Please tune in tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. to KIQI 1010AM to hear a live interview with our very own Imelda Navarro. She will be talking about the ongoing housing crisis, how it has been affecting Latinos, and what Latinos can do and have been doing to fight for candidates and policies that will address the issues that matter to them.
The program can be streamed online here.
Share the word so that the interview might have as large an audience as possible.
“Follow the money” has been a pretty reliable measure when looking at where a candidate’s interests lie. Not all candidates for our little San Mateo City Council race are popping up in the margins of my computer as we speak, but there he is again, compliments of the National Association of Realtors Fund “not authorized by a candidate or a committee.”etc. etc.
Big money is arguably the most corrosive factor in American politics today. We have seen this nationally, and we are now seeing this in our local city council elections.
In a throwback to last year’s contentious debate over rent control when national as well as state apartment associations and Realtor groups raised more than $1 million to defeat two ballot measures in San Mateo and Burlingame, similar groups are again funneling thousands of dollars into the local election.
As San Mateo voters near a choice for who they want representing them on the City Council, big money is flowing in from landlord and Realtor lobbyist groups.
Campaign finance forms are being submitted as the Nov. 7 election nears with seven vying for three seats on the San Mateo City Council. In a throwback to last year’s contentious debate over rent control when national as well as state apartment associations and Realtor groups raised more than $1 million to defeat two ballot measures in San Mateo and Burlingame, similar groups are again funneling thousands of dollars into the local election.
This month, San Mateo County and a handful of nearby local governments officially recognized what many of us already knew: Large rent increases and no-cause evictions are an urgent civil rights issue on the Peninsula. These practices, which thrive in the brutal rental market on the Peninsula, undermine the housing security of many — but they disproportionately harm African-American, Latino, Filipino and Pacific Islander renters. Left unchecked, the displacement crisis we now face will lead to a new era of housing segregation.
Now that the county has acknowledged the problem, it has a moral — and a legal — obligation to combat it.
One San Mateo 