Marin IJ Readers’ Forum for June 17, 2023

Focus on surplus properties for housing

According to my research, it appears that the state is using erroneous data and methods to justify its inflated housing mandate which is ruining the opportunity to provide for low-income, senior and workforce housing.

As a former member of the Sausalito City Council who spent time on the Association of Bay Area Governments executive board and as the one-time president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers, I would like to present several issues that prove the housing element is misguided.

We do not have a housing crisis, we have an affordability crisis. You can build as much housing as you want, but that doesn’t mean people can afford to buy or rent it. The California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) mandate for the Bay Area is 441,176 new units. Several sources, including the state auditor, have shown that this is very overstated.

The HCD mandates 57.4% of the units need to be subsidized. However, the housing element actually depends on developers. The developers depend on a project being sufficiently profitable. Developers are using a 15% to 20% range of subsidized units and 80% to 85% market-rate units to be feasible for them. This error on the part of the state should be a program-killer.

The state’s most egregious act is taking away communities’ local control. The Legislature has a history of pushing off expenses from their budget to local communities. The housing element is a perfect example of this wrongful and dangerous act.

Legislators should initiate housing solutions including using state-owned surplus properties. The state is exempt from paying property taxes on space it owns or leases. This is a huge cost advantage to making housing affordable. Without those costs, it might be possible that state properties can house 100% low-income, senior and workforce occupants instead of only 20%.

If structured as a purchase option, portions of rent could go for purchase credit. This is a positive “earn-out” approach for people who can’t afford to buy now.

— Leon Huntting, Sausalito

Lessons learned while hiking all Marin trails

When I retired more than five years ago, I gave myself a project: to hike every inch of every named marked public trail in Marin County. Little did I realize the scope of this endeavor. With a big assist from the trail books by Barry Spitz, I was able to create a master list. Earlier this month, I finished my list of 455 trails. I hiked approximately 1,500 miles.

I have a few observations. First, we live in a ridiculously beautiful county. People on the trails, at least during the week, are nice — even the mountain bikers. We have a surprising number of waterfalls. The county open space trails are the best maintained and marked in Marin. I feel those tax dollars are well spent.

Additionally, I learned that I love switchbacks. A back-and-forth hike on one trail is still two distinct experiences. And it’s hard to beat the joy of coming across an unexpected grove of redwood trees.

Now, as John Muir would say, it’s time for a saunter.

— John Chiosso, San Rafael

We must put solar panels over all our parking lots

Marin and other counties need to start planning how to develop solar canopies on existing large parking lots. It needs to happen everywhere.

This is the most socially progressive, rapidly exploitable way to develop neighborhood microgrids and widely distributed electric vehicle-charging infrastructure: solar canopies, plus on-site stationary storage batteries and chargers that deliver from the vehicle to the grid.

Large parking lots are existing acres of ridiculously underutilized urban land located right where most energy is being consumed.

We can reduce utility and transportation costs for owners, employees and tenants of leased commercial property, like large apartment and condominium developments, neighborhood shopping centers, business parks, hospitals, schools and other public facilities, as well as adjacent lower-density neighborhoods.

Doing so will provide needed shade for enormous asphalt heat islands. It will build a matrix of reliable networked neighborhood microgrids. We can accomplish all this without remote solar-farm land acquisition or new utility transmission spending. Widely distributed, cheap, reliable neighborhood power production and storage is better than exclusively remote, unreliable utility monopoly power.

— Jerry Wagner, Santa Rosa

Unchecked corporate dumping must be stopped

I’d hoped that the recent smoke blanketing the U.S. Northeast might awaken our politicians to do something about corporate dumping. Unfortunately, it appears I will need to dream on. There seems little hope for that. These people-created Cyclopean monsters we call corporations, make enormous profits by dumping (not treating) their planet-changing wastes. I worry that they are beyond control.

How bad must it get before we say enough is enough. They should not be allowed to keep throwing your trash over the back fence into our yard and forcing us to pay the cleanup costs. Society’s cleanup costs for corporate polluting vastly exceed these corporations’ avoided treatment costs and profits from polluting. It’s always cheaper to clean up at the source rather than after it creates a mess and determining who pays makes all the difference.

It’s economically obvious, but apparently politically impossible, to require corporations to use sustainable, nonpolluting production processes. It would be vastly cheaper for society to pay corporations to not dump rather than pay the extraordinary costs of forest fires, famines, human migration and species depletion, among other consequences.

As the saying goes, “Where there’s a will there’s a way.” Right now, I can’t see any will.

— Barry Phegan, Greenbrae

Recorded evidence will be tough for Trump to distort

Every so often, I find myself craving an objective news source that can deliver the information free of rhetorical manipulation, opinion passing for truth or political slant that insidiously colors the facts for political purposes one way or the other.

It was enlightening to have my sociology professor assign Marshall McLuhan’s book, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” when I was a college freshman in the early 1970s. The book is known for popularizing the phrase, “the medium is the message.”

It opened up an entirely new perspective on so much that society takes for granted. I will always believe that legendary TV news anchor Walter Cronkite was trustworthy, but I started to question how his delivery of the news affected our interpretation of it. The same was true of advertising, the way it was presented clearly had an impact.

Pertaining to news, McLuhan’s idea was that newscasts about a crime may be less about the story itself and more about the change in public attitude toward the crime.

All this brings me to Donald Trump’s latest indictment. From my perspective, pundits on Fox News appear to be asserting that the 37 charges of obstruction and storing of highly confidential defense documents is another witch hunt of an innocent former president. Conversely, I think MSNBC, in its glee, has already convicted Trump.

It appears to me that Trump, however, is a master of using context to distort truth. However, the recording where Trump brags that he has a classified document regarding an attack on Iran, as well as his statement during the CNN Town Hall that he can do what he wants with the documents, are both quite disturbing.

Ultimately, facts are stubborn and truth eventually prevails. Let the truth prevail.

— Bruce Farrell Rosen, San Francisco