Homelessness and Parking Dominate at CD-2 Forum
12 minute readWhile most of the political world and its observers were desperately awaiting results from the Iowa Caucuses last week—and may be left waiting forever—seven candidates vying for Long Beach’s Second District City Council seat squared off in a tiny elementary school auditorium. (Regrettably, Horsey Horseshoe was a no-show.)
The Monday night forum took place exactly a month before polls open on March 3, aka Super Tuesday, and was hosted by the Bluff Heights Neighborhood Association at Horace Mann Elementary School. If no candidate wins 50% of the vote next month, the race will go to a run-off on Nov. 3.
Like most city council candidate forums, there was a generous serving of bland platitudes, a helping of out-of-the-box policy proposals, and a side dish of real head-scratchers.
Homelessness and parking figured heavily into the night’s discussion. Some candidates chose to connect those issues with broader themes of climate change and economic justice, offering plans for short- and long-term solutions.
With the incumbent, Councilmember Jeannine Pearce (CD-2), saying she’s had enough of city hall for now, the field is wide open for the high-profile council seat. This is especially true considering municipal elections will coincide with presidential ones this year, meaning voter turnout is expected to be higher than usual.
Supportive housing popular among candidates
The city’s latest count found that there were 1,894 people experiencing homelessness in Long Beach. Although the overall numbers have been trending down since 2013, the number of people who said they were experiencing their first bout of homelessness jumped by 9% since 2017. This may be due partly to the fact that Long Beach rents have spiked in recent years as housing stock lags behind—in both the city and state as a whole—while wages for the bottom half of workers have actually declined.
“To truly solve homelessness, we need to deal with the root of the problem, which is economic inequality and extreme poverty that has been exacerbated over the last 40 years because of trickle-down economics,” said community activist and Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Eduardo Lara, who has positioned himself as the foremost progressive in the race and has received the endorsement of Pearce.
He called for more transitional housing, more mental health services, and legal aid for tenants to beef up enforcement of the state’s newly enacted anti-rent gouging law. He also noted that homelessness disproportionately affects the African-American population.
His proposals were in sharp contrast to what was put forth by school resource officer and construction contractor Jesus Cisneros, the sole Republican on the stage.
“I want them away from the parks. I want to move them away from the schools and away from the residential areas. I want to help them. I want to put them somewhere else. Keep them away from the residential area. Let’s put them in the industrial areas. Let’s put them in the 710 Freeway,” said Cisneros.
Though he apparently misspoke in that last bit, taken at face value, the rest of his comments advocate for an approach that a 2018 report by the United Nations said violates basic human rights.
Real estate broker and local landlord Robert Fox’s solutions focused on providing more shelter beds and jobs.
“Actually, we have solved this problem in the past. In the 1990s we had 30,000 homeless in the city of Long Beach, and we reduced that number to 3,000,” said Fox.
He may have been referring to an estimate that included both Long Beach and the South Bay. Long Beach’s homeless count began in 2003. The most concrete number we could find for the era referenced by Fox comes from a 1987 city study. It estimated that, at most, there were 5,000 homeless people on the streets on any given day.
“Back in those days, we didn’t have to have as many beds as the homeless count to pick someone up and take them to the Multi-Service Center,” he said.
This was likely a reference to a recent court decision that said it is unconstitutional for cities to criminalize sleeping on public property unless a city has adequate shelter capacity to accommodate its homeless population, which Long Beach currently does not.
“What would I do concretely? We need the beds,” he said. “I suggest that we open the armory on 7th (Street) and Alamitos (Avenue). Five hundred and ten beds, that works.”
While he also mentioned the need for increasing job availability for unhoused people, he wasn’t able to give further specifics during his one minute of allotted time.
Nigel Lifsey, an accountant who moonlights as an entertainment promoter, called homelessness a “macroeconomic problem” that requires greater economic development and better educational opportunities. But in the short-term, he pledged to reorient the budget to expand homeless services.
“What I would like to do is use my experiences in the finance industry, as an accountant, go through the budget (and) see where we can reallocate existing funds towards shelters, towards services, rather than having to find that revenue via taxes,” he said.
Environmentalist YouTuber Ryan Lum embraced a harm-reduction model that has been successful in other places, such as Utah.
“The only model that I’ve seen (to have) a proven track record is known as Housing First, and as the name implies, it houses homeless people first, and then once they’re housed, they’re able to get treated for the issues that caused them to be homeless in the first place.”
Cindy Allen, a retired Long Beach Police Department officer, pointed out that city services for unhoused people are only available during business hours.
“Homelessness is a 24-hour crisis,” she said. “Right now all of our services in this city are Monday through Friday, nine to five.”
Allen wants to expand operating hours for city services like the Multi-Service Center and the police and fire department’s homeless details. Another part of her platform, she said, is creating more bridge housing—a type of temporary housing that has service-enriched programs aimed at quickly bringing people off the streets and helping them transition into permanent housing.
Jeanette Barrera, a mental health provider and social worker who is often accompanied by a cadre of devotees clad in the campaign’s blue t-shirts, said she too would like to see more bridge housing and expressed support for an inclusionary zoning policy, which the council is expected to mull over some time in the coming months.
“Inclusionary housing is stating that if a big developer wants to come in and build a 200-unit skyrise, then they have to allocate at a minimum, like Los Angeles or in Torrance, about 10% (affordable housing). But we see how that’s working for them. So what I am saying is that what if we make it 20 or 30%,” she said.
Candidates address parking peeves
A 2018 study commissioned by the city found that hunting for parking in Alamitos Beach is, well, a treasure hunt. Half of the neighborhood’s residents reported that on average they circled around for over 20 minutes before finding a spot.
It’s no surprise then that candidates addressed parking as a quality-of-life issue. Parking, however, is inextricably related to larger conversations around climate change and the future of transportation, and consequently some candidates pointed out that the crowded curbs won’t be solved simply by adding more parking spots.
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Barrera, who is being endorsed by Long Beach Transit’s employee union, said she does not own a car and wants the city to begin planning for more rail lines in order to move away from the dependency on car travel.
“The one-occupant car is no longer self-sustainable. It’s not good for the environment,” she said, but added that she would be open to a city-funded parking structure in the district.
Avowed anti-road diet warrior Fox ribbed Barrera for allegedly cribbing his idea.
“I’ve been saying that for 12 years,” said Fox. “Jeanette liked my idea, I guess, of building neighborhood-friendly parking structures on Broadway and Fourth Street.”
The two were recently engaged in a he-posted-she-posted dispute on social media over some missing campaign yard signs. We could post screenshots but, really, who cares?
Anyways, Fox also proposed creating a city parking manager position and posited that creating more jobs in Long Beach would reduce the need for commuting, thus reducing car ownership.
“Eighty-eight percent of our people, according to the last figures, work outside the city of Long Beach. We have no jobs,” he said.
It’s unclear what the actual figure is here. Metro says it’s 66%, according to the environmental impact report for the 710 Freeway expansion. The city, using 2010 Census data, has put it at 76%.
Allen proposed creating “underground parking structures” and conducting a “red-curb audit,” something the city is already doing. She and Lifsey agreed that private parking lots that go unused overnight could also be part of the solution. Lum, on the other hand, wants street sweeping schedules to be re-analyzed to possibly make their rounds monthly instead of weekly. This didn’t sit too well with some audience members who let out groans at the prospect of grungier streets.
Cisneros bemoaned the increased car traffic that rising developments will bring to the area and in a fit of they’re-coming-to-take-our-cars paranoia went so far as to encourage the audience to forego public transportation in favor of personal vehicles.
“The mayor said he is making over 90 projects and they’re coming so we must demand the city to build us some parking. That’s one and number two, I love my truck. I have a monster truck. No one’s going to take my truck. So I’m not gonna do the train or the Metro. And if you love your car, you shouldn’t either,” Cisneros said to laughter from the audience.
Lara said he wants to promote a little-known parking permit program that allows residents to park perpendicular to their driveway and also lower the fees for those permits. However, he cautioned the climate crisis should be central to any parking plan.
“I would also advocate to make sure that when we do parking, we think of the environment and making sure that our carbon footprint is low because we need to take care of climate change in general, but also the environmental justice in terms of the lens that we approach towards policy,” he said.
(Almost) everyone is in favor of reforming officeholder accounts
Reforming officeholder accounts has recently gained currency among the more anti-establishment candidates in city council races. So what are they exactly?
Each elected official can create an officeholder account upon assuming office, which individuals, companies, and even dark money groups can donate to. The contributions are ostensibly for supplementing city funds for community projects or events. But a rule change put forth by Pearce—whose seat the candidates are jockeying for—and approved by the City Council in 2017 allowed these funds to be transferred to political campaigns. The city attorney’s office at the time said limitations on contributions were limitations on political speech.
Critics say this decision opened the door for political favors and patronage from special interests and unfairly gives incumbents who amass large sums of money during their term undue influence come election time.
That thumb on the scale in turn “pushes out younger generations from running,” said Barrera. “It pushes out people of color … (and) the working class.”
As a board member of the Long Beach Reform Coalition, a fairly new umbrella group mostly made up of neighborhood organizations, Fox has pledged to tighten regulations on the accounts.
“I oppose the officeholder accounts being weaponized as they are today for politics,” he said.
The only candidates who were not in favor of banning the use of officeholder accounts for political donations were Lifsey and Allen. Lifsey said the issue was “tough” but that ultimately, councilmembers should “work with integrity.” Allen, who is endorsed by six of the nine councilmembers and the mayor, argued that donations from officeholder accounts to political causes allows elected officials to further their constituents’ interests.
Allen is also endorsed by many of the city’s employees’ unions, including the Long Beach Police Officers and Firefighters associations.
Lara said the way incumbents use officeholder account funds has a corrosive effect on the democratic process.
“The spirit of what they were intended to do was to create programming within our own communities and not necessarily bolster someone else’s political career,” he said.
Seize the scooters!
Candidates also touched on other issues important to the district, including short-term rentals, litter, and e-scooters, with some innovative plans emerging from those discussions.
Cisneros proposed that parking enforcement officers help with sanitation and pick up litter on their down time (“Get this guy a broom!” he seemed to be saying).
Lifsey made the “semi-radical” proposal of banning private e-scooter companies like Bird and Lime, replacing them with a fleet run by Long Beach Transit.
And with the city struggling to work out how to regulate short-term rentals, Fox suggested Long Beach adopt the model used in Honolulu, where the millionaire also owns property. Passed last year, it puts a hard cap on the number of short-term rentals outside of designated resort areas, creates a rental registry, and puts the onus of removing ads for unpermitted rentals on platforms, such as Airbnb.
“(The law) has already been court-tested and (is) ready to go; challenged three times and Honolulu won. I don’t think we need to reinvent this wheel,” he said.
New changes to the election process in Los Angeles County means voters will be able to cast ballots up to ten days before election day, March 3, at any polling place in the county. The locations can be found here. You can watch a video from the county explaining the balloting changes here.
kevin@forthe.org
@reporterkflores
