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Happy Friday, Inequality Insights readers, thanks for reading.
In case you missed it, California Divide’s Felicia Mello wrote earlier this month about California community land trusts. These organizations buy land and then sell or rent the buildings on it to low-income residents. According to the California Community Land Trust Network, their numbers have tripled in California since 2014. It’s cheaper than building new affordable housing units, supporters argue. Indigenous tribes, immigrant neighborhoods, and formerly affordable inland cities are among the communities that are experimenting with them, Mello reported.
One example of how it works is the Pigeon Palace apartment building in the expensive Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. When the aging landlord could no longer oversee the property, tenants came together to crowdfund $300,000 for the San Francisco Community Land Trust. The trust combined that money with loans from a bank and the city and bought it for more than $3 million. Then, the trust rented units back to the tenants at more affordable rates than they may have gotten from a new owner – between $1,400 and $3,000 per month for two-bedroom apartments.
“We shifted from being renters in a market where someone could buy our building any day to where no one’s coming to buy our building,” said Keith Hennessy, an experimental dance performer who’s lived at the Palace for 22 years. With that stability, he said, “it’s easier to build a family. It’s easier to build community.”
California’s community land trusts currently house only about 3,500 residents, and most properties consist of fewer than 10 units. But the idea is quietly gaining steam. Billionaire MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, donated $20 million last year to the San Francisco Community Land Trust to expand its portfolio and help incubate new affordable housing trusts.
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- Premium pain. Landlords are facing higher insurance premiums, and passing along some of those costs to their tenants, according to CalMatters’ economy reporter Levi Sumagaysay. It’s “a little bit like death by a thousand cuts,” one California landlord told her. Some experts warn the insurance crisis could worsen the housing crisis.
- Education gap. Several Central Valley cities ranked among the least educated in the United States, according to a WalletHub analysis on factors such as the share of adults with bachelor’s degrees and the quality of public schools. The Modesto Bee reported that Visalia was ranked the least educated metro area in the nation. Stockton, Modesto and Bakersfield also came in at the bottom of the list.
- Heat hardship. Some Indigenous farmworkers struggle to cover their basic needs when they lose work shifts because of triple-digit heat, the Fresno Bee reported . Blistering temperatures over 110 degrees have been roasting the Central Valley in recent weeks. Farmers or labor contractors are required to provide shade, water, and periodic rest breaks to prevent heat-related illness, the Bee said.
- Occupational inequity. Even though California’s workforce is one of the most demographically diverse in the United States, the state’s 10 largest occupations have very little diversity, the Public Policy Institute of California found . The situation perpetuates earning gaps among workers. Men make up just over half of the workforce, but 98% of construction workers and 71% of chief executives and legislators, which are higher-paying jobs.
- Fraud investigation. A Los Angeles homeless service provider is under investigation on fraud allegations for allegedly failing to provide nutritious meals to residents, LAist reported . The City Controller’s Office did not name the service provider in a news release but said its on-site food inventory “consisted almost entirely of instant ramen noodles.”
- Guaranteed income. The San Diego Union Tribune’s Roxana Popescu wrote about guaranteed income experiments in San Diego . Jewish Family Service of San Diego, a local nonprofit, has been testing various versions of giving families or individuals monthly cash payments with no strings attached. The programs, partly paid for with county, state or federal funds, have served more than 2,800 households in San Diego County and have made cash allotments totaling more than $11.7 million.
- Criminalizing homelessness . A new report from Human Rights Watch slams Los Angeles for the way the city is prioritizing moving homeless residents out of the public view rather than helping them, CalMatters’ reporter Marisa Kendall writes . The organization particularly took issue with the Inside Safe initiative, which allows the city to move homeless residents from encampments into hotels.
- Border surveillance. The Markup’s Investigative Reporter Monique O. Madan, wrote about the new normal of border surveillance in a conversation with Francisco Lara-García, a sociologist at Hofstra University. There is more and more use of government- and privately-funded technology like autonomous towers, aerostat blimps, sky towers, incognito license plate readers, and biometrics, and rapid adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that can study border residents’ every move. It “just becomes a fabric of your life that you don’t notice, or you just don’t pay attention to it,” said Lara-García.
Thanks for following our work on the California Divide team. While you’re here, please tell us what kinds of stories you’d love to read. Email us at inequalityinsights@calmatters.org .
Thanks for reading,
Wendy Fry and The California Divide Team
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