This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern. This is Matt Matern on the Unite and Heal America show on KABC 790. My guest today is Assemblymember David Chiu, from San Francisco.

Love to have him on the show, we’ve got got a lot to talk about in the hour, we’re going to we’re going to start talking about the homelessness issue and Assemblymember to as is the chairperson for the Housing and Community Development Committee in the State Assembly. So he has a lot to say about that. And without further ado, Assemblymember Chiu.

Matt, thanks for having me on the show.

Well, it’s great to have you here. And essentially, we’ve got a homelessness crisis, a housing crisis, and I’ve had one for decades here in California. And we’ve we’ve tried a number of different measures, and we still have the crisis. What are some of the things that you think that we should be doing to alleviate that crisis?

Well, the homeless crisis in the housing crisis are obviously very inextricably linked, but they are, they do have different issues. So maybe we’ll just start with the conversation around homelessness. Most cities in California, over decades have been grappling with homelessness. But I think it’s fair to say that the crisis that we’re seeing on our California streets today is like nothing that we’ve seen in recent years, certainly, in my city in San Francisco, and Los Angeles on skid row, you go from San Diego, up to the Oregon border from the coast all the way in line.

This is the moral crisis of the day. And there are many, many causes for everything from the fact that we simply haven’t built enough housing for everyone, we literally do not have a roof for everyone, to the challenges around mental health, on our streets, to drug addictions, to the fact that we’ve had criminal justice reform, where we have a lot of folks who are leaving our prison system. But without a real path to move forward, often end up back on our streets.

And each of these, these root causes for why people are homeless. And I’ve literally only touched on a handful of reasons, have many, many things that we could do to grapple with it. So for example, you know, everyone knows that there are folks who are chronically homeless, let’s say they have a mental health challenge, or they have a drug addiction. That constitutes say, about 40% of our homeless population, the vast majority of folks on our streets are homeless, because they cannot afford a home.

And and this was true before the pandemic, when we have an economy that is creating haves and have nots, and so many folks, particularly in high cost cities, you have to have two or three minimum wage jobs to afford a two bedroom apartment. And if you don’t have that you are one paycheck away from homelessness.

And so, so much of homelessness right now is a function of the fact that people literally don’t have the ability to afford to live in a home. You add the pandemic to this, you add the recession that has stemmed from this pandemic, and all of these issues are exacerbated. So we could talk for an entire hour about the root causes. But that’s just a couple of minutes snapshot.

Sure. And one of the things that I’ve been working in this area for the last few years and have a foundation that is worked with a number of different groups here in Southern California, in who were helping homeless people across the spectrum. And one of their programs was this host Homes program where they had people bring homeless people into their homes, and they vetted the homeless person and vetted the homeowner.

And it is it’s worked out very well. And I thought it would be useful to expand that program statewide. And we’re proposing a piece of legislation that would do so and it would essentially give homeowners approximately $1,000 a month to to take in a homeless person. And that person would be vetted by a social service agency before they got placed and the homeowner would pass criminal background checks and the like, so that it would be a safe place for them to live.

And the hope is that we could do we could house a lot of people more effectively than we have been doing And in recent years, because there are millions event the bedrooms around the state and that people could could take in even a small percentage of our homeless population would make a big dent.

And currently, I mean, we’re paying to, to create new housing 550 to $750,000, a unit, which is extremely expensive. I’ve heard of one project going up to $1.2 million, a unit, which seems incredibly infeasible to continue at that rate. So love to get your thoughts on that.

I think it’s a really interesting idea. I mean, listen, we have to move forward on many fronts at the same time to address this housing crisis. And what I liked about the idea, it’s out of the box, it is hopefully figuring out a way to use underutilized rooms and in homes that already exists. It could give the if you can imagine sort of the landlord, in this situation, some extra cash during this time period, give a person the opportunity to get up on his or her feet.

So I think that’s interesting. You know, I know that my guess is there would absolutely be some folks that would want to take advantage of of being able to rent out a spare room in their house or their apartment. But I would also guess that there are a lot of people that that may have stereotypes about homeless folks that may not feel comfortable about this. These sorts of you know, if we’re creating a landlord tenant relationship, the the laws and rules governing that are complicated and, and how you think about that is is important.

I would also say that we know there are many folks who are homeless, who don’t need anything more than a roof to get back up on their feet to be able to work in a job and move forward. But there are plenty of folks who are homeless who need mental health services, medication, drug and alcohol treatment, and other things. And you need wraparound services with that. And maybe there’s a way to do that. But I think it’s an interesting concept that is deserving of of consideration.

Right? Well, I appreciate that. And I think one of the ways that we would address that your concern, which I think is a good one, and from all the social service providers that I’ve worked with have said that this population does need wraparound services. And I think the way that we address that is by having social service agencies be the funnel through which the participants in the program come so that we know that they’ve already access some of those services, and that they have a method to, to connect to those services going forward. And, and then get that whatever services they need, so that they continue to pull out of whatever condition they’ve found themselves in.

Yeah, that sounds that sounds reasonable to me. I mean, it’d be interesting if there was a pilot somewhere to see, to see how this this goes. You know, taking a step back, I think homelessness is such a multifaceted issue. And I would maybe a couple of ways to think about some of the solutions. We know that there are, we know that the number of folks who are homeless in our streets are at record levels 150,000 in the state of California.

Well, we also know is there a lot of cities, let’s say take LA, where, you know, for every, I think for every 100 Plus folks that they’re able to house, another 100 plus folks become homeless within short periods of time. And so one of the challenges is how do you prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. And that has to do with stabilizing people where they live, making sure, particularly during this time of pandemic and recession, that for folks who’ve lost their jobs who have seen drops in their income, that we are supplementing their ability to pay the rent so that they’re not forced out onto the streets.

This is why one of the first bills I introduced in this session was to create a framework to get financial assistance out to tenants and landlords. This past week, Governor Newsom signed a bill that the legislature passed that was based in part on a conversation that I was moving to get $2.6 billion of federal assistance out to tenants so that they can help pay their landlords so they’re not forced out on the streets. So part of the solution is to make sure that people aren’t becoming homeless in the first place.

Part of the solution is to make sure that we have interim solutions, say shelters or navigation centers, when someone is forced out on the street for those first couple of months or that first six to 12 months to just give them shelter.

And the part of the solution has to be how do we find permanent It housing permanently affordable housing for folks, whether they need services or not. And as you all know, in LA and throughout California, there have been huge challenges, trying to cite the next shelter, the next navigation center, the next permanent supportive housing.

Everyone in the state says we have to address homelessness. But a lot of people in the state say, let’s address homelessness, just not in my neighborhood, not in my city, do it down the freeway, do it next door, don’t do it right here. And when everyone says that, we aren’t able to build the housing or the housing opportunities for people, we’ve got to figure out how to get beyond that.

That absolutely is a huge problem. And I think that’s one of the reasons I came up with this or certainly piggybacking off of other’s ideas was that we have empty bedrooms currently in the system or in across the state and, and those could be used and as I was talking to Senator Wieckowski about this, a week or two ago on the program, and, and he stated something that was surprising to him.

And surprising to me when he said it that 30% of the extremely low income group in the state have houses.

And so this is, as you said, before, an opportunity to get some money in their hands. So it’s a benefit to them, and also obviously be a benefit to the entire state to have that as well.

We’re gonna go to a break. My guest today is Assemblymember David Chiu, and come back in a minute the Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. Thank you.

This is Matt Matern, and I’m on the Unite and Heal America show. I’ve got Assemblymember David Chiu with us today. And we’re talking about a number of major issues that face California, one of them is the environment. And Secretary I mean, Assemblymember Chiu, you’ve been on this, you know, working on these issues for the last eight years in the assembly, what do you think are the most important things to state should be doing in to address the environmental problems that we have as a state and as a country?

Well, I think the first thing we have to remember, in case we anyone has forgotten is while we may have the immediate crisis of the day of the pandemic, and the recession, and, and very significant conversations around equity and social unrest, climate change is continuing. And we literally have less than a decade to turn this around, not just for California, in our country, but for the world.

And so we have to be just as focused on climate, and we’re reminded of this every day, from, from the wildfires to if you you follow just a couple months ago, the orange skies over Northern California, to the impact of smog, to the impact of the environment on on health, this is something that we have to tackle at the same time, we’re tackling all the other crises of the day.

And this also is a truly multifaceted issue. So you know, we have to be moving on the fronts of of trying to make sure that our energy sources are clean to creating a clean transportation system and, and moving toward electric vehicles and hopefully utilizing public transit more frequently, to figuring out how to ensure that our buildings are decarbonized and are built and maintained in ways that makes sense to reducing the amount of waste that we produce and, and addressing that and moving on all these fronts.

I’m working every year it’s always important for me to move on a couple bills on the environmental front, but But I think what I’ll just say is, you know, someone who has a four year old, I think a lot about how when my son is 14, and he asked me, Papa, what did you do in the legislature to address climate? I don’t want to say I didn’t do everything I could to tackle this we have to do things differently.

We are literally the the the proverbial frog being boiled alive as the temperature of our planet gets ratcheted up a half a degree at a time and and we are we are hitting a point of no return. And so we’ve got to tackle this and We’ve got to understand that our way of life is in jeopardy.

Well, absolutely. And I remember one of my law school professors used to repeat that California was in the vanguard, and in creating law, and I think that we’ve been in Vanguard regarding the environmental movement. And I did hear you mentioned electric cars, but you didn’t mention hydrogen cars, I drive a hydrogen car and think I’m kind of a proponent of that technology. I think that that’s even cleaner than an electric and we should be doing whatever we can to roll that out as quickly as we can.

Totally support both. You know, I mentioned electric vehicles, because a couple years ago, Governor Brown signed a law that I had authored, to turbocharge putting electric vehicle, charging stations throughout the state. And we’re trying to grapple with the fact that there are 400 different local jurisdictions that regulate or over regulate the ability for the electric vehicle industry to place enough charging stations, so no one gets range anxiety.

And at this moment, we do not have enough charging stations, to power the future of the number of vehicles that we need, or we expect to be on the road. And we got to do better. But you know, I’m I love the future of hydrogen, actually just had a conversation about hydrogen Ferris in the Bay Area. I represent a district that is right on the water.

And, and I think the future of all these technologies, you know, electric vehicles, hydrogen, wind, solar, these are all things that we’ve got to move forward all at the same time. And, and it’s important for us not to lose focus.

What about you mentioned reducing waste? What, what do you think the government should be doing and saying regarding reduction of waste, ah, what should government not be doing? I mean, we produce an incredible amount of waste as Americans every day. And it’s not just what we’re producing. But it’s, it’s the waste we’re producing, that doesn’t go back into the ground is not say compostable or isn’t recyclable. That’s a huge change.

So I’ll give one example of something I worked on a few years ago. Your typical American wastes about 25% of the food that you purchase. So put another way, if you go to the grocery store, you come out with four bags, and you decide to leave one in the parking lot. That’s what we do every day of every week of every month of the year, as Americans, and we’ve got to do a better job of that. Now, why do we waste so much food?

Well, one reason we waste food is we have a dizzying array of date labels on foods that tell you so buy good until expires on throw out by literally several dozen different labels on foods that tell you when it’s supposed to expire. And people get confused. They look at it, they do the sniff test. But they look at a label and they’re and they’re like, do I throw it out? And many folks err on the side of caution. They don’t want to get sick, and they just throw out the food and what does that mean, we throw out a quarter of our food and what does that mean?

It means that we waste the energy that went into producing that food transporting that food, throwing out that food having it sit in landfills, just that issue alone of confusing date labels that lead to the waste of say 25% of our food that accounts for literally a ton of carbon dioxide tons that we are wasting.

And so so so so I passed a law a couple of years ago, working with the food manufacturing industry to streamline the deets on labels so people had a clear sense and streamline it really to two things have a date label that would tell you eat by this date or else it will go stale and then a date label that says if you don’t eat before this date, you’re gonna get sick if you eat it.

That’s really all we need. That little change is helping to reduce food waste but food waste in general has been remarkably harmful to the environment. While

you’re listening the United heal America program i My guest is Assemblymember David to and on KB see 798 Getting back to this issue of food waste we have worked with a group down here in Southern California called Food finders and that’s what they do is try to distribute and redistribute food that normally was going to waste and it is a shockingly large amount of food and and they’ve done a great job of getting into lower income people.

And but we’ve we’ve got to do more. There’s no doubt about it. If I turn you back to the compostable recyclable issue, I mean, is it time for the state of California to require that all of the containers that are, are sold meet that standard? And by when would it be feasible to do that?

I honestly think we should do that. It’s something that we do in my city. And I will say when the when the rules first came down, that you had to separate your trash into recyclables, compostable, and everything else, three different containers, people like, oh, that’s confusing. It’s hard.

You figure it out within a matter of days. And now it is. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s automatic. My my four year old son loves to help figuring out what the compostable versus the recyclable waste stream is, and we’ve got to do it. We don’t have a choice.

What about where is that all going? Because I’ve read that China has stopped accepting our lot of our recyclable plastic. And we’ve got a bit of a crisis there. What are we going to do if we don’t have a place to send this stuff, there really is a crisis. So China did shut down a lot of their major markets in this area. And what it means is we have to be even more careful about our waste streams.

And one of the things that is happening right now is a lot of plastics are being sent into the recyclable stream that aren’t recyclable, or things are being put into the compost stream, which aren’t compostable.

And because of the challenges in the market, you have waste management companies that are spending incredible, inordinate resources separating out and cleaning up those waste streams. And we’ve just got to do a better job of figuring that out. Well,

certainly everybody has a part in that process. And we all need to dig deeper and and on all those fronts. I wanted to turn your attention to the EDD debacle that occurred in recently with lots of checks being mailed out to prisoners and crime syndicates around the country around the world. And how did that happen? And how do we clean that up, so it doesn’t happen again.

So I never expected to be as engaged on this issue, as I have been in the last now going on seven, eight months. But what happened started really with the great recession 10 plus years ago, the EDD unemployment benefit system crashed. And policymakers discovered in 2010 Plus timeframe that the IT system was completely antiquated. You had all these bureaucratic procedures, that didn’t make any sense. Edd leadership wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

And 10 years ago, they vowed they were going to clean up the system. Well, what happened? They took $260 million, nothing actually happened. Here we are again. But now we’re in this pandemic, which has created the quickest unemployment crisis we’ve we’ve ever seen.

And so it has been an utter mess. Edd has failed, its leadership has failed. Many of us have been moving a variety of different reform proposals to address this. And we’ve got to turn we’ve got to turn the ship around.

Well, you’ve been listening to United heal America with Assemblymember David Chiu, back in a minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern. And I’ve got my guest Assemblymember David Chiu and we’ve been talking about the EDD debacle and and Assemblymember Chiu, you stated that there should be some accountability for that, that debacle and what what accountability are we seeing because I think people around the state are very concerned that we spent hundreds of millions of dollars updating a system and it didn’t work

well not only to discover that there have been sophisticated criminal syndicates engaged and billions of dollars potentially 10s of billions of dollars of fraud. Rather than having those benefits go to hard working honest Californians who are desperately trying to figure out how to pay for the rent or put food on the table. You know, as far as who should be held accountable.

I’ve been saying for many months that the lion’s share of the fault lies with EDD leadership that for many years ignored or failed to address this and, and frankly, during many months at the beginning of this pandemic, failed to see the red lights that were blinking on on all these challenges. We just all learn from A couple of audits this past week that EDD was not focused on the immense and likely historic levels of fraud, that that we have seen it has cost us.

And it has also meant that everyday Californians are, are not getting the benefits that they that they deserve. Because on the one hand, the system didn’t guard against criminal fraud. On the other hand, it’s failed miserably at at being the social safety net that we needed to be. Now the leadership of EDD that had been responsible recent years.

Well, this moment, has effectively turned over the EDD director that had been in place for the better part of last year, resigned at the end of last year, we now have a new EDD director, her top management team has effectively turned over. So we’re hopeful that with his new leadership, there’ll be able to turn things around.

But we need to everything from a modernization and a rehaul of information technology, to changing up bureaucratic procedures that putting real anti fraud measures in place, to holding everybody accountable to to making sure this is a system that is accessible to all I’ll mention, one dimension of this 40% of California speaks a language other than English. And yet a recent report of EDD found that if English is not your first language, the challenges of accessing the system are quote in surmountable. You cannot access a system.

If if English is not your first language, particularly, if not English, if not Spanish, you’re pretty screwed. So, so I I’m moving forward with legislation to really push that conversation. So we’re not shutting out literally 7 million Californians who primarily speak a language other than than English.

Well, that is important work. And I would certainly ask you as, as a leader in our state government to hold these members of EDD accountable and, and provide the oversight necessary to make sure that the systems are changed, because you know, we in California pay a lot of taxes, we certainly want them to be used for the benefit of our state versus the benefit of a bunch of criminals.

Amen. It has been infuriating. You know, 35,000 prison inmates had their names used for EDD benefits. We had over 100 folks on death row who had benefits attach their names, it is at one point a couple of months ago, I said it’s literally criminal, and got a lot of flack for suggesting that this is criminal. Well, it actually turns out in this instance, a lot of this fraud is being driven by sophisticated crime syndicates.

Well, turning to a different topic, which is the related topic of homelessness and the criminal justice system. And I had done some work with an organization that that took inmates who had, who had served long prison terms and helped mainstream them back into society, which is a difficult task when somebody has been out of the workforce for a dozen plus years and had, you know, just doesn’t know any of the technology that that has come around in the last 10 plus years.

And, and they’re just, they’re struggling to survive kind of in this new environment. And I thought they did some great work. What what types of reforms? Are you talking about instituting to help people in that situation?

You know, I’d love to know more about that particular program. I’ve just introduced a bill to really break down the barriers between our criminal justice system and our housing system. You know, listen, it’s not a surprise that we see the cycle of homelessness and incarceration play out on our streets every day, people who experience homelessness are more likely to be incarcerated. And people who have been incarcerated are more likely to experience homelessness.

And just to give one statistic, it’s estimated about half of all folks who are homeless, have had some interaction with the criminal justice system. And here’s what we’re trying to grapple with. To your point, when someone has spent years in a prison and cut off from society. We expect them to to get their civilian clothes back, we give you back, your watch your wallet, your walk out on the street, and we expect you immediately to be able to get a job and pay for rent.

And that’s just not reasonable. We’ve got to figure out how to help people transition back into society. And so I have proposed the following. We’re in the process as a state of closing down a number of very expensive prisons, it costs anywhere from 84 to, in some instances, say $100,000 as to how someone in a prison and we’re shutting those prisons down, and that is a good thing. But at the same time, we’re not investing to put a roof over someone’s head to help them at least for six or 12 months transition back into our society.

And so what I propose is that we use some of the savings, from closing prisons on housing for formerly incarcerated people, in order to reduce recidivism, be able to prevent people from having a cycle back into the system, and saving the state money, because we know when people exit our prisons, they need a stable home. And we also know that people can’t get a job a meaningful employment without stable housing.

And we also know that, that part of what is exacerbating the racial divide we’re seeing on our streets, is the fact that when we have a criminal justice system that has imprisoned a disproportionate percentage of folks who are black and brown, and we’re kicking them out onto the streets, and we’re not giving them a home, that is, that is ensuring that our homeless population is, is seen a concentration of folks from our African American community, from our Latin X community, a huge number of people exiting prison without a place to live. And we need to do better.

And so I just think, if we’re going to make sure that when folks leave the prison system, that they don’t end up right back in the system. And right now the stats are people on parole are seven times more likely to recidivate when they’re homeless versus when they’re housed. The way we turn that around, is to really think about how do we how do we help house these folks?

How do we help provide them services so that we can get them up on their feet in the short run, and hopefully, they’ll get a job be able to afford their own home and, and we keep them out of the prison system and off the streets from adding to our homeless numbers.

Well you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America with Assemblymember, David Chiu, we’re talking about a number of issues that are facing the state on KABC 790. One thing you said Assemblymember, too, is the the cost related to this.

And when you consider the rate of recidivism, as you just stated, for somebody who is, you know, homeless, that alone tells us that it makes sense from a, from an economic standpoint, to find a solution to this, because we’re ending up having to pay if that person goes back to prison, 80 to $100,000 a year to house that person in a prison, which is obviously far more expensive, and has a lot of other societal costs related to it as well.

Because we obviously know that isn’t something that doesn’t cause long term damage to that person and just that whole community to house more and more people in prisons, that isn’t going to be a solution. So yes, this organization that I had worked with in in downtown LA, and it Amistad, which is one of the pieces of that organization, and they had a fairly big, kind of like old warehouse, he type building and maybe former apartment building, and he had a great program that that helped people get back on their feet.

And it was really had those wraparound services that we had talked about earlier, which helped people get jobs, find, find a path forward versus right back out on the street, and then being, you know, dragged back into a life of crime. So that’s, I think that it’s something that we should be looking at further and funding programs like that, so that this doesn’t happen.

Absolutely. I mean, you know, listen, again, if it costs 80,000 or $100,000, to house someone at at a prison, and it costs us 15 to $20,000 a year to provide full wraparound services, the mental health services, the drug addiction treatment services, the the the job training services to help someone get up on their feet. That’s it. That’s an easy, easy decision for society and it just makes a lot of sense and, and at the same time, we’re saying we’ve got to end homelessness on our streets. We really have to focus on on this population.

Well, you’re listening to Unite and Heal America Assemblymember, David Chiu is my guest we’re gonna take a break and we’ll be back in a minute. Well, we’re back with the Unite and Heal America show I’ve got to Assembly Member gave it to you on the show and it’s been Free pleasure talking with you. One of the things we had been talking about various points in the show was wraparound services.

And I think it’s useful for the listeners to hear a little bit more about that. My understanding of what that means is counseling. It might be job counseling, it might be drug and alcohol counseling might be employment held, and things of that nature. If you want to expand upon that Assemblymember Chiu, that would be great to give our listeners a little bit better sense of, of the types of services that should be made available in the circumstance?

Yeah, it’s a great question. Um, you know, as I as I mentioned earlier, there are many reasons why folks are homeless, and over a half of all folks who are homeless are literally homeless, because at some point, they didn’t have enough money for the rent, and they got evicted, they couldn’t afford to live somewhere. They’re out on the streets, but they’re otherwise employable. They don’t have any challenges other than that, and they don’t need services.

But in many instances, again, about 40% of our chronically homeless population, you have folks who have been grappling with really challenging personal situation. So whether it’s the voice in their head, and they have a mental health challenge, that are grappling with whether they got addicted to painkillers or alcohol at some point, and they need alcohol and drug treatment programs, they may have an anger management issue.

Oftentimes, you have someone who is in a perpetrator in a domestic violence situation, who really needs anger management, counseling and psychological counseling to to be able to relate to other folks in a way that’s not threatening. So what supportive housing is, is it’s literally housing that has attached to it caseworkers, social workers, others who can meet the needs of whoever’s living in the housing, and meet them where they are, and address the challenges that are facing them. What they found is supportive housing is remarkably cost efficient.

It’s not just the more humane thing to do to help someone get back on their feet. But it’s actually for society, very cost efficient way of helping people end up not reoffending not becoming not becoming back addicted to the challenges that we’re facing before. It is the best way for us to address a lot of these chronic issues. Wanted

to pivot to another topic, the eviction moratorium that you’ve been involved in? And what’s the status of that? And how is that going to play out? And, and in particular, related to the California budget and how much it’s going to cost? And and what’s the long term effect on that for our, our budget.

So I’ve spent the better part of this past year really grappling with how we’re trying to address what had been a couple of eviction cliffs that we’re facing. And so let me explain what I mean by that. So we have millions of Californians that are hanging by a thread because they’ve been laid off or because their income has dropped dramatically.

You know, just last month, there were 2 million Californians who told census survey workers that they had little or no confidence in their ability to pay next month’s rent. And the challenge of this is not just on those struggling tenants, but also in many instances, they’re struggling landlords, because they owe a check to someone. And there are many landlords that are doing just fine, but there are plenty landlords, they’ve got to pay the mortgage, they got to pay the taxes, they got to pay the fees. And so there’s this whole ecosystem that is has been in great risk. When the pandemic started, the court system had halted evictions.

So basically, between March and the end of August, the California Supreme Court said no evictions for that 767 month time period. But then they said that it was up to the legislature and the governor to decide what to do after August and so I helped to craft what was a compromise between the landlords and tenants a basically a five month initial eviction moratorium whereby as long as a tenant paid 25% of their rent. They couldn’t be evicted before January 31. The rent would come due was going to come due on February 1, but but the tenant wouldn’t be evicted.

And this allowed us to avoid pushing millions of Californians out onto the streets and exacerbating the homeless situation we were just talking about, as well as we were trying to avoid pushing people into dense overcrowded situations terrible for COVID-19 during this time period.

Now, what happened was January 31, has come and gone and we were Facing until we passed a bill just a few days ago, if we had not extended the eviction moratorium, we were potentially going to follow other states that also did not extend their eviction moratorium, UCLA did a recent study in states that did not choose to put these protections in place and extend the protections, they saw an additional 433,000 COVID cases 11 or close to 11,000 COVID deaths.

And we obviously didn’t want that to happen in California. So the very first bills that I introduced, and in this session, were to both extend the eviction moratorium, as well as to create a framework of money to go to struggling tenants and landlords. And fortunately, Washington DC actually came through a couple of weeks ago, Congress passed a economic stimulus package that included $2.6 billion to California.

And just last week, the governor and and our legislative leadership agreed on how to disperse the funding in the following way. Basically, the funding will be accessible by low income tenants and their landlords. And by low income, I mean, anyone who’s making less than 80% of the area median income. So it’s working families and lower income folks. And what we are offering to landlord and tenants is the following.

If a landlord agrees to forgive 20% of the rental debt owed by a tenant, government will step in and pay for the remaining 80% of the rent that has been unpaid. I think it’s a very good deal. Now, if a landlord chooses not to forgive that 20%, we will still provide the tenant with the 25% of rental assistance they need, so they don’t get evicted during this time period. So it’s basically a choice that we provide, to to figure out how folks can get through this time period.

And it’s our hope, that with this, we’ll be able to get people from this time from early February, all the way to the end of June. And then we’ll have to revisit at the end of June how we address this. But this way, we are preventing potentially millions of folks from being evicted. We’re helping to stabilize the situation of both struggling tenants and landlords. During a time period when this deadliest moment of the pandemic, we can’t have folks forced out onto the streets.

Well, that’s certainly true. Now, you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America. My guest is Assemblymember David Chiu, KABC 790. Of the things that you say was that $2.6 billion was provided by the federal government, is that going to cover 100% of the cost of this program, or some portion of it going to have to come out of state government funds?

So that is literally the $2.6 billion question. The real answer is no one knows exactly what the full rental debt that’s owed at this moment to landlords by struggling tenants, there have been many estimates. And they’ve ranged dramatically from $400 million to $4 billion. We just don’t know if this is going to be enough money. And so part of why we structured the program, the way we did to ask landlords to forgive 20% of the debt is to make these dollars stretch.

Part of the reason why this money is only eligible for folks who make less than 80% of the area median income is to stretch the money. So we are hopeful that we’re going to be able to pay most of the back rent and and some of the rent moving forward between now and June, we will have a much better sense in the next month or two once applications come in.

We’ve prioritized how the monies will be dispersed. And the first priority is for folks who make less than 50% of the area median income, as well as folks in the hardest hit neighborhoods when it comes to the pandemic. And we’ll have a much better sense as we monitor this month by month and see how many people apply for the money.

How far we can make it stretch, want to ask you a bit about the pandemic since you’re here and what the state is going to be doing to roll out the vaccine more effectively than it has been? And how are we addressing this healthcare crisis from the state level?

Well, I think it’s it’s no secret that rolling out the vaccine has been incredibly challenging. And, you know, I I’d be remiss to say that if we had had federal leadership under President Trump, that had since the beginning of the recession, the pandemic thought carefully about how the federal government could coordinate the smooth and easy transition of vaccine distribution. I don’t think we’d be where we are right now.

But that being said, we’re grappling with this as as we speak. And initially, we had tried to be government had tried to be incredibly diverse. liberate and who receives the vaccine so that we provided the vaccine to individuals who are most at risk of, of contracting COVID-19. Those frontline workers, those seniors and others in very, in the most vulnerable environments. As we did that there were all sorts of complications.

And so recently, the governor decided based on conversations with his health experts to change it up and simplify it and basically focus vaccination distribution on on our seniors. And so that, at some levels makes distribution easier as we focus on people just based on age. But that also means that there are a lot of frontline workers who I would like to see get the vaccine, who may have to wait for folks who are over 75, or over 65 to get it.

And so these are, these are the trade offs that you have to make during the, during this unprecedented health crisis. You know, it’s been 100 years since the 1918. Flu that we’ve had to deal with something of this magnitude. And, and clearly, we didn’t have the systems to deal with it. But that being said, there are a lot of good people thinking really hard about this, and I think the vaccine distribution is is improving knock on wood.

Well, it certainly has been a bit confusing for those of us following it as to who’s going to get it and where, where, and when and how and the goalposts seem to be changing a bit from day to day and week to week, and I certainly hope it gets rolled out as quickly as possible.

And I agree with you, it seems like the frontline workers in the health care system should be some of the first ones to get the vaccine so that they’re safe while delivering the health care to the rest of us. So that’s, that’s we’re gonna have to end it for this week.

But it’s been a pleasure having you on the show and we’d love to have you back sometime. I had the pleasure of having Assemblymember David Chiu on our show. You’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern on KABC 790. Look forward to having you all back next Saturday.

This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern.