In this time of rising polarization, authoritarian populism, and maddening big-money politics, leaders often say that it’s up to we the people to save democracy.

But democracy costs money. And democracy—unlike the governments and special interests that seek to control it—has no budget. So how are you and I supposed to pay for all that democracy-saving?

There’s a new and practical answer to that question—called “Democratic Action Funds.”

I first heard a proposal for these from Marjan Ehsassi, a non-resident future of democracy fellow with the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, at a democracy conference I ran in Mexico City.

Ehsassi has studied some of the world’s least democratic places—Iran, Cuba, and North Korea. But in recent years she has turned her attention to backsliding democratic societies, including the United States, where big majorities of people tell pollsters that they have no real voice or power in government. As a result of feeling powerless, more of us are disengaging from political processes and civic life.

To get people reconnected, Ehsassi and other experts have embraced innovations to give everyday people consequential voice. Among the most promising are innovative deliberative bodies that empower regular people—rather than elected officials—to study an issue and make consensus policy proposals. These bodies are sometimes called citizens’ juries, citizens’ assemblies, or reference panels. I met Ehsassi last summer in Petaluma, in Sonoma County, where she was evaluating the first-ever citizens’ assembly in California.

There have been hundreds of such assemblies around the world—examining everything from snowmobile use in Finland to land-use decisions in Japan. And they’ve often produced significant changes—from the legalization of abortion in Ireland, to new urban plans in cities from Bogota to Brussels. But the practice is still rare, and growth of any democratic innovation is slow—mainly due to the cost of trying something new.

Which is where Democratic Action Funds would come in.

The idea—from Ehsassi and her colleague Peter MacLeod, founder of a Toronto-based public participation organization called MASS LBP—is straightforward: set aside a small slice of the billions of dollars that mature democracies now spend on things like elections and legislative operations, and use that money to fund the democratic efforts of regular people.

Under Ehsassi and MacLeod’s proposal, as offered in Mexico, any jurisdiction that conducts elections would allot 5% of the money it spends on elections and legislative operations to the new funds. Why 5%? That’s about what most industries spend on research and development.

Democratic governments at any level—local, regional, national—could establish such funds.  Each fund would be a trust, with monies collected from the government but administered by an independent secretariat.

Most of the fund’s money would go out in grants, for which governments, agencies, companies, NGOs, or others would apply. Under Ehsassi’s plan, a randomly selected group of citizens, not the fund’s administrators, would evaluate and choose which proposals get funded.

The money would be used to support citizens’ assemblies and other “high-quality participatory and deliberative initiatives” that directly involve everyday people in policy reform and addressing public questions. The fund would also set aside a slice of the money for training people involved in these processes, for monitoring and evaluation, and for research and development of best practices in the field.

In the United States, the total cost of the fall 2022 election was $16.7 billion. Five percent would give the country a modest, but significant, Democratic Action Fund of $835 million, enough to inspire a range of democratic innovations in every state.

In California, where an election can cost $300 million to run, a state-level Democratic Action Fund would receive $15 million annually. Such a fund could offer 60 grants of $250,000 every year. Ehsassi anticipates the funds sharing costs with the jurisdictions in which projects take place.

A program like this would involve thousands of Californians directly in democratic innovation and government decision-making. Research shows that such participation improves civic and democratic skills, and engagement, of the everyday people who participate. People learn that complex issues don’t have easy answers, and that the democracy work of representing your fellow citizens is quite difficult, and deserves respect.

Ehsassi stresses that these public participation platforms “are not progressive or conservative. Citizens’ assemblies are citizen-centric, put the public back in policy, and are healthy complements to our representative systems of government.”

In other words, Democratic Action Funds could make people, and our culture, more democratic—and an inexpensive way to help us, the people, save democracy.

The post Saving Democracy Costs Money. How Do We Pay for It? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the way that we organize our scientific research is bafflingly tribal. As a practicing scientist who has moved through large-scale industrial projects at IBM and Hitachi, as well as small-scale spin-outs, before shifting back into academia in the late 1990s, I have long been puzzled myself.

From outside the world of science, the public might imagine a system in which someone directs this enterprise, suggests what science is most important for society, and outlines what ought to get done. After all, the public pays for it, whether through our purchases, our taxes, or our charity. But this is not what happens. And ultimately, the public understands very little of the process.

A clearer sense of the greater science ecosystem is required to figure out what role science should play and how society can best make that happen. Who gets to do research in the 21st century, and why? How has it changed over time? Is science in good shape, and how can we know? When I started asking these questions I realized there’s a lot that even scientists still don’t know about themselves.

Amazingly, science is still generally “bottom-up.” We choose what research to do by encouraging scientists at universities to suggest ideas. They share these confidentially with a number of colleagues who rank them formally and select a few to fund. Much of the funding comes from taxes, and governments pass the responsibility back to the panels of scientist to decide which of their colleagues to invest these public monies in.

Scientists have long emphasized that freedom to decide what science they do is much more likely to give long-term rewards for the society that funds them. “Choose outstanding people and give them intellectual freedom” emphasized Nobel Prize winner Max Perutz as his key principle in running the enormously successful and vital Lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Yet, non-anecdotal evidence supporting this argument can be hard to pin down.

A review of Nobel Prize winners in the last half-century does reveal that most had no idea what they would accomplish, and could only articulate the path that their achievements had taken many years later, in hindsight. The molecular-based light emitters that now give sparkling mobile phone screens were undreamt of by Alan Heeger, who attempted to make unpromising plastic films conduct electricity in the late 1970s. Similarly, DNA pioneers Crick and Watson just wanted to understand the structure of DNA, not to use that knowledge to fix genetic diseases or do mass screenings of cancers.

In many countries, science is strongly believed to be directly useful to society. But once again, clear economic benefit is hard to assess. Science research comes from different locations, from the industry-dominated United States (80 percent of scientists in industry) to university-dominated Spain (less than 30 percent). A common saying is that “the best form of technology transfer is the moving van that transports the Ph.D. from his or her university laboratory to a new job in industry.” In reality, the United States is littered with university technology-transfer offices built on the dream of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley—or in the U.K., Silicon Fen around Cambridge. They are now waking up to portfolios of undramatic patents no one wants.

There is a great deal we simply don’t know about the scientific ecosystem today. Even counting how big the herd of scientists actually is and whether it is growing or shrinking, has been surprisingly difficult. While we collect simple data through yearly Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) government surveys, this hides the complexity of who is a scientist and what they really do.

Trying to square my personal experience of the intense world of science with these answers led me to the concept of an ecosystem of science. I realized that although there were myriad discussions between scientists on specific topics, there was no overarching description of how the whole system works and what the implications are. On the whole, collectively, science is useful, but how does that square with the parts?

In the ecosystem of science there are individuals and teams, but the ideas they build, and the bridges they build between ideas, can last much longer than either the individuals or the teams. Together this produces robust and persistent scientific knowledge, an interconnected library bequeathed to future generations. But the disjointed ways this library is added to, and how much as a society we are paying for each new idea, is hardly discussed. So, for the past few years, I have been investigating the idea of the “science ecosystem” and how all the actors within it create a meshed web of constraints and networks that are making change increasingly difficult.

I’ve found that the metaphor of the ecosystem can explain not just obvious outputs like delivering technology, but also the beauty of mathematical frameworks and the pleasure in understanding black holes. Such concepts correspond to “ecosystem services,” which are the non-tangible benefits freely emerging from a properly-functioning ecosystem. As a simple example, take a forest which gives us both trees for building houses (“ecosystem goods”) but also places to walk in peace and serenity (an “ecosystem service”). This perspective makes sense of important parts of the science ecosystem that have been harder to defend from a purely economic perspective.

Understanding ecosystem effects in science makes it easier to make sense of some conundrums. For example, it seems like globalization should be a good thing for science. It ought to lead to sharing information around the planet, pushing diverse teams to collaborate, and ensuring science spending is efficiently distributed to where it is done best. But that’s not exactly what has happened.

In the science ecosystem, powerful competitors rule, so organizations ranging from topical conferences to magazines never-endingly compete to maximize their impact and evolve. This pressure has unforeseen consequences.

Globalization has now racked up the competition among scientists, among disciplines, among funders, among universities, among research journals, and among every other species in this landscape. As scientists bring up increasing numbers of their intellectual children who want to find their own niches, the esteem that each gains from their research results necessarily declines. They all strive to publish more research papers, to be noticed in the crowd, making it more difficult to discern intellectual wheat from chaff and ever harder to keep up with what is being done.

Furthermore, doubling the number of scientists (which currently happens every 20 years) does not double the number of new research fields. Researchers instead concentrate where the trendy, most-publicized ideas are emerging. These bandwagon areas become so deluged that scientists lose track of competitors’ work, and research gets duplicated, ignored, or muddled. At present, this kind of frenzy surrounds areas ranging from the stacking of atom-thick materials, to finding uses for quantum effects in IT, and other topics. This explains why dropping extra money into a hot research field is no recipe for breakthroughs.

A second unforeseen consequence of globalization is how copying “best practices” in organizing science reduces the ecosystem’s diversity, ensuring the selection of similar projects everywhere. Applying for research funding involves a panel of scientists ranking proposals sent in to them based on scores returned by a set of external reviewers fed criteria about “utility for society” and “excellence.” More and more, they choose the same things.

I have become more and more convinced of the need for continual creative anarchy, for developing new ways of encouraging science, scientists, and ideas, and for new types of institutions and research centers. One current idea is to fund a new type of scientist, more akin to curators of the web of knowledge, who trawl and correlate existing studies to identify chasms in understanding and new opportunities. Future grants requests might have to have approval from such curator teams, aided by deep AI-based reviews of our current tree of knowledge to support claims for funding. Diversity is a crucial part of a healthy ecosystem, and the resilience of science depends on finding ways to encourage it.

When I started this project, my aim was simply to map what I found. But whenever I chatted with other scientists about it, apart from their fascination at their own lack of knowledge, they demanded suggestions for changes, directions for where we should go next. But we can’t instantly solve these global systemic problems. There remains the question of who is even free enough of the constraints on the ecosystem to help drive the necessary changes, let alone what those changes should be. But finding a way to understand the system as a whole—to comprehend where we stand at present—is a good first step.

The post Why Scientific Discovery Thrives on ‘Creative Anarchy’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m glad to see that the many worthy examples of how arts organizations engage the public are receiving attention. But at this very difficult moment, we need to pay even more attention to a straightforward assault on the arts at the federal level, which is in turn an attack on the arts in our cities and neighborhoods.

The Trump Administration has proposed to eliminate funding—these are not cuts, this is zero funding—for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

If you love the arts and you didn’t already know this, well, that’s a problem.

Right now, there is one school of argument that says we shouldn’t be alarmist, that there is bipartisan support for the federal funding of NEA and NEH and IMLS that has been built up over many years now. And there’s greater awareness of how the arts and humanities contribute to our economy, innovation, education, vibrancy and the quality of the places where we live and work.

But I’m in a different camp. As an arts administrator who has had to watch politics for a long time—I’m president and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP)—these are very different times. And with this White House, nothing can be taken for granted. Seemingly unthinkable changes of directions are possible.

That’s why arts organizations need to connect directly with their audiences and let them know just how much is at stake for the arts. Arts organizations should be very specific about the threat. And arts organizations need to help their audiences communicate to people in power, from Washington, D.C. to their mayors and city councils, just how important the arts are to them.

Too often people don’t connect the dots between government support for the arts and the arts events that they see and attend, because the organizations providing the arts don’t make this link clear enough. The reluctance of arts organizations to encourage advocacy is understandable: they don’t want to be seen as too politically partisan, particularly if they receive significant amounts of public money. But support of the arts should be seen as an existential issue, not a partisan one.

And advocating for ourselves as arts organizations is nothing new. I’ve often seen the executive director or the president of the board at a performing arts event come onstage to thank the sponsor or donors for a particular performance. So why not use that same time and format to say, “Hey, folks, the NEA is facing elimination, and we received $10,000 for this show you’ll see this evening, which was crucial in helping us attract additional support to make tonight possible.”

But too few organizations do this, which is one reason why too few people understand the connection between the NEA and their neighborhood.

I know this firsthand. I worked at the NEA for eight years, where I was director of artist communities and presenting, before taking my current job in 2011. There, I inaugurated the NEA’s Artist Communities granting program and helped initiate Live from Your Neighborhood, a study of American community festivals.

From that experience, I learned this: Federal funding for the NEA and other arts and humanities organizations doesn’t add up to a lot of money. The current annual appropriation for NEA is less than $150 million, which is equivalent to the payroll of just one National Football League team. (The NEH budget is almost identical.) But the money has a multiplier effect as it gets sent, in small pieces, to every region of the country, to supplement state and local arts funding. The money often works as a seed for governmental and corporate and donor support of the arts at these local levels. Arts organizations, at the receiving end, are magicians at turning small amounts of money into bigger things.

The bottom line: If you zero out the funding for NEA, that multiplier effect will end, and you will see much less in the way of arts in many communities.

And you may see states, communities, and regions decide that their current support for the arts is not necessary and can be significantly diminished or ended completely.

That multiplier effect will instead become a domino effect.

The impact of this will be geographically disparate, in a cruel way. I think the largest metropolitan areas will probably continue to have robust artistic offerings although small and community-based organizations in those areas will probably be impacted in a way that larger, more traditional organizations are not. In a Darwinian way, small and struggling organizations in any community are the most vulnerable. Federal arts funding has a disproportionate impact on smaller cities and rural areas—and with small and midsize organizations, which receive most of the grants.

The elimination of funding also could affect the abundant pipeline of performers, including some of America’s cultural treasures. Most people don’t realize that the individuals we see in our performance venues, movies, TV or on Broadway don’t just magically appear with all of their talent fully formed. They need years of training and development. It is often in community nonprofits—which depend in part on government grants—that they mature and develop as professional and career artists.

For my part, I’m asking APAP’s nearly 2,000 member organizations— presenters, producers, promoters and creators of the performing arts—to engage their audiences about the current threat and the need to support the arts. This is vital work now, and it will remain important even if the current threat to federal funding passes.

The United States is distinguished artistically by its ability to mix its various cultures and artistic traditions. You think of the creation of everything from jazz to hip hop—from where else could they have come from but America? Our environment and culture are less tradition-bound, more porous and more free than in many other countries.

But the American system of using marketplace success as the measure of organizational success makes it a struggle to win the governmental, foundation and patron support that the arts need. This is especially true of community organizations, organizations operating in economically challenged areas, and organizations of color. Part of that goes back to the DNA of our country, where support for the arts is minimally valued and the arts are not necessarily envisioned as important to our culture.

One result of this legacy is that, while the U.S. has diverse arts organizations, it is very difficult for arts organizations to find funding for their core operations. Yes, there can be money for a sexy new project, or an experiment with engagement. And that money is important. But such one-off funding often is a better fit with the needs of a donor or foundation than with the needs of the arts organization or the community it serves.

There simply is not enough money devoted in this country to the two most fundamental needs in the arts: funding for individual artists, and funding for the arts organizations that bring the work of artists to audiences.

Long before the current challenge to the arts, most direct grants to artists were eliminated at the federal level. And general operating grants for arts organizations to do their work and pay their people are few and far between.

The core of the arts, and of arts engagement, is the relationship between the artist and the audience. If you can connect a strong artist with a strong audience, you don’t really need anything else.

As worried as I am about the present funding questions, I’m optimistic about the future of the arts. I witness such great resiliency and scrappiness from artists and arts organizations. And I see many young people who want to go into arts organizations, despite all the challenges.

People in the arts don’t let difficult circumstances keep us down. That is one resource that always runs deep within us. And today we are drawing more deeply from that well than ever.

The post Arts Organizations Need to Teach Their Audiences Self-Defense appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Later this summer — if things go according to schedule— bulldozers and demolition crews will rumble down South Los Angeles’ Alameda Street corridor, turn into Jordan Downs, and begin demolishing some of the 700-plus cinderblock houses lined up like dominoes ready to fall for the $1 billion-plus redevelopment project. Roughly 1,410 mixed-income housing units, new businesses, green spaces, a new restaurant, and a supermarket are expected to emerge from the rubble.

The redevelopment has already been 10 years in the making, and could take another decade to complete. And when the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently gave a thumbs-up to the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) and the master developer team of The Michaels Organization and BRIDGE Housing to begin work, the reaction by many was a mixed-bag—relief that the project will finally start tempered by troubling questions that remain unanswered.

Circumspection may be appropriate, given how similar efforts to transform other housing projects around the country have been marred by unexpected costs, delays, and disputes. The federal government’s rising ambitions—to transform older housing projects mired in poverty into sustainable and mixed-use neighborhoods where the haves and have-nots live shoulder-to-shoulder—make big housing projects even more complicated. And in reshaping public housing from previous generations, like Jordan Downs, you’re not only replacing people’s homes, you’re replacing history.

Jordan Downs was built in the 1940s as a temporary base to house workers who moved to Los Angeles during World War II. It was appropriated for public housing in the 1950s. But the difficulties in kick-starting its redevelopment can’t be explained by a lack of community interest in the project, or in improving Watts, where needs for a better quality of life are obvious.

The Health Atlas for the City of Los Angeles shows that residents in the wider Watts area live on average 12 years less than those in the affluent community of Bel-Air, and have the highest rates of asthma, mortality from stroke, and low-birth weight babies in the city. Of the roughly 2,714 Jordan Downs residents, 24 percent of adults are unemployed. The state’s unemployment average is 6.3 percent. Eighty-eight percent of people residing at Jordan Downs live below twice the federal poverty level.

In recent years, the area around Jordan Downs has been the focus of notable business, governmental, and philanthropic investments. School facilities have been improved. The Watts Gang Task Force, which brought together police and the policed, has made huge strides in improving safety in and around Jordan Downs. All kinds of grassroots initiatives, from work-training programs to Project Fatherhood, which forges closer bonds between the fathers and sons of Jordan Downs, have shown success.

Nor have elected officials dragged their feet. Mayors, council members, and congressional figures have taken turns championing Jordan Downs over the years, with many seeking to expedite the redevelopment. And residents have largely echoed their “what’s taking so long” sentiments. The Housing Authority’s agreement with the developer requires that 30 percent of people hired on the project are from Jordan Downs. Some residents have already begun training for work on the demolition and subsequent construction.

So, why has the project taken so long to launch, and why have many people expressed reservations about the redevelopment as a whole?

Bureaucratic blunders and the Housing Authority’s inability to secure valuable grant funding provide some of the answers. Twice Jordan Downs has been turned down for a HUD Choice Neighborhood Initiative (CNI) grant, which would funnel a possible $30 million towards the redevelopment. Last year, the application was submitted with errors and missing documents. This year’s CNI application has just been drafted.

But a bigger issue has involved the discovery of a toxic footprint in and around Jordan Downs.

News of contamination at Jordan Downs first drew my interest there as a journalist back in 2014. I’ve followed cleanup efforts since, watching as the redevelopment lifted a veil on the sheer scale of the environmental problems. Toxic hotspots include an Exxon pipeline breach at the northeast tip of Jordan Downs, and multiple lead and arsenic cleanups in recent years at Jordan High, on the southeast corner of the housing project.

Though steps have been taken to mitigate known contaminated sites, questions hang over the past and the future: whether residents were adequately protected from toxic exposure, whether enough is being done to protect residents as the redevelopment rumbles forward, and whether environmental racism has swayed key decisions.

Recent contamination concerns have focused on the “factory” site—a now empty plot of land nestled in the very heart of Jordan Downs, immediately abutting homes. A steel mill operated there up until 2000; the site has also been used for trucking operations and waste storage. These activities leached a toxic inventory including engine oil and engine waste, diesel and gasoline, paint thinners, solvents, and chemicals found in electric transformers into the soil and groundwater. Lead was detected there at levels as high as 22,000 parts per million (ppm). The safe threshold for residential soil lead levels in California is 80 ppm.

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has focused attention to the seriousness of lead exposure, especially for young children. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention finds no safe blood lead level in children, nor can the effects of exposure to lead, a neurotoxin, be reversed. More than half of those who live in Jordan Downs are children under the age of 18. Recent studies have suggested that lead contamination extends well beyond the factory perimeter, and residents fear that they may have been exposed to lead-entrenched soils from their gardens, community areas, and playgrounds for years.

A 2009 Housing Authority interoffice memo stated that the residential portions of Jordan Downs could suffer from environmental contamination and “might require remediation.” But it wasn’t until a full five years later that California’s Department of Toxic Substance Control conducted soil tests around the perimeter wall of the factory site, to gauge whether lead had migrated into residential areas.

Though the tests returned elevated lead levels in roughly half of the samples, the DTSC made a No Further Action (NFA) determination not to test further out into the community—a decision questioned by local residents and their advocates, who conducted their own tests earlier this year. A coalition of environmental justice groups hired an X-ray fluorescence analyzer to take more than 100 soil samples in and around the homes. Fifty-one of the samples screened above the 80 ppm 
threshold for lead. Thirty-three of those 51 samples had lead levels ranging between 105.25 ppm and 346.04 
ppm.

Uncertainty about contamination has been fueled by the fact that the DTSC scientist who determined that no further testing was needed was recently embroiled in a racism scandal, where he and another senior department scientist shared emails containing racial epithets such as “injun badge,” “crackho hooker,” and “Chop-chop Hop Sing.” The emails were exposed in response to a public records request I made as part of an ongoing investigation into institutionalized racism within the DTSC.

Confronted with the emails, the DTSC promised to review their decision to take no further action. When that review might be completed is unknown.

Lead isn’t the only concern at Jordan Downs. A plume of trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent that can be especially dangerous for pregnant women and developing fetuses, has been discovered in the groundwater beneath residential portions of Jordan Downs. The DTSC conducted soil, vapor intrusion, and groundwater tests last year, the results of which, they say, indicate that TCE vapor intrusion isn’t a threat to the existing housing. However, the full reach of the plume has never been fully delineated, nor has the source of the contamination been identified.

To get a clearer picture of how those who live at Jordan Downs are impacted by the myriad sources of contamination, Physicians for Social Responsibility—a nonprofit health and environmental advocacy group—is conducting an assessment of the community’s health in July and holding a health fair at Jordan High School, offering residents medical services and lead tests.

As the redevelopment nears its launch date, contamination fears are joined by different concerns: that today’s Jordan Downs tenants might not have a home at Jordan Downs when construction is over. Such skepticism is grounded in a long history of displacement and evictions in South L.A., and in redeveloped housing projects around the country.

Jordan Downs is supposed to be different. As currently envisioned, the redevelopment is designed to progress in piece-meal fashion, with new housing being built first on the empty factory lot, creating an over-flow for the initial batch of residents to move into while their homes are demolished, and so on. The Housing Authority recently distributed “Right to Retain Tenancy” certificates.

But the nonprofit L.A. Community Action Network alleges that low-income residents are already being removed to pave the way for wealthier ones, and is documenting evictions it says are tied to the redevelopment. The Housing Authority says otherwise. Figures the Housing Authority provided show evictions at Jordan Downs have fluctuated year-by-year, between 2011 and 2015, during which time 100 separate families have been evicted. Though the annual eviction rate per unit was slightly lower than that at two nearby housing developments.

Displacement fears are inevitable in a county with an estimated half-a-million fewer rental units than are needed. The people of Los Angeles simply cannot afford to lose what affordable housing remains, even for a short time. Which is why delays are better than getting Jordan Downs wrong. Here come the bulldozers.

The post What’s Holding Jordan Downs Back? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You flunked higher education.

Another state budget, accompanied by an eight-month-long controversy over the University of California, demonstrated once again that we Californians don’t have a clue about what our public universities mean to the state. Because if we did, we wouldn’t make them beg us for the money needed to educate more of our children.

Instead, Californians—from our leaders in Sacramento to average voters—think that the UC and California State University systems are too costly and administratively bloated. That tuition is being raised to cover academic nonsense. And that taxpayers already give too much money to higher education. These claims are either nonsense—or the fault of Californians themselves, not the universities.

But before we get into all that, let’s start with the history lesson on higher ed that most of you seem to have missed. Most Californians think that we’re all here because of Junípero Serra or the Gold Rush, or oil, or sunshine, or Hollywood, or Silicon Valley.

Nope. The biggest force luring people to California over our history has been our abundance of free—or very cheap—high-quality public education. California pioneered such educational access very early—by 1912, Berkeley was already the largest public university in the world. Offering university degrees on the cheap was a great money saver; we stole away some of the smartest people from other states and countries and had to pay for just four years of their education (a much better deal than paying for K-12 for Californians). The result of this policy: For much of the 20th century, Californians weren’t just better looking than other Americans—we were smarter too, with the highest rate of college graduates.

But, then in the second half of the 20th century, we began to forget what we had. The state locked in lower tax rates and higher spending on other things by ballot initiative, at the expense of public investment in our world-class university system. The universities made it up by adding tuition fees, especially during the prolonged budget crises of the past 15 years.

Today, we Californians still look great—but we’re not as smart. We’ve fallen out of the top 10 of U.S. states by percentage of adults with college degrees. And if you look at younger people—ages 25 to 34—we’re in the middle. Montana’s young adults are more likely to have some kind of post-secondary degree than ours.

The public universities have held onto their reputations and found ways to serve more students—more than 238,000 at UC, and 437,000 at CSU—despite relentless cutting in state support. The UC 10-campus system, the target of so much political and media criticism for supposed bloat, saw a 30 percent decrease in state funding—and a 20 percent reduction in its cost per student—in the past decade. Those cuts have been made even though state taxpayers were already getting a bargain with UC; they now cover just $3 billion of a $27 billion budget.

But try telling that to voters, legislators, or the media, all of whom see the universities as greedy and inefficient—even as they’ve educated more people with less state support. UC and CSU haven’t fought very hard against cuts—they have, like good teachers, tried to appeal to reason, and they’ve tried to make funding deals with politicians. But reason and politicians are not to be trusted in California, especially when recessions shrink state revenues.

So how has UC come up with more revenues? By raising tuition fees—especially for out-of-state students who are still interested in coming here. The justification is that the higher rates for out-of-state students ($38,000 compared to $14,000 for in-state students) subsidize about 9,000 California students whose enrollment is not funded by the state.

In one disgraceful legislative hearing this spring, lawmakers actually complained that out-of-state students eligible for financial aid were in fact receiving that aid. Yes, you read that right. The state legislature doesn’t want any poor kids coming to the UC from out of state. “There are plenty of fish in the sea that can pay full freight,” said Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, a Sacramento Democrat, at the hearing, according to The Sacramento Bee. “We’re not elected to expand education for low-income kids from Nevada.”

Give us only your rich kids, please.

Since the state has a demonstrated need for more educated workers (we’ll be short by 1 million by 2025, according to a much-cited report), we should be building on our historic lead and rapidly expanding our universities. But today’s California is so small-minded and budget-obsessed that no one seems inclined to make long-term investments in our well-being anymore.

The usually reliable and nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has itself fallen prey to the myopic short-sightedness, declaring that UC doesn’t need to increase its enrollment, even as it receives record numbers of applications. The LAO points to recent dips in the number of college-age Californians and in the percentage of recent California high school graduates going straight to college to support its wrong-headed conclusion. But those same statistics argue for opening up more slots and opportunities for students from California and around the world, and making it cheaper for those students to graduate.

In response to Sacramento’s combination of cuts and meddling, the UC finally got tough and hired former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, the former Secretary for Homeland Security, as UC president and political champion. Last November, she sucker-punched the newly re-elected Governor Brown and legislature with a choice: give UC more money or watch it raise tuition again. Sacramento leaders and their media cheerleaders howled about the UC’s behavior, but Napolitano’s strategy worked. She forced Brown to the negotiating table and ended up with more money—including an increase in base funding over the next four years and crucial one-time money to cover pension costs—than anticipated.

But Napolitano still had to beg the legislature to cover an increase in enrollment of 10,000 students over four years (and appears to have gotten only enough in the budget to enroll an additional 3,500 students). Memo to legislative leaders, who cast themselves as champions of the state’s Latino population: much of the growth in California high school graduates and UC applicants is among Latinos.

With immigration flat and the birth rate under replacement levels, California will need to attract more foreigners and other Americans to study and work here to maintain the state’s vitality. It won’t be easy, as other countries and states are more competitive now, especially when it comes to cost-of-living considerations, including the cost of education. But if we don’t act to bring more young and ambitious people to the state, we’ll lose some of our advantages in diversity and connectedness.

It’s an argument that Californians haven’t much heard—and clearly don’t understand. Maybe we all could enroll in a refresher summer course on the importance of higher education in California, and the massive returns we receive from our investment in it.

But who would pay for it?

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One answer is money from wealthy immigrants.

To build apartments that are accessible to low-income residents, high-rent cities across the country—from San Francisco to Miami—have been tapping funds from EB-5, a federal government program that offers U.S. green cards to foreigners in exchange for investments in U.S. businesses. Launched in 1990 as a vehicle to create jobs, the program requires each investor to give at least $500,000 to a business that provides 10 full-time jobs to Americans. The investment is “at-risk,” so there’s no guaranteed return.

As an immigrant, a former securities lawyer, and the founder of a business, I immediately found EB-5 compelling and have worked to spread the word about its advantages and make it more transparent. I’ve created EB5 Investors Magazine, EB5investors.com, and a series of educational EB-5 conferences.

But the program was rarely used and little known until the Great Recession hit and traditional sources of capital dried up. Since then, real estate developers have embraced EB-5 funds from foreign investors around the world as an alternative for financing all kinds of construction projects, including buildings that contain affordable housing units. EB-5 funds helped build 115 affordable units at Stadium Place, an office-hotel-retail-residential project located in front of the Seattle Seahawks stadium. San Francisco’s massive Shipyard development in Bayview-Hunters Point, one of the poorest sections of the city, includes several hundred million dollars from individual EB-5 investors. As part of its negotiation with the city, the Shipyard developer pledged to devote 30 percent of its planned 10,000 units to affordable housing. And last month, Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado said that his city plans to target EB-5 immigrant investors as a source for financing an ambitious agenda to build affordable housing.

Like Los Angeles, most of the cities that have benefited from EB-5 appear toward the top of “least affordable’’ lists of U.S. cities. They all have large populations of homeless people, although Los Angeles has the highest number. (The homeless population in L.A. County grew by 12 percent in the past two years; the number of tents, vehicles, and homemade shelters being used as housing jumped 85 percent.)

But Los Angeles hasn’t cultivated EB-5 projects that involve affordable housing. Instead, L.A. developers with EB-5 have focused on building hotels—an easier route when you have to show job creation. Flag hotels in big cities are also easier to “sell” than low-income housing with migration agents in China who connect potential immigrant investors with projects. Of course, San Francisco and Seattle projects face the same reality and have gotten deals done. That suggests that developers here need a nudge to be more creative; one nudge might involve some form of city incentives.

Yes, there are challenges. Real estate developers, will tell you that affordable housing—defined as housing priced for people making less than 50 percent of a community’s median income—is notoriously difficult to greenlight because it is perceived as unprofitable. But what they don’t understand is that the use of EB-5 funds can help developers overcome that hurdle.

The big advantage for developers is that EB-5 funds are relatively cheap capital. Most EB-5 investors want to immigrate to the U.S. to raise their families, send their children to American universities, and take advantage of the entrepreneurial opportunities. A large return on investment is down the list for these immigrants. That translates into reduced demand for a high rate of return, which ends up costing the borrower less.

Another advantage: developers don’t have to put as much cash into projects, because of the lower proportion of equity in most EB-5 deals. In a typical deal using EB-5 funding, the developer maintains equity amounts equal to between just 15 and 25 percent of the total project cost.

Los Angeles affordable housing advocates would do well to look into EB-5 funding as an alternative source for financing mixed-use projects that include affordable and workforce housing. The money is there. Investors from China, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East already have invested billions of dollars of capital through the EB-5 program with the hope of raising their children in the U.S. What better way to use wealthy investors’ funds than by helping to finance the construction of housing for middle and low-income Angelenos?

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