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Rally to Support Affordable HousingCity Hall Steps Monday, August
2, 2021
3:00
– 4:00 p.m.
Before the City Council
Meeting
PASADENA NEEDS YOU!
Demand that
Pasadena’s Updated Housing Element solves our Affordable Housing Crisis
The Housing Element guides the City’s housing policy for the next 8 years
Now is the
time to TELL the PASADENA CITY
COUNCIL
· Affordable Housing is a right
· We need affordable housing for all
Protection for renters
PASADENA
AFFORDABLE HOUSING COALITION: All
Saints Church, Making Housing and Community Happen, NAACP, League of Women Voters-Pasadena Area, Pasadena
For All, POP!, Democrats of Pasadena Foothills, Complete Streets Coalition, Abundant
Housing LA
Dear Mayor Gordo, City Council members and Commissioners,
The State Department of Housing and Community Development provides guidance to cities on revising their Housing Elements, noting that California law requires all cities in California to “adequately plan to meet the housing needs of everyone in the community.” This broad mandate is too often narrowly interpreted to mean compliance with the minimum standards needed for State certification.
The Pasadena Affordable Housing Coalition, made up of a widely representative group of community and civic organizations, urges the Planning Commission to go beyond demonstrating that Pasadena has the theoretical capacity to meet our city’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment of 9,429 total units. The dominant theme of the City’s public outreach meetings has been the demand for effective solutions to the affordable housing crisis facing our rent-burdened tenants and unhoused residents.
To that end, the Housing Element must be a plan that goes beyond potentially allowing 5,974 units of affordable housing (to be added in Pasadena over the next eight years) but instead provides a comprehensive approach to achieving that goal.
Tonight thousands of Pasadenans will go sleep
worrying about their housing security – and hundreds more will not have a place
to sleep at all. It is cold comfort to them to offer a plan that in addresses
their needs in concept, but not in
reality.
The Coalition’s member organizations support a comprehensive set of recommendations based on three key overarching principles to ensure the plan not only meets the minimum standards of State law but most importantly meets the needs of Pasadena’s families, seniors, workers, disabled and low-income renters. These principles are:
·
Make
affordable housing easier and less expensive to build in Pasadena by removing the myriad local barriers that
inflate the costs and discourage development of affordable housing.
·
Provide
augmented local funding to help bridge the gap between the cost of providing
affordable housing and the current resources available. Pasadena cannot fill the gap on its own, but
can ensure that Federal, State, regional, private and non-profit resources can
be leveraged to maximize the supply of local affordable housing.
· Provide housing security to Pasadena’s rent-burdened tenants, recognizing the dire crisis facing them now as they cope with rising rents, inadequate legal protections against evictions and harassment and often substandard living conditions that go unreported for fear of retaliation.
Making affordable housing easier and less expensive to build in Pasadena starts with common sense policies that include enabling construction of deed-restricted affordable housing by right on congregational land and in commercial zones; removing parking minimums citywide; incentivizing the building of accessory dwelling units (ADUs); and streamlining the cumbersome processes that impede the development of affordable housing as well as permanent supportive housing for unhoused residents.
Consideration of an affordable housing overlay on congregational land has been needlessly delayed and if not pursued immediately should be among the first priorities for implementation in the Housing Element. Given the changing face of retail, development “by right” of adaptive reuse with affordable housing should also be a critical priority.
ADUs can provide “elegant density” that not only increase the housing supply overall, but help low-income owners and young families afford their mortgages. Finally, Pasadena should recognize that tortuous entitlement processes don’t produce equitable outcomes. Pasadena should set high standards -- and grant permits to those who comply.
Providing augmented local funding to help bridge the gap between the cost of providing affordable housing and the current resources available is the only way to adequately leverage the resources from Federal, State, regional, private and non-profit resources. Using redevelopment set aside for affordable housing, Pasadena compiled an exemplary record of supporting local affordable housing.
Since its abolition in 2011, the only local stream of funding for affordable housing has come from housing developers who’ve chosen not to provide onsite units to meet their inclusionary responsibilities. This is grossly inadequate to the need. Voters in other jurisdictions including Los Angeles, Culver City and Santa Monica have approved local taxes or bonds.
As Pasadena considers meeting its overall fiscal needs, affordable housing should be a paramount goal to maintain our character as an inclusive and diverse community dedicated to safe and decent housing for all our residents.
Enhancing housing security for Pasadena’s rent-burdened tenants is necessary because renters’ lives can’t wait for the city to meet the pent-up demand for additional affordable housing options. Just as developers often require grants and below market financing to make their projects viable, low and very low income tenants often require subsidies and protections against undue escalations in housing costs to make their rents affordable. No one knows whether the State’s program for forestalling mass evictions after the expiration of the present eviction moratorium will be adequate.
Even if mass displacement does not immediately occur, over the past two decades thousands of long-term residents, many of them multi-generational Pasadenans, have been involuntarily displaced out of the city. This tragedy has fallen most heavily on people of color, particularly the historic Black community in Pasadena, which the 2010 Census showed had been reduced by 24% in just ten years. Given the drastic escalation in rents and home values during the last decade, a similar or greater decline is to be expected upon the release of the 2020 Census figures.
To stem the tide of displacement, the city must fashion remedies to meet not only its RHNA goals - as important as they are - but the affordable housing concerns of its existing residents-over 60% of whom are renters.
Our coalition urges the City to recognize the dire crisis of its existing residents with means adequate to the challenge, adopting a comprehensive set of tenant protections including rent control, just cause eviction rights, adequate legal representation for low-income tenants and a citywide rent registry.
If any of these policies are not included in the Housing Element, the City must propose adequate alternatives for providing housing security to ensure Pasadenans are not forced out of their homes, their neighborhoods, their children’s schools and in some cases out onto the streets.
These three principles and the policies we’ve enumerated in this letter represent a framework for development of a comprehensive Housing Element. Our Coalition has extensively discussed a more detailed set of policies and programs which are all vital to a balanced and realistic plan for housing affordability in Pasadena. We ask the Commission members and City staff to give thoughtful consideration to each and every one of our recommendations for inclusion in the Housing Element.
We appreciate this opportunity to provide the views of hundreds of informed and active local community members who insist their City “adequately plan to meet the needs of everyone in the community.”
Respectfully submitted,
The Pasadena Affordable Housing Coalition
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Among the presidents honored on Mt. Rushmore are George Washington, who owned slaves, and Thomas Jefferson, who used his slaves as collateral to secure debt. See Mt Rushmore from a Native American perspective: https://www.history.com/news/mount-rushmore-native-american-protests
(Associated
Press)
By CLYDE W. FORD
JULY
1, 2021 3:05 AM PT
Americans remain largely unaware that many of the famous
Founding Fathers were deeply in debt. Some of them, including Thomas Jefferson,
attempted to forestall foreclosure by using their slaves as collateral. Using
human beings to back debt was refined in the years following 1776 — and it
helped jump-start our American financial system.
Slave-backed
debt was a depravity that treated Black men and women as fodder whose only
worth was the wealth they generated for others. In honor of Independence Day,
let’s look at the founders as debtors, especially at a time when so many
Americans are in debt from a pandemic that has left them unable to pay their
rent, mortgage and credit card bills.
Thomas
Jefferson died July 4, 1826, nearly $2 million in debt in
today’s dollars. Mount Vernon, George Washington’s tobacco-based estate, failed to keep Washington out of debt, so
he switched to wheat in the 1760s, though his debt lingered throughout the
Revolutionary War and his presidency.
How the founders got into debt was simple. Each year they sold their tobacco to European merchants (mainly British), primarily in exchange for the goods that supported their lavish lifestyles. As tobacco prices fell, but their desire for material comforts remained, they paid for that lifestyle on credit extended by many of the same merchants.
Before
the Revolutionary War, economic conditions in Europe squeezed British
merchants, who in turn squeezed American planters for debt repayment. This
pushed some American planters into financial collapse and others, like
Jefferson and Washington, to the brink of financial ruin. Some slaveholding
planters even complained of enslavement to British creditors.
The
patricians of July 4 bristled at their independence being clipped by British
creditors — and that independence being so deeply predicated on tobacco, their
main way of raising the money owed to those creditors. Tobacco was demanding to
grow, and without slaves to raise their crops, Jefferson, Washington and other
planters would have been far too busy farming to have had the leisure to
contemplate the lofty ideals of liberty.
In
this way, liberty was tied directly to slavery. Although it would be incorrect
to say that the founders went to war with Britain just to get out from under
debt, their mounting debt predisposed them to be open to the idea of separating
from Britain, resulting in the Declaration of Independence and the
Revolutionary War.
In
the years following America’s victory in that war, deep debt continued to hang
over Jefferson. He sought repayment plans with his European creditors and used his slaves, whom he listed by name, as collateral against
that repayment. In this regard, Jefferson was at the leading edge of
a blossoming trend. Although tobacco eventually yielded to cotton, an entire
financial services industry emerged from slaved-backed loans before the Civil
War — through what one economic historian called an
“orgy of bank-creation.”
Citizens’
Bank and Canal Bank of Louisiana, which both ultimately merged into J.P.
Morgan, accepted approximately 13,000 slaves as collateral for loans between
1831 and 1865. When some of those loans defaulted, the bank ended up owning
approximately 1,300 slaves. The Bank of Charleston, which eventually became
part of Wells Fargo, also accepted slaves as collateral on loans. So did the
Commonwealth Bank of Kentucky, which still exists today.
Planters
opened new Southern banks. They drew up lists of slaves as collateral, then had
those banks issue loans to members to buy more land and more slaves. Capital
for these loans was raised by selling bonds to investors worldwide, in London,
New York, Amsterdam and Paris — many places where slavery was illegal.
But
investors didn’t own individual slaves, they owned bonds backed by the slaves’
value. Of course, then insurance was needed on the slaves who backed the bonds
that investors purchased to provide loans for planters to buy more land and
slaves. Aetna, AIG, New York Life and many others stepped up to provide that
insurance.
“The
infant American financial industry,” wrote historians Edward E. Baptist and
Louis Hyman, “nourished itself on profits taken from financing slave traders,
cotton brokers and underwriting slave-backed bonds.” Black Americans, and their
descendants, never recouped anything from a financial system built on their
bodies.
Today,
many white Americans claim no hand in slavery or the brutalization of Black
Americans. Their forebears immigrated to this country well after slavery ended,
they say, and they worked hard, accruing no privilege or wealth. Yet, anyone
who’s ever bought a home on a mortgage, a car on installment, invested in the
stock market, bought insurance or opened a savings account has enjoyed systemic
privilege.
The
institutions used in these transactions were built on the bodies of Black men
and women who never accrued anything from the enormous wealth they generated.
Family wealth is accrued over many generations, and most Black families were
never afforded an opportunity to build it, even though they helped build wealth
for many others. This makes a strong case for reparations.
Before
that can happen — and in the name of the Founding Debtors — the federal
government should at least extend the eviction moratorium and provide debt
relief for the millions behind on rent and mortgage until well after the
pandemic is over and a full recovery is underway.
Clyde
W. Ford is the author of the forthcoming “Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives, and
the Making of White Power and Wealth.” He is a contributing writer to Opinion.
In January of this year
I submitted a feel-good article to Western Friend about Friends and the
“Beloved Community,” and received the best rejection letter ever. I was told by
Mary Klein that she tends to publish good news about Friends on the website,
but wants the magazine to contain articles that “dig deeper into the quandaries,
conflicts, values, etc. that underly all the good work.” Wow! I thought. This
editorial policy is sure to keep the magazine interesting!
Furthermore, she
offered intriguing queries that truly “spoke to my condition.”
·
What’s your trick for keeping going in
when the odds are stacked against you?
·
What’s your trick for returning to
Friends again and again with a loving spirit every time you’ve been swatted
away like the blessed, cheerful, loving gadfly you are?
For the
last few months, I have reflected on these queries. First, I was pleased to be
compared to a gadfly since it evokes Socrates, one of my heroes. When he was on
trial for his life, Socrates, according to Plato, compared himself to a gadfly,
a creature that stirs a sluggish horse to action, just as he had stirred up
Athenians by questioning their leaders.
"If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than
you will injure me" because his role was that of a gadfly, "to sting
people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."
I have not suffered the fate of Socrates (at least, not yet!) but I have
encountered considerable resistance from some Friends, and some have been
furious with me. I have been called a “knee-jerk liberal,” “sanctimonious,” and
other epithets that would not be suitable for a Quaker publication. I have even
been physically thrown out of a Quaker gathering and told, “You don’t belong.”
Despite such treatment, I feel I do belong. I feel that I belong to the
Beloved Community and to the small but blessed company of Quaker “heretics”
like Benjamin Lay, Hannah Bernard, Elias Hicks, Lucretia Mott, the Grimmke
sisters, and of course Joel and Hannah Bean who were the founders of what
became Pacific Yearly Meeting. I haven’t been treated nearly as badly as they
were, but I have had my share of being “swatted away.” It has been painful
experience at times, but one for which I am also deeply grateful. When I am
true to myself and seek to follow God’s guidance, I ultimately feel inner peace
and joy, even if I am given a hard time for doing it. My other hero, Jesus,
reminds us that it is blessing to be insulted and reviled for the sake of
justice or Jesus (Matthew 5:11). He also makes it clear that a truth-teller, a
prophet, isn’t appreciated in his home town or in his own religious community
(John 4:44).
Here are some of the “tricks” that I have found helpful in my efforts to
be faithful to the Spirit of love and truth.
1)
Take
time to listen to the Spirit, and to your heart, and be willing to consult with
others who are wise. At the end of the day,
it doesn’t matter what people think or say about us, what matters is being
faithful to our inner truth (the Christ spirit within us). Because we are all
prone to self-deception, it is also important to be humble and to test our
leadings with others we feel are wise. Over the years I have benefited from
having a spiritual director and an “accountability committee” to help me
discern if I am truly following Divine Guidance rather than my ego or wounded
self.
2)
When
conflicts arise, seek God’s wisdom, not
your own comfort. Many years ago, when I first came to
California, I became caught up in a conflict that many Quakers were having with
the AFSC. Some felt that it had lost its Quaker spirit and were upset that it
no longer offered service program to young people. Two disgruntled ex-employees
of the AFSC led a bitter campaign against the AFSC at the meeting I attended at
this time. I was clerk of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee and the
liaison for the AFSC so I couldn’t avoid this conflict that was tearing our
Meeting apart. The tension was so painful that I was tempted to leave this
Meeting and go to one closer to my home, but my Inner Guide made it clear that
I couldn’t leave until this conflict was resolved. Then Way opened in the winter
of 1993 when over twenty teenagers rose up during Southern California
Quarterly Meeting and insisted that we start a youth service program. Their
enthusiasm was so irresistible that Southern California Quarter decided to work
with the AFSC to fund this project and hire a part-time coordinator. I was
hired for this position and the first youth service project took place at a
migrant camp in Northern San Diego county.
For the next ten years I worked with Quaker youth, taking them on
projects in So Cal and in Mexico, and it was one of the most fulfilling and
meaningful experiences of my life. Out of the bitter conflict that wracked our
Meeting, God brought about a beautiful program that made a significant
difference in the lives of many youth and adults on both sides of the border.
When I finally had to move to another city and leave this Meeting, the
conflicts were resolved and I could depart gracefully.
Seek reconciliation based on integrity and mutual
respect, not agreement. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was
clerk of the Peace and Social Concerns Committee in another meeting and felt
led to speak out against American aggression during meeting for worship. Most
Friends agreed with my messages, but a weighty birthright Friend named Jim (who
happened to be a Republican) disagreed strongly and emailed me that I was a
“knee-jerk liberal.” His response caused me to question if my vocal ministry
was helpful or not, so I refrained from speaking for a while. I went to Ghost Ranch
in New Mexico for a week to attend Intermountain YM’s annual session and spent
a lot of time praying in the desert. After a lot of soul searching Inner Guide
made it clear to me that I needed to ask Jim for a clearness committee. He
agreed and we had a very profound time of sharing our hearts and minds, with a
couple of other Friends holding us in the Light. As a result, we learned to
appreciate and respect each other and became good friends. We still disagreed
about many things, but as Gandhi famously said: “Friendship that
insists upon agreement on all matters is not worth the
name. Friendship to be real must ever sustain the weight of honest differences,
however sharp they be.”
3)
Focus on love and
friendship. I have come to believe that our
“forgotten” Quaker testimony is love. What I have learned after 30 years of
trying to be a Friend, all of our Quaker practices and testimonies are
meaningless if they’re not seasoned with loving kindness. I have also come to realize
that Quakerism is not just a mystical religion, it is also a prophetic
religion—and true prophets are always about love: love for justice, love for
those who are suffering and oppressed, and love for their people, even when
they have strayed from the path that leads to genuine love. Whenever I feel
hurt or in despair, I ask myself: what can I do to express love? Lately I’ve
been sending birthday greetings to Friends and others using cards with pictures
painted by my 90 year-old mother-in-law who has late stage Alzheimer’s. Her
paintings are full of exuberant colors and embody her love for life, beauty and
God’s creation. Even though my mother-in-law no longer remembers my name, or
her own, and can barely speak coherent sentences, her face brightens with love
and joy every time she sees me. Visiting her has become one of the highlights
of my week. Her example confirms for me what I call the three C’s: first, we
human beings were created to love since we are made in God’s image and
God is love(1 John 4:8) . We are also commanded to love (the prime
directive throughout Scripture: “Love God and love thy neighbor as thyself”).
But to be fully human, we must also made a commitment to love. Getting married,
or joining the Religious Society of Friends or any worthwhile cause, requires commitment based on love. It
means showing kindness and forgiveness even when we are disappointed, hurt, or
upset. It means being willing to admit
mistakes, speak our truth, reconcile and work out differences. If we are
committed to love, our love grows stronger with each challenge and conflict we
face. I take to heart the words of Paul: “Only three things really matter:
faith, hope and love, and the most important thing of all is love.” What
sustains me and keeps me going in my efforts as a peace activist and Quaker are
friendships based on a love that never gives up, and never dies.
See my blogs at
laquaker.blogspot.com: “Quakerism’s Debt to Heretics,” “The Forgotten
Testimony.” “Coming to Unity
through Harmony: Dealing with Conflict in the Interfaith Movement and One's
Personal Life.”
Muna Abu Sneineh is a human rights consultant and lawyer committed to help bring justice to oppressed and vulnerable children in Palestine and globally. Muna joined DCIP as Chair of the Board in 2020, having previously served as a board member. She began her legal career focusing on human rights in Palestine and regionally. Her areas of expertise are in child justice, children in conflict with the law, child victims of violence, gender equality, and rights of persons with disabilities. Muna has served as a legal and human rights consultant and trainer with a variety of international and local organizations.
Shaina Low (she/her/hers) is an Advocacy Officer with DCIP. Her experience with organizations in the U.S. and Palestine/Israel has included fundraising, working with children, guest lecturing at high schools and colleges, organizing and leading advocacy tours, and bringing delegations to the region. Her legal research has covered topics including forcible transfer, the international community’s obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law, and the rights of prisoners and children. Shaina holds a BA in political science from Columbia University and a JD from the City University of New York Law School.
Jennifer Bing has worked at AFSC since 1989, serving in various capacities in its Israel-Palestine programs. She directs the AFSC
Nicole Hernandez (they/them) leads Puerto Ricans in Action (PRiA) in Los Angeles. PRiA was founded in the summer of 2016 to protest against PROMESA - the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (H.R.5278) passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. PRIA has continued to hold protests, marches, educational and disaster recovery campaigns ever since. Most recently, the group embarked on an archiving project titled "Calle de La Resistencia Diaspora Archive." PRiA's mission is to be the central organizer for Puerto Ricans across Los Angeles County.
Lawrence Reyes is a longtime human rights and media democracy activist. A member of the Young Lords Party and Boricua, he overcame drug use, incarceration, and being houseless on the streets of Brooklyn. Lawrence earned a degree in human behavior from Brooklyn College and in substance abuse counseling from UCLA Extension. Now a Senior Community Mental Health Worker for LA County, he is obtaining a master’s degree in psychology with a concentration in trauma at Antioch University. Through his work in the Puerto Rican Alliance, he has long been committed to coalition building, particularly among Black, Brown, Native, and other communities of color. Lawrence currently represents KPFK as a Local Station Board member and serves as a Director Trustee with the Pacifica Foundation. In addition, he is a Board member for WERC, an organization offering employment training to formerly incarcerated people. As a father, he is deeply engaged in the upbringing and education of his son and other youth, particularly in addressing mental health challenges and services within the LA Unified School District.