Sanbernardosuperb Blog

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The Sun: Reports detail housing woes for Southern California residents

By Kevin Smith, San Gabriel Valley Tribune
Posted: 06/28/15 – 4:23 PM PDT |

The Southern California real-estate market is feeling the sting of a changing climate, as a pair of new reports finds renters, would-be homebuyers and black households losing ground in the face of competition from investors and a widening racial wealth gap.

In a survey of 80 community-based nonprofits, the California Reinvestment Coalition found that long-term tenants are being displaced by high rents while potential first-time homebuyers are losing out to all-cash offers from investors.

“The irony in Wall Street profiting from a foreclosure crisis they helped create is not lost on anybody,” Kevin Stein, the coalition’s associate director, said in a statement. “Even worse, Main Street banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo and Citigroup, who are subject to the Community Reinvestment Act, are enabling these harmful practices by financing these investors or by securitizing their portfolios.”

The Community Reinvestment Act is designed to encourage lenders to help meet the credit needs of the communities where they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Eighty percent of survey respondents felt that institutional investors have a “negative” impact on clients and neighborhoods, while 77 percent said qualified homebuyers “often” or “always” lose out to cash investors when trying to buy an REO — or lender-owned — property.

Blackstone, Colony, Waypoint and American Residential were the REO-to-rental companies named by survey respondents most frequently as being problematic.

Half of the nonprofit housing developers surveyed for the study said they have been outbid by cash and institutional investors.

Lori Gay, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County, can tell you all about that. Her agency helps low- to moderate-income families obtain affordable housing and stay there.

“As a nonprofit, we had a grant awarded to us through HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program,” she said. “We got $60 million, which has really helped us to compete. But even with all of that cash, we still get outbid by investors — sometimes before the properties are even placed on the market. In some cases investors are buying up 500 homes at a time.”

The glut of investor-owned rental properties, combined with California’s ongoing drought, have served to hike the rental price of homes, according to Kevin Patterson, president of Palmdale’s RentSource Corp., which specializes in home rentals throughout the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys.

They are currently handling 350 properties.

To read entire story, click here.

The post The Sun: Reports detail housing woes for Southern California residents appeared first on InlandPolitics.com.

Los Angeles Times: Analysis California GOP benefits from redistricting decision as bigger case looms

The Supreme Court in Washington, where justices on Monday ruled that independent citizens’ commissions were allowed to draw electoral district lines. California’s districts are set up by its citizens’ commission. (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

By Cathleen Decker
June 29, 2015

Supreme Court redistricting decision benefits Republicans in California, the opposite of its impact elsewhere

Like so many political events, the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Monday that upheld the right of independent citizen commissions to draw district lines inspired a different reaction in California than elsewhere in the nation.

Here, it was a victory for Republicans, spared the alternative of having the strongly Democratic Legislature draw lines that would have carved into the GOP’s already paltry number of elected officials. Elsewhere, it was a defeat for Republicans, who control legislatures in places like Arizona, where the case originated, and wanted the restoration of the legislature’s power to draw lines beneficial to their party.

“In Arizona, the Republicans are upset today, but in California the Democrats might be a little less happy than they might have been otherwise,” said Jessica A. Levinson, clinical professor of law at Loyola Law School, who specializes in election law. “Redistricting can sometimes make for strange bedfellows.”

The partisan benefits were not terribly clear in the public reactions of elected officials, many of whom skipped over the political fallout to emphasize their support for the Mom-and-apple-pie notion of citizen involvement, enshrined by two ballot measures.

“Today’s decision by the nation’s highest court supporting redistricting commissions is a victory for California’s open and publicly accessible redistricting process,” state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León of Los Angeles and Assembly Speaker Toni G. Atkins of San Diego, both Democrats, said in a statement. “We hope other states will follow suit now that the court has removed any question about its constitutionality.”

“California voters overwhelmingly approved Propositions 11 and 20 to take the redistricting process out of the hands of elected officials and give it to an independent body,” Senate GOP leader Bob Huff of San Dimas said in his statement. “The court’s decision will ensure that Californians will continue to have an open and fair redistricting process.”

To read entire analysis, click here.

The post Los Angeles Times: Analysis California GOP benefits from redistricting decision as bigger case looms appeared first on InlandPolitics.com.

The Union Democrat (AP): California lawmakers to tackle health care, road funding

AP California News
By Femit Nirappil and Judy Lin
Associated Press
June 29, 2015 – 2:37 PM EDT

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The California Legislature is holding two special sessions this summer to tackle long-vexing funding shortfalls in the state’s transportation and health care programs. But talk of targeted tax increases has prompted political hand-wringing.

At issue in the sessions ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown is how California should pay billions of dollars for needed road and highway repairs as well as funding Medi-Cal, the state’s medical insurance program for the poor. Medi-Cal now provides coverage to one in three Californians.

There’s no set deadline for reaching deals. Lawmakers plan to take up the issues separately.

Brown, a Democrat, had pledged in his 2010 campaign to take tax increases to the ballot but says he didn’t make a similar promise during his re-election campaign.

“We’ll have to leave that as an open question,” he said.

Republicans question that logic.

“The contract didn’t disappear just because he got elected the second time,” said Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, R-San Dimas.

Voters aren’t likely to revolt against targeted tax increases because the state’s economy has improved and many see roads in poor condition, said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College.

Lawmakers of both parties agree the state’s transportation tax structure is out of date. They can’t keep relying on a gas tax that hasn’t been increased in 20 years and lets thousands of electric car drivers off the hook for maintaining the roads they drive on.

To read entire story, click here.

The post The Union Democrat (AP): California lawmakers to tackle health care, road funding appeared first on InlandPolitics.com.

Gableman changes his mind about that Rindfleisch appeal #JohnDoe #JohnDoeII #JohnDoe2

“A Wisconsin Supreme Court justice on Tuesday withdrew his unusual request asking for his colleagues on the state’s highest court to review its decision not to hear an appeal of a felony conviction from a former aide to Gov. Scott Walker.” – source Interesting. I feel loathe to speculate about this turn of events because more »

Monday, June 29, 2015

The Press-Enterprise: RIVERSIDE: Should city pay official’s legal bill?

Councilman Paul Davis was investigated in 2014 for alleged violations of city charter, but DA dismissed case.

Published: June 26, 2015
Updated: June 27, 2015 – 6:58 p.m.

Riverside City Councilman Paul Davis won’t face any charges in connection with 2014 allegations that he violated the city’s charter, which could have been a misdemeanor.

But the case, which some residents considered a boondoggle, isn’t quite over.

To read story by Alicia Robinson in The Press-Enterprise, click here.

The post The Press-Enterprise: RIVERSIDE: Should city pay official’s legal bill? appeared first on InlandPolitics.com.

The San Francisco Chronicle: Supreme Court’s white lie on Obamacare

By Debra J. Saunders
Friday, June 26, 2015 – Updated 2:12 pm

The GOP-majority Supreme Court saved President Obama’s bacon Thursday with a political ruling that papered over his signature Affordable Care Act. Writing for the majority in the 6-3 King vs. Burwell decision, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the 900-page law was written behind closed doors with little debate or amendment, and thus was “inartfully drafted.” It was the court’s obligation, he wrote, to translate bill language limiting the government subsidies to enrollees in “an exchange established by the state” to also cover federal exchanges.

Roberts always has been a consummate politician in his role as guardian of the big bench. The President George W. Bush appointee had good reason to fear how the public might react if the Supreme Court overturned a law that benefits millions of Americans.

Thirty-four states rely on federal Obamacare exchanges. That’s 6 million people, 87 percent of whom bought health care with federal tax credits. Roberts cited a study that predicted that cutting off those subsidies would result in a 47 percent increase in premiums and 70 percent decline in enrollment.

Between a rock and a hard place, Roberts argued that Congress surely never meant to cut out subsidies in states without their own exchanges because “it would destabilize the individual insurance market in any state with a Federal Exchange, and likely create the very ‘death spirals’ that Congress designed the Act to avoid.”

I sympathize, but Roberts has to know he’s wrong. Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the White House, explained during a 2012 speech, the federal law limited subsidies to enrollees of state exchanges in order to “squeeze” states to act. Quoth Gruber, “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits, but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill.”

George Washington University law Professor Jonathan Turley — no conservative he — wrote last year: “I believe that the text is clear in the act and that the Obama administration effectively altered the language when 34 states decided to defy the government and refuse to create state exchanges.”

Joined by two conservative brethren, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a blistering dissent. He raged that words have no meaning if “established by the state” doesn’t mean just that — and the law used the term repeatedly. Observing that Roberts also penned the 2012 decision that by a 5-4 majority perversely interpreted the Affordable Care Act “penalty” language as actually representing a tax, Scalia railed, “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

I think Roberts did what he did to protect the court from the outrage that would follow if millions of Americans lost their subsidies. There’s a big hole in my thinking, as Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, kindly pointed out over the phone. Even without Roberts, there were five justices — GOP appointee Anthony Kennedy joined the four Democratic appointees — ready to uphold the health care act as per the Obama administration.

To read entire column, click here.

The post The San Francisco Chronicle: Supreme Court’s white lie on Obamacare appeared first on InlandPolitics.com.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

The presidential clown car: Trump trumps Walker, Bernie’s coming to WI, Jill Stein is in, and More

TRUMP ON TOP A FOX poll puts Jeb at #1 and Trump at #2 in New Hampshire. Scott Walker is not in the top. This Politico article says that the numbers are too good to be true and quotes pollsters who say “Everybody should calm down“. Whatever the case, I’m still going to take pleasure more »