The Housing Crisis in a Nutshell, Version 2020 — The “Pay-to-Play” Controversies in Real-Estate

Los Angeles City Council Member David Ryu puts corruption issues right at the top of their recent May 19th email. This is a sign that the criminal investigation sides of things are starting to heat up.

A few days ago I received an odd email from my former council member David Ryu of Los Angeles District 4 (I’ve moved several times since then), putting the “pay-to-play” corruption issues the city is facing at the beginning of his opening statement. He didn’t specify who or what exactly (in order to avoid implicating himself), but anyone who has been paying attention to these sort of issues knows exactly what that means: taking money from real-estate developers in order to get access to city building permits, which has now become somewhat of a premium commodity in US cities all across the country. Jose Huizar of District 14 was literally raided by the FBI last year for that exact reason, after all.

Where there is money, however, ill-intention often follows — unbeknownst to many, a number of government insiders, accountability organizations, criminal investigation groups have been closely monitoring these issues for years now and given how weak the political system has become, they may be ready to make their move. Ryu’s (and the rest of the councilmembers’) involvement with this issue is currently unknown, but we may see some skeletons being dug up in the near future. This was his way to preempt potential allegations as the investigation starts to progress, especially as the election season starts to heat up during the summer.

What Does “Pay-to-Play” Exactly Mean?

Jane Kim, who was Bernie Sanders’ Bay Area regional organizer, has a history of accepting developer money into non-profit accounts, which then gets funneled into initiatives like her personal political campaign funds. Illegal? Probably not. Immoral? Probably. She is not seeking re-election this year, after being on a losing streak in many races for years now, including a mayoral race against the current SF Mayor, London Breed, and a state representative race against YIMBY’s strongest pro-housing advocate, Scott Wiener.

“Pay-to-Play”, something that everyone (including the accused), agrees is “wrong”, comes in mainly two forms: illegal, and “immoral but legal”. In the way zoning is currently done in the US, local government officials pretty much wield all the levers when it comes to what does and doesn’t get built in their neighborhoods. Homeless shelter in Beverly Hills, even if they’re the most equipped to handle it? No thanks, Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY).

Wealthy neighborhoods are quite proud of their policy history of keeping poor people out — instead of getting their hands dirty through blatant classism and racism, they took the easier path: simply build very little housing for everyone. Then they can filter them out based on how much money they have, and no-one would be the wiser. Sure, it might put a few people on the streets here and there, but if it keeps the shadows from apartment buildings covering up their zucchini farms, to them, it was well worth the price.

Despite having the available lands to build on to help the country get out of its housing crisis, cities like Beverly Hills have been severely under-building for decades, often blatantly disregarding state and federal level mandates that tell them to build enough housing to meet population levels. (The city’s homelessness problem is by design, not due to lack of resources.) But to say that enforcement in these areas have been lax would be an understatement: if we were even a fraction of where we needed to be in regards to our housing supply, we probably wouldn’t be in this crisis to begin with, and rents/mortgages would be much, much, lower for basically everyone. (The Los Angeles area alone needs at least 750,000+ units just to meet population levels and is far behind where it needs to be.)

(This includes the COVID crisis too, by the way, which has been exacerbated by the severe overcrowding issues that has become the reality in many US metro areas.)

Criminal violations regarding “pay-to-play” is fairly straight forward: If you take developer money for public use and use it for personal reasons, you should, in theory, get sent to jail immediately. Because the rules surrounding these types of issues tends to be complex, I suspect that many politicians right now may be breaking the law without them even knowing it — which will catch many of them off guard when real enforcement starts kicking in. If you’re interested in this line of investigation, this election season is something to pay attention to since we’re likely to see issues like these pop up all over. If you’ve noticed a lot of local politicians talk a big game even as they’re unable to hide their fear in their eyes and voice, this is what they’re afraid of, most likely.

The “legal but immoral” types of “pay-to-play” is a bit more tricky and harder to catch since many of its procedures have been “legalized” at this point, but is nonetheless severely damaging to the democratic process — politicians using non-profits to launder money for their own personal gain. As pointed out above with Jane Kim’s example, it’s not only Trumpists who are doing this — the “progressives” (or “fauxgressives” as we like to call them) are doing it too.

I do think that it’s time that we stop being naive about this stuff and start to take these allegations of corruption more seriously. And this November is the best time to do it to make your voices heard.

Party politics has gotten so corrupt at this point that we are forced to judge people as individuals since the standards that should be keeping organizations on the straight path are currently either too weak or non-existent. Maybe that’s how things should be, I don’t know. But what’s clear is that we need better ways of vetting and holding people accountable that doesn’t have to involve the prison system directly, every time.

Timeline For the Housing Crisis, Version 2020

Overcrowding vs. Density by Alfred Twu. Most US cities right now are overcrowded due to lack of density, not the other way around.

In summary, here is the new, updated list of the housing crisis in the US (and many other parts in the West) thus far:

• People go to big cities for good jobs
• Cities happily accept the new jobs because of taxable income
• Cities (controlled by NIMBY groups) block new housing for new workers
• Rents, mortgages, income inequality, homelessness all go up
• Real-estate becomes an extremely lucrative industry due to artificial scarcity
• Real-estate becomes a two-tiered system — Mega-Corp developers/landlords, and small-business “mom and pop” developers/landlords
• Politicians work with the Mega-Corps because of $$$, corruption allegations start to emerge
• The FBI and accountability groups start their investigations towards said corruption allegations
• Politicians, afraid of criminal persecution, try to deflect the city’s problems away from themselves, scapegoating “mom and pop” businesses for crimes that they are often doing themselves
• Deflection efforts becomes more formalized: NIMBY groups launch propaganda and misinformation campaigns surrounding housing issues in US cities since they have the money to do so
• Propaganda and misinformation campaigns get fed into local activist groups to drive a wedge between voters/tenants and small-businesses groups to keep them distracted from the real issues
• Mega-Corps let said activist groups run rampant because they serve as a perfect distraction from the back-end deals they may be involved with. Besides, one of these small-businesses might experience success and become a competitor one day, which would be an inconvenience
• Failed or bankrupted “mom and pop” businesses are forced to sell their properties, probably to the Mega-Corps who have have enough money to wait their competition out until they hit rock bottom. Mission accomplished. (Which is the likely outcome of the #CancelRent movement if it doesn’t include mortgage cancellation as well)
• The public’s understanding of housing issues has become a complete mess, further made worse by #FakeNews, political partisanship, and other political agitations that make it difficult to have reasonable conversations. “Troll armies” — likely supported by foreign cyberwarfare groups — fuel the flames even more
• The COVID crisis hits. The elites in power, totally out of touch with the reality that most US metro areas are overcrowded right now, issues the stay-at-home order, which has arguably made things worse by forcing people to stay in confined spaces for extended periods of time. In the NIMBY’s mind, there is only one family per parcel of land, and anyone who says otherwise is a communist/nazi

I’ve always said that I never thought that Donald Trump being a real-estate guy and him now being our president was a coincidence — he was a type of monster that the system itself created, after all. I tend to stay out of the day-to-day political partisan battles because most of it is just a distraction and doesn’t really get anywhere — as Albert Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

The solution to the housing crisis has always been the same, per recommendations of the experts out there: either spread out the jobs, or build more housing near the jobs. Either would work — but we have done neither. What’s needed most right now is action, not more words. There are mountains and mountains of “task force reports” and “feasibility studies” that all say the same thing: Build More Housing.

On the surface, things may look hopeless, but because the solution to the problem has always been obvious, the obvious thing to do is to simply vote for those who are strongly advocating for the common sense solutions that will actually get us out of this mess. And they are out there — we just need to find them, and champion them every chance we get. The next best chance of doing this just happens to be this November.