Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
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Santa Monica's great lie. The Mayor has said: "(...) the benefits we enjoy here, from our pothole-free streets to our glorious beachfront to our wonderful schools." The oft-repeated mantra is that we should all suffer horrific sales taxes, weak policing (not the fault of the police, but of city hall), overdevelopment of rentals and a dearth of affordable home-ownership, that leaves our residents permanent rent-slaves, is justified because Santa Monica is such a lovely place to live. In reality...
Dear Editor, The Santa Monica city attorney, or the city council needs to act immediately to force the Mayor's recusal from all council discussions and votes regarding either of the transfer tax ballots currently under consideration. Fact: The Mayor is spending $200,000 of her own money to gather signatures and campaign for her transfer tax ballot measure. The presence of a competing measure will require her to spend additional funds to achieve success, which will lessen her own finances. The...
As Caroline and Anastasia say, rent control is for all tenants, but it is the rent challenged who they, understandably, use to justify emergency rent freezes, thus lumping all renters into one group. But using a subset of the group to set policy for all is the opposite of how progressive taxation and the redistribution of wealth is performed in any well-meaning democracy, such as ours. All taxation and economic policies need to account for individual wealth, to ease the negative side effects of...
This is not a 'wealth tax' as the signature gatherers proclaim - it is a real estate transfer tax. They are completely different things. With this new transfer tax, if you buy and sell a house for even the same price, you will owe $500,000. And as the threshold is not inflation adjusted, in a very few years it won't be just the wealthy paying this, it will be everyone - even for modest homes. And then the house-flipping industry will stop... This will have a crushing effect on realtors,...
The state of California has issued an unfunded mandate that Santa Monica must build 6000+ affordable homes, or face punitive fines and loss of zoning control. The city currently plans to build these as affordable apartments to rent, which would be utterly disastrous, both for the occupants of the affordable housing, and existing city residents. But if the homes were built as deed-restricted affordable condos for sale we would avoid the negative financial impacts on existing residents and the...
This is not a 'wealth tax' as the signature gatherers proclaim - it is a real estate transfer tax. They are completely different things. With this new transfer tax, if you buy and sell a house for even the same price, you will owe $500,000. And as the threshold is not inflation adjusted, in a very few years it won't be just the wealthy paying this, it will be everyone - even for modest homes. And then the house-flipping industry will stop... This will have a crushing effect on realtors,...
