Protect Latino Neighborhoods – Oppose SB 1120

Protect Latino Families and Neighborhoods - Oppose SB 1120

Please Protect Latino Families and Communities: Please Oppose SB 1120

I ask that you OPPOSE SB 1120 if it is voted on by the Assembly. It allows developers, without review and without following the protections of CEQA, to demolish good affordable homes on family streets to build four dense units where an older and more affordable house stands now. The land will be split in half, and the two new market-rate homes on each side of the halved land will come without garages, and just one parking space for each home.

Even if Latino families could afford these new market-rate homes, which is highly unlikely, the no-garage concept creates a hardship for one group more than any other in California: Latino parents and young adults with jobs that require a car and who work at home with their hands.

SB 1120 steals yards from children, particularly Latino children, who critically need safe outdoor space in urban and polluted settings. It gentrifies and displaces Latino and Black working-class areas because so many are so near bustling downtowns and light rail. Brown and Black households will be targeted first by SB 1120, bringing personal and family upheaval in an era of change and fear.

The bill is environmentally troubling, inviting broad destruction of the urban tree canopy, the only effective defense against California's growing heat-island effect that is hammering Latino communities and, according to leading researchers, kills the very young and very old who cannot afford AC. At the same time, the level of greenhouse gases absorbed by modest backyard vegetable gardens and other greenery will drop significantly, creating unhealthful surroundings for children and the elderly in communities already over-impacted by chemicals and industry.

New ADU laws have vastly expanded California's growth potential, even though very little growth is coming into the state, according to the US Census. Let those new ADU laws work their magic, for extended families or those with an elderly grandparent, or those who in our current recession could benefit by earning income from a tenant. Take a breath and see if you legislators can declare victory as ADUs pop up statewide.

But unlike ADUs, SB 1120 is a sweeping experiment in ending single-family zoning. It has been attempted only in two small cities, Portland and Minneapolis. The jury is out on whether their experiments have hurt or helped. But there's another troubling issue, presented by SB 1120: from Los Angeles to Orange County, Sacramento to the Central Valley, California towns and cities are jammed with untapped zoning capacity.

Los Angeles could grow to nearly 7 million with no further "upzoning" but that is not in the cards for decades. The OC has shot far, far past its regional housing targets. The Central Valley has extensive untapped room for growth. The Inland Empire, now well over 50% Latino, is a world of untapped potential — and untapped zoning capacity. In the urban core in L.A. County and the Bay Area, revered urban planner Peter Calthorpe has shown that hundreds of miles of underutilized commercial boulevards are waiting for mixed-use projects that won't cause a single Latino homeowner to be pressed out by displacement or gentrification.

I understand how busy legislators are. Now is a good time to pause, rethink, and take a breath. This divisive displacement and gentrification bill, SB 1120, is not pressing, not needed and not helpful. It's impact on Latino working-class homeowners and longtime but challenged Latino renters is impossible to overstate.

Please don't feel you must approve something, anything, even a bill that is this wrong for our troubled times. The public understands this era is a crisis, and they want to see the crisis addressed. Not the theories of consultants and think tanks whose experts are wrapped in comfortable surroundings.

Dear legislator, please steady things instead of disrupting things. Now is not the time.

Please Oppose SB 1120.

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