By Antonio Ray Harvey, California Black Media

The Community Housing Working Group hosted a briefing on April 23 at Cafeteria 15L in Sacramento.  Discussions focused on how the housing crisis in California affects Black and Brown communities and explored ways to provide low-income families and individuals with affordable housing.

Tia Boatman Patterson, CEO and President of the California Communities Reinvestment Corporation, said “entry-level housing” is not available as it was in the past, adding that affordable units were a major point of entry into homeownership for many families in the Black community.

“My mother bought her first house when I was in junior high. It was an 850-square foot, two-bedroom and one-bathroom house in 1978. That house cost $30,000,” Boatman-Patterson said.

“A woman working part-time at JCPenney was able to afford that house. We don’t build these types of housing now. We do not build entry-level homeownership,” she added.

The Community Housing Working Group is a collection of diverse community organizations from across California working together to address housing challenges in their communities. The organization believes that solving the affordable housing crisis will require creating enough smaller, lower-cost, multi-family homes located near jobs, transit, and good schools.

The briefing included a panel discussion titled, “Exclusionary Zoning: A Look Back and a Path Forward.” Boatman-Patterson participated in that session along with Henry “Hank” Levy, Treasurer-Tax Collector for Alameda County, and Noerena Limón, consultant, Unidos U.S., and Board Member of California Housing Finance Agency.

Trending

OP-ED: Assemblymember Mia Bonta Says No to Closing Schools, No to Cutting School Resources

Boatman-Patterson, a former Associate Director for Housing, Treasury and Commerce in the Office of Management and Budget for the Biden Administration, started her presentation by highlighting how exclusionary single-family zoning is contributing to continued segregation of California communities.

She said that single-family zoning originated in the Bay Area city of Berkeley in 1916.

“By creating single-family zoning and having fenced-off communities, you were able to exclude the ‘others,’” Boatman-Patterson said. “It really was a method to exclude — what they called ‘economic segregation’ — but that was a guise for racial segregation. Single-family zoning, along with redlining, became a systemic approach to exclude based on affordability.”

Title VIII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1968 — commonly known as the Fair Housing Act of 1968 – is the U.S. federal legislation that protects individuals and families from discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. It was passed to open the doors to affordable housing.

In 1968, 65.9% of White families were homeowners, a rate that was 25% higher than the 41.1% of Black families that owned their homes, according to National Low-Income Housing Coalition. Today, those figures have hardly changed in the Black community, although White homeownership has increased five percentage points to 71.1%.

Boatman Patterson said the rate has not changed in Black and Brown communities because financing for affordable entry-level homes is almost nonexistent. The homeownership disparities contribute to the disturbing racial wealth gap in the nation, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s October 2018 report.

“We really must align the financing with the actual building of units, which we haven’t necessarily done. Because of this misalignment, I think we continue to see problems,” Boatman-Patterson said.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

By California Black Media

State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SSPI) Tony Thurmond is advocating for comprehensive training for teachers in reading and math, emphasizing the urgent need to improve student academic outcomes across California.

On April 24, during testimony in the Senate Education Committee, Thurmond backed Senate Bill (SB)1115, which aims to provide evidence-backed educator training. The committee passed the bill with a 7-0 vote.

Thurmond pointed out to the committee that existing funding for educator training in literacy and math only covers about one-third of California’s educator workforce. SB 1115, Thurmond said, would fund the remaining two-thirds.

“This is an issue of moral clarity,” according to Thurmond. “In the fifth-largest economy in the world, and in an age when we have access to substantial brain science about how students learn, it should be unacceptable to train only some educators in the best strategies to teach essential skills.”

SB 1115 incorporates multiple research-backed methods, including phonics, and it aligns with the California ELA/ELD Framework, which encourages biliteracy and multilingualism.

Thurmond emphasized the moral imperative behind the push for enhanced training by noting that 70% of incarcerated adults struggle with reading or are illiterate.

“Every child should feel supported as they learn to read and every teacher should feel confident in their ability to support students’ foundational literacy,” Thurmond said. “SB 1115 is about ensuring that all children have the opportunity to read by third grade, and that all children have a shot at the life-changing outcomes that come from early literacy.”

The next step for SB 1115 is a hearing in the Senate Appropriations Committee on May 6.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

By California Black Media

Physician retention in California has decreased over the years for women doctors of color, a report by the Physicians for a Healthy California stated.

According to the report, women physicians are more likely to experience burnout than their male counterparts, a trend that worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report states that Black and Latino physicians are underrepresented in the healthcare industry. Only 2.8% of physicians are Black and 5.5% are Latino across the state of California.

It also noted that women doctors of color are often assigned to serve in vulnerable and under-resourced communities.

“It is critical for health care organizations to implement effective strategies focused on the retention of this important group of clinicians,” the report stated.

Women doctors of color face career dissatisfaction, contributing to the low retention rates in California’s healthcare industry. The burnout particularly experienced by female doctors of color stems from workplace harassment and perceived lack of value at work.

Additionally, moral injury was another key factor driving women physicians of color away from the workforce. Unlike burnout, moral injury is defined as “the betrayal of what’s right by someone who holds legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation.”

Currently, two of the nine California regions used in the framework of the report — the Inland Empire and San Joaquin Valley — have less than 50 primary care doctors. Physician shortages are projected to get worse over the next few years.

By 2030, the report indicates, the demand for physicians will exceed the supply by at least 12%.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post