CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-In an article originally published in The Federalist on October 2, 2019, The Honorable Chuck DeVore notes that, according to a new poll from the Institute of Governmental Studies at U.C. Berkeley, a full 74 percent of the state’s very conservative voters say they’re looking into moving, and 84 percent of those cite California’s political culture as their rationale for leaving.
Few Californians are conservative because most Californians do not want to go back to the days when a gay teacher could be hounded out of the school or blacks suffer de facto segregation or Latinos expelled from school for speaking Spanish. The Conservatives wear their bigotry like a badge of honor.
Thus, those who stay end up paying a "liberal tax" of 30% in order to live in a state where an Asian student isn't shot dead because he rang the wrong doorbell. (Thirty percent is the figure I assign to the extra cost to live in LA over another part of the country.)
Californians Act as If It’s an Either-Or Choice
Californians refuse to fight against both Dem corruptionism and GOP bigotry. That may be due to our being a low information society that lacks an understanding of how economic and political policies interact.
On February 13, 2020, LA Times (aka Pravda West) business columnist Michael Hiltzik writes, “There’s Still No Evidence That Taxes Are Driving Residents out of California.” But if we understood taxation on a deeper level, we’d see how both the conservatives and the liberals don’t always recognize a tax when they see it.
The tax rate is irrelevant without knowing what those taxes buy. Los Angeles’ mentally moribund electorate is unaware that their taxes are buying worse air pollution, exorbitant housing costs, disease and pestilence in the streets due in part to the rise of homelessness and in part due to the city’s mafiazation of garbage collection, not to mention LA’s persistently worst traffic congestion in the world. The tax which contributes to the driving of Angelenos to other states is the Wall Street tax on housing, something 99% of Angelenos are unaware of.
“Unlike many taxes, the Wall Street tax gets us taxpayers nothing in return. . . .The Wall Street tax is the extra rent or mortgage Angelenos pay each month for housing costs over and above the fair market value. One way or another, our rent and mortgage payments end up on Wall Street.”
The 1% Are Not Impacted by the Wall Street Tax
Would Jeff Bezos not have bought the Warner Estate if it cost $250 million? For someone else, however, who makes $50,000 a year and is starting a family, the Wall Street tax prevents them from buying a home in Los Angeles. Worst yet, the Wall Street tax becomes part of the rent for renters. The landlord has his exorbitant mortgage payments and renters are his source of income. Thus, the middle-class quality of life is seriously impacted by this tax. Perhaps due to its ideological pro-Wall Street bias, the Federalist Society does not understand that absurdly high mortgage and rent payments are a type of tax that drives the middle class out of California.
Many of the bonds foisted on us by the government in Sacramento decrease our quality of life. Measures HHH and JJJ masqueraded as measures to help the poor, but their purpose was to support excessive densification by allowing developers to construct allegedly affordable housing and then undergo fraudulent bankruptcies in which friendly judges remove the developers’ economic burdens of honoring the Affordable Housing obligation – something that garnered them extra millions in loans. The developers escape repaying the city for the bond money, get 100% market rate projects, and then the taxpayers still have to repay Wall Street. The city -- not the bankrupt developers -- borrowed the money.
Since Angelenos do not see the connection between these bonds and the higher cost of housing and the lower quality of life, they do not mention the bonds when explaining why they want to leave California.
The Basic Principle Is This
Taxes that lower the quality of life while increasing living costs prompt people to move away, while taxes that improve the quality of life encourage people to stay.
Taxes for rapid transit are tied to the excessive densification which results in Los Angeles’ deplorable GINI Coefficient as the worst of any major U.S. urban area. While few can articulate that urban sprawl spreads wealth and uplifts the majority while densification transfers wealth from the majority to the 1%, Family Millennials increasingly realize that the harder they run, the farther behind they fall.
Densification Makes People Poorer
Densification increases land prices under the ersatz belief that the highest land use is the best land use. This landlord propaganda ignores everyone else’s quality of life. If one owns a 180 x 100-foot lot in the Basin, it’s worth more with a 20-story building built on it than with three single-family homes.
Densification in the Basin steals the land wealth that belongs to Valley landowners and transfers it to the 1% who own Bunker Hill and Century City. It creates horrible traffic congestion so that the politicos demand hundreds of billions of dollars to construct mass transit which we would not need if we allowed land use to follow people toward the peripheries.
Illegal up-zoning (also called spot zoning) that the LA City Council makes possible through its criminal vote trading system, increases the value of land near each spot zoned property. Developers pay more to build a 36-unit apartment than to rehab three single family homes. A developer’s purchase price enters the real estate “comparables” and any nearby homeowners use those statistics to set listing prices. The few families who can afford to buy the nearby houses at their inflated price end up incurring the Wall Street tax for an excessive mortgage. After a decade of corrupt City Council-fueled inflation of housing costs, more and more homes have been torn down because only developers can afford them, making housing cost inflation worse. As a result, the percentage of homeowners in LA plummets and the smart Family Millennials move to Texas.
Corruptionism Fuels LA’s Increasingly High Cost of Living and Decreasing Quality of Life
The engine behind the net exodus from Los Angeles is corruptionism which destroys the quality of life, but thanks to judges like Richard Fruin who ruled that the LA City Council’s actions are “non-justiciable,” -- legalese for “above the law” -- the 1% are making out like bandits. Whoever said “crime does not pay” has not paid attention to Los Angeles corruptionism. The reality is that men who would cut down the last old growth redwood have the same mentality as developers, politicos, and judges who decimate LA rent-controlled housing, creating the homeless crisis. They don’t worry that about 1,000 homeless people die each year and about 30% of them each year due to being homeless.
Dems Won’t Discuss These Matters During the Upcoming March 3rd Primary
They’ll mouth meaningless shibboleths to make a candidate appear empathetic, but there’ll be zero analysis how the Dem’s New Urbanism is ruining the quality of life for the average person while making the 1% super enormously wealthy.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
