California Nation podcast: Is enough being done to prepare for a COVID-19 economic fallout?
Click the player above to hear this week’s California Nation podcast episode, which focuses on eviction protections, a wealth tax and whether California is doing enough to help families suffering the economic consequences of the coronavirus.
The coronavirus pandemic has devastated California’s economy. With unemployment surging as high as 15%, and with a budget hole estimated at $54 billion, state leaders face tough choices.
So do out-of-work Californians, some of whom can’t pay their rents and don’t know if they will have a roof over their heads in the coming months. On Sept. 1, the state’s current protections against coronavirus-related evictions will expire. Some legislators and community advocates fear a “tsunami” of evictions, which could add to the state’s homeless crisis.
In this week’s episode of the California Nation podcast, I talk to community advocates and legislators who say California must take urgent action to protect people from the economic fallout of the pandemic.
“There are millions of people who are at risk of eviction come Sep. 2,” said Christina Livingston of the ACCE Institute, a community advocacy group. “We know that all of those folks will be pushed into poverty.”
The pandemic has worsened California’s endemic economic inequality, sharply contrasting the differences between privileged Californians who can work online and those who must risk their lives to pay the bills -- or go without.
“There is the version of California that lives in the first world, where they’re mostly worried about managing their boredom or their creature comforts,” said John Kim, executive director of the Advancement Project. “And then there are the low income, high need people of color that are essentially making live life or death decisions on a daily basis ... So, we have this very divergent sensibility about what it means to live in California.”
Livingston and Kim, whose organizations are part of a group called United Front, say Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California State Legislature aren’t doing enough to help vulnerable Californians on the front lines of both the COVID-19 crisis and the economic crisis.
But it’s not necessarily for lack of trying by some legislators. Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, and Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, have both introduced bills designed to help suffering Californians.
Chiu has introduced a bill that would protect Californians from eviction if they can’t pay their rent due to the coronavirus. The bill, Assembly Bill 1436, would allow tenants to pay their landlords back over time.
“If the Legislature doesn’t act, we could see a wave of mass evictions, which would be catastrophic for homelessness, COVID-19’s spread, and so many other things,” Chiu said.
Earlier this month, Bonta introduced AB 2088, a “wealth tax” he says would generate over $7 billion in state revenue to prevent deep cuts. The bill won’t get a vote this year, but Bonta said his legislation helps frame the debate over how to generate revenue in a state many millionaires and billionaires call home.
“We need to be thinking about multiple solutions, a multifaceted approach to how we get through this, and one of them has to be revenue generation,” said Bonta. “I can’t believe we would not put that on the table.”
This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "California Nation podcast: Is enough being done to prepare for a COVID-19 economic fallout?."