 Good evening everyone, it's time to start, I mentioned already but folks are just coming in. My name is David Sandino and I'm moderating tonight. My goal is to keep us on time and talk as little as possible. And I'm happy to serve as moderator for our housing forum tonight entitled Housing Past as Prologue. This forum is a series of housing forums that have been organized and put on by the League of Women Voters and Civ Energy. I also have a few other thank yous. I wish to thank the City of Davis for helping to fund this location and also for Davis Community Church for making this wonderful hall available tonight. Also want folks to know if you didn't have a chance to sign up with League of Women Voters and are interested in future communications from them about other events like this or wish to contribute a donation, that sign up sheet will be in the back and you can do it during the break or after the event. The purpose of this forum tonight is to provide thought provoking information about, I think everybody would agree, one of the most important public issues of the day, access to housing. And what we're doing today is providing a variety of perspectives. Tonight's program has been divided into two parts. The first part of the evening will consist of a presentation by our feature speaker Richard Rosting followed with time from questions from the audience. We will hand out three by five cards, maybe you have them now, you'll be able to write your questions, they'll be collected when Mr. Rosting is finished and they will ask questions that way to keep the flow going and to allow as much time as possible for questions. After we finish that question and answer, we're going to shift to three local housing experts, Ash Feeney assistant manager for the City of Davis, David Thompson, president of Twin Pines Community Housing, and Alisa Meyer, managing attorney for Northern California Legal Services. We'll introduce them in more detail later, but they're coming halfway through the program and after their presentation, we will have another panel discussion including those three panelists and Mr. Rosting and other sets of questions. So it's an ambitious schedule, but everything goes right, we'll finish about 8.15, 8.20. After the end of that presentation, Mr. Rosting will be available again to sign and autograph books. I got one. I encourage you to do that as well. The books are being sold by our independent bookseller here in Davis, Avid Reader. So without further ado, let me introduce our featured speaker tonight, Richard Rosting. With a little background, Mr. Rosting is a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Third Good Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Haas Institute of the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of the book The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Government Segregated America. He is also the author of other books including Grading Education, Getting Accountability Right. Mr. Rosting is frequently heard on public radio and other media sources. I was driving one day to Davis and I heard an interview on NPR of Mr. Rosting and I was stunned by his analysis and his thoughts, so I'm glad we're able to bring him here tonight to share this. His book, The Color of Law, was designated as one of the 10 finalists of the National Book Awards, long list for best nonfiction books of 2017. The New York Times book review stated that The Color of Law, quote, is a powerful, disturbing history of residential segregation in America, end quote, and that this trouble history and trouble story, quote, must be told end quote. We are fortunate tonight to have Mr. Rosting here to discuss his ideas in person. So everyone, please welcome our future speaker tonight, Mr. Richard Rosting. Thank you, David, and thanks to all of you for coming here to engage in this conversation with me this evening. I am going, I know some of you have introduced yourselves to me earlier this evening, some of you are housing experts, some of you are active in governance in this community and in California. I'm not speaking to you this evening in your roles as planners or housing experts. I want to speak to you in your role as American citizens. It's a role that all of us share regardless of our professional obligations. And I want to begin by reminding you that in the 20th century, we had a civil rights movement in this country. Some of you may remember it. It began, this you won't remember, it began in the 1930s by challenging segregation in law schools because civil rights lawyers figured that if judges were too stupid to understand anything else, they might be able to figure out you couldn't get a good legal education in a segregated law school. And then that precedent was used to challenge segregation in colleges and universities. Then in 1954, as you all know, in the Brown versus Board of Education decision that abolished or prohibited legal segregation in elementary and secondary schools. And then the Brown decision gave inspiration, stimulus to a beginning civil rights movement of activists. They engaged in marches and demonstrations, civil disobedience. People lost their lives, some of them in that struggle. By the end of the 1960s, the civil rights movement had abolished segregation and you know this history, I'm sure, and lunch counters and buses and public accommodations of all kinds and interstate transportation and employment. The civil rights movement had persuaded much of the country that segregation was wrong, that it was immoral, that it was harmful both to blacks and to whites, that it was incompatible with our self-conception as a constitutional democracy. But yet, at the end of the 1960s, the civil rights movement really folded up its tent, went home, left untouched the biggest segregation of all, which is that every metropolitan area in this country is residentially segregated. I've lived in many of them. Everyone that I've lived in had clearly defined areas that were either all white or mostly white, clearly defined areas that were either all black or mostly black. How could it be? How could it be that we came to an understanding that segregation was wrong, immoral, harmful to both blacks and whites, incompatible with our self-conception as a constitutional democracy? How could it be that we left untouched the biggest segregation of all? We're an apartheid society. Let's face it, clearly defined boundaries everywhere we look by race. How can it be we left this untouched? Well, I guess you could say that it's harder to redress residential segregation than to end segregation and lunch counters. If you abolish segregation and lunch counters the next day, anybody can go to any restaurant, enter by any door, segregation is over. But if we abolish segregation in neighborhoods the next day, things will look much different. So what we've done, all of us, and I mean all of us, liberals, conservatives, African Americans and whites, Easterners and Westerners, Northerners, Southerners, is we've adopted a rationalization. I include myself in this. We adopted a rationalization to excuse ourselves from addressing the most serious segregation of all. And that rationalization that we've all adopted goes something like this. We tell ourselves that the segregation of colleges and universities or schools or public accommodations or interstate transportation, all of that was done by government, we say. It was done by law, by regulation, by ordinance, by public policy of one kind or another. And if the federal government was doing it, it was a Fifth Amendment violation, a civil rights violation. If it's a civil rights violation, we're obligated to fix it. If the states and local governments were doing it, it was a 14th Amendment violation, another civil rights violation, and we're obligated to fix it. But residential segregation we tell ourselves, all of us, we tell ourselves this, something entirely different. Residential segregation we tell ourselves, oh, that just happened by accident. It wasn't done by law, by regulation, by public policy, by ordinance. That sort of just evolved. It happened because bigoted white homeowners or maybe landlords wouldn't sell homes to African-Americans in white neighborhoods. Or maybe we tell ourselves this because of actors, businesses, and the private economy, not government agencies, but banks, real estate agents, private actors who was conduct isn't governed by the Constitution, discriminated on how they carried out their jobs, and that's what created residential segregation. Or maybe we tell ourselves it's just because blacks and whites like to live with each other of the same race. We feel more comfortable that way. And if other race people move into our neighborhoods, we flee. Or maybe we tell ourselves it's just the result of economics. In average, African-Americans have lower incomes than whites, and so many of them cannot afford to move to middle class neighborhoods, and that's why we have residential segregation. All of these individual, private sector, bigoted perhaps, but non-governmental decisions is what's created residential segregation, and we tell ourselves that what happened by accident can only unhappen by accident. It's not a civil rights violation because it wasn't done by government, so we can't do anything about it. We give a name to this rationalization, every one of us, and the name we give it, you hear it all over, we say it all the time, is the fact of segregation. Segregation that just happened, in fact, not in law. Well, David Said, I've written other books before this. Before I got involved in this topic, I was an education writer, a policy writer by education. I was a journalist. In the 1990s and 2000s, I spent a lot of time denouncing the dominant education policy of the country at that time. It was a theory that we had an achievement gap between black and white students, on average black students achieve at lower levels than white students, because teachers had low expectations of black children, and if only we could raise teachers' expectations, the achievement gap would disappear. It was a ludicrous theory, but I'm not exaggerating. Many of you will remember this. It was shared across the political spectrum, as widely shared as the de facto notion of segregation. In 2001, we adopted a law, a federal law, called No Child Left Behind. It was as bipartisan law as you can get. It was sponsored by President George Bush. In the Senate, it was introduced by the most liberal Senator, Ted Kennedy. In the House, by the most liberal congressman, George Miller. The law provided that in seven years, we were going to abolish the achievement gap. The achievement gap. There was going to be no more achievement gap between black and white children. And the way we were going to accomplish that was by raising teacher expectations. And the way we were going to do that was by testing children more and holding teachers accountable for their test scores. Magical thinking, if there ever was any. Well, it turned out to be a utter failure. Didn't close the achievement gap one bit. We did a lot of testing. We're still doing it. But I wrote column after column, trying to explain why I thought this was a ludicrous policy. And I remember writing one about asthma. As you may know, black children in urban neighborhoods have asthma at four times the rate of middle class children. Four times the rate. They have asthma because they live in more polluted neighborhoods. More deteriorated buildings. More vermin in the environment. And if a child has asthma, a child maybe. Not always, but maybe is up at night wheezing. And we'll come to school the next day. Drowsy. Maybe sleepy. And I tried to explain a very simple statistical proposition. If you had two groups of children who are identical groups. Same racial breakdown. Same social and economic characteristics. Same family structure. Same in every way you can imagine. Except one group had a higher rate of asthma. That group was going to have a higher rate of drowsiness. And that group was going to have lower average test scores no matter how high teacher expectations were. And you could do the same kind of logical explanation with one of a number of characteristics that low income and in particular minority children come to school whether it's asthma or lead poisoning or homelessness or stress from family economic insecurity or unemployment. And each one of them is going to predict somewhat lower achievement on average on the part of children who suffer from one of these economic or social disadvantages. And then I started thinking about this and I'm a slow learner. But as you may be able to tell you know I've got a lot of years on me so I had a lot of time to learn. And it gradually dawned on me that it's one thing if a child has asthma or lead poisoning or homelessness or economic insecurity what happens when you have a school where every child is coming to school either with asthma or lead poisoning or homelessness or economic insecurity. How can that school ever no matter how many laws you pass be expected to achieve at the same level as a school where children come to school healthy and well rested and well nourished and secure homes. We can't expect that. Well we call schools like that segregated schools. And schools today are more segregated than they ever have been in the last 50 years. More segregated than they ever have been in the last 50 years and the reason they're more segregated is because the neighborhoods in which they're located were segregated. And that's how I began thinking about the topic that led to this book. And then in 2007 I read a Supreme Court decision that evaluated the efforts of two school districts. One was Seattle, Washington. The other was Louisville, Kentucky. Both of these districts had implemented a very very token trivial school desegregation plan. In both cases they gave parents the choice of which school and district child would attend. But if the choice was going to exacerbate segregation that choice wouldn't be honored in favor of the choice of a child who wouldn't do so. So for example if you had an all white school or mostly white school with one place left and both a black and a white child applied for it the black child would be given some preference. You can't imagine a more trivial desegregation program like that. How often do you have one place left? And you have to choose between two opposite race children. That's the program that these districts adopted and the Supreme Court evaluated, denounced it, said it was unconstitutional to do such a thing. The controlling opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Chief Justice explained. It's true he said the schools in Louisville and Seattle are segregated. But he said they're segregated because the neighborhoods in which they're located are segregated. Well that was a pretty wise observation on the Chief Justice's part. In fact why they're segregated. But then he went on to say that the neighborhoods in Louisville and Seattle are segregated. De facto was the term he used because of all the things I just described. Bigotry, actions of private businesses, people's choices to live with each other the same race, economic differences. And he said if it's de facto segregation where government didn't create it government is prohibited from uncreating it. There's not only not a constitutional obligation, there's a constitutional prohibition of the government going in and undoing something that it didn't create. Well I read this decision and I remembered a reading about something else that happened in one of those cities, Louisville, Kentucky some years before. In Louisville, Kentucky there was a suburb outside the center city called Shively. Any of you from Kentucky or Louisville? No? I don't dance. There's a suburb outside Louisville called Shively. There was a white homeowner in that suburb, a single family homeowner. He had an African-American friend living in the center city. The African-American friend was a decorated Navy veteran. He had a wife, a daughter. Good job. Wanted to move to a single family home in a suburb like Shively but nobody would sell him one. So the white homeowner bought a second home in that suburb and resold it to his African-American friend. And when the African-American family moved in, an angry mob surrounded the home, white neighbors, protected by the police. They threw rocks through the windows. The police wouldn't stop it. Couldn't stop it. Didn't try to stop it. They dynamited and fire bombed the home. The police took no action to prevent this. The riot was all over. The state of Kentucky arrested, tried, convicted and jailed with a 15-year jail sentence. The white homeowner forced sedition for having sold a home in a white neighborhood to a black family. And I said to myself, this doesn't sound to me much like de facto segregation. If the entire criminal justice system, the prosecutors, the courts, the police were all engaged in concerted action to maintain racial boundaries in Louisville. And I began to look into it further. And what I discovered was that there were thousands, I'm not exaggerating, I'm using these words very carefully, thousands of cases of mob violence frequently protected by police in this country. In cities all over the country, not just in border states like Kentucky, but New York and Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco, mob violence protected by the police designed to drive African-Americans out of homes that they had legitimately purchased in white neighborhoods, usually those that were bordering black neighborhoods. Every one of those, to the extent that the police were involved, not protecting the black homeowner, not preventing the violence, every one of those was a 14th amendment violation, a civil rights violation that has never been remedied. And then I looked into it further and I discovered that there were many, many federal, state and local policies that were racially explicit that were designed to create, sustain, reinforce, perpetuate racial segregation in every metropolitan area of this country and without those policies, we would not have the racial landscape that we have today, not here in Davis, not in any city in the country. Of course there was private bigotry. Of course there was action of private businesses, but those private actors could not have created the racial segregation we know without government structure, subsidy and inducement. So let me describe in the few minutes I have this evening some of the more powerful policies that the federal government followed to create segregation. I don't have time obviously to go into very many of them, a lot of them are detailed in my book, I'll just describe a couple of them. The first one I'll take a few minutes with is public housing, something that we all, I think, misunderstand as much as we misunderstand de facto segregation. Public housing did not begin in this country for poor people. Poor people were not permitted into public housing when it was first created in the 1930s during the New Deal by the Roosevelt administration. We had a 25% unemployment rate in the country at that time. Public housing was for the 75% who were employed, who had good jobs, stable incomes who could pay the full cost of housing in their rent. Public housing was the most desirable housing available for middle class and working class families when it was first created in the New Deal. The Public Works Administration was the first New Deal agency built housing across the country for working class families who could afford housing but there was no housing available because no construction was being done in the Depression. Public Works Administration built housing and everywhere it built it segregated it. Separate projects for whites, separate projects for African Americans, frequently, frequently creating segregation where it hadn't previously existed. Most of the projects were for whites, a few for African Americans, creating segregation where it hadn't previously existed. Now I say that because there were many, many urban areas in this country in the 1930s and before, somewhat after that were integrated. We had a lot of integration in mid-20th century America, much more than we have today and we would be stunned if we were transported back there to see the extent of residential segregation that we had. And if you think about it, you'll realize it had to be. We were a manufacturing economy at that time. None of this internet stuff. You know, we were making things and factories had to be located in the Central Factory District that was near either a deep water port or a railroad terminal. They couldn't be located, spread out around the countryside. How are they going to get their parts or ship their final products? And if you had a factory district that was concentrated in a downtown urban area, the workforce had to be concentrated there as well. And if you had African Americans and whites working in the factories, they had to be living in broadly the same neighborhoods, be able to walk to work, take short streetcar rides maybe. They didn't have cars to drive in from the suburbs. So we had a lot of integrated neighborhoods and the Public Works Administration frequently segregated them for the first time with separate projects for African Americans and whites. The first public housing ever built in this country was built in Atlanta in an integrated neighborhood called the Flats. Atlanta had segregated schools and segregated water fountains and segregated lunch counters, but it had an integrated neighborhood for the reason I just described. In the Flats, the Public Works Administration demolished housing, integrated housing and built a project for whites only, forcing the African Americans who had been displaced to double triple up with relatives of fineless adequate housing elsewhere. And throughout the country, the Public Works Administration and successive federal agencies did the same thing. In my book, I describe the autobiography of the great African American poet, novelist, playwright Langston Hughes, whom I hope some of you are familiar with. In his autobiography, he says he grew up in an integrated downtown Cleveland neighborhood. His best friend in high school was Polish. He dated a Jewish girl. It's not surprising. He lived in an integrated neighborhood and went to an integrated high school. But the Public Works Administration went into that neighborhood of Cleveland where Langston Hughes grew up, demolished housing and built a separate project for whites, a separate project for African Americans. And with that and other segregated projects elsewhere in Cleveland he created the pattern of segregation in Cleveland that we know today. And they did this everywhere in the country. In my book, some of you may have read it already. Where I can, I like to try to pick on self-satisfied smug places that think they're better than everyone else. Not so much you, maybe a little bit. Cambridge, Massachusetts, maybe you've heard of that. The area between Harvard and MIT, the Central Square neighborhood, was a fully integrated neighborhood in the 1930s, about half white and half black. Public Works Administration built two separate projects in that neighborhood, one for whites, one for blacks, creating a pattern of segregation that hadn't previously existed. And with other equally segregated projects elsewhere in the Boston metropolitan area. During World War II, the actions of the federal government to create segregation where it hadn't previously existed continued. Particularly here on the west coast as a good example of it across the country hundreds of thousands of workers flocked to centers of war production to take jobs in war plants, jobs that hadn't existed during the Depression. They overwhelmed the communities where they settled to take these jobs. There was no housing available for them. If the government wanted the ships and the aircraft and the tanks and the jeeps to be produced they had to somehow find housing for these workers and so it did. The government created, the federal government created housing for World War II war workers always on a segregated basis, separate projects for blacks, projects for whites in order to keep defense production going. These workers who were in the same plants, same shipyards, same aircraft factories but segregated in their housing by the federal government. And the west coast here is a particularly good example of that because there were very few, not none, but very few African Americans living on the west coast prior to World War II, prior to these war industries. The historians divide up the migration of African Americans out of the former slave holding states into the rest of the country into two big periods. The first great migration is called around World War I for similar reasons to take jobs in war plants and munition plants at that time. But that brought African Americans primarily to places like Pittsburgh or Chicago and Detroit, the Midwestern and Eastern cities, not out here. It was the second great migration during World War II that brought a large African American population out to the west coast. So when the government segregated their housing, it was creating segregation not on a previous informal pattern but where it never existed before because it hadn't put a large enough African American population to segregate. In San Francisco, federal government built five housing projects for war workers. Four were for whites only. One was for African Americans. Some of you are familiar with the area in the Fillmore district. The government built it in the Fillmore district because a few African Americans were living there already because there were lots of apartment vacancies after we displaced into internment camps, Japanese Americans who had been living there. So there were a few African Americans living in the Fillmore district. The government decided that was going to be the black neighborhood of San Francisco and that's where it built its black project for war workers. In Seattle, in Portland, in Los Angeles, up and down the west coast, we have segregation today I think entirely because of the policy of the federal government in creating segregated projects for war workers. In Los Angeles, we all know the community of Watts. It became an African American neighborhood. It wasn't an African American neighborhood before World War II but the government decided that all of the housing projects for black workers were going to be placed in that one neighborhood, Watts, and it became a black neighborhood as a result. After World War II, we had an enormous housing shortage. Not only had very little housing been built during the Depression except for the public projects that I mentioned and during World War II it was against the law to use construction materials for civilian purposes unless it was for war workers, war related. So there was a big backlog there and then millions of returning war veterans came home needing housing for whom there was no housing available. They were double tripled up with relatives. There was an affordable housing crisis then that's comparable to the affordable housing crisis that we have today. And so I'm going to go into this in a little bit detail because the analogy today is so, so powerful. Conservatives in Congress wanted to defeat the expansion of public housing to take care of returning war veterans. President Truman had proposed a vast expansion of the National Public Housing Program. Again, not for poor people. These were for returning war veterans. They had jobs in the post-war economy. They had a rent but there was no housing available. So conservatives in Congress led by an Ohio senator whose name you may, some of you may recall a Senator Robert Taft, proposed an amendment to Truman's proposal, a 1949 Housing Act. We call it a poison pill amendment. Some of you may have heard that term. A poison pill strategy in Congress is where opponents of a bill put forward an amendment that they think can get a majority. But when the amendment is attached to the bill and the full bill then comes up on the floor of the House and Senate, a different majority finds the bill objectionable because of that amendment. Excuse me. So Taft proposed an amendment to the 1949 Housing Act along the following lines. He said, from now on, public housing has to be non-discriminatory, no racial discrimination in public housing. It was a cynical, cynical proposal. They didn't want public housing at all. He thought public housing was socialistic. The private sector should be taking care of the housing needs of returning war veterans. Just like today, the private sector wasn't taking care of the needs of working class and middle, lower middle class families. But he wanted to defeat the public housing proposal. So he proposed a non-discrimination amendment. He planned to vote for the amendment and his fellow conservatives, his Republican friends would vote with him. He thought he would get Northern Liberals to join him in voting for the non-discrimination amendment. That would create a majority. And then when the full bill came back on the floor of the House and Senate, amended as a non-discriminatory program, the conservatives would flip and vote against the final bill. They would be joined by Southern Democrats who would join them in voting against the final bill because it would require non-discrimination. And the entire bill would go down to defeat. That was his poison pill strategy. So liberals in Congress had a very difficult choice to make. They were being forced to make a devil's bargain. Were they going to support the non-discrimination amendment and ensure that they would do nothing to address the housing crisis, which was just as severe as it is today? Or were they going to oppose the non-discrimination amendment in order to get public housing built even though it would be on a segregated basis? Well, I'm not minimizing the difficulty of the choice any more than I minimize the difficulty of the choice we make today when we try to decide whether to build affordable housing in places that's very difficult and maybe impossible to build but that would be desegregated. Well, they thought about it, they debated it. The leading liberal in the Senate at that time was the Senator from Illinois, Senator Paul Douglas. He decided and his fellow liberals decided to vote against the non-discrimination amendment in order to preserve the possibility of addressing the housing shortage. Senator Douglas got up on the floor of the Senate and made a speech along the following lines. He said, I want to say to my Negro friends that you'll be better off if the non-discrimination amendment is defeated and you get the housing that you need than you will be if the non-discrimination amendment is passed and you get no housing at all. Well, he persuaded them the non-discrimination amendment was defeated. The full bill came up on the floor of the House and Senate. There's a continued segregated program. This is in 1949. The federal government then used the vote against the non-discrimination amendment as its justification for continuing to segregate all federal housing programs, not just public housing for the next almost 15 years into 1962. I remember 1962 not so long ago. That's how until then it was not until 1962 that the federal government adopted a policy of stopping congregating housing programs of all kinds. Well, I'm not so sure we were better off as a result of that bargain that Paul Douglas made, although it's true he did address the housing crisis. As a result of that bargain, and I'll go into it a little bit more in the middle of the toe, but we wound up concentrating the lowest income African-Americans in the urban neighborhoods in this country, and we got the achievement gap that I began by describing before. Somebody earlier was talking about health disparities between African-Americans and whites, shorter life expectancies, and greater rates of cardiovascular disease for African-Americans in this country in large part because they live in more polluted, more dangerous neighborhoods, less access to good food, to healthy food, to supermarkets. We got the mass incarceration crisis that we're all familiar with, which could not exist if we weren't concentrating the most disadvantaged young men in single neighborhoods. And we also got something which I find frightening and which you may as well, and that is the very dangerous frightening, as I say, political polarization we have in this country, which largely tracks racial lines. It's not entirely racial, but it largely tracks racial lines. How can we ever develop the common national identity that we need to preserve this democracy if so many Africans, Americans, and whites live so far from each other that we have no ability to develop a common national identity to empathize with each other, to understand each other's life experiences. So those are the consequences of that devil's bargain that we made and we make the same bargain today. We have, for example, in this country, an affordable housing program. It largely relies on tax credits issued by the federal government. The tax credits, the federal government places a priority on developing affordable housing in already low-income segregated neighborhoods. It doesn't call it that, it calls it low-income neighborhoods, but they're mostly segregated. And that's because it's easier to build it there. Developers don't have to hold 100 community meetings in many of your communities, explaining why they're bringing black and brown people into the neighborhood. The land is cheaper, so that's where we built it. Our affordable housing programs today reinforce segregation, creating those same consequences that I just described a few minutes ago. Well, very soon after the 1949 Housing Act was passed, which resulted in this vast expansion of public housing in this country, a development occurred which was quite surprising, and that is that all the white projects developed large numbers of vacancies. The black projects had long waiting lists. Pretty soon, even the most bigoted public official couldn't justify a situation where some of his projects in the city were half empty and others had long waiting lists. All the projects were opened up to African-Americans. Pretty soon, public housing became a predominantly African-American institution. And then at about the same time, all that industry that I was talking about before that had to be located in the areas where this public housing was located, it left. It went to the suburbs, to rural areas, because it no longer needed to be located near deep water ports and railroad terminals. The highways were being built. It could get its parts and ship its final products by truck. So the African-Americans who are now living in these public housing projects in the surrounding area became poorer and poorer. No longer had access to good jobs. Couldn't pay the full cost of rent in the projects. The government began to subsidize for the first time public housing. Once it began to subsidize, it stopped investing in it, stopped maintaining it. The projects deteriorated. And we got the kind of urban slums of concentrated poverty that we associate with public housing today. Why, though, did the white projects develop all the vacancies and the black projects have long waiting lists? That was, I'm going to conclude by telling you this, by talking about this. That was because of another federal program that was even more powerful than public housing, and that was a program of the Federal Housing Administration. That was explicitly designed, explicitly designed to move the entire white working-class population out of urban areas into single-family homes in the suburbs. This was an explicit federal program to suburbanize the country with white working-class families. We were not a suburban country at that time. The suburbanization was created by this program of the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration in the post-war period. You're familiar with all of these developments. The biggest probably is Lefittown, east of New York City. Maybe you've heard of that. Somebody earlier this evening gave me a flyer advertising homes in one of these developments, OSD Manor, here in Davis. Did I pronounce it correctly? No. How do you pronounce it? OSD, OSD Manor, here in Davis. These were created by the Federal Housing Administration. Developers like Lefitt, or the developer, I guess, the developer of OSD Manor was Joseph Spink, the famous city planner who laid out the streets and designed the homes in OSD Manor. These developers could never develop the capital to build, in the case of Lefittown, 17,000 homes in one place. OSD Manor was a couple of hundreds smaller than that. But still, where were they going to get the capital to build 17,000 or even 200 homes in one place for which they had no buyers? No bank was going to be crazy enough to lend them money to do a thing like that. It was a purely speculative venture. We were in a suburban country, as I say. Who thought anybody would want to move to places like this? The only way that these developers could get the money to build these projects was by going to the Federal Housing Administration, submitting their plans for the development, making a commitment to the Federal Housing Administration or the Veterans Administration that they would never sell a home to an African American. These agencies, these federal agencies, even required that the developers place a clause in the deed of every home, prohibiting resale to African Americans or rental to African Americans. So this flyer that somebody gave me earlier this evening was from the University of Westie. Is that Westie Manor? It's a beautiful California ranch home, large, wide frontage lots. FHA and GA, GI Finance, that's the Veterans Administration. And it says, a restricted home development planned for you, the city of Davis, and in keeping with the university development. Well, that's how this community came to be segregated. Many African American returning war veterans could have afforded to buy those homes. The price was $9,000. That's how much these homes cost in 1950-51. In today's money, that's about $100,000. Maybe you can buy a home in that development today for $100,000. No. I guess I'm wrong. What did they cost? $400,000, $500,000? Maybe more. $800,000. That's all right. So the white working-class families returning war veterans who were subsidized by the federal government to buy these homes gained over the next few generations $700,000 in wealth. $9,000 at the time. It's worth about $100,000 in today's money. $700,000 in wealth. They used that wealth to send their children to college. They used it to finance perhaps temporary unemployment emergencies. They used that wealth to finance their own retirements. And they used that wealth to bequeath wealth to their children and grandchildren who then had down payments for their own homes. African-Americans who were prohibited from participating in this wealth-generating exercise gained no such wealth. The result is that today, African-American incomes are about 60%, 6-0% of white incomes. That's a disparity. But you would think if you had a 60% income ratio, it would have a 60% wealth ratio as well. But in fact, African-American wealth is about 5% on a family basis of white wealth. And that enormous disparity between a 60% income ratio and a 5% wealth ratio is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy that has never been remedied. It's a civil rights violation. It's a clear civil rights violation right here in Davis. The city of Davis should be buying up homes for $800,000 in that community and reselling them to qualified African-Americans for $100,000. That would be a narrowly targeted... That would be a narrowly targeted remedy for a very specific constitutional violation. And this speech has done all of the country, whether it's the city of Davis doing it, or the federal government, or the state of California. These are civil rights violations that we need to remedy. Policy makers know how to fix this. There's nothing mysterious about how to redress segregation in this country. I just get described a very extreme policy. Although, as I said, it's perfect. Any court would have to uphold such a policy if it understood the history that I just described. If it was presented with this leaflet, it would have to uphold the policy that I just described, even the most conservative court. Chief Justice John Roberts maintains his stance by denying this history, but if confronted with the history, there would be no justification for this de facto myth. But there are many, many more or less extreme policies that we could implement. We should abolish zoning ordinances that prohibit the construction of anything, but single-family homes, sometimes on large lot sizes. And combine that with inclusionary requirements to make sure that we don't simply increase density for the benefit of the middle class that's also suffering from a housing crisis, but also increase density for the benefit of racial minorities who have been excluded from participating in decent housing in this country. We should reverse the priorities of things like the low-income housing tax credit, which plays a priority in existing low-income neighborhoods and require that more of them be built in high-opportunity neighborhoods. We should resist in urban areas that doesn't really apply, I think, much to Davis, to resist the gentrification process that simply converts low-income segregated neighborhoods into high-income white-segregated neighborhoods. We should do that with policies like rent control and limits on condominium conversions and, as I say, inclusionary zoning requirements. So the policies are well known. What's missing? What's missing is a new civil rights movement that's going to demand that these policies be implemented. And as I said at the beginning, I'm talking to you in your role as citizens. Fixing this is not government's responsibility. It's not the Senate's responsibility. It's not Congress' responsibility. It's not the Assembly's responsibility or the State Senate's responsibility. It's your responsibility. It's our responsibility as citizens to demand that these policies be implemented because they will never be addressed in the current political environment. And unless there is a new civil rights movement that demands an end to segregation in this country, we're going to go further and further down the road of an apartheid society, which cannot end well for any of us. So thank you very much. Thank you, Richard, for that presentation and those ideas giving us a lot of food for thought. So the next part of the program is we have an opportunity to provide some questions for Mr. Rosting. So if you have your 3x5 cards, you can see several folks walking around from the League of Women Voters, Civ Energy, give them your cards, and we will ask the questions for Mr. Rosting. So let's get started with the questions here. The first one we have for you, Richard, why did the price of houses as a proportion to household income increase so greatly after 1995? Are you going to filter these questions? Yeah, that might be for a housing expert. I am not a housing expert. I'm a historian, if I have any specialty, it's education policy, so I think you know the answer to this question as you all know it as well as I do. I think it's largely because of the increase in population without an increase in the housing being built and these exclusionary zoning ordinances that I described are a big part of contributing to that. But there are other contributors to it as well. There's the increased regulatory costs of building housing which places the burden of environmental improvement on the lowest income families who are not already in housing while people who are already living in existing housing that are not environmentally friendly don't have to do anything to improve them. But mostly it's because we keep on attracting jobs in this state without providing the housing that they need and so the demand keeps exceeding the supply. You mentioned at the end of your presentation about some potential remedies that might be enacted to reverse some of these federal actions. Do you have some examples where good examples where this has been done and it's worked? Sure, there are many examples around the country of communities that are making some progress in this area but it's so slow and so small that all they can be as examples they're not changing the overall environment. For example, Montgomery County, Maryland a very wealthy suburb outside Washington DC adopted an ordinance some 20 years ago that requires all developments to set aside 15% of their units for moderate income not low income but for moderate income families and then the county's public housing authority purchases one third of that 15% for its public housing program so you have truly mixed income developments in one of the most affluent counties in the country and it's been very successful. The children of the public housing residents who are in these indistinguishable units within these developments do far better in school than comparable public housing children who are not in integrated environments so that would be one example. New Jersey has a fair share program which requires every jurisdiction in the state to provide and make a possible of the construction of housing for its fair share of its metropolitan areas low income population. That would be another example. We have some examples of local localities that have tried harder to place low income housing tax credit developments in high opportunity communities so that's going on. We have some examples of usually as a result of court settlements where public housing authorities have been sued for unconstitutionally segregating their units and the settlements have resulted in some places of vouchers for former public housing residents to be able to move to suburban high opportunity communities and the vouchers are substantial enough that they can afford to do so. So that would be another. Dallas is one example of that. Baltimore is another. So there are examples around the country that are making progress. It's not impossible. Another question for you. Your book focuses on African American communities and disparities. How does your paradigm apply to California's Hispanic population? Well, I would certainly never suggest that Hispanics in California did not suffer from state sponsored discrimination but it was not never as serious and as intense or as widespread as the suffering and the discrimination against the descendants of American slaves. That's a unique experience in this country as enslaved people have never been fully restored or fully given the full rights of citizenship whether in housing or in any other area. So in California, for example, I'll give you one example. Many of the developments that were built in the 20th century as I said had restrictive covenants, deed clauses that prohibited resale or rental to non-coercasions and very frequently, African Americans who purchased homes or rented homes and violation of those deeds were evicted by courts as neighbors would go to court and have them evicted because they purchased a home and a violation of it. Some Hispanics were also evicted but more often than not, courts ruled that they couldn't be evicted because Hispanics were Caucasians and couldn't be evicted under these restrictive covenants. So they suffered under these rules but not to the same extent. The other thing I would say is that when these policies were enacted by the federal government in the mid 20th century, the federal government really didn't think of California as part of the country. No, I'm serious. These were all Eastern and Midwestern focused policies where the... Well, you're laughing. There wasn't even a baseball team west of the Mississippi in those days. So they were focused on the East and the Midwest and African Americans were the only significant minority in the East and the Midwest in the mid 20th century. So that was the intent. That was the primary intent but certainly Hispanics got caught up in it as well. Another question for you. How would you respond to someone saying that gentrification creates economic development opportunities and that poor communities are historically mobile and can take advantage and find those opportunities? I don't understand that question. Yeah. So I think the question is that gentrification can provide for economic development in that gentrified area and there's a possibility that folks in a poor community can move to that gentrified area. Can move to it? Yeah. Or from it? It says to it. Well, gentrification could be a very positive force if it were controlled because gentrification could create diverse communities both economically and racially but we don't have controls on it now so what happens more often than not is that gentrification converts a low income segregated community into a high income segregated community and the former residents are displaced and forced to find less housing, less adequate housing elsewhere in new segregated neighborhoods that become segregated. So for example, I don't know much about the Sacramento-Davis area but I know in Oakland, California, Oakland is very rapidly being gentrified. It's not creating opportunities for the existing low income residents. They're being displaced to Antioch, a new segregated neighborhood where the African Americans who are now living there because they can no longer afford to live in their previous neighborhoods are living even farther from jobs than they did when they were living in Oakland. Their rents rise to the point where they can't pay them any longer. So their homes are bought and demolished and more affluent homes for more affluent families are built. So it's not a positive force at this point but it could very easily be if we controlled it. If we had rent control, that if we prohibited or limited at least condominium conversions, those kinds of policies could create a healthy gentrification but we don't have that now. Another question for you. You talked about this at the end of your presentation looking for some more details. What type of reparations if any do you envision on a national scale that should be made to African Americans and other minorities? Well, reparations is too narrow a term. We need much more than monetary payments. Most people think of reparations as a single monetary payment to the current generation. And that would not fix this. It wouldn't even go of tiny step towards fixing it. What we need in addition to some expensive policies such as, and I was serious when I said this before, such as the purchase by government of homes and the resale of the big discount to African Americans who were previously prohibited from purchasing them when they were affordable. Now they're not affordable to working-class families or either race. So that would be an expensive program but many things that we need to do and broadly speaking I consider that reparations but most people don't think of it that way. So for example, abolishing exclusionary zoning and combining it with inclusionary requirements would be a very powerful step towards redressing it. It wouldn't cost anything at all to do that. It wouldn't cost government anything at all to do that. I think you have to... I see your hands up but unfortunately we have run out of time. We have to move to the next part so if you have questions please still submit them. We'll do our best to have those addressed and also Mr. Rosting is staying afterwards and there'll be an opportunity maybe you can talk to him or we can perhaps raise your questions in the next panel group. So what I would now is thank Mr. Rosting for your questions. You can sit right there. So you can stay seated or if you need to take a quick break here's the time because we're just going to take a minute and we'll transition now with our panel coming up here. Okay, thank you everyone. We're ready to commence again. I'm glad Mr. Rosting's presentation generated thought and questions so more to come. So let's go now to the next part of tonight's program. I think it'll be a nice transition. We have three experts on local housing issues. Each one will have a 10 minute presentation and then we'll continue on to end the evening with some more questions for the full panel including Mr. Rosting. So let me introduce the first speaker, the second and the third. So the first one is Ash Feeney. Ash is the Assistant City Manager of the Economic Community Development for the City of Davis and Mr. Feeney will discuss what the City of Davis is challenged by on issue of housing affordability. Next up is David Thompson. We welcome David. David is President of Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation. He has spent nearly all his life working and committed to the development of cooperatives and affordable housing. On November the panel is Elisa Meyer. We're delighted to have her. She is the Managing Attorney for Northern California Legal Services in Yolo County. Ms. Meyer represents low income individuals and families and housing, public benefit education and civil rights. So our three experts will be able to share their wisdom tonight. So let's start now with Mr. Feeney. Thank you David and thanks to Mr. Feeney for putting this form on tonight. Definitely listening to Richard Rothstein's presentation there definitely gives you something to reflect on with respect to our past and certainly we've got a lot to improve on so let's focus on getting the future right. I was asked to talk about the challenges the city faces on affordability. Some of the things that we heard about it's really economic struggle and a lot of it's tied to land use and here in the city of Davis that certainly rings true from an affordability standpoint. We recently had a poll that was done a scientific poll by EMC and if you haven't seen that poll it's available on the city's website but the single, you know the top issue there with 31% of the respondents citing it was affordable housing. So whether that is affordable housing has a lot of different meetings we have what we call big A affordable which is actually deed restricted affordable housing and then we have affordable housing meaning most people can afford the housing irrespective of if you qualify for a deed restriction or not. So certainly it's an issue that's definitely top of mind for a lot of people that really picked up significantly from the prior polls and actually for people that are in their 30s and two of the respondents cited that as their key biggest issue. When we think about how did we get here and what are we going to do about it we want to definitely focus in on that tonight but I mean we talked a little bit about it with Mr. Rothstein it's really an economic issue it's a basic economic issue of supply and demand the question about post 1995 why has there been such a significant increase in the price of housing it's got a lot more expensive to produce it's harder to produce from a process standpoint costs have gone up there's really kind of four things that a developer looks at when they're going to develop housing they call it the risk matrix and you have the political risk what's my process certainty do I know that I'm going to get an approval for a project that I'm bringing forward then you have the development risk that is what's expensive the development am I doing infill am I doing redevelopment am I doing greenfield what are some of those development risk factors that I need to consider the more risky the development side the more of a return they seek then there's a financial risk and the market risk so it's really those four risk factors that kind of help inform a developer on what kind of return they need to forecast to take on a development project and so if you have increases in any one of those risk factors beyond what one would normally expect their return goes up and they're expecting to get a higher price here we have significant political risk factors development risk depending on the site but I think political risk is probably the single biggest risk factor and then development risk includes construction cost and certainly not just here in Davis but across the state and for the nation that matter costs have increased considerably so that's certainly an issue but from a supply and demand standpoint you know the way back into 1958 the first city's general plan farmland preservation and orderly growth has been part of the DNA of the community and that's been reaffirmed over time in each one of the general plans and actually in year 2000 measure J passed and was renewed and measure R was renewed in 2010 which is you know growth measure I'm sure everyone here is familiar with it but if you're gonna annex land into the city limits or rezone ag land in the city it requires a voter approval so from a risk standpoint that increases political risk and it also really kind of focuses where is the growth going to occur you know since that growth measure was put in place you know there's been a number of infill projects that have been done but if you look back and look at kind of the city's housing stock you know most of it was built from 1960 to 2000 after the year 2000 when measure J was put in place there's been an addition of 10.9% to the city's housing stock whereas in that same period the county's stock county Y grew by 21.3% so definitely you can see the slower growth occurring there you know some of the well there's some great intentions with growth policies like that there are some unintended consequences that have happened with it I mean certainly prices of housing have increased rapidly maybe beyond what people were expecting when they thought about those policies and then also one of the things it's telling is there's been a demographic shift too and that has some real implications you know for the city over time as I was preparing for tonight thinking about this topic I went back and referenced the state of the city report in 2017 the city went ahead and put this state of the city report together as we embarked on the own specific plan update that's underway right now and it also it's basically provides food for thought for that plan as well as a general plan update which we'll be embarking on later next year but it's a great report if you haven't ever looked at it if you're here you think about these issues I'd encourage you to look at it it's on the city's website there's a lot of great data in there and then there's a lot of policy questions that are important for consideration of the future and see someone in the audience here tonight that plan so thanks for that but if we look at the types of housing so it's not just kind of growth policies but it's what do we have what we have we're deep on single family low density residential housing the most expensive housing type actually 78% of the city's residential is owned low density residential so that's a high barrier to entry when you have the prices that we're seeing today what I'd call little affordable is 7% that's medium density and then beyond that that's all in the higher density categories which are more representative apartments a couple of the key indicators for housing affordability issues saying that you have an immediate housing issue is overpayment and overcrowding with respect to overpayment that means when you're paying 30% or more of your household income towards housing costs in this state of the city report it notes that 61% of renter households are overpaying for their housing 22.1% of owner occupied households are overpaying for their housing and looking at 2018 census estimates because this data is a little older in this report median household incomes estimated at just over $63,000 in a median housing value at $594,000 we've got an estimate of about 29% people living in poverty here in the city and if you think about ownership challenge think about if you're fortunate enough to own your own home how challenging that was to save up for that down payment to afford a $600,000 house here in Davis you have to save $120,000 down payment to have that 20% down and then you'd have to earn about $104,000 per year if you're going to qualify for a 30 year 4.5% rate to afford that home you know median income is at $63,000 so definitely we've got a disparity there and just to think of saving that $120,000 and how long that would take that's a big challenge for a lot of people from a rental challenge according to a recent UCD survey the average rent in 2018 was $1,673 a month if you think about that the median income at $63,000 that's like 31% of their income so even from a median income earner an apartment is just a little bit more than 30% of their income from a bad rental standpoint which is a model that we see here in the city and I think we're seeing it more and more in jurisdictions that have housing problems as a rent by bed model in fall of 2016 it was $875,000 it's increased to $892,000 a month and so that would require if you're going to have 30% of your housing cost going towards that housing payment you'd have to have an income of $36,000 so you know kind of putting some of the numbers to that I think at least helps me when I think about these type of issues certainly the council has been very active in approving a number of projects to address this concern there's been a number of multifamily projects that have been improved within those there's some pretty creative inclusionary housing requirements that the council went ahead and put forward in addition to that you know campus has been working on some pretty big projects over at UCD to hopefully take care of some of the student housing demand that we've been seeing but I think in the period since you know the intended slow down of housing production what we've seen is pricing has escalated at a very rapid pace and it's really impacted those at the lower income levels and or those that aren't already in a home that don't already have the benefit of home ownership so a lot of folks have been left behind you know during that period when you look at this report from a demographic standpoint some of the implications of that is we've seen you know a lot of the middle segment we've seen a 9% increase in the overall over 55 years old segment we've also seen a 7.2% decrease in the segment that's between ages 25 and 54 so we're seeing that family segment noticeably decline between 2000 and 2015 so you know our shopping and spending suffer because they're buying gallons of milk instead of quarts of milk school suffer economic entrepreneurship and when we look and do our outreach with companies we also find that there's a real concern about having their employees find housing so from a building economic development strategy while retirees and students are a critical part of any community that's not really great for building a diverse economy we want to diversify our industry so those are some things that people may want to keep in mind as we go forward on our general plan update and we've got our arena allocation which is a regional housing needs allocation and so for the last cycle we had 1066 units that's just coming to an end in 2020-21 and our next 8-year cycle we're projecting 2075 units so maybe thinking about where those units are going to go, what's the composition of those units and how do we really address some of these major challenges we're seeing from an affordability standpoint as we embark on the next general plan update which we'll get underway next year so I'd encourage you to take a look at this report I think my time's up but happy to answer any questions once we get there so the report's got definitely some good food for thought as we embark on those policy matters thank you good evening my name is David Thompson I'm president of the Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation and I am so pleased and proud to be on this panel here tonight because I have worked with Richard Rothstein for a number of years on filling in little gaps in his books and I have just loved the work that he has done this is the doomsday book of racial segregation in the United States and so Richard congratulations the reason why I mention about being with the cooperatives is that associated cooperatives which was formed in 1935 was the only supplier willing to provide the labor and the supplies to people who wanted to build racially integrated cooperatives there were a number of attempts in California six of them that I know about that created about 1500 units of housing and were all started as racially integrated cooperatives there are members where veterans coming back from the war cooperators who wanted a better society and various other kinds of people these cooperatives were created in let me see Palos Verdes Crestwood Hills LA Ladera near Palo Alto the San Fernando Valley and Valley Homes in Campbell they were all sponsored by unions or churches or other groups to build affordable housing however none of them were completed as cooperatives all of them were built the reason being a lot of what Richard spoke to you about tonight FHA at that time in the late 1940s would not finance any cooperative that did not include a racial covenant in its papers and as a result regretfully five of those cooperatives failed went bankrupt the people who led them the people who joined them the people who meant to build a more beautiful community here on earth all went out of business trying to do the good thing their plans were taken over by others 1500 houses were built but not one black person lived in any of those five pretty shameful chapter in American history but I'm very proud of the fact that our cooperatives did their very best to make that kind of life happen however one of those cooperatives did succeed fortunately it came a little bit later and what I have to go into there is the fact that one of the co-ops that was trying to get built hired Thurgood Marshall to be its lawyer Thurgood Marshall and I'm cutting the history short here because we have a very short period of time but Thurgood Marshall lived in a housing cooperative in New York that was purposefully created to be racially integrated that was the first home he ever had and the only home he had until he was seated on the Supreme Court he wrote to the president Truman 1949 FHA on its face changed its policies but did nothing about it 1952 Eisenhower was elected he came in he neither did anything about it and it was not until 1962 as you say in your book that president Kennedy finally prevented FHA from its discriminatory practices now during that meantime Sunnylands was able to move to the forefront and I want to say that tonight in our audience I would like to introduce two young men who were born in the first racially integrated community and cooperative in the United States with Donnie and Henry please stand thank you very much they will talk a little bit later about a film that they have made about that first integrated cooperative community I want to just go and make a little reference to Levittown 17,000 units 45,000 people living there blacks used to line up to be able to join and when they got to the front of the line they were told to go home there was going to be no home here to you and yet when it was finished 17,000 units with all white people living in it and one of the people that got accepted believe it or not was a former German U-boat captain the blacks who had been lining up to join had all been in the armed forces and they were not allowed to join in the 1960s had and its efforts in San Francisco did lead though to many many thousands of black families getting housing home home ownership but only through cooperatives in the Bay Area and we have a number of people to thank for that but in particular the international longshoremen workers union that sponsored a racially integrated co-op in San Francisco of which Alice Walker lived there I want to talk a little bit how much on time I know it's five minutes okay thank you I'm trying to cut as much as I can here what I want to talk about is how one cooperative in Davis has done something about affordability so I'd like to talk about the Dostopinos housing cooperative is anybody here who lives at Dostopinos oh okay hi how are you good alright so the reason I bring it up is because as Ash was saying earlier you know we have these dilemmas if it's all right then no housing is ever going to be built for moderate and low income people just isn't going to happen the market doesn't allow it so the city in some ways is allowed to make some changes and as a result of some of those changes we have a few units that come along that are available to low and moderate income housing Dostopinos housing cooperative the owners of the neighborhood development which is called send a waiver I asked the city for permission to develop 70 acres and they wanted to come out of the line that was there at the time in the city the city had a kind of a line up you had to get in line and therefore they wanted to jump the line and they said that they would provide the land and build 60 unit limited equity housing cooperative if the city would give them permission to develop the remainder of that subdivision and they were allowed to do that and the amazing results are after 30 plus years and I'm just giving you little highlights here but if we want moderate income people to live in our town this is one of the things that we need to pay attention to after those 30 plus years a three bedroom unit at Sequoia which is a market rate apartment building across the road from Dostopinos if you want to live there January 2020 you will pay $2200 if you wanted to live at Dostopinos in the same three bedroom unit apartment on that same day in 2020 you would be paying $1248 a $952 a month difference which amounts to cash in hand for a moderate income person who has been able to get into Dostopinos of $11,424 one of the dilemmas we have in the housing situation is that most of the rents in Davis are above what people should be paying and so we have a lot of people who work in Davis who live in Davis who can never save a damn dime because they're paying so much for rent but if you're living at Dostopinos you have $11,400 left at the end of the year to do lots of things with but there's only 60 units of Dostopinos and there's about 13,000 units of market rate rental housing in the city where you are not going to achieve that kind of savings I truly believe that we need to be looking at a new Dostopinos in Davis we need to start to try to pay attention to how we can deal with that moderate income housing class and group and I also feel that we should be looking at workforce housing cooperatives so that teachers and school district employees have a place that they can be or UCD junior faculty and staff can have a place that they can live in but workforce housing has many opportunities to offer because if you think about it 21,000 people drive to Davis and 16,000 people in Davis drive somewhere else every day so we have 40,000 trips of 20 miles each 1.6 million miles per day because people aren't living near where they work so we need to pay attention to that okay I'm going to go on and I've got one minute so I won't talk about the cost of housing I think that we did a good job there I do want to have one applause for the city because I don't think Richard would know this but the policy that we had for about 20 years was a fabulous policy because it required every new subdivision to have a portion of that land set aside for low income housing and we built a ton of housing under that formula and all of that housing was surrounded by houses which are available for $800,000 per person so we had a very inclusive policy the problem is we don't have that inclusion if we don't have new subdivisions and so that's part of what we have to deal with city housing policy needs to address the need for normal affordable units there has been an accommodation for student housing but for example at Cesar Chavez where we have 52 units available at about $400 per month we have 143 people who are on the waiting list for the 25% units but they cannot move across the road to Lincoln 40 to a low income unit over there because that unit is 6 or 700 for a bed so we've got to do something about regular people's housing in Davis and we need to pay attention to that so I think I probably should stop if we want a more integrated community we're going to have to do something because doing what we are makes us less integrated day by day and I personally do not want to live in a segregated community and I hope you will join me and join others in acting as best as you can to start creating a different policy for our city to carry out thank you I'm Elisa Meyer I'm the managing attorney of our local legal aid office known as legal services of northern California we actually have eight field offices and we cover a territory the size of Ohio it's all of northern California hence the name and while I was introduced as housing expert I don't necessarily think of myself as an expert but I do see people with housing problems every single day at my work and my job tonight was to talk about why housing policies are important from the perspective of our clients so about 50% of the total cases that come through our office are housing cases we all know we have a very severe housing shortage in California that is not news that doesn't make me an expert everybody knows that it has a severe impact on individuals and families at the lower economic segments vacancy rates in Davis I think we know if you've read the paper anytime within the last year it's less than 1% Woodland has now joined Davis in that it's less than 1% West Sacramento is not far behind so this is a regional issue there's no place for people to go if you don't have enough money to afford rent my statistics are a little different than the rent what I found is that rent for a one bedroom in Davis ranges from 1340 to 1900 these are for apartments that are not subsidized average rent for a 959 square foot apartment in Davis is $2,177 that is huge and staggering if you're living on a fixed income and for the general public frankly 44% of our housing stock has over $2,000 and that's for apartment units with 50 plus apartments so you may still be able to find some smaller maybe fourplexes or things like that that might have lower rent than these we have 7,800 unfurnished apartment units for rent in Davis as of the last housing element cycle that started in 2013 and 1,689 of those are the affordable units and some of those were developed with the inclusionary housing policy that David just mentioned where we had a 35% requirement so those units are scattered throughout the community yet we still have 7,779 households having some sort of excessive housing cost burden as of the last housing element cycle and I suspect we are going to find that it's much worse today so we have a huge issue with supply and demand and one of the ways that the excess housing cost has manifested themselves is a spike in the number of people experiencing homelessness the county's point in time count was conducted on January 22nd, 2019 I participated in that count as the lead for the rural areas the number of people counted was 655 county wide and for Davis it was 190 now this is just one night that HUD tells us they give us one night and it's always in January so it's not really reflective and it also is just for people who wanted to participate in that count there are people who will not participate in any sort of count like that because they want to fly under the radar and they don't want to participate in that so I think those numbers are actually higher and then we know we don't have adequate shelter there's not adequate emergency shelter the city is doing some good things in that area to try to address that so that's positive but the results from the point in time count also showed a race disparity and the number of people experiencing homelessness in the county so although 2.6% of our population in the county identify as African American 14% of the number of people experiencing homelessness on that night on January 22nd identified as African American similarly the number of people who identified as American Indian and Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders experiencing homelessness is more than double the total county population for those people those groups so at my office we've also seen how the housing crisis has impacted people we've had 864 new housing cases since January 1st I wish I had a lot more attorneys to address this but I don't so I can tell you anecdotally that women and people of color are over represented in the eviction cases specifically single single moms are a large number of people that come through our doors and it's really hard to be a legal aid attorney in Yolo County when we don't have a supply of housing for people to move to so if somebody loses their job and they get a three day notice to pay rent or quit and they come to our office seeking a defense and there's absolutely no defense because they just fell on hard times typically what we try to do is negotiate a move out because we would want the person to still have what we call a soft landing there's no soft landing anymore because there's no place for people to go so that leaves with little we can do to help people and then when people are lucky enough to reach the top of a waiting list which can take years you heard David mention how long it takes at César Chavez Plaza well if you finally get to the top of that list and you're screened unfortunately we have things like people with criminal background for sleeping outside still who are rejected from that housing and I know that because they've been my clients they have to appeal their housing denial for doing something that they had to do which is sleep and then it seems ridiculous that I'm trying to get them into housing and they can't get into the housing because they slept outside so it shouldn't really take a lawyer to handle that kind of thing it just seems like yeah I shouldn't have to be an advocate for somebody who has something like that on their record it shouldn't even be a crime at all because you're doing something that's necessary so what is the solution so it's a hard time to be a legal aid lawyer but it's also an encouraging time in our state because we just passed a robust housing slate this year and it will help rent burden tenants and create new eviction protections so that's pretty exciting a lot of you probably heard about AB 1482 that gives California tenants new rights that starts with a rent cap that prohibits annual rent increases of over 5% plus the consumer price index or 10% whichever is lower and it also creates just cause eviction protections for tenants that have been in place for 12 months or more there are of course exemptions to this but at least we have something now that we can turn to approximately 20% of jurisdictions have passed an urgency ordinance to make those effective immediately because they would take effect January 1st so statewide especially in the Bay Area and Los Angeles most of the Bay Area jurisdictions are passing this so it's effective immediately and landlords can't just start serving notices to terminate tenancy now to avoid these new laws and then we also have SB 329 which is really exciting beginning January 1st 2020 housing choice vouchers and other similar forms of housing assistance will now be protected as a source of income under California's Fair Employment and Housing Act so that means it will be illegal to terminate against prospective tenants simply because they're going to pay with some housing assistance so that's very exciting also and then I wanted to talk briefly about two ways that the public can address the housing crisis because what can you do that's one of the reasons probably why you came here tonight to figure out what role you could have so Ash addressed briefly the housing element cycle is coming up our housing element goes 2013 to 2021 so in August of 2021 the city I estimate would be submitting their new updated housing element yes it has to be adopted by then so the planning is going to start soon and that is where the public can come in so you heard that the arena numbers are projected to be 2075 units 930 of those will be for very low and low income households and so along with any jurisdictions in California Davis has not constructed units to meet the regional housing needs assessment for those at the lower economic segments during this housing element cycle so this eight year period that ends in 2021 as of June 25th 2019 so the city has to turn in all the cities have to turn in these annual reports to HCD which is the housing and community development department of the state and when you look at that you can see how a jurisdiction how close they are to meeting those targets that are set out and we met 40% of our targets for very low income units 47% for low income 34% for moderate which is a little surprising and not surprising 173.1% for above moderate income households so we have a bit of a disparity there this is not uncommon for jurisdictions Davis actually was a little higher in meeting the very low and low income targets so that's good news but it's also troubling news statewide because there's the housing crisis and you know it's impacting people at the lowest economic segments so as we know we're getting a doubling of those numbers for the next cycle so we really need to get creative and involve the public in planning to meet the needs of the community so one of the components of the housing element law is that public participation is required the city has to make a diligent effort to achieve public participation of all economic segments what I'm hoping that will look like this time around is not just having planning commission meetings you know just the general city meetings that occur and then talk about it there I'm hoping that it because most people at the lower economic segments aren't going to show up to those meetings in fact last housing element cycle I believe I was the only one at any of those meetings making any comments so it would be really great if there are other meetings than planning commission social services city council which can be intimidating forums for anybody to comment at I hope that they'll be robust public participation in identifying adequate sites for people who are at the lower economic segments and just adequate sites in general for multifamily housing which we desperately need in this community so a little bit about adequate sites so adequate sites is one of the things that is a required component for the housing element we have to the city has to create a parcel inventory to meet all of those regional housing needs assessment numbers that are given to them by the Sacramento area council of government so it's perhaps one of the most important parts of the housing element in addressing disparities because basically we're creating a land use map of where we expect people to live so we know we're producing above moderate we are having a little struggle low and very low so it's important to make sure that we have identified adequate sites throughout the community not just in one concentrated area but dispersed it throughout our entire community and you can have a say in that because as I said public participation is required so I really hope that there'll be lots of meetings where you can provide input on where those sites would be also in the last housing element we identified unfortunately the sites for low income and very low income housing in the downtown mostly and these were sites that were not vacant they were occupied by banks these place pizza all these places that were going to be redeveloped and were underutilized so luckily the law changed and the law now says that if you did not develop that housing on those sites you cannot use that same site again so we have a chance to do something better to identify some hopefully vacant sites or actual underutilized sites that are not existing businesses that are businesses that maybe went out of business so public participation is key and I hope that we will all show up to those meetings and not just me I would love to see a lot of you there providing input on the housing element next time thank you well great presentations we have 10 minutes for some more questions so the cards are being distributed yeah so we have some that are already ready so we can pick those up I'm going to get the ball rolling just while we collect the cards and my question is does the pan this is for the entire panel by the way does the panel see a role for public housing again as a way to deal with affordable housing and our housing shortage so you can there's a mic there the private sector is incapable of building housing for not just low income families but for moderate and even lower middle class families in this society at this present time it won't do it it can't do it it can't do it and make a profit and so it won't do it we need public housing not just for poor people we need mixed income public housing and I don't mean just poor people and near poor people but we need mixed income housing that is racially integrated and economically integrated in Europe they call it social housing maybe that will take the stigma off that was created by the way in which we segregated our housing in this country but we can't solve our housing crisis in the private sector any other comments from the panel public housing as a possibility I'd just say one of the great challenges we have is just the production of affordable housing the private sector does have a challenge in producing affordable housing that's not there unless it's kind of tied to some market rate housing and a lot of the tools that cities previously had at their disposal like redevelopment agency funds that would help support funding affordable housing those have gone away so some of the things that are happening here at the city is now we have some projects that are proposing like income streams and perpetuity to help kind of replace RDA funds and there's a widening of the toolbox on what we're looking at in order to help produce affordable housing units but it's gotten more challenging than it previously was anyone else want to touch that one okay this question is directed to you Elisa but I think all the panel members may have some thoughts on it you mentioned the 2019 legislative session resulted in new tenant protections including the housing vouchers that have to be accepted what can local governments like Davis and Yolo County do to complement that new law well one of the things that I said was also adopt urgency ordinances so they take effect immediately so that housing owners aren't trying to skirt around the law before it arrives on January 1st any other thoughts on the panel Ash do you have any thoughts on that okay another question from the audience it says one argument against increasing density in Davis that it may change the character of Davis's small town feel how can we address this maybe on just housing there's probably other ways to address it but how can we maintain that small town feel and still deal with our housing issues look a small town feel is a euphemism for a segregated community and unless we're willing to confront directly the history of segregation in this country how we developed a caste system and apartheid system from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow we are not going to be able to solve this problem and I want to say one thing further about the comments on the panel density is part of the problem it's not the entire problem and increasing density is not going to desegregate this community we need racially explicit policies to the extent that we can get away with them but we need to be explicit about what our goal is if we simply pursue density the beneficiaries of density are first going to be the people who are most able to afford the most affordable housing and the increased density and then you'll go down and by the time you get to the people who have been segregated it will be many centuries from now so unless you plan to increase density so much that you're going to take care of the entire poorly housed population you're going to reinforce segregation at the same time that you increase density so they both need to be addressed explicitly we are building and this is neighborhood partners I'm not representing neighborhood partners here tonight but we are building on Creekside 93 units of housing for a variety of people who are in need that is approaching 40 units per acre and that is possibly the highest density done for affordable housing here in Davis one of the values of density when you're talking about lower income is that we are able to have people near bus stops and near transportation and near jobs and so that has a very very important element because one of the things that had happened over time in Davis is that even the affordable housing was required to be at a low density and when we get that kind of land and we can put up 93 households in that when previously only 36 were allowed to be on that site that is one of the things that the city changed that makes it more as more capable of serving more people so we are hoping that we will be able to do more high dense housing which is really not terribly dense but it does mean we can accommodate a lot more people unfortunately I think that's the last last question so well Ash does have something I think from a density perspective by having greater density it allows an opportunity to have more supply supply is a big challenge with respect to affordability the more supply the more opportunity for housing our vacancy rate is an unhealthy vacancy rate our supply from an inventory of for sale housing it's practically non-existent so the more we can use tools to increase supply that are consistent with policies that the city holds dear then density is one of those tools and I think looking at different ways to provide affordability within those density programs is something that we'll be looking harder at and we've been looking at in the recent past and that's the last word on the subject tonight so I think we're all in agreement this was just a very illuminating presentation tonight thank our speakers and I want to thank all the audience for your participation your question sorry we couldn't get to all of them but we're going to try to address those outside we want to let you know that the sign up sheet for League of Women Voters and Civ Energy are there and the members are walking around they can talk to you about it if you wish to get more information also Mr. Rothstein will be in back to sign his book and talk more about housing so please feel free to stay and talk to him some more and our panelists will be staying around too so if you have questions that didn't get answered you can ask the panel directly so I want to thank everybody for coming drive safely