I’m vice mayor for the City of Bell and I ran for office in the summer of 2010, post-scandal. If you guys recall, my city … made history (not very positive). The reason why I stepped up to run for office is because I’m a product of the area. When my family settled in the US, they bought a house and Cudahy, so I attended the local schools. I went to Elizabeth Street [Elementary School] in Cudahy, Nimitz [Middle School] in Huntington Park, and Bell High School. I was homecoming queen, student body president. I was a scholarship kid. I went to Yale University and then I went on to Columbia Law School as well. And in between, I got a job teaching at the University of Navarra. I taught statistics and theory of probability. Not very fun topics, but you know, [I’m] very nerdy and I enjoyed them.
And again, the reason why I ran is because I finished law school, came back home and started doing real estate development. During 2007, actually 2004 to 2010, I did real estate brokerage and real estate development. And during that time period, you guys remember 2007, 2010, the capital markets went under, right? A lot of homes were lost. So I ended up not developing because the capital markets froze. But during those three years, what I learned to do was how to finance projects. I was very frustrated developer because I didn’t have the ability to.
But now I realized that those three years were incredibly valuable because I learned how to finance and save deals, which is definitely the training ground that I needed to put something together for the City of Bell. So to give you an example of how bad we were, six months after taking office, we were informed that we were in debt by $155 million with the general fund of $13 [million], so I literally have pulled more all-nighters working on Bell matters than I did in all of my schooling. Because quite honest[ly], people’s lives are there. So I’m very proud to say that eight years later, we are currently in debt, still in debt by $75 million, which is [a reduction of] more than 50 percent. Unfortunately, we still have a $13 million general fund because we haven’t succeeded in increasing the sales tax base.
I’m running to finish the work that I started, not just in Bell, but the issues that [have] really played up and down the district. I live, work and play in the 33rd. I live up north. I work down here. My law firm was in Long Beach. So for the past five years, this is where I come. I go to church here. I go to your supermarkets. I go to your gyms. And I definitely, definitely identify with the 33rd [State Senate] District, up and down. So in a nutshell, my goal is to improve people’s lives here, bringing jobs, bringing health care, improving people’s quality of education. I feel like I’ve been very, very blessed and there’s no reason why other people can’t have the opportunity that I did. With your support, I’ll go to Sacramento and continue working for us.
Source: Introductory Statement, Women Rising: A Panel of Women in the Race to Lead SD 33, Feb. 25.
Did not respond to our questionnaire and did not address the subject during public forums.
Did not respond to our questionnaire and did not address the subject during public forums.
Did not respond to our questionnaire and did not address the subject during public forums.
Did not respond to our questionnaire and did not address the subject during public forums.
I got involved in the 710 project with the simple fact that I made a promise to my community that I was going to fix the Florence exit… Atlantic and Florence [avenues] are actually the two worst exits on the 710. So you end up having, obviously, all these health problems and whatnot … I ended up getting really, really involved in the 710 and came to the realization that the plan, really, it’s not even feasible. It’s not viable right now.
We’re talking about an expansion; we’re talking about bringing in corridors. The Port of Long Beach is set to increase the amount of goods that are coming in the next ten years or so. But the 710, there’s no plans to fix that. So what is that going to do? That’s going to end up creating a bottleneck in the northern part that’s only going to exacerbate the problem… As we continue [like] this, that’s not going to happen.
We don’t have the infrastructure up and down the 710 (to become fossil fuel friendly by 2045), and that includes Long Beach. We’re not going to [be able to] accommodate that. So we need to go to Sacramento and advocate and make it real, right. Like you said, make it real, we can promise the sky but if we have no monies and we have no plans that are really viable, we’re just doing a disservice.
So I for one am going to keep it real. I’m going to advocate for what can be done to be able to produce positive results. Aspirational legislation is great, but at the end of the day, we need to serve our communities.
Source: On 710 Expansion and the Green New Deal from Women Rising, A Panel of Women in the Race to Lead SD 33, Feb. 25.
In terms of housing, the reason why we have such high rents is because there’s not enough affordable housing. So the only way, really, that I can think of solving that is to, again, create incentives [for] developers to build these entities, right. Sometimes they think it’s not profitable enough, but you can create incentives.
So I like I mentioned during the time period that I was working as a developer, one of my specialties became new market tax credit financing. And most of those monies I used to focus on giving it back to the developer in [order] to finish the gap financing … In terms of Costa-Hawkins, I think that’s an issue that needs to be settled at the local level
…In the city of Bell we are also very dense, we’re two square miles with 40,000 people. So we’re incredibly dense. We are 30 percent property home ownership. So what that has created is that there’s really not a lack of incentives for people to come back to the community and fix them. So one of the things that happens is that if you don’t create incentives for people to want to fix them in the context of rent, then you end up having a lot of landlords who do not who do not repair the buildings.
So what we try to do is basically push and focus on fixing the neighborhood itself so that we can make it attractive for other people to want to come and want to live there. So as we fix the community, as we fix the commercial corridors, we’re able to increase the sales tax base and [are] able to invest in our own communities. So I would say that this is an issue of … local control, and the state should definitely keep it there.
Source: On Affordable Housing and Repealing the Costa-Hawkins Act, Women Rising: A Panel of Women in the Race to Lead SD 33, Feb. 25.
Did not respond to our questionnaire and did not address the subject during public forums.
Did not respond to our questionnaire and did not address the subject during public forums.
Did not respond to our questionnaire and did not address the subject during public forums.
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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.
The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.
Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.
More on them later.
And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?
I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.
It’s like Lenin said, you know…
Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.
I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.
That is just its “ideology.”
The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.
This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.
If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”
“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”
This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.
This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:
(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system
Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.
“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5
This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.
Definition