Corrections, clarifications to column on CARB Scoping Plan suit

I write to make three important corrections, and one clarification, to Howard Miller's June 13 column, "Tectonic legal plates: climate change and housing in California."

First, the plaintiff/petitioner in this civil rights lawsuit is The 200, and includes distinguished civil rights leaders in our state's African-American, Asian, Pacific Islander and Latino communities. The mission of The 200 is to restore homeownership to California's minority families, to close the substantial wealth gap between home-owning white families and multi-generational government policies that have deprived minorities of equal access to homeownership. The 200 is not, as the article incorrectly reports, a Latino organization.

Second, our civil rights lawsuit challenges four anti-housing measures included in the California Air Resources Board (CARB) Scoping Plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. California already has extremely low per capita GHG emissions: Only New York has lower per capita GHG, which continues to have a fleet of zero-GHG nuclear power plants. When our working families move to other states where they can actually buy a home, their most common destinations are Texas, Arizona and Nevada -- each of which has per capita GHG emissions that are double (and nearly triple) California's. By making it even harder and more expensive to build housing, CARB anti-housing measures actually increase global GHG emissions and take us backward on climate change.

Third, new high-density housing in urban areas costs about five times more than more modest traditional wood-framed starter homes (including duplexes and townhomes). Almost all of these new high-density urban housing projects are rentals costing $3,500 or more, and the small fraction of condos that are built generally cost $1 million or more. These prices are prohibitive for working families and have already caused a substantial increase in racial segregation in Bay Area and Southern California communities. CARB's simplistic endorsement of this type of housing as necessary for climate change ignores the scale of the housing crisis and particularly ignores the housing and homeownership needs of minority, millennials, students and seniors. The 200 does not oppose dense housing near transit but does oppose bureaucratic government policies never enacted by the Legislature that effectively end homeownership for working families.

CARB refused to quantify how much GHG emissions would be reduced by their anti-housing measures, but scholars at UC Berkeley have estimated this agenda would reduce GHG by about 1% of the GHG reductions included in the Scoping Plan. Notwithstanding our state's status as the fifth largest economy in the world, we only produce about 1% of global GHG. Making housing more difficult to build and more costly, and ending homeownership for hard-working Californians, to reduce 1% of 1% of global GHG emissions is discriminatory as well as ineffective, and violates our civil rights. CARB's Scoping Plan doesn't even count, or mandate GHG reductions, from catastrophic forest fires that kill people, destroy homes, and cause immediate as well as long term harm from air pollution. CARB's Scoping Plan doesn't even count, or mandate GHG reductions, from the expensive luxury goods imported by wealthy environmentalist strongholds that have long blocked housing that can be purchased by middle-income families such as Marin.

CARB knows it has a problem with equity, poverty and racism. However, handing out grants for electric car chargers when buying a new electric car is far out of reach of the 40% of Californians who can't even pay regular monthly expenses, or grants for "affordable" rental housing that now costs more than $500,000 per unit to build, shows the same elitist "let them eat cake" arrogance and isolation that brought down the French monarchy.

We have fought, and won, civil rights battles against hardened bureaucracies for decades. It is shocking, and deeply disappointing, that we find ourselves having to engage yet again in a battle waged by self-professed "progressive" environmentalists in deep Blue California, where even the attorney general elevates ineffective and counter-productive anti-housing climate policies above civil rights, and argues that it is constitutional for CARB to adopt racist housing measures. California's minority communities -- and the now-majority of students and millennials who are minorities, and the majority of our poor and homeless who are minorities -- do not accept CARB's decision to make us collateral damage in their war on climate. 