CALIFORNIANS:
If you’re a renter, or you might be one, or you know and like people who rent, you should vote against Proposition 98 next Tuesday, June 3.
gordonzola has done a fine job of explaining why at this post and previously at this other post. I’ll summarize here with cut and paste bits from his post:
State Proposition 98 on the June 3 ballot will change your life and change our city forever if it passes. This dangerous measure would end all rent control in California. Worse, it would also end just-cause eviction protections. If it passes, landlords will be able to raise evict tenants for no reason other than that they want to raise the rent.
Besides attacking tenants and rent control, Prop 98 will also end a number of environmental regulations as well as zoning and land use laws. Under Prop 98, developers will be able to ignore height limits in residential neighborhoods, build on environmentally sensitive areas and bring chain stores into neighborhoods where they are now prohibited. Prop 98 will also end requirements that developers build a certain number of units which are affordable to people with low and moderate incomes.
Also likely to be ended by this language will be laws requiring landlords to give 60 day notices for large rent increases or no-fault evictions, as well as laws requiring relocation benefits for no-fault evictions. Laws limiting the amount of security deposits or limiting when a landlord can hold on to a security deposit will also end. Prop 98 is a constitutional amendment so its provisions will override all other local and state laws (and make challenging it in court especially difficult).
Please vote. Without a good showing it’s likely to pass, because they put it in a boring election between two important ones.
Be My Blog 
i plan to VOTE NO ON EVERYTHING. the initiative system is total garbage….
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Yes. I do not tire of telling people how that system broke california and then the whole country: http://substitute.livejournal.com/743364.html
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wow. that was a great post. i wasn’t aware of the background behind it, but it makes a lot of sense. it explains (and makes me feel better about) me breaking my “no to everything” vow a few years ago to support a local measure that would raise local sales tax to keep the SLO City/County Library afloat as well as keep my job there. no surprise, it didn’t pass and i lost my job. yikes, and still i am considering a career in library and information science, perhaps that is not so wise…
i wonder if we can get an initiative passed that rids CA of the initiative system.
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Well, at the risk of sounding like Charlton Heston, the problem isn’t the guns killing democracy, it’s the triggermen. The initiative process has always been a way to air legitimate issues, as well as being a forum for wingnuts and snake-oil salesmen. When women got the vote in Montana, Oregon and California, at least, it was by initiative, not by an act of enlightened legislators. The Progressives took that ball and ran with it for almost two generations, and they got a lot of good stuff done.
I think the real problem is that we’ve lost our Jeanette Rankins, and Bob la Follettes, and oozing in to take their place, wankers like Howard Jarvis. The reactionaries, opportunists, and realtors are a hell of a lot better organized now, the way the Progressives used to be.
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Coming soon..the Bonaire Way Starbucks/Best Buy
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It could happen around the corner in Costa Mesa! All rental stuff there.
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Saw the other post, will definitely be passing this on, since I’d be affected by it.
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I didn’t know whether to leave this comment on this entry or the one you linked to, since it’s primarily about things that you raised in your other entry, but anyways.
It sounds like California is still stuck in the hell that we in Ontario suffered through for 8 years, but managed to drag ourselves out of a few years ago. I’m going to link to Wikipedia not because it’s the be-all and end-all of human knowledge, but because that particular article happens to accurately represent the situation as I understand it. 🙂
I was in high-school at the time, and I experienced many of the same types of “cost-cutting” measures: arts and music down the toilet, crises in health-care, highways getting built and then sold to private corporations (who, incidentally, now have the highest tolls of any highway in North America), and so on.
Glad we got out of that one, but the effects are still noticeable around here 6 years later. (Ed: I have no idea where “almost 10” came from, heh.)
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I just voted no and so did my father. Thanks permanent absentee ballots.
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Yes and Yes.
At least here in Oregon, one of the continual scandals (fill in the blanks depending on the year) is signatures. Who’s gathered them, which paid signature gathering organization is the most brazenly corrupt this year, etc, etc.
That shit, at least, should be legislatively fixed by now. I’m all in favor of just banning paid signature gatherers entirely, and see how fast the hard right “grass roots” movements wither. If there’s one arena where the lefties still seem to have an edge, it’s achingly-earnest well-scrubbed young people circulating petitions.
We’ll see.
Good luck to y’all tomorrow.
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