Tag: hit&run

When Los Angeles voters were considering Proposition JJJ—an initiative last year to mandate affordable housing requirements for new developments—critics from Habitat for Humanity to the Los Angeles Times warned that the measure would lead to less housing construction in one of America’s most expensive cities.

Now that the law has passed and is in full effect, those warnings are being borne out.

From March to June, developers submitted just 5,117 applications for new housing construction permits in the city, down from 9,226 for the same period last year, according to a study released by the Building Industry Association of Southern California (BIA).

Tim Piasky, CEO of the BIA’s Los Angeles branch, puts the blame squarely on JJJ’s expensive requirements.

“There was land available” for new construction projects, Piasky says. “But now those requirements made those projects exceedingly more expensive, and developers could not make those projects financially feasible.”

Under Proposition JJJ, construction projects seeking amendments or changes to the city’s building code or zoning requirements must include a certain percentage of affordable housing units. The percentage is set by the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, which published guidelines in March, and it is largely determined by how close new developments are to public transit lines.

For instance, a development that is half a mile from the nearest intersection of two bus lines would have to make 20 percent of its new units affordable to lower-income households, defined in California law as families making 80 percent of an area’s median income. For developments that are less than 750 feet from the intersection of two light rail lines, the percentage is 25 percent.

JJJ also added new labor regulations, compelling developers to pay a prevailing (read: union) wage and requiring that 30 percent of construction workers on a project be permanent Los Angeles city residents. 10 percent of those local workers are required to be “transitional workers”—defined as workers “facing socioeconomic obstacles or other barriers to employment and whose primary residence is within a five mile radius of the project site.”

“It put a lot more hurdles in place as far as housing construction,” says Piasky.

From March to June last year, 2,110 developments applying for building permits sought the amendments or exemptions covered by Proposition JJJ. In the same period this year, the number of applications dropped to 118.

According to Piasky, even those projects that don’t fall under JJJ’s requirements are seeing their costs go up, as demand for land not subject to the initiative has also increased.

City planners have pushed back against claims that Proposition JJJ has caused a citywide construction slowdown, saying that overall building permits for the first six months of 2017 are still up over the first six months of 2016.

Much of that, however, might have to do with Proposition S, a failed city ballot initiative from early March that would have prohibited any exemptions or amendments to the city’s building requirements for two years. Developers reportedly rushed to file applications prior to the vote, so as to be grandfathered into pre–Proposition S rules.

Even before these changes, Los Angeles was one of America’s most expensive cities to live in. A report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies says that 57 percent of renters in the Los Angeles metro area were spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing; 31 percent were spending over 50 percent of their income on rent.

Census Bureau data compiled by the website ApartmentList found that rents grew by 15 percent in Los Angeles from 2005 to 2015. Wages, meanwhile, grew by less than 5 percent, so more and more Angelenos’ pay is being eaten up by housing costs.

By mandating the construction of more affordable housing units, Proposition JJJ was supposed to fix that. Instead it seems to have made the situation worse. “If there are no projects going forward, how are they producing affordable units?” asks Piasky. “Not only are they not producing affordable units they aren’t producing any housing units.”

For months, President Trump has threatened to cut off a series of payments being made to insurers participating in Obamacare’s exchanges.

These payments are known cost-sharing reduction subsidies (CSRs), and they are paid directly to insurers in order to offset deductibles and other out of pocket costs for lower income individuals enrolled in Obamacare plans.

Trump has held out these payments as political bargaining leverage, warning that if Congress did not act to repeal and replace the law, he would end the payments, and Obamacare would implode. Trump’s decision to treat the payments as discretionary ignores a federal court ruling that the payments never should have been made in the first place.

What, exactly, would happen if the payments were cut off at the end of 2017? Higher premiums, larger federal deficits, and short-term instability, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report.

Premiums would end up 20 percent higher than if the payments were continued, and 25 percent higher after 2020. Most individuals enrolled in Obamacare plans would not feel the impact of those premium increases directly, however, because insurers would raise the cost of plans that are subsidized through a separate provision in Obamacare. Those subsidies, a form of tax credit, rise with the price of premiums, and, as a result, the federal deficit would increase by about $194 billion over a decade.

In addition, CBO predicts that some insurance plans would drop out of the individual market next year, leaving about 5 percent of the country without access to an Obamacare plan in 2018. By 2020, however, insurers would re-enter the market in most places. In the short-term, about 1 million fewer people would be covered, but after 2020, the CBO estimates that coverage rates would be higher by about 1 million, owing primarily to the interaction between the CSR payments and the law’s tax credit.

The result, in other words, would not be a full-on implosion, but increased short-term instability, and higher federal spending on Obamacare going forward. In addition, it is possible that if the federal government cut off CSR payments, some states would set up programs to funnel money to insurers using the health care law’s state waiver program.

The CBO, as an economic forecasting organization, treats the potential end of the health law’s CSR payments primarily as a policy question, looking at the likely ripple effects on the insurance market as it exists under Obamacare. And Trump has treated the CSR payments as a point of executive branch discretion, to be dangled in hopes of gaining political leverage.

But the reason that the future of the payments is uncertain is that they are the subject of a legal dispute left over from the Obama era. The CSR subsidies are called for in the statute of Obamacare, but Congress declined to appropriate any money for them. The Obama administration, which had requested an appropriation, decided to pay them anyway.

House Republicans sued the Obama administration, arguing that under the Constitution, only Congress has the power of the purse, and that Congress was injured as an institution when the Obama administration made the payments without a clear appropriation.

Last year, a federal judge sided with House Republicans, ruling although the payment had been authorized under the law, it had not been appropriated. “Congress is the only source for such an appropriation,” Judge Rosemary Collyer’s ruling declared, “and no public money can be spent without one.” The payments had been made illegally. The ruling was stayed pending appeal, and has been on hold since Trump won the presidency.

The point of the House GOP lawsuit, then, was that the executive branch does not have a choice. Either the administration has an affirmative duty to make the payments, or it has an affirmative duty not to make them. The judge ruled that the president has an affirmative duty not to make the payments without an explicit Congressional appropriation, and that doing so violates the Constitution.

There may be reasons to quibble with the particulars CBO’s estimates, which are, as always, subject to substantial uncertainty. But the policy ramifications of cutting off these payments are worth understanding, especially since today’s report suggests that cutting off federal payments now would lead to greater spending in the long term.

Yet in assessing the Trump administration’s actions, the relevant question is not what effect they would have on premiums or coverage or spending, but whether they are constitutionally justified. Judge Collyer’s ruling was clear that they are not. By continuing to make these payments, and by treating them as a matter of executive discretion, Trump is participating in and perpetuating illegal and unconstitutional behavior.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he wants harsher criminal penalties for rioting, but his proposal could easily blow back on peaceful protesters.

Pointing to last weekend’s violence in Virginia, Cuomo is pushing to expand the state’s hate crime laws with what he’s calling the “Charlottesville provisions.” Under the new rules, according to the Auburn Citizen, rioting that targets a protected class would become a more severe felony than it is now, leading to a potential penalty of seven years in prison. Inciting such a riot would jump up from a misdemeanor to a felony, and could now get you up to four years in prison, based on New York State’s sentencing guidelines.

As is typical when a politician makes grandstanding announcements about fighting crime, Cuomo sees—or wants you to see—only some of the likely outcomes. He says these laws wil protect marginalized minorities against bigots. He does not discuss the power dynamic that hate crime laws set up. Once you establish a list of protected classes, many different groups will try to get onto it. Right now, law enforcement interests around the country are trying to add police and first responders to the list.

Louisiana and Kentucky have done just that. In Louisiana, one police chief has declared that simply resisting arrest now qualifies as a hate crime.

In that context, consider how law enforcement may view protests against police abuse. Typically, most of these protesters are peaceful, but these actions often end up drawing black-clad people looking to cause trouble. Frequently, the violent activities by that handful of people will prompt police to try to shut down entire protests and arrest those who refuse to disperse, regardless of whether those arrestees had done anything violent. We saw this happen repeatedly in Ferguson, Missouri, in the protests after Mike Brown’s shooting. There were peaceful protesters, and there were people who threw rocks and set fires. But the militarized police frequently shut the whole protest down.

We have prominent figures who see even the mildest criticisms of law enforcement as an incitement to attack cops. We have a president who believes the fabricated narrative that our police forces are under assault and who is willing to consider new federal laws to enhance sentences for crimes that target law enforcement. It doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to visualize Cuomo’s idea being used to stop or at least chill protests against law enforcement misconduct.

Large public protests often target government behavior, whether we’re talking the White House or City Hall. The Charlottesville protests started with white nationalists protesting the city’s decision to remove a Confederate monument, before it all went downhill. The potential for this law to be used to suppress mass public activism of other sorts is high.

It would be naïve to assume this wouldn’t happen. A law proposed to stop attacks on black people would ultimately be used against Black Lives Matter protesters.

“Canada’s idea of a fair trade deal seems very different from President Trump’s,” observed The New York Times on Monday.

That’s quite an understatement.

Canada’s idea seems very different from what most Americans think of when they hear “free trade” or “free markets.” As Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland explained yesterday, the country wants to “modernize” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to include “progressive elements.”

As it stands, the 23-year-old trade treaty between Canada, Mexico, and the United States—enacted to eliminate barriers to open economic exchange, such as steep—already comes with conditions that go beyond reducing trade barriers. NAFTA lays down rules regarding the three countries’ labor standards, agricultural sanitation measures, agricultural production practices, intellectual property rights, and other trade-adjacent issues.

But as we head into NAFTA renegotiations this week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his administration want to expand the rules to include sections on gender issues, climate change, and indigenous rights. Freeland said such changes would move NAFTA from a “free trade” deal to a “fair trade” one.

While she didn’t get into specifics, we can look to a recently renegotiated trade deal between Canada and Chile for guidance. The new pact includes a chapter “acknowledg[ing] the importance of applying gender perspective to economic and trade issues” and confirming “the intention of both parties to enforce their respective international agreements on gender from a rights perspective,” according to a press release from the Canadian government.

It also “provides a framework for Canada and Chile to cooperate on issues related to trade and gender, including women’s entrepreneurship and the development of gender-focused indicators,” and it “commits both sides to the creation of a trade and gender committee that will oversee cooperation and share experiences in designing programs to encourage women’s participation in national and international economies.”

At best, it’s a toothless public relations move that will only serve as a boon to bureaucrats.

At worst, it’s a dealbreaker for Donald Trump, who has already threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NAFTA. And if that’s the outcome, it’s terrible news for the U.S. employment rate and for the economy overall. (Canada, meanwhile, has threatened to withdraw from NAFTA if Trump insists on scrapping a dispute-settlement section of the deal.)

Regardless of what ultimately comes to pass, Canada’s plans highlight the creeping imposition of “social justice” goals into all facets of politics and economics. That’s a troubling development, especially for supporters of small government, no matter how much one might supports those social aims more broadly.

For a full list of Canada’s recently-released NAFTA wants—including some proposals that really are related to freeing trade, such as a measure to kill “Buy American” rules for construction projects and a call to ease work visa requirements—see the Toronto Sun.

Venezuela used to be the richest country in Latin America. Today, its economy and civil society are disintegrating. The country is experiencing widespread hunger and out-of-control violence—a result of former President Hugo Chávez’ move, starting in 2002, to nationalize industries, establish price controls, and block foreign capital from entering the country.

Back when Chávez was still in power (and still alive), U.S. celebrities, including Danny Glover, Naomi Campbell, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, and Sean Penn, praised the former president and his brand of “Bolivarian” socialism. As did left-wing intellectuals, including the famed M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky.

What do they have to say now?

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If you’ve visited disruptj20.org, a website that organized folks for the purpose of disrupting President Donald Trump’s inauguration events in D.C., the Department of Justice (DOJ) wants to know about it.

Whether you were even in D.C. on Inauguration Day is apparently not relevant. In an effort to track down anybody who rioted or engaged in violence on that day, the Justice Department has gotten a search warrant demanding that the site’s host company, DreamHost, provide records related to their investigations.

It’s not unusual for law enforcement agencies try to get records about particular users of sites if they believe these users are engaged in criminal activities. And it’s constitutional for them to use warrants to try to track down specific information from or about users suspected of a crime.

But according to DreamHost, the warrant the Justice Department is asking for the IP addresses of anyone who has even just visited the site. So the company announced in a blog post yesterday that it’s fighting the warrant:

The request from the DOJ demands that DreamHost hand over 1.3 million visitor IP addresses—in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people—in an effort to determine who simply visited the website. (Our customer has also been notified of the pending warrant on the account.)

That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.

DreamHost also argues that the overbroad demand violates the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that search warrants identify specifically what the government wants to seize. The government appears to be essentially demanding all of DreamHost’s data about disruptj20.org, including everything that connects to the site or originates from the site. It’s a fishing expedition to see if the feds can connect anybody to the site with any of the actual violence that took place Inauguration Day.

Ken “Popehat” White, a former federal prosecutor, warns that this type of search indicates an overt hostility toward anti-government protests:

The government has made no effort whatsoever to limit the warrant to actual evidence of any particular crime. If you visited the site, if you left a message, they want to know who and where you are—whether or not you did anything but watch TV on inauguration day. This is chilling, particularly when it comes from an administration that has expressed so much overt hostility to protesters, so relentlessly conflated all protesters with those who break the law, and so deliberately framed America as being at war with the administration’s domestic enemies.

There will be a hearing on the Justice Department’s motion to compel DreamHost to comply with the warrant on Friday.

The federal government’s Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program is supposedly “the most important resource for creating affordable housing in the United States today.” But since its creation in 1986, the $8 billion program has been plagued by scandals and other problems.

The latest involves California treasurer and 2018 gubernatorial candidate John Chiang, who has helped funnel millions in LIHTC tax credits to developers who have given him some $100,000 in campaign donations.

The Sacramento Bee reports that Chiang, through his role on various committees charged with dispensing LIHTC money, was able to steer $60 million in federal tax credits to the developer Pacific West Communities, which has since donated $37,000 to his various campaign committees.

Another developer, Domus, has gotten Chiang’s signoff on tax credits for three separate projects since 2013. The company has donated $40,000 to Chiang over the same period.

The problem, say LIHTC’s critics, is that there is little accountability for how the program’s credits get handed out.

“Really, there is no federal oversight of the process,” says Daniel Diaz-Garcia of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has now published three reports on LIHTC.

In theory, the Internal Revenue Service provides oversight for LIHTC. But the agency isn’t very well-suited to oversee such a complex program. “The IRS is a tax collection agency,” says Diaz-Garcia. “It’s not involved in housing policy. It’s not involved in administering programs on the part of the federal government.”

Each year, the IRS gives each state a pool of LIHTC dollars. (The amount each state gets is based on its population.) The states then—through what are known as Housing Finance Authorities, or HFAs—award these tax credits to developers of affordable housing projects. Those companies then sell the tax credits to investors in their developments.

Throughout the program’s 30-year history, according to those GAO reports, the IRS has audited only seven of the now 58 HFAs.

In California, the tax credits are awarded by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (CTCAC). As treasurer, Chiang is one of three voting members of CTCAC, which gives him enormous influence over where the state’s $94.9 million in federal LIHTC money goes.

Potential conflicts of interest—or in Chiang’s case, actual conflicts of interest—in awarding the tax credits highlight the need for internal safeguards and regular reviews of the program. But thanks to the IRS’s “minimal” oversight, the GAO has found that the agency “cannot determine the extent of noncompliance and other issues at HFAs.”

This is not the only high-profile scandal related to the program. In Florida, developers fraudulently inflated construction costs in order to squeeze some $34 million out of 14 separate LIHTC-funded projects. The head of Florida’s HFA—who was supposed to be monitoring these projects for this kind of fraud—resigned in 2016 after an audit found he had spent $50,000 on a single steak and lobster dinner for those same affordable housing lenders he was supposed to be monitoring.

Another problem with LIHTC is its system of “boosts.” Not only can developers reclaim up to 70 percent of a project’s initial costs through tax credits, but states can also give out a “boost” of extra tax credits should a developer demonstrate this is necessary to make their project financially viable. A 2016 GAO report found that states often failed to determine those additional credits’ financial necessity before doling them out.

Virginia awarded boosts to all LIHTC projects that received certain green building certifications, including in one case a developer who didn’t even ask for the bonus credits. Arizona just gives the boosts to all LIHTC projects, no questions asked.

All this has led to a situation where LIHTC recipients are spending more money on a decreasing number of projects. A recent investigation by NPR and Frontline found that 70,220 units were constructed with LIHTC funds in 1998 at the cost of $4.1 billion in tax credits. In 2014, LIHTC handed out $6.8 billion to build just 58,735 units.

California’s data show a similar trend at the state level, with the tax credit allocations per unit (including state tax credits) rising from $195,764 in 2010 to $219,946 in 2016.

These mounting costs and diminishing returns are a natural consequence of the program’s complex design, says Vanessa Brown Calder, an urban policy analyst with the Cato Institute.

“You lose a lot of value along the way from the IRS to the developer to the tenant,” Calder tells Reason. Academic research has found that only about 35 percent of the value of the credits provided to developers shows up as rent savings for tenants.

Calder says the only real way to increase affordable housing is to reform the state and local zoning regulations that drive up the costs of home construction (and, as a result, raise rents). “All these federal subsidies coming in are just band-aid solutions,” she comments. “They’re just kind of like the federal government chasing its tail.”

At $8 billion a year, LIHTC is a pretty expensive band-aid.

Charnesia Corley was a 21-year-old college student with no criminal record when two cops from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office stopped her in June 2015 for running a red light.

After searching her car, police claimed to have found .02 ounces of marijuana. That was enough, they apparently felt, to justify a full-body cavity search. When Corley refused to remove her clothes in the dimly lit parking lot where she was being detained, one of the officers threw her to the ground, pushed her partially underneath her own car, and yanked Corley’s pants down to her ankles. For the next 11 minutes, dash cam video of the incident shows, she was held down by two officers while being searched. Corley claims that fingers repeatedly probed her vagina and that the officers ignored her protests. A third officer stood nearby holding a flashlight. No drugs were found on Corley person.

Sam Cammack, an attorney representing Corley in a multi-million-dollar civil rights lawsuit against the county, calls the search “rape by cop.”

“It is undoubted that they sexually assaulted her,” Cammack says. “They put their fingers inside her vagina. You can’t pull someone over, think you might find something, and do that to them.”

The full dash-cam video was released to the Houston Chronicle and can be viewed here. It appears to confirm Corley’s side of the story, showing officers putting her in handcuffs, tossing her to the ground, removing her pants, and spending several long minutes searching her body.

Two of the officers who conducted the search, William Strong and Ronaldine Pierre, were indicted in June 2016 by a Harris County grand jury on charges of official oppression, but those charges were dropped last week.

“These officers did commit a crime, and now it appears they are not being held accountable for their actions,” says Cammack, who wants an independent prosecutor assigned to the case. He says he plans to release dash-cam video of the traffic stop to the media in the hopes of generating enough public outcry to force the county to reopen the case with a new prosecutor.

Corley and Cammack appeared on CNN last night to tell their side of the story to host Don Lemon.

Police initially said Corley consented to the search, but they also charged her with resisting arrest and with possession of marijuana. Harris County prosecutors dropped the charges against Corley in August 2015 and issued a statement calling the search “offensive and shocking.”

The Harris County District Attorney’s office did not return calls from Reason, but county prosecutor Natasha Sinclair told the Houston TV station KRIV that “no one in this office stands by the search the way it happened,” but she also said the officers’ “bad judgement” might not rise to the level of criminal offense.

The DA’s office told KRIV that it dropped the charges against Strong and Pierre after “new evidence” became available and was presented to a second grand jury, different from the one that voted to indict the officers last year. Because grand jury proceedings are secret, that additional evidence has not been released to the public.

Cammack says he does not believe that a second grand jury has the authority to overrule a grand jury that lawfully charged the two officers.

Cedric Collier, a spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, confirmed to Reason on Monday that Strong and Pierre are still employed by the department. The two had been placed on administrative duty during the grand jury investigation, Collier said, though he was unsure if their status had changed since the charges were dropped last week. Collier declined to comment on the call for an independent prosecutor, and he said the department is “reviewing our policies and procedures” involving traffic stops and searches.

Whether or not the officers who searched Corley’s vagina for more than 10 minutes ever face criminal prosecution, there seems to be little question that the search violated the federal Constitution, state law, and Harris County Sheriff’s Office protocol.

A body cavity search without a warrant is a “blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment,” Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director of the Texas ACLU, told the Houston Chronicle in a 2015 article about the incident. Robertson could not imagine a circumstance where a roadside cavity search would be considered constitutional. Protocol for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office calls for suspects to be arrested and taken to a substation if a body cavity search must be performed, the Chronicle reported. There a microwave scanner is used for non-intrusive searches.

As if more clarity is needed on the issue, the Texas state legislature in 2015 passed a law specifying that “a peace officer may not conduct a body cavity search of a person during a traffic stop unless the officer first obtains a search warrant pursuant to this chapter authorizing the body cavity search.” The bill—passed in response to public outcry over several high-profile incidents of roadside body cavity searches, including one in Harris County where a woman claimed that male troopers laughed while a female officer conducted a body cavity search on her—was signed into law just weeks before the Harris County officers strip-searched Corley.

• The CEOs of Merck, Under Armour, and Intel have all resigned from President Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council in protest of Trump’s response to the violence at Saturday’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
• North Korean President Kim Jong-un appeared to take a step back from his recent threats to attack Guam, saying he “would watch a little more the foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees.”
• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is threatening to restart his country’s nuclear program “within hours” if the U.S. imposes new sanctions.
• Protesters in Durham, North Carolina, toppled a Confederate monument outside the Durham County Court House last night.
• “A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.”
• India declared independence 70 years ago today.

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Andrea O’Sullivan weighs in on the outraged response to James Damore’s memo about gender diversity and ideological echo chambers at Google:

What is most important to note is that Damore’s memo was not “anti-diversity” at all. In fact, he directly states that he “value[s] diversity and inclusion, [does not deny] that sexism exists, and [does not] endorse using stereotypes.” Rather, he maintains that if we can’t have “an honest discussion” about diversity, then “we can never truly solve the problem” and provides several alternative suggestions to close the gaps that he believes would not cause issues like discrimination and lowered expectations.

We’ve got a real monster on our hands here, folks!

The disjoint between the quality of Damore’s attempted conversation and the downright hysterics of the media reaction is greatly disturbing. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the state of the art in social psychology and neuroscience will know that the Google Memo’s chief arguments are largely in line with much of the literature. But the few experts who have attempted to chime in and offer their support to Damore’s theses have been unceremoniously drowned out by the tide of unhinged condemnations.

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