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.”

The post How Tibetan Buddhists Helped Me Seek Enlightenment at Howard Jarvis’s House appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Don’t squeeze your kids too hard as you send them off to another school year, because the state of California is already squeezing your kids hard enough to hurt their future.

Call it The Great California School Squeeze. The state is stuck in a nasty school funding paradox: Even though our school districts have never had higher funding levels than they do right now, many districts face financial peril.

Why? Because The Squeeze is a torture machine with three ratchets.

First, escalating payments and obligations for retirement benefits are growing so fast (more than 100 percent in this decade in many districts) that they gobble up most of the rising education funding all by themselves. That leaves little for today’s students and teachers.

Second, with California’s birth rate at a record low, the number of students is stagnant in some districts and declining in others. Since school funding is granted on a per-student basis, fewer students means less funding, even at the higher rates.

Third, the state is pressuring schools to take expensive new measures to address major social problems—including shortages of college graduates and systemic inequality that leaves poorer young people lagging. Elaborate new state measurement systems for schools go far beyond test scores to assess everything from equity to school discipline. A new funding formula that gives more money to poorer schools has created pressure to eliminate achievement gaps.

So The Squeeze, in essence, requires producing millions more educated California adults from a smaller student population, even as retirees grab bigger shares of available funds. California’s famously complicated legal barriers to cutting pensions and raising taxes may make breaking free of The Squeeze politically impossible.

But a failure to escape The Squeeze threatens what was once the essence of California: our leadership in knowledge and technology.

For the past half-century, California has been steadily giving away the lead it once held over the rest of the country and the world in education. In 1970, according to a new Chapman University report, Californians were better educated than the average American. The state had a higher percentage of adults with college degrees—and a lower proportion of adults with less than a high school education—than the nation as a whole.

But California now has the second highest percentage of adults with less than a high school education in the country (and had fallen, as of 2012, to 14th in the percentage of adults with college degrees). California was one of only four states to see an increase in the number of people with less than a high school degree between 1970 and 2012. By comparison, the large, diverse states of Texas and New York both have seen declines in their numbers of adults without high school diplomas.

Reversing such trends would be a monumental task for California even in ideal conditions. But in the midst of The Squeeze, it seems impossible. School districts, rather than adding programs, are freezing budgets, laying off teachers, and forcing school closures.

This process may be ugliest in Oakland, where the school board members have publicly declared, “We have too many schools.” What Oakland really has is rising retiree costs and much lower student enrollment, putting the district in danger of returning to state receivership. In Southern California, my hometown of Pasadena has announced plans to close five schools starting next year, including the last two public schools in the neighborhood where I grew up.

The Squeeze also limits California’s instructional hours, despite research showing that more time to learn is essential for making educational gains. We might live in the world’s fifth largest economy, but I’m about to send my youngest child to my local elementary school where he will only have a half-day of kindergarten because that’s all that our state funds.

It’s obvious that California needs to give its schools more. But from where? Today’s kids and teachers are already taking hits from The Squeeze. And even if it were possible to claw back pensions from retired teachers, it wouldn’t be fair. Teachers don’t get Social Security and their pensions are reasonable, averaging just over $50,000. This reflects the Penis Rule of Pension Abuses; scandalously large retirement payouts, like the $1.27 million recently given to L.A.’s police chief, usually come from predominantly male professions like fire and police.

Unfortunately, there is no way to get the money from those most at fault: previous state and local politicians who made retirement promises without properly funding or disclosing them. Much of The Squeeze on California schools today comes from efforts to recover from years of underfunding of pensions by accelerating school districts’ contributions to the two state pension funds that cover school workers and teachers.

What’s most scary about The Squeeze is that it’s likely to get worse. The Squeeze has hit hard even as the stock market has risen and the economy has expanded; a recession and stock market decline would make The Squeeze so bad that school districts could be forced into massive cuts and bankruptcy.

If you’re surprised to be reading all of this, that is by design. School districts often hide the growing size of their retiree obligations deep in budget documents. Many districts ask local voters for additional taxes which delay the reckoning but don’t fix the problem. Diminished local media don’t have resources to cover it. And powerful teachers’ unions have tried to shift blame for The Squeeze to their favorite bogeyman, charter schools, even though they are a small piece of the public school system.

You also aren’t hearing about The Squeeze during the campaign season. The endless state media celebration of Gov. Jerry Brown’s tenure has obscured the crisis. Political candidates have offered few ideas for tackling The Squeeze, because, well, there are few ideas for tackling The Squeeze.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

Addressing The Squeeze starts with clearer disclosure: making it plain the ways in which retiree costs and enrollment declines are hurting today’s kids and teachers. While retired teachers must have their pensions protected, cost of living adjustments should stop. And districts should stop giving retired teachers separate health benefits; they should rely on the same public programs—Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare—that the rest of us do.

The savings from such changes won’t be nearly enough to escape The Squeeze, but they should make it possible to do more for today’s teachers. As David Crane of Govern for California has shown, school districts from San Francisco to Fresno are now devoting less than half of their revenues to compensation for today’s teachers.

But breaking the grip of The Squeeze will require more from California taxpayers—and not just small tax increases on the local level.

The state has two big dysfunctional systems that hurt today’s kids. One is a complex tax system, built around Proposition 13, that protects older homeowners. The other is a complex education funding system, built around Prop 98, that ties education spending to the budget and economy, rather than to students’ needs. It has effectively acted as a cap on education spending since Prop 98 was adopted 30 years ago.

Both systems need replacing. The Prop 98 funding formula should die, and education funding should be tied to educational needs. Doing that would require tens of billions of new dollars each year, which in turn would necessitate a massive tax reform.

Of course, even such difficult and transformational reforms might not be enough for schools, now that state Democrats want to grab new tax dollars for a single-payer universal health care system. That might be a worthy goal. But California first needs to rescue the kids from The Squeeze that’s crushing our single-payer education system.

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