Democrats: Pandemic highlights failures
Although the party has control, some say government is not working
In California, pain is everywhere.
At food banks, where hungry families once able to comfortably stock their pantries stand for hours in lines that circle around the buildings. At home, where renters anxiously crunch numbers to make next month’s payment pencil out. At fast food restaurants, where kids connect to free Wifi so they can log on for class.
After a four- month recess, state lawmakers are preparing to return to Sacramento Monday with a list of proposals to ease the financial agony reverberating through the Golden State.
Yet for some Democrats, the coronavirus has sparked more than legislative ambitions.
After nine months of watching their constituents suffer, the coronavirus has inspired a professional revelation: Government isn’t working, despite the fact that their party controls the Capitol.
As federal officials largely left states to fend for themselves, the billions in reserves the state had going into the pandemic couldn’t safeguard millions in the middle and working classes from the worst of COVID-19. Neither could a list of progressive policies considered national examples of how to care for the sick, unsheltered and poor.
The pandemic, they said, laid bare their failure to address issues such as housing and hunger even before the crisis hit.
“Normal wasn’t working for so many people,” Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D- Oakland, said. “Highest cost of living in the country. Education gaps. We don’t have great paid leave policies. We don’t have affordable child care. ( The coronavirus) really shined a spotlight on some of the issues that are front and center for us.”
Sixty-three percent of Californians believe that children growing up today won’t have the same financial opportunities as their parents, according to a December Public Policy Institute of California survey. Nearly 70% said California’s gap between the rich and poor is expanding.
At least a third of California’s low-income households are either on unemployment or have lost work, can’t pay a bill or are worried about keeping up with their rent or mortgage. Forty-three percent have visited a food bank in the last year and 38% are on food stamps.
“This moment really demands a level of intentionality and soul searching amongst lawmakers,” Wicks said, “To say, ‘ We have to do better for our constituents.’ ”
But where to begin? And how?
The Legislature isn’t built for speed or flexibility, said Democratic consultant Andrew Acosta, which hamstrings lawmakers who are eager to address “a crisis where people are looking for answers yesterday.”
They can write letters asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep playgrounds open, lobby on behalf of essential workers for a top spot in line for the COVID-19 vaccine or launch a fundraising effort for furloughed restaurant employees.
What’s really needed, however, is courage to break from standard legislative protocol to finally address the root issues of what’s caused so much suffering this year, Acosta argued.
“If you can’t change how the process works, then you’re limited in how you can move quickly and adjust on the fly,” Acosta said. “But now that we’re in COVID, in my opinion, you have to rise up and break up out of the status quo, the ‘we always have to do it this way.’”
Here’s where Democrats said they will start:
Housing crisis
About 1.3 million renters in California are “extremely low income,” according to 2018 data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Seventy-seven percent of these households are considered “severely cost burdened,” meaning they spend more than half of their income on housing costs.
The pandemic disproportionately slammed these households, with many of its residents already living a “paycheck or two away from the streets,” Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, D-encino, sai.
Democrats have imposed too many fees and environmentally driven barriers to construction, some acknowledged, resulting in less supply and higher rents for their constituents.
It didn’t have to be this way.
In early 2020, Newsom called for a bill that would spur construction to help alleviate a statewide multimillion unit shortage following years of lukewarm interest in the Legislature to fundamentally change how California builds homes.
Even as the coronavirus forced legislators to shear hundreds of bills from their agenda, Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-san Diego, built a blueprint in 2020 with her Democratic colleagues to modify California’s zoning restrictions, allow for infill residential development on commercial property and to let cities build more duplexes.
The plan failed amid what Isaac Hale, political science lecturer at UC Davis, called “inter- chamber” politics and “divides within the Democratic caucus” over how best to solve California’s housing crisis.
“That was a choice,” Hale said.
S e ver a l se s sion s of stalled housing solutions helped create the state’s most pressing shelter emergency: hundreds of thousands of California renters face eviction by Feb. 1.
Extending an eviction ban beyond that date with Assembly Bill 15, Assemblyman David Chiu, DSan Francisco said, is critical to keeping Californians in their homes during the coronavirus and while the Legislature works on proposals to put more units online.
“Production absolutely needs to be part of the agenda for 2021,” Chiu said. “We can’t allow for politics as usual to stymie a critical solution for saving Californians. Too many people are suffering. We have to grapple with the hardest questions and hammer out solutions for them.”
Access to health care
Within California’s COVID-19 statistics dashboard is a story of racial, wealth and medical inequity, especially among certain populations historically denied health care.
About 12% of California Latinos lack insurance, a December California Latino Economic Institute report says, which is “double the rate of other groups.”
Though they make up 39% of the state’s population, Latinos in California represent 55% of coronavirus cases and 47% of deaths.
The numbers have reinvigorated a legislative appetite to expand coverage to every Californian, regardless of immigration status.
L ow- income undocumented children and young adults already qualify for Medi- Cal.
But as the virus continues devastating Latino communities, Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, DFresno, said it’s imperative to provide coverage for undocumented adults.
Supporting the middle class
The list of failures within the California Employment Development Department since the start of the pandemic reflects more than an antiquated system pushed to its technical limitations.
Instead, some Democrats have argued, the mountain of backlogged cases indicate a fundamentally flawed labor system that leaves too many low- and middle- class families living paycheck to paycheck while the state gets more expensive.
“We’ve never been really honest about our middle class simply hanging on. Yes, they’ve been able to get by,” Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-san Diego, said. “(But) we’re starting to see the middle class feel the stressors the working class has felt for years.”
The state’s current Pandemic Unemployment Assistance maxes out at $450 a week, according to the agency’s website.
Most checks totaled less than that, said Sylvia Allegretto, co- chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley, which is “just not enough.”
“W hat were people thinking was going to happen? The idea that people don’t have paid time off, don’t have sick leave, don’t have child care, that essential workers are CEOS,” Allegretto said. “That’s laughable. We know who the essential workers are.”
With unemployment hovering about 8% and stay-at-home orders likely to remain in effect for several more weeks, Gonzalez said now is the time to push for stronger labor protections. Her ideas include expanding the state’s paid family leave program to cover at least 90% of workers’ income and working to increase sick days from three to five, two goals Gonzalez said the coronavirus has made that much more important.
“Sometimes we take baby steps in order to get the policy,” Gonzalez said. “But now we say, ‘ OK, we know it’s tough, but we have to push this.’ ”
All of it costs money. John Kabateck, California director for the National Federation of Independent Business, said now is the time for California to save, not spend, and to avoid raising taxes or caving to special interest groups’ expensive requests.
“Our policymakers never met a dollar bill they didn’t like,” Kabateck said. “Hopefully, this pandemic has given all of our state leaders an Economics 101 lesson on how to be better at spending our dollars.”
Still, teachers’ unions will want more money to safeguard their classrooms from COVID-19. Affordable housing advocates want a low- income housing tax credit for developers. Social safety net advocates are petitioning against cuts to services.
Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center, said lawmakers would be wise to use the budget as a tool to ease pandemic inequities, which will require “a shift in public policy that is also unprecedented.”
Everything from small business assistance to child care subsidies, he said, will be necessary to get the workforce moving again.
Wicks said it will take legislative grit to accomplish the bold proposals the pandemic mandates.
“We do have legislators who are trying to figure this out,” Wicks added. “And maybe that’s the silver lining. When there’s a crisis, there’s urgency to address these things that needed to be addressed for a long time.