TRANSCRIPT 🔗
00:00:01
Speaker 1: This is Monks and Merrill.
00:00:03
Speaker 2: Hosted by Michael Monks and Chris Merrill. This is Monks and Merrill.
00:00:10
Speaker 1: On demand. And on the social medias at Monks and Merrill, at Monks and Merrill, where you can see my local squirrel splooted all over the pavement. Which, if you're unfamiliar and you missed the first hour, it's not a bad thing. Squirrels just spread eagle, trying to stay cool on the pavement. I find it strange, though. How is that cool to lay on the hot ground? Well, it was in shade. It wasn't laying. I've seen some pictures, though, because everybody's taking photos of the splooting squirrels. Yeah. And it looks hot. It's pretty hot in the shade out there these days. I'm not a squirrel, so I don't have any idea. Monson Merrill, what's up? Happy Monday. Thank you. Not much insightful commentary, other than.
00:00:51
Speaker 3: To say that you guys have the It Show right now.
00:00:54
Speaker 1: Oh, we've got it? A lot of people have said that this is an it show. A lot of people are saying it's something. It's an it show.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: What a total it show that is. You guys are it. You're doing a great job. Thank you. Everybody's loving it. Woo! Woo! Keep up the good work, boys. That's nice of you to say. Thank you. Thank you, pal. Appreciate it. Very, very kind. There's a new pullout from Pew! It says that the reason we have so much trouble, such a divide as far as the haves and the have-nots, the reason we have poverty, homelessness, and all the ails that find their way to us is because the housing's too expensive. It's not exactly an appropriate characterization. I'm not far off. It's research from Pew that is known for the polling that they do, but also other research. And what it argues is that the housing shortage that people say we have here in California is a major cause of poverty. Well, why is that? Well, because we have unusually high rents. And if you're somebody who is spending 35%, 40%, 50% of your income on rent, and then you have all the other bills on top of that, it's tough to live. It makes you poor, even if you have a good income. Right. It makes you homeless. And then you have no other choice except to start doing fentanyl. Yeah, it is one of the options. That's the only thing you can do. It's true. So what ends up happening is we end up getting a whole lot more pressure on things like SNAP and child tax credits and earned income tax credits. And then you have politicians that say, well, we've got to raise the minimum wage in order to help people pay for life. It's too expensive. Exactly. We end up with this cycle that we've created. Exactly. And that does not better the cost of living at all. I mean, even those minimum wage hikes can lead to higher costs of living. And the... The policies that we see our local politicians implement are always so reactive. They never look internally at what role they might play and why there's a housing shortage. Regulations, red tape, as they call it, the delays and the planning and the permitting department. That's the big one. Of course it is. We're seeing the rebuilding in Altadena, and you better figure a 25% premium on whatever your plans are. It's going to cost you 25% more just based on the premiums.
00:03:09
Speaker 3: Right?
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Speaker 1: That's right. That's about what we're seeing, depending on the size of the home that you're putting in. But you're going to have to pay a ton more money, which keeps housing unaffordable. Housing's unaffordable. It means that people are poverty-stricken. If you're poverty-stricken, that means that you're turning to public assistance. If you're turning to public assistance, that means we have to get that money from somewhere. And if we have to get that money from somewhere, that means that the cost of everything is going up, which means it's harder to get out of poverty. There's the cycle. But this research from Pew is really interesting because it identifies California as one of the states where high housing costs account for the largest share of across the 10 hardest hit jurisdictions that it studied, 16 to 34% of poverty was attributable to above average housing costs. So what happens? It's a broad swath, 16 to 34%. Well, sure. If we could get a reduction in the amount of rent, and I'm not talking about one of those government implemented rent caps and those sorts of things that we see at LA City Hall. I'm talking about if there were an oversupply because we just allowed the building to take place and we made it faster. We weren't beholding all the unions and the special interest and the coastal commission and those sorts of things that we could just build. We might see rents plummet and Pew estimates that if inflation adjusted rents dropped by about 20%, you know, for a $ 2, 000 apartment, that would bring it down to what? 1,600 bucks. Yep. You would have an additional $ 400 in your pocket. That is significant for a lot of people. And Pew has found if we could drop it by 20%, overall poverty in the high-cost states studied could fall 18% to 26%. Okay, but hear me out. What if, instead of cutting the red tape and making building more affordable, what if we were to implement an oppressive tax on apartment building or high-density building in order to take more money from the developers? What if we were to do that? Would that actually make things better? Joining me now is spokesperson for the Nithya Raman Vermeer campaign, Chris Merrill. Chris, thanks for making time for us. We understand you want to talk about the mansion tax. It's raised a billion dollars for the city, which we can then turn around and we can give out to people who we've kept out of housing by simply raising the tax on everything. It's a wonderful system. But has it all been good? It's been... There are some hiccups along the way, but those are the sorts of things that we anticipated and we knew that were going to happen.
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Totally unintended consequences of things that were predictable and people warned us about. And as a result, we've decided not to do anything about that, but to continue the program status quo. It makes us feel very happy about ourselves. Oh, that's right. The mansion tax. How fun. We're going to get into that at some point because there's a new report out about just how bad that mansion tax spent for this very issue. It's just halted building. Which is literally driving more people into poverty.
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Speaker 3: Exactly.
00:05:58
Speaker 1: It was supposed to help poor people get affordable housing. It's a disaster. And yet you can never convince these leftists in Los Angeles that they were wrong about something. Meanwhile, whoever is the next mayor of Los Angeles will have to deal with this poverty problem. I'm sure they're both very eager and smart about how they'll do that. So whether we give Karen Bass another four years or hand the mantle over to the DSA and Nithya Raman, there is one Very important voting bloc who could decide the whole thing. We'll talk about who holds that power next.
00:06:28
Speaker 2: You're listening to Monks and Merrill on demand from KFI AM 640.
00:06:34
Speaker 1: More stimulating talk. And this is Monks and Merrill on Monday, October the 5th. Another hot scorcher across Southern California. I saw from the National Weather Service today, Chris, that we have officially had the hottest summer ever. We're number one. Yeah. We're number one. That's why you're seeing all these splooting squirrels. I might go home and sploot myself. Post some pictures of that on Instagram a little bit later. So think about this mayor's race. Who will ultimately decide this thing, right? I know that if you are maybe a moderate, hell, even if you're liberal, these may be unsavory choices. Just based on the performance of them in office, the results or lack thereof, or what their policy positions are. It's pretty depressing. I'll tell you that from my perspective, it's, it's pretty depressing because it doesn't look like either way LA is going to improve anytime soon. And it desperately needs to improve, but they're not looking at me. I'm just another white guy in downtown LA who cares. It's the Latinos. I mentioned this last week. I said, I think the block that matters is going to be the Latino voting block. And the reason I say that is if we, if we split off other demographics, older voters are, tend to be breaking for bass younger voters are going to go for the dsa candidate that's the people you know that's your freeze palestine people that's the people that think gaz is more important than the pothole in front of their house yeah that uh that think that co-governing is is far more important than keeping the metro safe that sort of thing so they're breaking for nithya raman older voters going for karen bass but the latino voters make up what 50 of the population yeah although only about 30% of the voters, which I think is really interesting. So Latino voters aren't voting as reliably as different demographics are. And, you know, not to suggest anything, but a significant portion of our Latino population is probably ineligible to vote legally. Yeah, some, probably, yeah. Yeah.
00:08:33
Speaker 3: Okay.
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Speaker 1: So there's that as well. And right now, that poll that came out from Berkeley and the LA Times a couple weeks ago. This is the one that Karen Bastel, we can't trust because it showed her behind. Yeah, well- They did break it down into certain demographics, and boy, Nithya Raman is kind of crushing it. Really? With Latino voters, she leads 45 to 21. Okay, I don't want to give too much credit to Kieran Bass on this, but I think I kind of believe her that this poll is... You think it's just too much? It's too much, especially because if you take a look back at the results after the primaries, Bass won the Latino vote.
00:09:07
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
00:09:08
Speaker 1: After the primaries. So, are you telling me that the Latino voters who didn't vote for Bass the first time around but voted for Spencer Pratt are now all breaking for Nithya Raman?
00:09:22
Speaker 3: I don't know.
00:09:23
Speaker 1: That doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't make sense that people who... If you're winning the Latino vote in the primaries, then what changed between the primaries and now? And I haven't seen anything that's changed dramatically other than possibly... Boyle Heights and the lineage logistics, because there's a heavy Latino population there, obviously, and there was a lot of... Yeah, and they're still aggrieved. Right, but has that suddenly cost Karen Bass 20% of the Latino vote across the entire city? I don't know. I mean, the woman basically... this is like the one area where she did represent the, I guess, the most basic opinion of most people who live in the city of Los Angeles. It may not be everybody who's listening, so calm down, but people in this city were angry about the immigration arrests that were taking place across LA. We saw the protests, and Karen Bass said, was there. I mean, she just was. She's spoken about this a lot. And she is trying to hit Nithya Raman, you know, for not being as vocal as she has been on these issues. On the other hand, because the Latino population in Los Angeles is so large, you can't treat it like a monolith. You know, there are low-income Latino voters. There are high-income Latino voters. There are Latino voters in the Valley. There are Latino voters on the West Side. There are Latino voters on the South Side. In the Palisades and Boyle Heights. All of these folks may have different perspectives on what they want from Los Angeles. We do have this tendency to put everyone in a box. We do, and it doesn't really work anymore, especially as those constituencies have grown. You can't expect, well, Black voters are going to feel this way about this issue the same way that they might have 30 years ago if their economic
situation changed. If they live in different places, their experiences are different. Gay voters are going to support this. No, not necessarily. It's just not the same. You really can't, especially in a city like L.A., where to be Latino doesn't necessarily mean Mexican. I mean, there's all these different nuances to what it means to be Latino in Los Angeles. I don't know, and we're talking about this because it was the LA Times who put out an article about how Bass and Rahman are both trying to court Latino voters as the race is in its waning days here. I think I'm more interested, and there will be some overlap here, to my point. Where does the Palisades go, and where does the San Fernando Valley go? Because they broke overwhelmingly for Pratt. They did. Yeah. So I think they're going to feel unrepresented. I think Bass will retain her stronghold in South L.A. I think that Rahman will continue to be strong in places like Los Feliz, Silver Lake, parts of downtown. Yeah, exactly. I think to me, more so than wondering about where the Latino voters will go, not to diminish their strong constituency, we've talked about how much of the electorate they've got. Quick couching. It's the West Side and the Valley. That's what I'm going to be most curious about on Election Day, is how do they break? We've got a lot of folks out there Based on this very poll, where a third of the electorate across the board undecided, I think there are folks who are really struggling hard with this. Not because they're waiting to be courted. It's almost like two candidates who can't court you. You're just wondering, who's the least worse? Yeah, this is going to be a bad tasting medicine. I got to take it. Yeah. You could skip the medicine, but you're still going to suffer from the consequences one way or the other. Am I really committed to firing Karen Bass because I'm so disappointed in how she's been mayor for the past four years? Well, she shouldn't be rewarded with another four years. On the other hand, does anyone believe that Rahman is going to be better? I have heard a theory that some folks will vote for Rahman, not because they like her better than Bass, but because they think she'll be even worse and it could trigger a recall pretty quickly. But I hedge that, too, because I have to say. But if it's a recall, then it's going to be a recall of a Democrat mayor. And then who would be in place would be likely a more conservative. I mean, it would still have to be somebody next to their name for the recall. I don't know. I mean, not all Democrats are cut from the same cloth as these two. I totally agree with you. That's what's got people so upset. But when you're 70% Democrat, you can't say, oh, we've got to get rid of her and now recall Nithya Raman so we can put in Spencer Pratt. Right. No, I don't know. That's not going to work. I don't think it's going to work either. I don't. Recalls are very difficult. And expensive. And expensive. I have heard Pratt voters saying, I want Nithya Raman so that we can just blow it all up.
00:14:13
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:14:14
Speaker 1: Not that there's necessarily this... scheme for a recall but rather let's let her be awful let's let her make this terrible so that people will kind of snap back to yeah the exact opposite of whatever she is then in in uh when are we voting again 2030 yeah yeah 2030 i know 2030 that's why i'm depressed about it me too because i don't anticipate things will get better and i don't know if we can afford for them to get worse so it's just a very scary time Hey, imagine finding out somebody dumped explosives or even radioactive waste outside your back door. That would be a bummer. Then imagine being told that we still need Congress to decide if we should figure out who did that. The poison's been sitting there for generations. The government response? They went on vacation.
00:15:05
Speaker 2: Why?
00:15:05
Speaker 1: That's next. Monks and Merrill. KFI AM 640. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
00:15:10
Speaker 2: You're listening to Monks and Merrill On Demand from KFI AM 640.
00:15:17
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us. We do appreciate you being a part of the program. Remember, if you haven't, you need to just go ahead and follow the podcast on the iHeartRadio app. Never miss a moment of our brilliance. And we get an awful lot of feedback on the talkbacks, too, about just how brilliant we are. In fact, it's fair to say most everyone always agrees with us. Did you see this alert? We had another small earthquake. We did? Did you feel it? I didn't feel it. A small earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of three and a half. 3.5 has struck roughly 18.6 miles southwest of Dana Point. Okay. So that's just the latest. So I didn't feel it. Three plus shaker. It's coming. It's coming. We got to find a seismologist that'll come on the show and tell us when we're all going I mean, we've had a few good scientists on, and they do tell us that we can't tell you that. We don't know. I think they're holding back. Here's what I think is happening. Let me put on my Tim Conway Jr. conspiracy hat for a minute. I think they know exactly what's going to happen. And I think that they are advising people who have a whole lot of money. And I think they're intentionally telling us that, well, we just don't know. How could we possibly know when it's going to happen? But they know when it's going to happen. So when you start seeing all the helicopters flying out of here, you're going to know an earthquake is coming. Yeah, somebody's leaving. Because the seismologists have told them, okay, it's going to happen. Yeah. On October 21st. And then the rest of us are just going to be like, duper duper well, couldn't have known it was coming. Yeah. That's what's happening. We just have to prep. I told you I was reading Reddit today because I was looking at those squirrel splooters.
00:16:47
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:16:48
Speaker 1: And I saw another thread on
the LA Reddit page asking, anybody out there thinking they need to be prepping for the El Nino? Do you want to have extra supplies in your house? Do you want to have extra cash in your house? I feel like this is something that you could do concurrently, right? Yes. You can kind of prepare for the earthquake and prepare for any... Let me tell you something. We just had the hottest summer. They announced it today, the National Weather Service, the hottest summer in LA history. And El Nino hasn't even really picked up its steam yet. No. So it's going to be rainy and nasty, coastal flooding, erosion, and all that. Speaking of nasty, did you happen to see the story about... I guess they've been dumping a bunch of DDT and other crud Off the waters between LA and Catalina Island. DDT. Wasn't that Jake the Snake Roberts move in the WWF back in the 80s? It was. You are correct. But it was also the bug spray that basically was killing everybody off, too.
00:17:46
Speaker 3: Oh.
00:17:46
Speaker 1: That's the bad stuff, yeah. And so that actually got into the marine sediment, and it's moving through our different food sources. Because, you know, the big fish eats the little fish, and the little fish eats the big fish, and then we eat the big fish, and so on and so forth. Okay. David Valentine is a professor at UCSB, a professor of earth science. Professor, before we get into Congress dragging their feet on this, because it sounds like this has actually been a problem for a while, how worried should people be that we actually have toxic waste sitting offshore somewhere?
00:18:18
Speaker 3: Well, I think that– well, first, thank you very much for having me. Of course.
00:18:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, and to sort of dive into that concern issue, it's disturbing. There's no doubt that– Nope. You know, we had a hard time connecting to him. That's why we were just kind of running our mouths there for a couple of minutes. His call just dropped. And we've lost him. So I think we're going to have to reschedule that because the segment's almost over already.
00:18:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:18:48
Speaker 1: Maybe we can see if he can join us tomorrow. Yeah, let's try to work this out tomorrow. Because I actually do like this. Yeah, we've been wanting to talk to him. In the meantime, don't eat any fish. Well, we don't know that for sure. That's why we wanted to ask him. You're toast. Yeah, but you're a dummy. I want to talk to an expert from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Not a dropout of Grand Valley State. Joke's on you. They wouldn't let me in. But do you think you should be prepping? Are you prepping for the earthquake or the El Nino?
00:19:23
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:19:24
Speaker 1: And I don't know what to do. Should I just get like a 24-pack of water? And I don't want to go crazy. I don't. Here's my mindset on this. I did two months ago buy one of those wind-to-charge weather radios. and it's sitting next to my bed right now. Because my- The guy on Reddit has
that. He says, I got one of these things. I got a wind-up radio. It's wind-up, but also- solar charged. Does it get KFI? It does. That was the first thing I did as I checked. It's got KFI. But it's also got the different weather stations on it. So that's next to my bed. It also has a flashlight. My logic is this. If I'm in an earthquake and I'm buried in rubble, I have to have something within arm's reach, right? If I'm in an earthquake and I'm not buried in rubble, then... It's not like I'm going to walk out to the kitchen and get my water. That's right.
00:20:12
Speaker 3: Right?
00:20:12
Speaker 1: So my thought process is what I need to be able to do is have my phone and a way to charge my phone nearby and then a way to alert people that I'm here. So that's what I thought. Being buried in rubble changes the whole dynamic, of course. Yeah. But if we're not buried in rubble but the region has been hit hard– And we are suffering the consequences of that maybe through not the rubble, but the power might be out. Yeah, definitely. Those sorts of things. Runs on the groceries. If I have to, I'll drink a little bit of pool water to keep me going until I... What about pee? When things get... I'm not even going to say desperate. When things get, you know, parched, then yes. That's when you step up and you start going full water.
00:20:54
Speaker 3: World on things.
00:20:54
Speaker 1: Does that even work, though? I thought it doesn't help. Why don't you try this next weekend and come back on Monday and let us know, Jesse? That's your homework, okay, buddy? I'll film it for socials. Why? Is there a concern there's no nutrients? I think so. How much in the way of nutrients do you have in water, Jesse? It's about hydration, my friend. I don't know. Should we be stomping these splooting squirrels and freezing them just in case we need meat? Get back on track. Last week, you heard from Altadena residents who say Sacramento should give them time to rebuild the community they lost. Terrible. Today, the other side says protecting Altadena from developers could actually keep some Altadenans from ever getting home. I don't know. You wrote it. I'm going to have to fact check that on the other side of the plate. I don't think I've ever heard that. Altadenans? You said Altadenans. You did say Denons. I did, but I like to be a little fancy on the end of these. Altadenians? People in Altadena. How about that? Altadenans. Anyway, who gets to decide what the recovery looks like in Altadena?
00:21:56
Speaker 2: You're listening to Monks and Merrill on demand from KFI AM 640.
00:22:02
Speaker 1: Available anywhere on the iHeartRadio app. It is Monks and Merrill. I'm Michael Monks alongside Chris Merrill. So glad to have you with us, too, on this hot, hot Monday across Southern California. We talked late last week about this situation unfolding in Altadena after Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1090. which temporarily shields that part of L.A. County from state laws that make it easier to split residential lots and build small multifamily projects. We heard that residents there are concerned that as they rebuild Altadena, it won't look like what it used to look like before the Big Eaton fire. Yeah, they want the single-family homes, the sort of all-American family-type setting, right? That they've had in the past. They're worried about speculative development, developers coming in. BlackRock is going to buy it all up. That's right.
00:22:47
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:22:47
Speaker 1: An organization called California YIMBY. I've had them on before. YIMBY stands for yes in my backyard. We've had them on before. Have we had them on this program too? Yes, we have. My old Saturday night show. Nobody cares. That hundreds of people heard over the course of years. Anyway. Heard by dozens around the world. Yeah. California YIMBY argues that the law removes options. that could help cash-strapped homeowners finance their own return. We talked about this too. What if you want to get rid of this property? What if you're at your wit's end and you want to dispatch your property and hand it off to somebody else? Does this limit your options? Well, Matthew Lewis is with California Yimby. He joins us on the phone now. Matthew, thanks so much for being with us. Who do you think gets hurt by this law?
00:23:36
Speaker 3: Thanks so much guys for having me. And I, just to be clear, I think everybody in the world listens to your show.
00:23:43
Speaker 1: They listen to this one. We were joking about our old week. We came from the weekend. We were on the bench. We were six man for a while.
00:23:50
Speaker 3: No, I appreciate you guys asking this specific question. I think the first thing is to acknowledge like the extreme trauma of losing your house and whether that's through a disaster or foreclosure or all the ways that people can lose their homes in the United States. I mean, it's, It's one of the most traumatic things you can have happen to you. And so the idea of, you know, well, how do we make sure that we make people whole again is actually really critical. I think the government has really a central role to play in answering that question. I do think, though, that, you know, when you look down in the fine print of what's happening, it's not just in California. It's really across the western United States. with the growing risk of extreme events like wildfires, and then in some places, floods and hurricanes, and we have this heat wave. I mean, there's a pattern here. You can call it climate change if you want to. Regardless of how you feel about that, these extreme events are becoming more frequent and more destructive. And right alongside that, I'm sure you guys have heard throughout Southern California, we have it all over the state, there's this insurance crisis. And this bears directly on this question. What's happening is that as more homes are being destroyed or severely damaged in extreme events, the insurance
industry is pulling back because it cannot afford to pay everybody off for the amount of damages. The fires in Southern California that included the Alpadena disaster were something like on the order of over $ 50 billion of losses. Just to give that perspective, the state of California's entire budget is around $ 280 billion.
00:25:18
Speaker 1: So this was like.
00:25:21
Speaker 3: Almost like a fifth of the entire California state budget lost in 48 hours. And the reason that's so important is that a lot of people who have homes in these areas, and California is everywhere experiencing this right now, if you look at your insurance policy, you'll find often that the replacement value of your home is actually less than the cost of rebuilding it. And this is incredibly important for people to look at because if it costs you a million dollars to rebuild in Altadena and you're only insured for $ 650, 000, and I think this is a pretty common phenomenon, where do you come up with that.
00:26:00
Speaker 1: $ 350, 000?
00:26:01
Speaker 3: What if you're on a fixed income? What if you're like a government worker and you don't have like giant salary increases or bonuses the way they do in the private sector? You're kind of left out to dry.
00:26:12
Speaker 1: And what happened.
00:26:13
Speaker 3: Hang on, man.
00:26:14
Speaker 1: Hold on, hold on. Matthew Lewis from California EMB joining us right now as we talk about rebuilding in Altadena. Now, to be clear, Gavin Newsom did sign SB 1090, which does put a pause in the high-density building until 2030. Yeah, yeah. But that said, is this— I mean, is your concern here about there not being enough density, or is your concern about limiting sort of the victim's options after a fire or another natural disaster strikes. What is kind of the idea behind your position on why this was a bad idea to sign this temporary restriction on higher density builds?
00:26:51
Speaker 3: Limiting density restricts the options of people to rebuild. And what we've seen in the rest of the state of California is that most people never rebuild. There was an incredible piece of journalism that was done by Liam Dillon. He used to be with the Los Angeles Times. He's with Politico now last fall. He went and pulled building permits for all the destructive fires in the state going back 10 years. And what he found was that 62% of Californians never rebuild their homes at all. One of the major reasons for that is that they don't have the money to rebuild homes. It is more expensive to build a house now in California than at any time in history. If you built a home in, you know, a lot of these homes were built in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. Building costs back then were significantly lower.
00:27:34
Speaker 1: Than they are now.
00:27:35
Speaker 3: And so when you combine the underinsurance problem with the fact that it's more expensive to build now, unless you're already rich. it's going to be really hard for you to rebuild one house on one lot
after a fire. It's much easier if you can build two or three or four and use those other two or three or four units to finance your own house. What 1090 does is it takes away that option from owners who don't have all the money in the world.
00:28:05
Speaker 1: Matthew, we've got about a minute left, and one of the concerns expressed by people who are glad the governor signed this piece of legislation restricting that multifamily development is evacuation routes. We actually just heard a similar argument in Woodland Hills, blocking a development there near a golf course. Save the mountain lions and protect our evacuation routes. I mean, this is an area that was hit significantly by fire. I mean, are those legitimate arguments?
00:28:31
Speaker 3: I think that there is a fair bit of legitimacy to that. I do think, though, if you guys want to do another episode on a related topic, the state of California's transportation departments has set up so many Californians for horrible, horrible circumstances because we don't have good transit. We don't have good ways to get out. You guys saw the traffic jams at Pacific Palisades. People left their cars on the road, and they had to bulldoze the cars out of the way to get the fire trucks up to Pacific Palisades. That is a failure of a transportation system. That's not a problem of housing. Those were all single-family houses, and they still couldn't get out.
00:29:04
Speaker 1: Good point.
00:29:05
Speaker 3: So I don't know that adding 10% more homes to an area worsens a transportation disaster that's decades in the making. The state of California has to get off its duff on solving these transportation issues, and it's not the job of a single-family homeowner or a duplex owner or really builders in general to solve that problem. It's the job of our transportation departments.
00:29:23
Speaker 1: Matthew Lewis from California YIMBY. We will definitely talk again. I appreciate you taking the time for us today. Thanks so much for having me on.
00:29:30
Speaker 3: And again, everybody listen to your show.
00:29:33
Speaker 1: Thanks so much.
00:29:33
Speaker 3: Thank you guys.
00:29:34
Speaker 1: Wait a minute. Are you telling me the Palisades fire wouldn't have been so bad if only we had buses running through there? I don't know. If only we had a train. Because that's a really great idea. Oh, there's a firing inferno. Let's get in the tunnel. It was one of the scariest things to see up there. Of course it was. I'm not getting on a train where I can get mugged on my way out. No, no, no. Evacuation routes will now involve muggings. Everyone on the Metro out of the new Palisades station. That was we had one on the John Cobalt show. And Deborah remembers this as the fire was really starting in the Palisades. There was a caller who was stuck in one of those traffic jams and was on the air with us. as they all decided to get out of their cars and run.
00:30:21
Speaker 3: It was horrifying.
00:30:21
Speaker 1: As they were kind of being told, like the police were not, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. And when I went up there to cover it, really after the fire had gone through, just kind of looking at the aftermath, those cars sitting there and that road all burnt out was very walking dead.
00:30:36
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:30:37
Speaker 1: Apocalyptic. Oh, that was. Dystopian. Of all, I mean, tragedy to see the houses, but it was particularly scary to see that burned out traffic jam. The people who just had to, Bail. They bailed. Well, I remember watching on TV because, John, we were on the air live covering that and watching people just leaving their cars and running for their lives. Now, Debra, if only we had a train that was operating every 15 or 20 minutes. I don't think that's what he meant. But I would like some clarity on it. I don't think that's what he meant. He's not suggesting that. More light rail in the Palisades. Killing me. L.A. created a tax that's designed to make expensive property sales help solve the housing crisis. It's the mansion tax, right? Now you're going to have a chance to vote to suspend that tax for some of your neighbors. Now, why do we need to suspend a tax that our leaders told us was such a great idea? That's next on Monks and Merrill. KFI AM 640 live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. This is KFI On Demand. You've been listening to Monks and Merrill. Hear the show live weekdays from noon to 3 on KFI AM 640 and anytime On Demand on the iHeartRadio app.