Oakland Natural Gas Ban Done Without Economic Impact Analysis, Needs Affordable Housing Exception
ONN – Oakland Natural Gas Ban Done Without Economic Impact Analysis, Needs Affordable Housing Exception – vlog by Zennie62 YouTube
On Tuesday, the Oakland City Council passed what would be a ban on natural gas use in all new building construction if it got enough votes on its second reading. My problem with the legislation pushed primarily by Oakland District One Councilmember Dan Kalb, and with the help of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Oakland District Two Councilmember Nikki Fortunado Bas, is that it was done solely with concerns about climate change, and without true regard for the creation and maintenance of affordable housing.
When I brought my concerns to Councilmember Kalb, he remarked that “the affordable housing community supported” his plan. That’s meaningless to me because he’s pointing to a political group here or there, and not any economic analysis that would demonstrate an effort to make sure that Oakland’s poor and middle class were not hurt by the market reaction to the ban.
The fact is that California has the fifth-highest housing living costs in America, and topped only by New England states, and Alaska – this ban threatens to push Oakland even higher than that mark. And of the 40 cities listed as having some type of natural gas ban by The Sierra Club, 38 of them have almost no black people living in them; Oakland, with over 20 percent African American, is the lone exception to the rule. Even Berkeley has a population count that’s around 8 to 9 percent.
Oakland has been on notice for chasing its black population out of its city or to homelessness by high housing costs. This ban will assure the continuance of that problem. That is, unless, Oakland provides an exemption for affordable housing.
Such an exemption does exist in the case of East Palo Alto, which has a black population of around 11 percent, after a 23 percent mark in the first decade of the 21st Century. Thus, the vast majority of cities with natural gas bans have very small African American populations – then there’s Oakland. This looks like a push to, well, push, the rest of the poor black folks out of Oakland, or onto the streets.
Having an exception for affordable housing would create an incentive to build more affordable housing stock at a time when Oakland has a shortage. Hopefully, the City of Oakland wakes-up to not make an economic mistake, before it’s too late. The ban will not stop climate change – even if we reach zero emissions, over-population assures that the problem will not go away.
Stay tuned.
Note from Zennie62Media’s Zennie62 YouTube and Oakland News Now Today Blog SF Bay Area: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.