Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson        Red Bluff Daily News 8/26/2025

    RV glitches, rent control, redistricting

There’s not much to report from the campgrounds this week. That’s aside from running out of propane (runs the frig but it stayed cold til we refilled, and we didn’t cook); the slide-out quit, well, sliding out (put us back to one of us sitting for the other to walk by, like our old ‘84 Southwind); the electric just quit, which meant no lights, water pump, or refrigeration due to the lack of sparking for the propane—or my CPAP for nighttime breathing. Omitting the details, all returned to normal functioning thanks to a mobile RV repairman, and remembering to push the button to re-engage the batteries—whew.

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It’s astounding to see “rent control” being considered for mobile home parks, aka “trailer parks” or “mobile estates.” Rent control has never, in all its iterations and locations, produced positive results on balance, for either property owners or renters. Owners have little incentive to increase supply of rental units, or to spend limited funds on upkeep; renters ultimately suffer from lack of supply and deteriorating conditions.

This is stated from some authority and experience in the real estate field, as well as “lived experience” working in SoCal’s Santa Monica in the 1980s. In one of the earliest misguided uses of rent control, all of the above predictable side effects occurred.

People started following moving vans to see if someone was vacating an apartment to get a heads-up that it might be available. Such are the perverse incentives when the “do-gooders,” the quasi-socialists, think they can succeed in allocating supplies of, well, anything better than the market system, rather than allowing those with the resources to build more housing at market rates.

Rather than try to put a cap on mobile home park rents, there might be locations for more “mobile estates” if there is sufficient demand. Could the problem be that doing anything having to do with housing in California is fraught with regulations, limitations, taxes, and the endless naysayers, busybodies and “NIMBY-ists” (Not In My Back Yard folks)? 

Would that Red Bluff and Tehama County still had good-paying timber and resource-related jobs providing workers with wages to afford existing housing—oh, that was decades ago when the fanatics deemed the spotted owl to be the only concern governing forest policy. Too bad.

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Congressman Doug LaMalfa has informed constituents of the need for all of us to weigh in and prepare to fight, and vote, against the wrong-headed, shamefully partisan and, basically, illegal redistricting scheme being pushed on voters for a special November election. Among objectionable aspects is the crass, self-serving way Democrats, including Gov. Newsom, have carved out districts blatantly designed to eliminate Newsom’s critics, and Republican congressional opponents like LaMalfa and Kevin Kiley.

This violates the California Constitution by 1) holding hearings on a bill less than 30 days after introduction; 2) drawing maps without authority and contrary to Constitutional requirements; 3) drawing mid-decade maps which are prohibited; and 4) changing the law requiring 131 days notice for special elections on Constitutional Amendments. (credit Mark Meuser)

Assembly and State Senate Republicans have written Attorney General Pam Bondi asking the DOJ to investigate “corruption and violation of federal law” tied to Newsom’s redistricting scheme:

“In recent days alarming allegations have surfaced that may explain why state legislators are proceeding forward with such a blatantly unconstitutional and politically unpopular proposal. Specifically, various media outlets are reporting that several members of the state legislature may have not only engaged in drawing the lines of these maps to benefit themselves politically but may be providing their vote for these proposals on the condition that the maps are drawn to benefit themselves.

“As just one example, KCRA reported that one powerful senator ‘had one of the new, targeted districts drawn specifically for him in exchange for his support of the redistricting plan.’”

You might rightly suspect that news coverage (that’s you, AP) has little interest in the above criticisms of the redistricting plot, while they engage in thinly-veiled booster-ism for Newsom’s national profile and presidential aspirations (See Saturday’s puff piece “Governor’s National Profile Soars With Latest Trump Fight”).

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Concerning Santa Monica where, as a restaurant manager, I had the first of numerous encounters with the homeless refuse of society depositing their filth and having to be physically thrown out: “A group of residents and business owners in a tony California beach enclave that’s been overrun by homeless junkies is paying to ship local vagrants out of town—and claims both sides are thrilled. 

"Sidewalks in the chic Los Angeles suburb of Santa Monica have become riddled with tents while bums ransack its shops and boutiques and shoot up in the parks in broad daylight” (New York Post). Free bus and plane tickets may be just what many of LA’s homeless hordes prefer, compared to crime, drugs and squalor.