I was tempted to say horrible things about Legislative Counsel, but if the money were to go into the cities’ regular budget instead of the redevelopment slush fund, I would have no problem with that. Related “Legislative counsel says Brown’s redevelopment plan illegal” by Kevin Yamamura at SacBee.com

There is a lot of worry that getting rid of redevelopment will get rid of the one affordable housing program we seem to have in California.  A quota of 20% of redevelopment land to be used for ‘affordable’ housing was, given the nature of redevelopment, a good law that was forced on the agencies.  But [...]

I confess that I was hoping that 2011 would be 1995.  After all, we had just climbed out of a serious recession in the earlier part of that decade – dwarfed by the more recent one of course, but big at the time – and we had the configuration of Democratic President and Republican Congress. [...]

P. J. O’Rourke has taken off on the absurdity of bicycles.  However, there are some people that really need and use them, and I’m thinking of “Los Midnight Riders” from my earlier post.  There does need to be some safe place for bicycles, and cars do need to recognize the bicycles are ‘vehicles.’  However, I [...]

Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star does an excellent column on how redevelopment cuts across traditional partisan lines.  I still say we have the social justice opportunity of the century! Related “Herdt: On Taxes, Redevelopment and Teamwork” by Timm Herdt at the Ventura County Star

Here is David Brooks defending the upper middle class American approach to parenting.  He declares that Amy Chua sheltered her daughters from the kind of social interactions that teach us how to deal with people in the real world.  In Anglo culture, home schooling parents, though usually much less manic than Ms. Chua, have the [...]

This article is not only interesting for its own sake, but because it illustrates a cultural division that has been raging in mixed Asian-Anglo communities such as Irvine, California.  There are not separate school systems, but there are ‘Asian’ churches and ‘Anglo’ churches and some trying to bridge the gap, and many Irvine public schools [...]