This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern.

This is Unite and Heal America on the show with KABC 790. I’m delighted to have on the program a great guest today senators are Bob Wieckowski, who represents the Northern California district around Fremont, state senators in California represented about a million people more than our congress people.

So, Senator, you have a wealth of experience, having served as a Senator for seven years, and also in the State Assembly. Before that, you’ve chaired a number of committees, including one on Environmental Quality. You’ve worked on housing, judiciary, and a number of others. There’s a lot of California issues I’d like to talk about. But first, I’d like to get your take on the historic inauguration and what it means for the country, California. And if you tell us a little bit about Vice President Harris, and I understand that you’ve worked with her?

Yes, Vice President Harris, then Attorney General Harris helped me out on one of my bills on bank levies. You know, I’ve done a lot of bills on a bank or wage garnishment, excuse me have a bank levy bill that’s in law now and wage garnishment, to try to reduce the amount of money that creditors can take out of your check, because basically, they could take 25% every time and it’s really exacerbates homelessness.

And chronixx knew she was instrumental in throwing her support behind it and saying this was an important bill. And that always helps out when somebody from the either the governor or administrator, and it was she was supported by all the Democratic Senate caucus, we all got supporting her when she was running for president and vice president. So she understands the challenges that we have here in California. And everybody’s just so proud of her.

I mean, the you know, the the news is taken care of telling her story. So she’s a she’s somebody that makes us feel more comfortable in California when we’re trying to effectuate national public policy. She knows where we’re coming from. If they say, oh, Senator Wieckowski is calling on an arbitration matter, she may take the phone call, because she says so.

Yeah, I know Wieckowski is, he’s the nuts and bolts guy on this on this issue. So what can you say about the hope that I think so many people are feeling right now that we’re going to get back to business?

I mean, I, you know, I have the greatest respect for my Republican colleagues, and Democrats and Republicans throughout the state. And, and I’m an institution guy, I like to make the institution work.

And if it’s not working, if the courts aren’t working, or the legislature is not working, let’s put our energy in in a polite, dignified way, and make it work. And I don’t think that we’ve had that for the last four years. And I think President Biden, Vice President Harris, brings it up, brings that there.

So it’s a different tone, very difficult. Challenges. I mean, 50-50 split for guys like me, and all the legislators throughout the country know, that’s a tight little parameters that you have to try to get public policy affected, but were filled with hope today.

Well, it certainly was a great day for our country to see our first woman sworn in as vice president and, and an African American and Asian background. So I know a number of my co workers and I were very excited about it. And the historic first and what a great role model for young women in California and across the country and across the

world. It’s I mean, it’s hard for us to put figures on it. I mean, I represent a district who’s saying a million people, I think my numbers are 56%, Asian Pacific Islanders, I have a huge in Indo community from India. And but a lot of Pakistanis, and folks, 54% of folks, and Chinese and Vietnamese and all that, and the little girls and in high school and elementary school that now see the vice president United States is just it’s just wonderful. It’s wonderful for our state and for the country.

Right. So pivoting to the environmental issues, which I know you spend a lot of time on in the Senate and before that in the in the assembly. What do you expect the current administration to do along those on that front and and what should California be pushing to get them to do?

Well, I think, you know, there’s several programs. I mean, one of the things that that we’ve done in California is we have our renewable portfolio standards standards, the electricity that Southern Edison and PG and E and Sempra produce about 60%, from renewable sources. That doesn’t include hydro. That’s been not an accident, we have put some pressure in the last 20 years. And I will say for the big three, they’ve come through with with renewable standards.

So we’re doing more solar, we’ve brought the price of solar down, we have, we’ve developed most of the wind here before we get to offshore. So I expect the the federal administration to be working on on those products or those policies. And you know, it’s not for the detriment or anybody, it’s just saying this is clean reduces the carbon footprint. The other is the automobile emission standards. I mean, we’ve California since I was a kid, was able to have their own standards.

And now we have 18 states to follow our emission standards. And there’s been several lawsuits with the previous administration about what we should be able to do that, I think, I think, folks are gonna be able to follow California standards. I hope for the industry, there’s just one standard, you know, it’s better for car manufacturers that they have one emission standards, and we get increased mileage from each vehicle, they’re cleaner, and, and those things occur.

The others are, you know, the, the in the weeds is, is stationary sources, the polluters in our state, how do we reduce the amount of pollution that we have, and we’ve taken the cap and trade program. And I’ve spent a lot of time being a critic of that, because I really want it to be robust. I want, you know, the world talks about ambition, climate ambition that folks need. And people look to California, particularly the last four years, when the United States left the climate, the Paris Climate Agreement, they look to us for leadership.

And sometimes I don’t think we’re doing enough whether it’s in the fires and doing prescribed burns and prevention, reducing the amount of fuel we have, or with the cap and trade program, really making sure that these polluters pay the price of of polluting or change the mechanics, whether making cement or refining oil and all that and reduce the amount of carbon that they’re emitting into the, to the atmosphere.

Well, one of the ideas that you had in a prior bill, which unfortunately, didn’t pass, it was SB 775, which kind of I think, puts the blueprint in place for border adjustment tax, which is something that I was a proponent of, which I think is fair. And it was in my understanding a carbon tax based upon import.

So if the Chinese are using a lot of carbon to create a prop a product, that they would face a tax when it hits the US, which would then make it fair for our manufacturers, who shouldn’t be the only ones playing on the playing field of low emissions. This way, if the Chinese are going to have high emissions, they pay attacks, and it’s a good way to incentivize good behavior around the entire planet. Right?

I mean, we, we don’t want our industries, our manufacturers to be adversely affected because another state or another country is polluting, is allowing their polluters to undercut because you know, what pollution is? You’re not calculating the cost of production, right?

If you if you calculate the cost of production, you say, Oh, that’s a diesel engine, you gotta pay some more money for that. That was a Yeah, that was the way that the way that we dealt with having incentivizing new technologies to come on board to reduce those and having our manufacturers and our polluters do that. I think we have pretty clean oil refineries.

It’s a dirty business, right. But But if all the oil refineries in the whole world, were at the same level as California, we’d see the emissions just drop immediately, because some of them are, some of them are in the 1930s.

Right. And I think, you know, it’s an idea. So I think that the federal government I know John Kerry’s interested in trying to figure out how do I level the playing field in throughout the throughout country, so a border adjustment tax may be Hoover’s pay.

But to me, one of the most elegant ways to deal with the problem, and it also deals with it globally, because it’s a it doesn’t make sense for the US and Europe to be the only ones focusing on this problem. And having all the other countries pulled like crazy, because we’re not going to solve the problem. We have to have everybody pulling together on this one.

Right and it what it says it says to Developing nations like India and China, you know, five years ago John Kerry was telling them you cannot build all these coal processing facilities, energy facilities, you gotta go natural gas or go with go with solar or wind, and they’ve done it, they’ve done it in this last five years, where we know this the worst of the worst that can go in.

So that’s a that, unfortunately, you know, Governor Brown had a different idea. I mean, I had a cap and trade program that gave a dividend to every citizen, it just, you know, it says, when we made money from the, from the taxes that we did, there was a rebate that went to every citizen. So clearly the poorest of us that you know, that $500 or $200, whatever the amount was really compensated them because they have a smaller carbon footprint than somebody who’s more fluid.

Okay, we’re gonna be going into a break. And I just wanted to remind our listeners that I’m here with State Senator Bob Wieckowski. And we’re talking about the environment as well, as we’ll be talking about homelessness, come back, and we’ll get to talk with him about these issues going forward.

This is Matt Matern, and I’m back here with our guest, Senator Bob Wieckowski. And talking about issues facing California, one of the big issues facing California is homelessness. And this is a big and important issue here in LA, but also in Northern California, there’s a proposal I’d like to talk to you about.

It’s to give money to homeowners who would take in a homeless person, kind of along the lines of the foster care program, and the homeowner would be vetted, the background check and there’d be a homeless person would also go through a screening process to make sure they would be a good fit for the program.

And the hope is that we could house 1,000s of unhoused people into vacant bedrooms we have around the state, and it could be done much more cost effectively than 550 to $750,000 a unit that it currently is costing the government to build units to house homeless people. So I think this is an issue, I wanted to see what you thought about this type of initiative, and whether it would be something you might be willing to sponsor?

Well, I’ve I’ve read the initiative, and I think it has obvious merits. I mean, you know, when like, indicated, when you’re spending five $600,000, to build an affordable housing unit, we’ve got all kinds of bills that are coming back this year, to spend more money and to increase fees so that we could get a bundle of money to build some more units and the affordable housing, I say industry or lobbyists all like to own their own 60 unit facility. When you look around, you realize that there’s people are aging and kids are moving out that there are a lot of empty bedrooms.

I mean, the the bill, and it’s it’s fundamental. Concept, identify said, it’s not that there’s not places for people to sleep, it’s just this, this person is in the four bedroom house living by themselves, that person’s in a three bedroom house living by themselves, how do you match them together?

So I think the bill has merits I’m going to talk to Scott wiener. He’s the Chair of the Housing Committee in the Senate about it. You know, there’s there’s obvious there’s some questions, because, you know, we’re all new ideas. Do we want somebody that was homeless yesterday that come into my house tomorrow?

You know, there’s there’s that transition, and is there somebody who’s already been in a facility maybe comes to my house, and that person off the street goes in this and every homeless person has a different story. Now, we’ve got a guy here that was in the newspaper, he’s teaching at a community college, and he just lost his apartment. He’s homeless, and he’s teaching classes.

So we’ve got a look at all these ideas, Matt, because our problems not getting any better. I mean, last year, the governor devoted his entire state of the state to homelessness, and what did we get done? I mean, COVID Yet I get that so there’s there’s an excuse but it really these low cost opportunities and having people volunteer that says, Okay, I want I’m, it’s a problem. I’m willing to take whatever the stipend is, and let somebody live with me for a year or two.

Right. Well, I see opportunity to for people who are lower income, but have a house that is less than fully occupied, that this would be an opportunity for them to rent a room essentially, and get a decent amount of money. He for that and serve the community as well.

And we probably have lots of former social workers and people who are drug counselors, who would have some ability to work with the homeless populatio who could who could benefit from this as well, which that’d be as well, we know that all those services that are provided, because sometimes people have homelessness is just one of the ills that people are experiencing.

I was talking to some home affordable housing advocates, and they were letting me know that 1/3 of people now, who are the extremely low income, can we have low income, very low income and extremely low income, the bottom of the bottom, the extreme, a third of this extremely low income are homeowners, their purity, they bought their house, they worked, you know that, you know, 7080 years old, they bought their house when it was 25 grand, they paid for it, but now they’re extremely low income.

So what you’re talking about that that’s a person that could use a little extra coin, just to live just to live there, this hanging on with this, you know, the pandemic and, and all the things that our modern society is putting on us. And I was surprised by that statistic. So I think that there may be an appetite for that.

Right? There are a lot of seniors out there that are just getting Social Security, who were who are just barely making ends meet barely enough to, to pay for food and medicine. And so this would be a situation where we obviously we need the homeless people.

And that’s the process and the procedure that the bill sets forth is that, that the social service agencies will make sure that the person that they’re placing meets criteria, that they’re sober, that they’re not, you know, having problems that would would not work in, in a home environment, right.

I mean, I put that I put that in what’s you know, I’ve done a lot of work with accessory dwelling units at us, and you know, some of these garage conversions are cost 150,000 bucks, and I say to the affordable housing advocates, why would you not find three homeowners and convert three units and put people that are in your facility there and take the homeless and put them into, you know, the 60 unit facility, and there’s, there is a resistance from the advocates.

So I think I mean, I think it’s a good idea, I’m going to talk with the chairman of the Housing Committee, because we’re going to be, you know, everybody wants to do something, but nobody wants to take a risk or try something that’s a little unconventional, it’s easiest thing to do is to write somebody a check and say, Thank you for housing this person, right, it just has a lot less overhead costs than then building units, which in I mean, down in LA, we passed the Triple H measure, I think it was about four years ago, and a couple billion dollars. And I believe it’s less than 500 people less than 500 units and that house had been created in that period of time. So it’s just so slow to build houses in the state of California.

And what we’re not doing is we’re not capturing the entrepreneurial ship or the of individual people that say they want to do it, you know, get together $60 million to build this, find that, you know, three acres and put in the services and all that that’s the Cadillac, that’s, that’s great, but, but if I’m unhoused, and I get a room, I’m much better off, right.

And then or if I’m if I’m in a facility, and I move into a room, and then somebody, some maybe some family or a single parent with a child can move into the affordable housing unit that I have. And you know, the folks that handle those things should be able to make it work.

Right, that would be a good thing, too, that you’ve you’ve basically taken somebody who might have, you know, gotten off the street, and now has gotten a job and could transition to a unit in somebody’s house. Because they’ve shown they’re established. There, they’ve got a job, things of that nature, and could be a good tenant, essentially.

Right. And if they have all the support services, they’re used to doing the support services, and they can do them on their own. They’re not like people, sometimes they want to build them in the same building because they say we want people to have access to these support services, which are are good, you know, I mean, who would have thought that the governor’s that project, home key program to buy hotels and motels and, and and fix them up in house people?

You know, evidently, they have 6000 people in them so far. I mean, and you know, not we all know, Los Angeles, we’re in Northern California, there’s nice hotels, and then there’s these sort of after 40 years or 50 years Are they they’ve provided their services for the vacationer. But now that building can be used for something else.

And it’s, it’s one of those things, when you think about it, you think, why weren’t counties doing that? Why was an LA County and Alameda County in San Francisco and Sam, all these doing that, you know, during the last recession, buying that, anticipate? We had a homeless problem 10 years ago, right? Why weren’t they doing it? So all ideas are worth considering and seeing where the places and how that gets worked out? I think it’s, it’s worth considering.

We appreciate your openness to that idea. And, you know, we should, we should be working across the spectrum to find solutions to this. And I’ve worked with a couple of different organizations down here and in Cal in Southern California, that work with homeless youth as well as, you know, all spectrums of the population.

And, and, you know, I know that they’ve got one program called the host home program, which essentially is this program, but smaller scale. So, and they’ve placed a number of people like this, and it’s, and it’s worked out pretty well. So I think that it could, they could definitely roll out and scale to the whole state. So I think we’re going to break a breaking point.

We’re going to take a station ID break. This is Matt Matern, I’m on live program, Unite and Heal America. I got Senator Bob Wieckowski. Here with me. We’re talking about issues in Southern California, the environment, homelessness, coming back in a minute, KABC 790 Monday.

Back here with you, this is Matt Matern on Unite and Heal America. I’ve got Senator Bob Wieckowski here with me, and we’re talking about many issues facing California. One of them is arbitration clauses.

And we have we have a lot of companies out there that have arbitration clauses that force their workers to arbitrate their claims, rather than to be able to take them to court. And I know that you’ve been behind a number of bills related to this, and maybe you could tell us what your thoughts are, as far as for post lead legislation going forward?

Well, unfortunately, it seems like the arbitration is history makes you continue to do work after you’ve after you’ve tried to correct it. I mean, you know, I’m sure your listeners know that arbitration when it first came up was, you know, really designed for business to business, the Federal Arbitration Act was really focused on sophisticated plaintiffs and sophisticated defendants.

And now we fast forward into a situation where you can’t get a job, sometimes you can’t start a job unless you sign a mandatory arbitration, and you’ve got mandatory arbitration is on the back of your credit card receipts. And, you know, this idea that we’re not going to clog the courts really is a one sided, one sided deal, because these, you know, if I, if I have a dispute with my credit card, I’m one guy, my credit card has 12 million or 30 million clients, and they tend to use the same arbitration companies, the same arbitrators.

So what we did a couple of years ago, you know, now you looked at those contracts, and you’d say, you gotta go, you got to go to South Dakota, and you got to apply Louisiana law to the arbitration clause. When you’re in California, you work for a California company, and you say, Who put that in?

So I did a bill a couple of years ago to knock that out and said, if you’re a California and you get to apply California law, and you get to have the arbitration in California, so last year, we did 707 of Bill, and basically what we’re finding is that the arbitration clauses said you can’t do a group arbitration like a class action suit, you had to file individually. And what happened because the arbitrator mean the employers felt like nobody would do this.

And what happened is people filed all these claims. All these little small people say, Okay, I want to go to arbitration. And what my day with the, with this dark arbitration, who knows what the we never know what the law is that they provide, because they they never disclose it. They never even have to apply the law of the state. But we found out is that the little consumer would file the arbitration and pay their half of the fee because it says in the contract, you got to pay the fee.

They pay it, and it went into this dark hole where the employer or the credit card company wouldn’t pay their half of the fee. So the arbitrator would never set the hearing. So you were just in you had to go into arbitration, and you couldn’t get out of it.

So basically, the bill said that, no, no, no, you can’t do that, if you got 30 days, from the time that you pay the fees. And if you didn’t pay if the if the defendant, the employer, or the credit card company didn’t pay it, then you had three options, you could either go to state court and get a real trial with a real judge, you could you can get a judgment, you win. Or you can, you could pay the fees and go forward with with the arbitration.

So we thought it was a, you know, a real good deal majority Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg out and Van Van eyes was, you know, a co author with me, we worked on jointly giving some accountability for workers and consumers for a way away out. And now I find out that some of the arbitrators the judges, so so to speak, they’re saying that the due date, when when your payment is is not 30 days after the first the plaintiff pays at the complainer, paces, it’s 30 days before they fit set the trial.

So people they’re trying to go around the law that we just change. And it’s it’s madness. I mean, I mean, you want to get very aggressive with these people math, I don’t know what to say. It’s just we’re trying to make it a little bit fairer for that little consumer who nobody is paying attention to.

I can always say amen to that, because I happen to be subjected to these arbitration agreements, as I’m a plaintiff’s employment attorney. So we run into these things every day. And it is just as you said, many times, employers failed to pay their arbitration fees for months. And before you had that bill, which I appreciate you putting into getting put into law, they did delay for months and months and months, and there wasn’t much you could do about it.

And and we have used your provision to help speed the process along now, I still don’t like mandatory arbitration, because quite frankly, the arbitrators who do lots of cases for the same entities and having very low rates of finding for plaintiffs, I understand there was a study done that if there were 20 or more cases going to the same arbitrator, your chances of winning with that arbitrator as a employee were 4%. Basically, the odds go to zero, if you keep you if the defendant the company keeps using the same arbitrators, they they keep rolling in the company’s favor right.

And what they do is sometimes they you know, they give you three names, and your you know, your Joe Blow you don’t know the name of an arbitrator may have I don’t know the name of your state senator for you’re gonna know the name of a private arbitrator that’s there. So it’s just the whole arena is very, very unfair, you got some high powered very well paid attorneys that are making these mandatory clauses.

As tough as they can be. And because it’s a federal law, we could only do so much in the state of California, right. I mean, I did I’m, I would love for the Congress to and the Consumer Protection Bureau to determine that arbitration clauses could per se not apply to contracts for employment, and also credit card contracts. It was just it goes back to just you know, one company suing another Google’s going after Facebook, fine. You guys can do arbitration, and they’ll go to court, right for consumer contracts and employment contracts.

Yeah, we shouldn’t have mandatory arbitration because essentially, it allows large companies to steal a little bit from a lot of people. So say, if you tell a time company that, you know is is overcharging by $10 a person? Well, that $10 To me, I’m not gonna go to arbitration for $10. But if you’re doing it to a million people, well, then that’s real money. And that’s, that’s the unfortunate problem with these arbitration clauses.

Yeah. The other thing I snuck into that bill was the reporting requirements of the arbitrators demographics, because we’re doing it for judges we have we want to know, you know, how many what, how many judges are male, how many judges are female, and we know that in the state bench, that’s about 64% men and about 66% White, but in arbitration, it’s 92%, white and 74% men.

So it’s just you know, you the idea is that we want to have a more diverse court, we should have more diverse arbitration collection so that it’s people that look like us, right people that, you know, it’s not all white guys. So that information is now required to be brought in. So we can have another look at that to say, hey, arbitration companies, we need more diversity in that in your panel.

Absolutely. And it’s it is unfortunate that we don’t have a diverse set of choices when we’re forced into arbitration. So it’s a double whammy, you’re you’re forcing a situation where you don’t get a trial in front of your peers. And then you’re forced into a venue that favors the employers versus the employees. So it couldn’t be much more unfair.

So yeah, we do hope that the Biden Harris administration takes this up, and the Congress changes it. I think there were even some Republicans that were kind of supportive of limiting arbitration clauses. And I think there were some noises regarding employment contracts and sexual harassment and things of that nature. We’re getting some traction, obviously didn’t go anywhere, this last term, but maybe we’ll get some traction, this next one.

Yeah. And we’re hopeful that the bill that we did that, that some of these are these companies that don’t pay their fees, that the planets would actually take them to court and actually get a printed decision on, you know, so we have some body of law to say, Oh, you have to apply this in California to all employment contracts, because this is the debtor have these arbitration clauses, because this is the interpretation of, you know, the judge.

I mean, it’s, it’s a glacial pace that we’re at, but we’re hoping to get some improvement. But, you know, I just scratched my head when I think of, you know, the worker that’s trying to get a job now and says, an arbitration clause, and I gotta go and all these restrictions, and you’re just desperate for a job. So you take it right here, right? It’s just the big guy beaten up the little guy again.

Yeah, well, we run across it all the time that they basically have these mandatory arbitration agreements that you have to sign if you want to get employment. So as an employee, most employees don’t have that kind of negotiating power, particularly at low it low wage jobs. I mean, if you’re coming into McDonald’s negotiating a contract at McDonald’s, they’re telling you what’s going to happen.

Right. But if you weren’t forced into the arbitration clause, and you just had a judge, you could say, Okay, I have a judge, maybe I owe 50-5,0 60-40, a little bit better than 4%. You know, it’s, it’s, that’s, that’s the deal is that, you know, we’re countries founded on this idea that if you have a dispute, you should have equal access to the courts, you should have access to get in there and have your, you know, even if it’s a 10 minute hearing, have the opportunity to state your case, and what this what your complaint is.

So that, you know, one idea I have is that there could be a checkbox to opt out of any arbitration. So so it wasn’t a mandatory situation, that the employee would have a right to check a box saying I opt out of this arbitration, which would then kind of equal the playing field if, because otherwise, they’re they’re just forced down their throats. Right. Right.

And, and, and then the employers would still benefit because some people would never see the check the box, right, they would just be in it. You know, the be they kept some, but there’ll be other people that will say, I don’t know if it’s ever gonna happen, but I may want my day in court if it comes into because sometimes these disputes are heard they’re not nickel and dime things. There’s, they’re they’re serious, you know, labor violations, discrimination, sexual harassment, the list goes on.

Oh, absolutely. We have many cases like that are very serious cases. Unfortunately, we’re forced into arbitration. We’re gonna have to take our break here. This is my matter. I’m on the Unite and Heal America program. I’ve got Senator Bob Wieckowski here with me, and we’ll be back from the break in just a minute.

We’re back with Bob way. kowski This is Matt Matern the Unite and Heal America program and circling back to a topic that we talked about a minute ago, homelessness, but a different take on it something that you worked on a lot of the ad use. And if you could explain kind of to the audience what those are and why they’re important and why we should have more.

Well, about 20 years ago, rod right, who’s an assembly member that time a la politician passed a law that had every city has at the turret has a set up a secondary unit ordinance. So let’s say how can you build a granny unit or a secondary unit, and basically, almost universally every city set up obstacles that made it impossible for somebody to build a secondary unit in their backyard or in their garage. I mean, it was just they restricted, they made every type of restriction.

So in 2016, what I did is I did a bill 1069 is sort of the granddaddy of the new wave of of legislation, we defined the secondary unit as an accessory dwelling unit. So it was no longer dealt with as a separate, separate unit for your water district or special districts to charge a fee, the city to charge you a fee. And we said you can’t force people to have parking, they can park on the street if they’re there. And the people actually have a right to build a secondary unit or convert their garage or convert part of their house, as long as they’re within a half mile of transit.

That’s that’s all I had to be that major transit. Just if there’s a bus stop within a half mile of my of this house, I could do it. And we hope to liberalize and to say that there was no sprinklers, you couldn’t require sprinklers. There’s a whole list. And it started this renaissance. You know, la went from one year had 80 units. And then the next year in 2017, when the first bill, for sure, it was almost 2000 units that were built. So so there was activity, trying to figure out, you know, after these restrictions, I did another bill that got rid of the impact fees, you know, cities charge since a stretch $50,000 Just for the permission to do it.

So we said if you have less than 750 square feet, there cannot be any impacting there’s no school impact fee. The old law was 500 feet. So we moved that to 750. The same thing with the special districts, these assessments, and that we did a grandfather clause and because you know, Los Angeles believes that there’s 250,000 unpermitted units, you know, the people bootleg these things into the garage in their backyard.

And you know, we would argue with the League of Cities and then locals to say, well, how can you say this is going to have an adverse effect when all these people have built them invisibly in the backyard. So we got rid of that. And then we had another barrier was home ownership. You know, if you bought an apartment complex, or a duplex or four Plex, you don’t have to live in one of the units. And they were saying an adu.

She had to have homeownership. So we sort of got rid of these, you know, restrictions. And now we’re in this implementation and information, because people are hungry to know about that. It allows seniors to build a second unit, maybe to have a homeless person in or maybe some seniors who don’t have the income could move into the adu and then rent out the house, if it gets it.

So it’s a great opportunity for a lot of people. And the main thing that’s driving our homelessness problem from what I know, is that shortage of units, I mean, we just haven’t built enough new units in our most densely populated areas. So anything that allows restriction to kind of be loosened in any ways, it’s very helpful to 1000 units in one year is great.

And we think, you know, I mean, in the Bay Area, we have 1,500,000 single family houses, you know, and they’re they’re ordinary stucco, one storey buildings are nice. I have one I’m in one right now, you know, so there’s nothing wrong with them. But but if you want to build another stucco, one storey building in the backyard, you could you could do it. And it’s an it’s an easy way. It’s like the homeless idea. We want to incentivize homeowners to do something that that’s good for them.

We don’t need that a big government program, we say if you want to do it, and then you rent it out. If you live in the neighborhood, you get a little bit of extra cash, or, you know, there’s so many boomerang kids and so much economic turmoil that sometimes it would be just family members that would be living in debt. And one of the tricks is trying to figure out the financing, because a lot of very low income people want to do this, but they’re not going to be able to pay that if they want to borrow the money from a bank, they’re not going to be able to pay it until the unit’s completed. And as we know, as construction that may be four months, six months, whatever it is.

So we’re working on that trying to figure out how we can do a bridge loan when other construction folks but it’s really an exciting that was there’s this whole new industry that’s popped up where people that you know, they specialize in your detached garage, they turn that into a unit, they’ll take your garage if it’s in the house standalone prefab things.

There’s there’s a lot and it’s, you know, it’s less than $200,000 bucks. So it’s basically you can almost get three at us for the price of one affordable housing units. And again, it’s, it’s you want to have these Renaissance because a lot of our cities and towns are a little tired beat up maybe. And the idea of having people go in with construction and building these mountains, some of them are 400 feet, 500 feet, but there’s, it’s enough for a single person to live in.

And, you know, it gets folks gets folks working, it energizes a community. And again, I’m not saying it’s the whole solution to the homeless problem, or the the housing problem. But it’s, you know, if 10% of the people would build the units, we’re talking a million units.

You know, over a million units and in, in California, and then that’s, that’s a number, then you’re, then you’re breaking into the south, because we’ve only got 150,000 homeless people. So if we, if we had an extra million units, it would certainly reduce the demand, the supply that we have currently, which is driving up rents, so yeah, you know, and it’s, and it’s like, a lot of people, you know, the dream in the 50s.

In the 60s, my parents bought a house in the suburbs, a lot of these people are in their 80s and 90s. Now, and they’re a widow, and they’re by themselves, there’s, there’s a real problem. You know, we’re learning from the pandemic, the isolation that people are going through that they they’re not getting, you know, we’re staying at home, and we’re not, we’re not having communications, that we’re doing zooms.

And you realize that it’s an opportunity to bring other folks that may not you know, that maybe your friend that just rents an apartment to come in and live in the backyard or kind of you got a 4000 square foot house, for God’s sakes, you’re there by yourself, why not make another, you know, 600 square foot unit for your friend to live in there and have their own little kitchenette. So it’s a lot of lot of good social changes and opportunities, if even if it’s a caretaker for you.

So I think definitely getting the financing piece in place to kind of do the micro lending that would be necessary to to get that done, because I would think converting a garage might be less than even less than $200,000.

Yeah, it could be I mean, I mean, well, first, there’s a lot of bootleg garages, and it’s gonna cost you an itty bitty little amount just to get it up to code or get it safe. From there, they’re safe. I’d like to see some of the garages come, garage doors come down, and I have a door with a window and it looks like a regular little living unit. Because a lot of them are just you know that people are living there behind the garage door and I’m thinking okay, let’s get let’s come clean here. So it’s a it’s a possibility.

Yeah, well, just kind of pivoting to another topic. We’re talking to Senator Bob Wieckowski, on the Unite and Heal America program with Matern and 790. And I wanted to talk to you a bit about the pandemic and, and currently the rollout of the vaccine and and what’s happening here in the state of California, and what can we do to improve the situation on the ground?

I mean, I simple, simple, simple, I think part of the initial rollout with the one a one b, one C, who’s in the emergency, you needed to be have a PhD to figure out where it was, and everybody, you know, if they weren’t calling the state senators office on Edd, they were calling about where am I? When am I when am I going to get the vaccine, but I’m on the list.

And, you know, we we have these ideas that go out there, like have dentist, you know, give the vaccine and I think what we what we need to do is to simplify it, you know, if we’re, if we’re worried about vaccine giving vaccinations to in critical workers, and we should go to the place of employment, and we should have the people go to the hospital or the senior center or senior assisted living and give everybody the vaccine there go go to them with the with the with the needle versus saying we’ll come back tomorrow, you’re not on the list.

To do that. There’s a whole other problem with you know, we get promises of we’re going to have a million vaccinations, and then we only get 500,000. So that’s, that’s another problem that I mean, it’s all hands on deck trying to figure that out.

What do you think are the biggest challenges in terms of turning that around and getting our kind of organizational ducks in a row so that the, the distribution of the vaccine is is done more effectively?

Well, I mean, I’m, I favor the, you know, bringing in the National Guard bringing in dentists, bringing in the pharmacist bringing in these new workers because every buddy who’s involved in the hospital right now is beat to death. I mean, they’re working so hard trying to figure out how to fight with the COVID, to try to say, now we’re going to organize this whole vaccination program, it’s a huge separate thing that shouldn’t be put on onto their lap. I think it has been.

But going back, I think, as simple as you can make it and just say, you know, we have all the football stadiums you got Dodger Stadium wants to have it. You know, the the problem with that is, is some people just can’t get there, they’re stuck at their home, or they don’t have automobiles and and we know that there are some zip codes that have a unbelievably high rate of incident, you know, whether it’s in Latino areas, wherever the section is, and we should be going out to them to give them the vaccinations and set up ad hoc facilities.

Well, that makes sense. I do think that our health care workers have done heroic work over the last year, but they’ve got to be wiped out after a year like this. Just all hands on deck for 12 months straight, they’ve just got to be wiped out and throw another project in their lap is, is challenging. So I think it does make sense to kind of spread it out to other workers that could could take up some of the slack from them right now.

It’s giving somebody a shot. It’s, you know, I mean, I’m not saying I, I’m sure, medics, people that were medics in the army, they didn’t go to medical school, they went to, you know, they had one class and a community college and say, Yeah, Medic, okay, I’ll give you the shot. And you learn how to do it. And it’s a repetitive thing.

And, and we need less six months or nine months or whatever it is, folks to do that and make it easy to bring back retired folks that say, Okay, you’re now going to be the chief vaccinator here in this community, and we’re gonna go out there and we’re going to, we’re going to treat our people and then obviously, sticking with the wear your mask and social distance to we got to keep that’s, that’s going to be with us until it’s over.

Yeah, absolutely. And definitely remind everybody wear your mask everywhere that you go. And that definitely reduces the spread. And it seems as though our numbers have been trending down over the last week or so, which is good news.

I just wanted to thank you again, senator for being on the program. It’s been great having you and hopefully we could have you come back on the program at some time in the future and and talk about what’s been happening in the last you know, going forward thing.

It’s been my pleasure to be on Unite and Heal America.

Very good. Keep up the good work.

Thank you. This is a Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern and KABC 790. Looking forward to having you back next week.

This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern.