So why is there near constant talk of altering or limiting California’s direct democracy, including now, in the aftermath of last year’s gubernatorial recall election?

There are two answers to that question, one visible, and one hidden. On the surface, would-be reformers usually say that they want to make citizen lawmaking more effective and easier for everyday Californians to understand. But below the surface, attempts to reform the process reflect profound tension, and disagreements about who—voters or elected officials—should exercise dominant political power.

I know this pattern firsthand because of my peculiar experience. As the former president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, I’m forever linked with the most famous initiative in California history, the property tax-cutting Proposition 13. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been associated with four separate committees that pursued reform of the ballot initiative, the tool that allows voters to decide whether to make laws or constitutional amendments.

As Californians consider current efforts to change the initiative and recall, thinking back on these four efforts is instructive.

Action of the legislature created three of the committees. A fourth was made up of political activists, special interests, and citizens groups. This fourth committee was the one that achieved changes to the system, notably securing legislative approval of some of the modifications proposed by previous commissions.

And that is no irony. I’ve learned that if you’re going to change direct democracy, it’s best to work from outside the government—just as you do in using direct democratic tools.

The history of the initiative and its direct democracy cousins, the referendum and recall, extends back more than a century to the Progressive Era. As former California Gov. Hiram Johnson, who led the establishment direct democracy in California in 1911, said in his first inaugural address, the initiative, referendum, and recall, are not panaceas for all our political ills, “yet they do give to the electorate the power of action when desired, and they do place in the hands of the people the means by which they may protect themselves.”

If anything, Johnson undersold direct democracy’s influence. At the beginning of the 21st century, then-Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, who has long been involved in initiative reform efforts, wrote: “The initiative process in California has evolved into a virtual fourth branch of government.”

While there is always room for tinkering to make something better, it’s important to be careful not just about the details of proposed changes, but the motives people have for tampering with public institutions. Change efforts often are thwarted by concerns over shifts in politics and power.

That’s been part of the story of all four reform commissions I served on. The first, the 15-member Citizen’s Commission on Ballot Initiatives was created by a legislative resolution. The governor, senate, and assembly each appointed four members, and the Attorney General, Secretary of State, and the County Clerks’ Association were also represented. I was appointed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson.

In early 1994, the commission issued its recommendations, including seeking legislative review of initiatives before they went to the ballot, and allowing corrections and changes by the measure’s proponents even after it qualified for the ballot. The group also recommended extending the period for gathering signatures to qualify measures from 150 to 180 days (to make qualification a little cheaper and easier)—time is money—and expanding financial contribution disclosure requirements on initiative campaigns.

Two years later, in 1996, Gov. Wilson again appointed me to the 23-member California Constitution Revision Commission, which was made up of other elected officials’ appointees This attempt at reckoning with California’s long constitution delved into direct democracy.

One constitutional revision commission proposal was to allow statutory initiatives to be amended by legislators after six years. I opposed this, and other recommendations, because they gave the legislature more power, and the people, through the initiative process less. And in practice, it wouldn’t work; initiative sponsors could block legislative amendments of initiative laws by making their initiatives into constitutional amendments, which cannot be amended directly by the legislature. “The end result,” I wrote in opposition to the idea, “will mean more amendments to the constitution, burdening a document the [commission] hoped to condense.”

In 2001, Hertzberg, who was leading the assembly at the time, convened a 34-member Speaker’s Commission on the California Initiative Process. Like the first commission I served on, it sought to make it easier to gather petition signatures and to disclose more public and financial information about measures.

But the lead recommendation of the Speaker’s Commission was a call for the return of an indirect initiative—a type of initiative, abandoned in the 1960s, which allowed voters to make a proposal to the legislature. This effectively gave power to the legislature to change an initiative even after it qualified. It did not gain traction, precisely because of the transfer of power to politicians.

Interestingly, all three of these government-sponsored commissions released their results during election years. Legislators, not interested in angering a public fond of the initiative process, did not move forward with any of the recommended reforms.

Another decade would pass before I got pulled into another initiative reform. In 2014, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the California Chamber of Commerce joined to create a committee not sponsored by government resolution.

While the approach was new, this effort advanced ideas that had been part of previous reform attempts. These included extending the time to qualify an initiative from 150 to 180 days, providing more public information on ballot measures and how they were financed, and greater flexibility and space for negotiations—specifically, allowing an initiative’s proponents to pull a qualified initiative if the legislature comes up with an acceptable alternative to the proponents’ proposal.

These ideas all had something in common: they enhanced the power of the people, not the legislature. That’s why, in my view, all three recommendations eventually became law.

Of course, attempts to enhance the legislature’s power, at the expense of voters, continue—and once in a while they break through. Back in 1996, the Constitutional Revision Commission had suggested limiting citizen initiatives that changed the constitution to the November general election ballot—while allowing the legislature to put its own proposed constitutional amendments on any ballot they wanted (general election, primary and special election ballots).

This provision favoring the legislature wasn’t enacted then, but it returned in the 2010s—not through a commission, but through legislation that Gov. Jerry Brown signed.

Supporters of the change claimed that this was a democratic reform—that it would be better to have initiatives voted on when a larger voter turnout occurs during November elections. But the motives were more political; studies showed that turnout by liberals and progressives was stronger in November, and the Democrats who changed the law wanted initiatives to face a more friendly audience.

Today, there are new ideas being discussed, both in the legislature, and by outside groups. Current proposals include reforming the recall in light of the unsuccessful effort to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom; curbing the power of special interests to control what voters see on the ballot, and adding more deliberation to initiative campaigns.

Even when considering novel proposals, the best way to understand California arguments over direct democracy is as political contests between the power of the legislature and other elected officials, and the power that the people have in the legislative process.

The initiative power can challenge the status quo and advance different political ideas than the dogma favored by those in power. In the current California political environment, it is no secret that the dominant political power belongs to the Democratic Party and a more progressive ideology. Challenges to that thinking can come from initiatives that gain wide support from the voters. You can see such challenges in recent initiative and referendum results—keeping the death penalty and cash bail, and allowing workers to continue freelance and independent work—that did not follow the majority thinking in the Democratic legislature.

Those tempted to limit the people’s power and enhance their own should be careful. Polling last month from the Public Policy Institute of California reaffirmed what past polls discovered. Likely voters consider the initiative process a good thing as opposed to a bad thing by a more than a two-to-one margin, 67 percent to 31 percent.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the people are opposed to reform. The PPIC poll found that likely voters would consider major changes (33 percent) or minor changes (48 percent) to the initiative process.

I’m among those who would like to see reform. Extending the qualification time from 180 days to a full calendar year is worth considering as a way to help more grassroots groups and individuals to use the initiative power, I’d also like to see the ability to write ballot titles and summaries moved from the partisan attorney general to a more neutral body. This issue was discussed endlessly in the 2014 reform group but ultimately did not advance.

The most important thing is for reform proposals to be scrutinized carefully, especially by voters, to guard the people’s initiative. In an election year, I don’t think we’ll see any big changes to the process, but there’s always 2023. And should we see another commission appointed or another committee convened—particularly by anyone other than the legislature—my schedule is open.

The post People, Not Politicians, Should Reshape Direct Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No historic plaques mark the five-bedroom home at 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd., which sits between West Hollywood and L.A.’s Miracle Mile. But this is where the famed anti-tax activist Jarvis lived, held meetings with Gov. Jerry Brown and other California players, and organized Proposition 13, 1978’s tax-limiting ballot initiative that still dominates California politics.

Another fall fight over Prop 13 is underway. The November ballot’s Proposition 15 proposes to lift Prop 13 caps on taxing commercial properties, thus creating—depending on whom you ask—either billions of dollars for education or new burdens for businesses. So, recently, I went over to check on the historic house—and got an unexpected lesson about how California and its homes keep changing, even if its initiative politics never do.

Jarvis’s undistinguished gray house is now Nechung Dharmapala, L.A.’s Tibetan Buddhist Center. The home has been painted a distinguished shade of orange associated with Buddhism. Above the front windows, two deer surround a wheel representing the Dharma, and a small stupa—a hemispheric structure representing the enlightened mind—rests outside the front door.

Inside, bedrooms are occupied by two monks, one an administrator, and the other the center’s spiritual director. The large, high-ceilinged living room where Jarvis once conducted the angriest California politics of the 20th century has been turned into a 21st-century sanctuary for lessons on the renunciation of ego, the development of compassion, and the possibility of enlightenment for all beings.

It took more than a year to redecorate the home into Nechung Dharmapala Center. Photograph courtesy of Nechung Dharmapala Center

At first, the home’s political past and religious present seemed discordant, but the more I contemplated the place, the more I began to see the continuities and connections. Indeed, 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd. has become a double-monument to both the perils of revolutions and the paradoxes of protection. The house’s history asks: Why do humans suffer so much in their search for the safety and stability that this world only fleetingly provides?

Prop 13 was a great victory of a conservative California revolution that promised protection—against rising taxes, especially the property taxes that raise the cost of homes and thus displace people. The paradox is that the protector Prop 13 hasn’t protected us from California’s high taxes or extortionate housing prices.

Protection is also Nechung Dharmapala’s reason for being. This Buddhist center is associated with Tibet’s centuries-old Nechung Monastery, which is the headquarters of the State Oracle of Tibet, who embodies the deity Pehar, also known as “The Protector of Religion.”

How the living room looked when 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd. was put up for sale.

Of course, the protector Pehar couldn’t stop Chinese communists from destroying Nechung Monastery and Tibet’s other religious sites after the 1949 revolution. But therein lies the paradox. The communists’ attacks on religion actually protected the faith. Tibetan Buddhists fled, spreading their teachings and establishing centers around the globe, eventually reaching Howard Jarvis’s front door.

Jarvis’s Tudor-style house was built in 1925, according to county records. Jarvis, a Utah native and “jack” Mormon (he drank cheap vodka he carried in his briefcase), bought it in 1941 for $8,000. He stayed there for the rest of his life, through at least one renovation and three marriages, the last to Estelle Garcia.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Jarvis held court in a big comfortable chair, smoking a cigar and eating Estelle’s corn soup, while distinguished visitors sat on simple sofas. The house was filled with energy and the conviction that a handful of people, without holding office, could upend the world.

“There were some curses, but no prayers,” recalls the Jarvis aide Joel Fox, who also served for a time as president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which remains a force, leading this fall’s campaign to fight Prop 15, and thus protect Prop 13.

Prop 13 governs modern California because it controls the money: Specifically, it requires a two-thirds popular vote to raise local taxes, and a two-thirds vote of the legislature to raise state taxes. But most Californians associate it with its property tax provisions, which cap overall taxes and allow for the reassessment of properties at market value only when they are sold.

When Prop 13 passed, Jarvis’s 3,000-square-foot home, on a 5,900-square-foot lot in a desirable part of L.A.’s westside—which he’d bought nearly 40 years earlier—was assessed at less than $60,000. Its annual tax bills, based on that low base, would stay below $1,000, even as neighboring homeowners paid 10 times that. In 2005, the home assessed value for tax purposes was $75,854; in 2006, after Estelle died (Jarvis himself died in 1986), it was reassessed at $1.25 million.

The house was sold in 2008 according to county records, and put up for sale again in 2013—as Tibetan Buddhists were growing desperate in their search for an L.A. headquarters.

The Nechung Kuten, who is also the Chief State Oracle of Tibet, had visited L.A. in 2007 and 2009 and called for the establishment of a center where Tibetans, Mongolians, and Westerners could study and practice Buddhism in a non-sectarian way. A donor stepped forward to fund a center, but finding the right place—with both a big gathering room and small bedrooms quiet enough for monks—was hard. Until a real estate agent took them to 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd.

They bought the house in 2013 for $1.38 million. It took more than a year to redecorate the home in a Tibetan style, construct the shrine, and install the Buddha statues. In 2014, the center opened, and the space is often full.

In COVID, resident teacher Geshe Wangchuk has started conducting his lessons online. Photograph courtesy of Nechung Dharmapala Center

In Jarvis’s old living room, resident teacher Geshe Wangchuk now presides. He became a monk at age 12 (with ordination at the Nechung Monastery in Dharamsala, India) and arrived at Nechung L.A. in 2016. He’s skilled not only in explaining Buddhist philosophy but in the creation of sand mandalas and butter sculptures.

During the pandemic, Geshe Wangchuk shifted his daily practices and weekly teachings online. On Saturday mornings this summer, I watched him instruct, via nechungla.org, Zoom, and Facebook, a highly diverse group of Californians. The lessons leaned on a text, “The Three Principal Aspects of the Path,” by Je Tsongkhapa, a 14th-century teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. One passage presented a particular puzzle:

Furthermore when appearance dispels the extreme of existence,
And when emptiness dispels the extreme of non-existence,
And if you understand how emptiness arises as cause and effect,
You will never be captivated by views grasping at extremes.

I wondered if a mind could really be that open. Does avoiding extremes require feeling empty and uncertain about whether you actually exist? And how, I asked, might I apply such enlightenment to 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd. or any of the extremes of today’s California?

The team at Nechung L.A. had no idea of the house’s history and knew nothing of Jarvis. In a conversation with Nechung L.A.’s board secretary, Tenzin Thokme, I found myself starting to explain Prop 13, and then why Prop 15 is in the news. But my explanations were mostly just questions. Might Prop 15 pull a few billion more dollars out of commercial property and into the schools? Or might the initiative’s many exemptions be exploited by wealthy property owners? Might this measure at the very least make a symbolic strike against Prop 13—or will the whole exercise just reinforce Prop 13’s power?

But if I understood Geshe Wangchuk, the recognition that I have more questions than answers is OK. Because uncertainty about what comes next, for me or for a proposition or for a house, might be the most powerful answer we ever get. Je Tsongkhapa taught it best 600 years ago: “If the entire object of grasping at certitude is dismantled, at that point your analysis of the view has culminated.”

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2016 threatens to become the Year of Rent Control, with the topic white-hot in the Bay Area, home to California’s most expensive housing. Rent control refers to laws that put limits on how much landlords may raise rents; such laws often include provisions requiring landlords to produce specific causes before evicting tenants.

Last summer, Richmond became the first city in California in 30 years to pass a new control law (the law was later suspended, and the issue will likely be decided at the ballot). This touched off similar legislation and ballot measures to establish or strengthen rent control in other Northern California cities, including Alameda and Santa Rosa.

And in recent months, rent control has become a top issue in the state’s biggest cities.

In San Jose, multiple proposals to tighten rent controls, perhaps by tying them to inflation, have been debated in the city council, and some could go to the ballot. A ballot initiative to cap rent increases was just filed in Oakland. Los Angeles is considering a new registry of rents and a crackdown on landlord efforts to skirt existing rent control laws. And in San Diego, a tenants’ movement and an online petition are building momentum to establish new controls. In all these places, landlords have countered with their own legislation or possible ballot measures.

The attention to rent control is understandable, given the costs of housing, but unhelpful. Rent control is a policy that, as libraries full of research and California’s own experience demonstrates, doesn’t do much to accomplish its avowed purpose: to make more affordable housing available. The last thing California needs is a costly and time-consuming fight over rent control.

As the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office made clear in a 2015 report, the heart of California’s housing problem is that we Californians have long failed to build anywhere close to enough new housing to accommodate the number of people who live here. The office said we’d need an additional 100,000 units a year, on top of the 100,000 units we’re building, to mitigate the problem. As a result, housing prices and rents have long been higher than in any other state. And the problem has been getting worse, even in this era of slower population growth. In 1970, the gap between California home prices and the rest of the country was 30 percent; today, home prices are 250 percent more expensive than the American average.

The shortage is strongest in the urban coastal counties where people most want to live, creating a wave of people who push inland in search of housing. So Californians devote more of their incomes to housing, live in more crowded spaces, and commute further to jobs. In a Sacramento speech last fall, Roger Sanders, former finance director for the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, noted that, from 2010 through 2014, “the state population increased by 1.55 million, while throughout all of California only 312,000 permits for new housing were approved, or one unit for every five new residents.” Significantly, the urban counties (10 northern counties and seven southern counties) approved only 200,000 units, or only one for approximately eight new residents.”

The reasons for the lack of building are many and related: community resistance, environmental policies, high costs of construction, a lack of fiscal incentives for local governments to approve housing, regulatory constraints on development, and the high cost of land. This is such a wickedly complex problem that it’s laughable to see rent controls as a cure.

Since housing markets are regional, it’s especially hard to see how local rent control in one city or another could ever make any impact. To the contrary, one reason for California’s sprawl is the way that cities within regions compete with each other to claim the most desirable businesses and housing for themselves, while sticking their neighbors with needier people.

And if rent control really works to control prices and produce stability, as its supporters claim, why are the cities with rent control—among them Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Santa Monica, San Jose, Thousand Oaks, and West Hollywood—so expensive? And on the other side of the question, opponents of rent control sound ridiculous when they warn that it will discourage new construction, especially since state law has exempted new construction from rent control laws since 1995. All but about 15 cities in California have no rent control—and they have housing shortages, too.

The real import of the rent control debate is as a reminder of California’s civic disease: our long history of embracing complicated formulas as ways to dodge the hard work of democratically solving tough problems. Rent control laws often include complicated formulas for allowing rents to be raised by different percentages or in different ways depending on a host of conditions (like whether a landlord has made capital improvements or had made previous rent increases).

It’s instructive that rent control’s California history is deeply intertwined with the ultimate dodgy California formula, Proposition 13. That constitutional amendment, approved by voters in 1978, provided the foundation—via its limits on property tax increases and supermajorities for state and local taxation—upon which two generations of other fiscal formulas have been built.

One false promise of Prop. 13 was that saving property owners money on their taxes would lead to lower home prices and rents. So when home prices and rents soared after the amendment passed, liberal cities began to install rent control ordinances that, like Prop. 13, didn’t lower rents or housing prices either.

Rent control has been—and will be, if it expands in the near future—just another complication in a housing world that already has too many such kludges. And it’s a particularly counterproductive one since, just as Prop. 13 keeps taxes lower the longer you stay in your home, rent control grants special privileges to the older and more stable among us, regardless of their actual financial need.

That is the peculiar tragedy of 21st-century California: A place that once cherished and defined the new is now organized around the imperative of favoring the old and the established. It is infuriating, and odd, that people who think of themselves as progressives defend, and even seek to extend, such fundamentally conservative policies.

The people who need protection in California are poor people who cycle through housing. The best approach here is not more housing incentives—decades of housing incentives both to developers and renters have produced very little housing here—but developing robust support structures (via transportation, health, child care, jobs, and cash) that follow poor people wherever they can find opportunity. And, of course, more housing.

In a state devoted to anti-tax formulas that don’t keep taxes low and education funding guarantees that don’t guarantee much money for education, it’s no surprise that rent control laws don’t make housing affordable. So let’s not pretend that rent control is anything other than just another way of pretending to address our housing problems.

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This probably doesn’t sound like news given the recent publicity about disputes over homelessness, rapidly rising rents, and gentrification—and the flurry of policy proposals for everything from rent control to fees on commercial construction and property sales used to support affordable housing programs. Unfortunately, the conversation about housing is largely disconnected from the reality of the problem, its causes, and potential fixes.

Debate about the housing crisis typically revolves around low-income households, and understandably so. The rule of thumb is that people shouldn’t spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Meeting such a standard is nearly impossible for most low-income families. More than 90 percent of California families earning less than $35,000 per year spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. But this isn’t new; that percentage has been stubbornly high for years. Nor is this an exclusively Californian problem—the comparable figure for the United States overall is 83 percent.

The crisis for families living at or close to the poverty line absolutely deserves attention. But what is also disturbing about current trends is that the crisis is now spreading to middle-income households, families earning between $35,000 and $75,000 per year.

In 2006, 38 percent of middle-class households in California used more than 30 percent of their income to cover rent. Today, that figure is over 53 percent. The national figure, as a point of comparison, is 31 percent. It is even worse for those who have borrowed to buy a home—over two-thirds of middle-class households with a mortgage are cost-burdened in California—compared to 40 percent in the nation overall.

The social costs of this middle-class housing crisis are not sufficiently appreciated. These middle-income families have less money to spend on other goods and services—and that creates huge losses across the economy. It forces California employers to pay higher wages than elsewhere in the nation, raising costs for California consumers and diminishing the state’s competitiveness. Some middle-class households choose to move out of California in search of more affordable housing, depriving the state of young, skilled workers who represent the backbone of the workforce—and the state’s future.

What’s driving this housing crisis? It’s a classic problem of supply and demand. Put simply, the state doesn’t build enough housing to accommodate its population growth. California is home to roughly 13 percent of the nation’s population, and has slightly greater than average population growth. Yet, over the last 20 years the state has accounted for only 8 percent of all national building permits. This chronic lack of new residential construction has led to the higher costs associated with less inventory (low housing vacancy rates) and elevated levels of overcrowded housing (8.2 percent of Californians live in overcrowded circumstances compared to 3.4 percent of all Americans).

To put the shortage in proper context, consider the amount of housing that would need to be built in order to move the state to national norms for housing stock, vacancy rates, and crowding: California would need to expand its stock by between 6 and 7.5 percent—that’s between 800,000 and a million additional residential units. In Los Angeles County, where the situation is far more acute, the state would need to add 180,000 to 210,000 units, between 12 and 14 percent of the total.

These figures dwarf the meager efforts policymakers are proposing to fix the problem. The bill known as AB 35, recently vetoed by Gov. Brown, would have raised $1.5 billion over 5 years—to build a mere 3,000 affordable housing units. Another piece of legislation, AB 2, proposed a new form of tax-increment financing that would have partially replaced the redevelopment agencies the governor closed at the start of his current term. The redevelopment system only managed to build 10,000 affordable housing units in a decade—a tiny fraction of what was needed.

How do we build more? Given the scale of the problem, we need the market to do the work. But why haven’t builders been able to keep up?

One obstacle is the high cost of building and doing business generally in California. The state has stiff regulations regarding construction quality, high labor costs (in part because construction workers also need to handle their own high housing costs!), higher land costs, and fees and expenses charged to developers by local governments.

These higher costs are very real. But taken together, they do not provide a complete explanation for the shortage of housing.

If you were to compare the same newly built house in California and Texas, the California house would typically sell for twice as much as the one in Texas. If you were to add up all the additional costs of building that house in California—land costs, permit fees, construction code—the number would not fully explain the gap in prices. The gap is much wider. In other words: builders make a lot more profit building a house in California than they do in Texas.

Normally, this would suggest a surge in building in California, as opposed to the opposite, as capital is allocated to pursue higher returns. The trouble is, we’re not talking about a free market in California, which limits competition in the construction business. The state has erected two giant barriers to entry: Proposition 13 and the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA.

Proposition 13 limits the value of housing to local governments by keeping property taxes much lower than in other parts of the United States. This means that California’s local governments—at least the ones that are fiscally wise—do not encourage residential investment, since it produces less in taxes. In fact, they often promote commercial investment that brings in other types of taxes instead. And they use their power to levee very high fees on those who develop, and create restrictive rules that add to the cost of the process.

The state’s CEQA law imposes similar costs on growth. Yes, such environmental laws are well intentioned and desirable in theory—forcing developers to mitigate excessive disruptions they might create in the natural or urban environment. The problem is that “excessive” is being interpreted to mean “any” in the current application of the law. Developers are forced to pay for many costly mitigations. Even worse, various interest groups and NIMBY-minded residents have essentially figured out how to hijack the system to block development and serve their own ends.

Is there any conversation about reforming CEQA in Sacramento? None. Any chance of reforming Proposition 13? Very little. The only discussion to date involves the so-called “split-roll” that would raise commercial rates while leaving Proposition 13’s limits on residential property taxes untouched. This will only make the local government bias against residential real estate worse.

And so, California families continue to face a very real housing crisis. The state leaders, meanwhile, are not helping. It’s the cruelest irony; we have a housing crisis, and California’s leaders are not addressing it. They’re merely professing to help with costly policy gimmicks that are no substitute for freeing the market to align supply with demand.

The post Affordable Housing Is Now a Middle-Class Crisis in California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.