Have you ever wanted to gather all the people who want your vote into one place to get their views on an issue near and dear to your heart? That’s what the North Santa Barbara County Manufactured Homeowners Team did during its Sept. 12 candidate forum, which was designed to “win support for mobile home issues,” specifically rent stabilization, according to team President Gary Hall.
Most candidates obliged by at least supporting the ideas tangentially related to the team’s focus, including rent stabilization, affordable housing, real estate value, and oranges.
Maribel Aguilera-Hernandez—a 4th District Santa Maria City Council candidate—spoke up for maintaining homes’ values.
Rent control depresses property values, she said, and landlords wouldn’t get as high of a return on their property—so she proposes subsidizing housing.
“We subsidize housing for low-income, and I think that is a different way if we cannot get anywhere with capping rent.”
The trick with taking that tack is that it’s not really on topic. The mobile home activists (they graduated from “advocates” once they showed up to their 25th City Council meeting) know what they want: predictable, limited rent increases for the land that mobile homes sit on. This isn’t a citywide renter issue, it’s a niche issue.
And then Aguilera-Hernandez compared landlords to oranges:
“Let’s say you own a perfume [shop] that sells orange-smelling perfumes, and I sell oranges. There’s a shortage of oranges. And we both want the orange and there’s only so many. We need to be creative. So if we start to look at what do you want and what do I want, you can take the skin of the orange that you need, and I take the part of the orange that I need. And we’ve creatively solved the problem, and we both got what we wanted. That’s the way we need to start looking at problems. There’s no losers and winners. We all need to get a little bit of what we want. We won’t always get 100 percent of what we want.”
OK, but the activists already received less-than-100-percent of what they wanted from the city, which actually yielded a big fat zero.
Yet somehow, the team got candidates from the federal level down to the city to show up to their little, super specific one-issue forum to talk about rent stability—so maybe there’s a chance that their oranges can become the city’s perfume.
Did I get the metaphor right?
Lompoc’s got oranges for days—and by oranges, I mean bicyclists in dangerous situations on H and Ocean streets. Lompoc City Councilmember Victor Vega really wants the city to find a solution to this issue, and that includes repealing a city ordinance banning bike-riding on sidewalks.
At least pedestrian-bike collisions aren’t as horrifying as car-bike collisions?
The Police Department spoke against such a move, saying that they’ve used Lompoc’s bike ordinance as a way to stop people and search them.
“Because [biking on the sidewalk] is illegal, we use it as a probable cause where we maybe didn’t have something,” Police Capt. Kevin Martin told the council on Sept. 6. “I’ve taken guns off people who are riding bikes. I’ve taken lots of narcotics off of people who are riding bikes on … sidewalks.”
Sounds slightly profile-y to me.
That’s classic oranges and perfumes, amirite?
The canary is selling oranges by the bushel. Send perfume to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 15-22, 2022.