Construction Maison

Cross posted from our sister-site, Santa Monica Next . California state legislators are back in Sacramento after a month- long summer recess and they are looking to tackle the state’s growing housing crisis with a package of bills that could generate more than $3 billion for affordable housing as well as streamline new housing approval and construction. But lawmakers and political observers alike have noted that it won’t be an easy task to get the votes necessary to pass some of bigger-ticket legislation, like S.B. 2 and S.B. 3 , both of which have passed the State Senate but still need to get through the Assembly. And both require a two-thirds supermajority to pass. S.B. 2, introduced by State Senator Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), would place a $75 fee on real estate transactions and generate roughly $250 million a year annually. State Senator Jim Beall (D-San Jose) introduced S.B. 3, which would put a housing bond before the voters in 2018 that would generate $3 billion. “We ne...

Every metropolitan area in the nation is racially segregated, and Los Angeles is no exception. We tolerate residential segregation because we’re convinced that it happened informally — because of personal choices and private discrimination. But what cemented our separate neighborhoods is something most of us have forgotten — government’s unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century, establishing patterns that persist to this day. The 2010 census data show that 60% of Los Angeles’s African Americans live in neighborhoods where few whites are present. The exposure of blacks to whites is as minimal as it is in Chicago or Newark; concentrated African American poverty is as common in L.A. as in New York or Pittsburgh. The New Deal created the nation’s first civilian public housing in the 1930s, segregated not only in the South, but nationwide. In his autobiography, the African American poet Langston Hughes recounted his adolescence in Worl...