Mayor Garcia Keeps Lying—First About Police, Now About Housing

The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect the views of FORTHE Media.

What I’ve learned about Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia over the past few months is that, when cornered, he resorts immediately to telling outright lies.

When cornered about the half-a-million-dollars-and-counting he has accepted into his political committees from the Long Beach Police Officers Association, he lied and said, “They’re not my committees.”

That lie was thoroughly unraveled in a previous article.

And now that he is facing a growing recall campaign, he has lied again. Much like his previous deception, this one involves both some outright fabricating, and some vague use of language—I assume in order to confuse residents and provide some “plausible deniability” around what exactly the statement even means.

The claim appeared among a list of other boasts, released as his official response to the recall campaign. Each of them is likely worth looking into, but this one stuck out to me the most:

“Under Mayor Garcia’s leadership, Long Beach has … Built and planned 4,000 new affordable and working-class homes across the city.”

It is both concerning and revealing to me that the mayor would choose to respond to the recall—which is partly based on the mayor’s perceived dishonesty—by doubling down on his dishonesty. It’s a bit like the LBPD responding to protests against police brutality by engaging in police brutality.

4,000 AFFORDABLE HOMES? WHERE ARE THEY?

I reached out to the mayor’s office immediately after I decided to write this article, and I reached out multiple times, asking for some kind of proof for the mayor’s claim. But I have yet to receive a response.

As a result, we have to turn to the city’s own record-keeping.

The California Department of Housing and Community Development helps set for every California city certain building goals, known as the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA). Long Beach’s Department of Development Services then keeps track of construction permits issued, so they can monitor the city’s progress on those goals.

So how many affordable units were permitted between 2014—when Garcia became mayor—to 2019? It was not quite 4,000. The city’s own data on this says it was… 

626.

Chart courtesy of the Long Beach Department of Development Services. Click to enlarge.

Yes. 626.

What about for 2020? The Department of Development Services confirmed that year-to-date there are only 50 more affordable units on the way. And backlogged? The Department says 144 units are pending approval, and another 153 are approved but awaiting construction.

Though these latter amounts are not at all guaranteed—especially during a pandemic-related economic recession—even if we throw them in to help Garcia’s cause, it would only bring his total to 973.

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If I had to guess what corner of his imagination Garcia extracted the 4,000 number from to begin with, it must be that he hoped to pass off the entire total, including units market-rate and above, as “working-class.” Though, even the “Total Units” category is below 4,000. In fact, like almost every other city in California, Long Beach has consistently been far beneath its RHNA building goals for all income brackets:

Charts courtesy of the Long Beach Department of Development Services. Click to enlarge.

A Beacon Economics report released last year found that, at its current rate, Long Beach would not reach its 2021 goal for “Low Income” units until the year 2178 (pg.5). But even the “Market Rate” category, if we were to average the years out from the chart above, would just barely be on path to maybe meet its eight-year target.

Garcia has thus somehow failed to protect renters, failed to appease homeowners, and at the same time failed to actually develop the city. We have all the worst bits of gentrification with none of the alleged benefits. Whenever he departs, Long Beach will be left with less diversity, less public space, less developable private space, increased rents, increased taxes, and years’ and years’ worth of actual housing construction to catch up on.

It’s truly unbelievable to me; and it’s precisely this legacy of floundering that leaves the mayor facing a recall campaign from enraged homeowners and tenants alike, while he scrambles to literally conjure up statistics for the achievements he doesn’t have. But while Garcia may soon abandon Long Beach to save his own career, the tragic irony is that his career is exactly what has cost so many Long Beach residents their homes.

A MORE ACCURATE LIST OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Unfortunately, it’s not just that Garcia’s claim is wrong; it’s not even just that it’s wildly, wildly wrong. It’s that he has spent his entire political career doing the exact opposite of building affordable housing:

1) Garcia has helped sell the downtown area to developers to do with what they please. He was instrumental in passing the city’s 2012 Downtown Plan, which opened Long Beach up to a development free-for-all. Garcia was a councilmember at the time it passed, and despite the city’s own draft report which warned it would cause a loss of housing, and despite suggestions from other councilmembers to include affordability provisions, and despite another report which warned of displacement, Garcia ignored all of the above and “spearheaded moving the Plan forward as-is.”

2) From his time as a councilmember in 2010, through his first few years as mayor in 2016, Long Beach lost over 5,600 housing units (pg. 4). Far from helping to build thousands of working-class homes, Garcia has helped take enough homes away that the city has roughly the same housing capacity now as it did a decade ago. The 2010 Census estimated the city had 176,032 units, while a 2018 Southern California Association of Governments report found a small increase to 177,245. Garcia’s decade-long tenure in office has been marked by a steady loss of affordable units, and a small gain of units either market rate or above.

3) As affordable housing stock has steadily been replaced with more expensive units, rents in the city have become some of the worst in the nation. A study released late last year showed that, until a global pandemic came along, Long Beach was the third worst city in America when it came to how much rents have increased as measured against median income.

4) Not helping is the fact that Garcia has given priority to luxury projects and luxury hotels. Megaprojects like the $215 million Broadway Block had bids from affordable developers, but the city went with the luxury developer instead. And while the city struggles under Garcia to meet its own meagre affordable housing goals, an expected 800 new hotel rooms are already on the way (pg. 12). Under Garcia’s leadership, the city has permitted the construction of more hotel rooms than affordable homes.

5) The mayor has also helped prevent some multi-family housing from being built in the city. Not only did he tuck his tail between his legs when faced with opposition from Long Beach’s eastside NIMBY class, but in doing so he set the conditions for the city to lose space for future multi-family housing. As a direct result of Garcia’s lack of courage and lack of leadership, the city’s future housing capacity has shrunk.

6) In the early months of 2018, Garcia also reportedly struck a private, backroom deal with one of his political opponents, Robert Fox. The mayor had Fox agree not to run for office against him, and in exchange Garcia let Fox and others make private changes to the city’s map of future housing plans. In other words, Garcia used the threat of multi-family housing as a bargaining chip to placate the city’s eastside homeowners and keep himself elected—the same strategy President Donald Trump is presently employing.

7) Garcia has for years opposed rent control outright, and has also failed to fight for more moderate policies like just cause eviction, instead waiting for lawmakers in Sacramento to do all the hard work. As a result, he has failed to protect tenants from rent spikes, displacement, and evictions.

8) Because of Garcia’s continued negligence, Long Beach may now, in the middle of a pandemic caused by an infectious disease, be one of the most overcrowded cities in America. The city’s most recent data [from June 2019] states, “12.2 percent of all households in the City are experiencing overcrowding,” and that the areas with the highest rates of overcrowding are also the “socioeconomically disadvantaged communities with fewer affordable housing options…”

9) Finally, he has continued to prioritize his biggest donor bases—developers and the police—over the lives of working-class people. As a summarizing example of this, a 2017 city report covering a decade’s worth of affordable housing claimed that Long Beach had invested over $146 million “in the production of new affordable housing units between 2007 and 2017.” But that seemingly large sum, spent across an entire decade, is only about 60% of the city’s proposed fiscal year 2021 budget for the LBPD ($240 million).

Garcia’s attempt to erase this history by pretending he has been on the side of working-class peoples breaks my heart. It is one thing to be wrong about a statistic; it is entirely another thing to lie about your own, well-documented legacy.