. He displayed no leadership in defending the basic safety of many of our country’s citizens.

Subsequent to the election he failed another leadership test. He failed to denounce the various outcries for… Read More

Everyone wishes success to our incoming President. Unlike the crowd that hated Trump, Republicans will not be sitting with their voodoo dolls sticking pins into them in hopes of Biden falling on his face. As much as I would like to applaud Biden’s $1.9 Trillion stimulus plan, it would be an act of economic insanity to do such. Let me explain why.

First and foremost, Congress just passed a $900 billion bill to stimulate the economy. Virtually none of that has been spent. Some people have received stimulus checks, but the vast majority of the law is still being dissected. Why would we commit an extensive amount of new funds when we have not even spent the recently approved funds? It is unclear that all the monies were spent from the Cares Act in March 2020. The answer is this is not really economic relief. This is a Democrat hodgepodge of a wish list along with union mollification. That is not for reasons of economics.

One would also expect that Biden’s economic team would have a handle on what is going on in our economy. The facts are common knowledge; they do not need to get transition briefings from the Trump team. Americans made $1 trillion more in the… Read More

In 1982 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling wrote an article espousing the Broken Windows Theory. Simply stated, it says if you let small crimes and evidence of such become apparent it will lead to larger and more specific crimes. In effect, it gives people a license to continue on misbehaving as they have clear indication that people don’t care to stop the errant behavior. Otherwise, fix the broken windows.

This theory was adopted by then-newly elected Mayor of NYC, Rudy Guiliani, and his police commissioners. Its adoption was responsible for cleaning up our largest city after decades of decay. Unfortunately, Democrats and their Leftist allies never accepted this theory despite the clear results and characterized it as they do everything these days as racist.

This summer Americans sat locked in their homes watching the disintegration of our cities in what was determined by many elected officials and talking heads to be righteous actions. Most Americans did not accept the actions of the miscreants. They did not accept the destruction of businesses and the livelihoods of their fellow citizens along with their employees’ jobs. They detested the burning of… Read More