Local landlord and real estate broker Robert Fox, who has spent decades banging on the walls of City Hall from the outside, now wants in.

The 68-year-old millionaire, who is mostly self-funding his campaign, often touts his up-from-the-bootstraps story of having parlayed a small cleaning company into a sizable real estate portfolio. 

The Indiana-native has lived in Long Beach for 35 years and has deep ties to the city’s neighborhood associations, many of which he helped to found, according to his resume.

In 1999, he ran an unsuccessful bid for the Second District seat as an openly gay candidate at a time when it was not as widely accepted as today. He finished in second place behind Dan Baker, who abruptly resigned following a suspect land deal in 2006. 

During that race, a newspaper reporter wrote “Fox’s critics say his fervent nature can sometimes be offensive. His supporters say it’s an expression of his unyielding commitment to the 2nd District.”

Today, Fox remains a controversial character.

He continues to be a staunch advocate for the home-owning, suburbanite class, often revolting against threats to “neighborhood character” proposed by City Hall.

Fox took particular issue when the city rolled out the first draft of its land use element in 2017, a document that lays out zoning blueprints meant to accommodate future growth. 

Using his gift for organizing and riling up outraged NIMBYs, he pushed for drastic cuts to density in subsequent drafts of the planning document. In one instance, he hijacked a LUE workshop from city officials, fomenting a donnybrook filled with “half-truths and outright misrepresentations,” according to a letter from the Willmore City Heritage Association president, who was in attendance.

A study by Beacon Economics commissioned by the Long Beach Downtown Development Corporation found that the LUE that resulted from the anti-density campaign spearheaded by Fox will “drive rents higher, push vulnerable residents out, and ultimately stifle economic growth.”

In 2018, he worked with pro-landlord group Better Housing for Long Beach to prevent a rent control measure from making it onto the ballot. In the process, he was accused of “using racist remarks against detractors,” according to a profile in the Long Beach Post. He denied these accusations.

Fox’s latest crusade concerns the Broadway road diet, which replaced two opposing car lanes with two bike lanes between Alamitos and Redondo avenues in an effort to make the corridor safer for pedestrians and cyclists. He claims community input during the planning phase of the project was ignored.

He has also said that the project has “exponentially” increased car crashes, touting crowd-sourced statistics. But without more long-term data, it’s impossible to definitively say what effect the project has had on crashes.

If elected to the City Council, he has promised to “restore common sense traffic design” to the corridor.

Fox pulls no punches when criticizing current city leadership, accusing the city of becoming “an autocracy, ruled from the top down. A dictatorship of bureaucracy and small minded people craving absolute power” at a kick-off event for the Long Beach Reform Coalition, an umbrella group—of which Fox is a board member—made up of neighborhood organizations. He signed a pledge at the event, committing to supporting a robust list of proposals to tighten campaign finance regulations, increase government transparency, and rules around civic participation, including allowing the public the right to agendize City Council items.

What will be your biggest public safety priorities if elected? Do you support increasing police presence? Are there other programs or policies that are not law enforcement-based that you believe can decrease crime? 

Public safety requires more investment in adding numbers to the force (to restore us to pre-recession levels, from which we are still down by nearly 200 officers) rather than spiking pensions and already high salaries and promoting overtime (which is dangerous because it leads to exhaustion), as well as a return to community policing. 

Not having a sufficient number of police per capita—we have just two thirds that of Los Angeles, for example—(this) is the first step in guaranteeing public safety. But we also have to change the way we police. I believe strongly in opening up our locked substations to the public and actually allowing people to come in for service, the way we used to do. Community policing is essential, and there’s no way officers can get to know the community and be anything other than reactive without sufficient numbers. Lastly, we need to seriously look at issues of police misconduct, whether (it’s) officer-involved shootings or other misconduct, as well as special treatment for elected officials as occurred with the (Councilmember) Jeannine Pearce’s incident in 2017. The TigerText matter was very concerning. However, I don’t want to suggest anything other than that the vast majority of our beat officers are anything but the best. We love our LBPD in Long Beach for the most part, and we just need much more of them.

Do you believe money in local elections plays an undue influence? Would you be in favor of reforming officeholder accounts or even abolishing them?

At a minimum they should be scaled down to their original levels, a max of $5,000, or even eliminated. I was very upset when six of our nine councilmember voted to raise the limit to $30,000 for themselves annually between elections. These special interest slush funds must be stopped and put back to their original community purpose use.

The matter of officeholder accounts is just one plank in the Long Beach Reform pledge, which I have signed.

The mayor indicated in January that the city is committed to preserving the Queen Mary despite needing what is estimated to be over $200 million in repair work. A $23 million city bond for repair work has already been spent. Do you believe the city should continue to invest in the ship and how?

I’ve known Mary Rohrer with Save The Queen a longtime and go to the ship every week for meetings of the Long Beach Rotary Club. Despite the massive amount of money and goodwill given to Urban Commons, they have completely failed and may have even tried to bribe the incumbent councilmember. The ship is still falling apart, years later.

Unfortunately they had no track record or restoration capabilities whatsoever and they have been yet another chapter in the long, sad story of operators doing a disservice to our iconic asset. What’s become clear is that, unfortunately, this is not just about a private operator, this is also about the failure of the city to be honest. We just fired Ed Pribonic, who was the official inspector on the ship for two and a half decades for telling the truth. Until we get honest, we won’t get anywhere.

So my short answer is: I support further investment in the ship because to do otherwise would be not just a major embarrassment but an economic disaster for the City.  It would send the wrong message and could cost us major tourism, downtown economic development, and convention revenue. But I won’t support any further investment until we get rid of Urban Commons, until the City Auditor completes a full audit, and until we truly get honest and see where we are cost and expenditure-wise and what potential options we have.

Projected city budgets for fiscal-years 2021 through 2023 show shortfalls of up to $22 million primarily due to ballooning labor, pension and insurance costs. Would you vote for cutting city services in order to alleviate this deficit? If not, how would you deal with it?

Absolutely not. The great outrage in Long Beach is that we have incredible sources of revenue, like the port, airport, oil, and the convention center, and we have the highest taxes, and yet we get a total poverty of services in return.

This state of affairs is truly a scandal, and the solution is further punishing the public after shortchanging them with austerity? I am for far greater investment in public services and infrastructure.

To pay for these much-needed investments, we shouldn’t be going back to the taxpayers, who are already at the extreme of over-taxation, from the highest possible sales tax to extremely high property tax—especially for new homebuyers—utility tax, and other high fees (like parking tickets). What we need is a top to bottom outside review and audit, like the one done in 2012 by Management Partners Inc. (whose recommendations were ignored). That way we can show both the city bargaining units (including the $100,000 and $200,000 “club” of managers, as the Long Beach Business Journal puts it) and the public how our fiscal priorities are out of whack compared to healthy, well-run cities. We are ranked 38th out of 471 California cities ranked by the state auditor according to highest fiscal risk. Our billion-dollar pension liability hangs over our future ability to pay for core services, and I don’t believe the average city employee, especially those in public safety, set out on their careers with the intention of bankrupting a city.  Tax giveaways for developers on the other hand reek with backroom dealing.  

Until we get our priorities straight and put the residents before the special interests, we will never get our fiscal house in order to ensure future generations are better served than we are. The truth is we have enough already to pay for absolutely everything we need. But our money is being stolen for political ends, and that must end.

LiBRE: Despite the passage of AB 1482, we are working with multiple residents in District 2 facing a 60-day notice right now. There is no proper enforcement of the law and since it’s new there’s no cases tested in court yet. There is also a loophole that allows landlords to evict a tenant if they want to “substantially” remodel the property. We would like to know what you would do to protect tenants from unjust evictions? Note: The City Council passed an ordinance to close this loophole on Feb. 18. 

I believe very strongly that if either party to a rental lease violates its provisions, the party who held to the mutually agreed terms is due justice. Furthermore, as a member of the gay community, I know from my life experience personally what discrimination looks like.  And discriminatory conduct in rental housing is not just against the law but truly an outrage against our shared values in Long Beach.  

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion these days about the effects of certain housing policies, and the result is the grave injustice of unintended consequences. Policies like AB 1482 and last year’s relocation ordinance have the effect of sheltering some renters for a period of time, while dramatically increasing the rent on all those looking for a new apartment. This will have a devastating impact on students and working young adults getting their first independent housing, as well as the working poor of any age who have to relocate to change jobs, seek educational opportunities, or for family reasons. No amount of relocation assistance will soften the blow of doubled or tripled rents, as we’ve seen in other cities with such policies. And the long-term consequence, according to nearly all economists, is a slow degrading of the housing stock, eventually resulting in the mom-and-pop landlords, who provide affordable housing, leaving the industry.  Developers love them because that’s where you get the real end-game of such policies: gentrification. The older housing stock eventually gets converted into rent control exempt luxury housing and both the mom-and-pop landlords and their tenants all get displaced.

Everyone In (Long Beach): Homelessness has been identified as an issue of top importance by Long Beach residents. How will you, as the District Two Councilmember, step up to help end homelessness in your community and in Long Beach as a city?

Regarding homelessness: We will never get anywhere if we waste obscene amounts of money on boondoggle white elephant projects like the North Long Beach proposed shelter, which we already blew $12 million on and cannot even use as intended. As someone in real estate, the lack of basic due diligence for the city to purchase a property without understanding that it had a preexisting cannabis cultivation lease is mind-blowing. As the only candidate who hired homeless over the years for my businesses and who was on the boards of the Homeless Summits for four years, and who helped establish the Multi-Service Center, I already had a background on this. But I have since had numerous discussions with experts and stakeholders, and the solutions are clear and simple. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, and now we must have beds to match the homeless count before we can take the homeless anywhere. We have eight designated officers (paid) above $75,000 a year for the homeless in this city, and all they can do is talk to them.

So, we need first of all to add beds, but not just beds. We have also to ramp up investment in social service providers, who can help folks navigate the long path back to reintegration, checking in on a daily basis. We also need more transition housing for the next step beyond shelter beds. And we need greater investment in mental health and drug addiction counseling. We must immediately end our city’s go-it-alone approach and work collaboratively with LAHSA, the county homeless agency. This is not a crisis which aligns with municipal borders, and even if we hadn’t wasted $12 million on the North Long Beach facility, it’s location was suited to serve Compton and Paramount, at no cost to those cities, as much as it was to serve Long Beach (but it provided politicians a photo-op). And the idea of building our first city-run facility a ten-mile trip from downtown is beyond irrational. It is truly appalling that the lot was purchased without review of the existing lease with the marijuana growing consortium. Their ironclad lease extended to 2026. So we spent all that money on a property we cannot use until years from now. This was the fault of the City Attorney’s office

Lastly, we need major reform of our homeless count. A count based on homeless individuals self-identifying, answering 12 questions before they qualify as homeless and with numbers tabulated in-house rather than by an independent third party, neither of which is the practice of other cities, can no longer be tolerated. When the city tells us the homeless numbers are not going up and they clearly are, something is very wrong with our city governance. If you want change you must give up your ego, your photo-ops and your vanity projects. Roll up your sleeves and get down in the trenches like I have and work with good common sense.

Surfrider Foundation, Long Beach Chapter: Given the certainty of increasing sea level rise how does the candidate feel about the City’s efforts to build new structures on the beach, such as the Jr. Lifeguard tower, the Belmont Pool, and the expanded Alfredo’s concession stands?

I talk about this issue wherever and whenever I can. When I went to see our then-City Development Services Director Amy Bodek in 2017 regarding the first draft of the Land Use Element (a fight I went on to lead and win in seven of eight council districts, with high-density development plans scaled back by each councilmember), I asked her about the issue of climate change-induced sea level rise in Long Beach. I had heard it would be at most 30 inches. I brought articles from Europe stating a sea level rise of 5 feet by the year 2100. She looked up from her computer and said to me, “Robert, it’s going to be nine feet.” The city has researched this and knows the danger is real, including the possibility of Belmont Shore, Naples, and the Peninsula requiring a sea wall. The cost of that would be extraordinary and of course it would spur a major debate about equity.  Fortunately, we’re not quite there yet. However, the idea of city officials plowing ahead with plans to put the Belmont Pool on the beach or to build, if not a new Angel Stadium (a deal I knew wouldn’t happen), some other arena in the Elephant Lot downtown, is irrational and reckless. We need to take this issue seriously, because sea rise is coming, whether we like it or not.

Long Beach Transportation And Parking Solutions: What are you willing to do to fight for a comprehensive Parking Plan that uses modern parking planning, data, and professional evaluation to balance the needs of drivers with other modes of transportation?

Parking is a great example of how this city in recent years does things exactly the wrong way. First, we created the issue of over-development, beginning with crackerbox (apartments) in the early ’90s and exacerbated it by lowering parking requirements for new downtown development in recent years. Yet, despite it being a growing crisis for decades, we still have NO master parking plan and literally no one on our massive city payroll who is primarily in charge of coordinating the parking issue. I have met with experts and advocates, including of course Long Beach Transportation and Parking Solutions (TAPS), and spoken with thousands of residents knocking on doors. We need permit parking zones most urgently—the entire Second District is designated as officially parking impacted by the city and should have them. We need a parking expert to design a master parking plan. We need an official city parking manager with dedicated city staff to implement that plan and manage it day-to-day.
We need to lower tickets in all parking impacted areas and stop penalizing residents for poor planning. And instead we need to embrace a cluster of solutions ranging from technological (including app-based) to building parking structures to creating new parking. (We should) maximize existing parking (loan incentives to add parking, umbrella insurance policies for those with unused lots), facilitate use of shuttles, require much more parking in new developments, (create) preferential permit zones for residents to integrating greater mass transit and usage of last-mile solutions (like scooters and ride share), and delineate and reserve spaces for unusual size vehicles, like motorcycles. We should create diagonal parking where the streets are wide enough. We need to delineate the parking spaces on our neighborhood streets, inclusive of mopeds and motorcycles. Using the Elephant Triangle as a three- or four-story parking lot with free shuttles up to downtown makes more sense than any other plan they have come up with. 

Also we need to increase our parking requirement for any new construction. Bring it back to 1.75 (spots per unit). And we should call this what it is: In the Second District we have a Parking Crisis; a man-made catastrophe due to poor planning in service of greedy developers (the short but disastrous crackerbox building boom of the early 1990s, when hundreds of permits were issued to developers in just a few months before the feeding frenzy was closed off). It’s both a quality-of-life and environmental crisis, and it should be the number one focus of the next councilmember.