A15: Project 2050

Notice: The article has been recently updated for clarification and typos.

This piece is an article about my town. I wasn’t expecting to article, but it just kind of appeared with a deadline today at 4:00pm. We made it at 3:59pm. Hopefully you enjoy.

What is project 2050+ plus what are their plans, and how effective will it be? Is it truly the saving grace which they like to mention?

The 2050+ Plan is the idea that by 2050, we will have all these great advancements in the Bay Area in of form of transportation, housing, the environment, and so forth. However, before we talk about these changes, let’s first look at how much it will cost.

It’s not complicated, the politicians just makes this quite confusing. The first part you may see is revenues. These are the revenues the San Francisco Bay Area will need to cover all the costs. Of course, the government doesn’t really have revenue. We are its revenue, so just know that government revenues are what we will be paying as the taxpayer.

Next, we see the labels existing and new. Existing stands for the current amount we spend and new for the future amounts that will need to be added to complete project 2050+. By adding four sources together, we get a total cost of $1.477 trillion which will be paid over 25 years. Quite a substantial amount for our little home, but how much is this really?

Steps:

This $45,156 is the amount you can expect to pay in taxes per year. What, did you expect, that it would be reasonable? Now this will not just be in local taxes, but broken across state taxes, subsidies, federal taxes, and other hidden expenses. We might be able to fleece a bit of money from other states to pay for it, but I would like to know how much it would cost us alone as a good benchmark. Before you go crazy, let’s give the government a fair shake, maybe they know something we don’t.

Transportation will be the largest cost, with a total of $512 billion. First, let’s look at the transit passengers per day:

As we can see, transportation has gone downwards since 2019, yet costs have not. 2020 was the heat of covid, yet five years later, we still have yet to see that number bounce back. With the signing of the Senate Bill 63 by Gavin Newsom this October, the Bay Area is calling for a 14-year $980 million annual transportation sales tax. This tax covers the annual deficits of our transportation system which amount to $800 million plus gives them another $180 million to spend. How this is not covered by the already gigantic $423 billion they will currently collect over 25 years ($16.92 billion a year), your guess is as good as mine.

If you are wondering why our government will never say they are overspending, it is because if they ever admit they are overspending in one place, people may start asking questions about where else they are overspending. Auditing by the taxpayer is a big NO.

Don’t worry, we are also throwing on another $71 billion Next-Generation Transit Network. Considering the cost of the high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles jumped from $33 billion to $128 billion, this one might get very expensive.

So, the expenditure in transportation does not look great, how about the sea levels. Surely, we have to protect against that. Now, these people (our politicians) love to preach to us about their dogma of climate change, and that rapidly rising sea levels will lead to disastrous consequences unless large scale planning is in place.

Well, is it really going to be that scary? Not quite, for the sea level is rising close to 1 inch per decade, which is about the thickness of a nickel each year. If you think that is catastrophic, then I don’t know what to tell you. Sea levels have risen linearly for over a century, with no detectable acceleration from man-made CO₂ in sight. At current trends, it would take well over 250 years to reach that dreaded 2 feet.

I could discuss all the problems with man-made climate change however, that would be a bit too long for this article. If you would like to know more, here are the first two articles of a four-part series I am working on it.

Part 1: Global Warming: Man or Nature? (Click Here)

Part 2: Global Warming: Common Myths (Click Here)

Why does this number matter so much? Well, that magical two feet is going to cost us $96 billion or on a per person basis, $12,800 each.

We need affordable housing; we need affordable housing! That is the mantra which is preached to us. We have so much inequality that it must be fixed. The only way is to spend $100’s of billions to build low-income houses, and currently we are not building enough. We need 55,147 housing units a year and are only building 25,735. So, the government is going to what it does best, and force us to build more.

If this overcrowding is not what we desire we can still stop it with zoning restrictions, right? Not quite, with the passage of Senate Bill 450 in November 2024, we are no longer able to stop anyone with zoning restrictions from flooding our home with all these low-income houses.

Now you may ask but isn’t that ok because at least these people would have homes. There is another part which they are not promoting. They intend to increase the population by 1.7 million, about a 25% growth (7.7 → 9.5) by 2050. They are planning on changing our malls into giant apartments, erecting 15-17 story buildings, and flooding our towns with multifamily homes. You thought the Bay area was overcrowded now, oh just you wait, if we allow things to continue as they are, it will get much worse.

You cannot fix a home scarcity problem by importing more people! The people who will be hurt most by this are those who the government is claiming to defend. When do we get a say in this? What if I don’t want mass migration into my little town. What if I don’t want a booming urban center, but the simple neighborhood I grew up in. I see the way my hometown is going, and I don’t like it.

So, what’s my answer to all this affordable housing nonsense? None. I want a net-neutral or net-negative influx of people, and that doesn’t seem very unreasonable. This county is not the poor house of California. Let’s speak truthfully, these people are not going to be loyal, good, taxpaying citizens, but with them is going to come crime, and more mouths for us to feed. Do you think low-income people are going to want more or less taxes? More, much more, and not paid by them, but by us. And the more people we import, the less control we will have over home and our future. If we don’t do something now, we won’t be able do anything later.

Let’s talk about who this housing is truly affordable for. It’s affordable to the politician who will gain more votes leading to more taxes. It’s affordable to the migrant who gets a cheap house. And, it’s affordable to the construction contractor who can gain up 50% of the housing costs in subsidies. But, it certainly won’t be affordable for the regular taxpayer who has to fund all this.

Is this really the best you can do politicians? With the amount of money we give you, is this what you could come up with? Guess how many people they asked when creating this doomsday plan? 17,000. That is 0.2% of Marin, and somehow these bureaucrats are going to act like this was a whole community effort. This plan is one gigantic fleece job, and I for am done with the government taking me for the fool and will no longer be going to sit around idlily allowing my home to be destroyed. Will you?

Let’s start with the two main organizations driving this change: the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). If you ever step into the domain of politics in this region, these two are the heads of the snake.

They manage the area’s “long-range transportation, housing and land-use plan, which guides the agencies’ policy and investment decisions”. But, who are the leaders, who are guiding organizations? I like seeing the names and faces of those destroying our towns.

Andrew Fremier is the executive director of both the (MTC) and the (AGAB). Shocking, talk about collusion in our government. He oversees a staff 400 strong who manage the entirety of the San Francisco Bay Area including the council of governments for the region’s nine counties and 101 cities and towns.

Nor is that all he manages. Fremier leads the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA), the Bay Area Infrastructure Authority (BAIFA),  the MTC-SAFE, and the Bay Area Headquarters Authority (BAHA). His tenacles run thick through our government.

And now for his number two.

In 2023, Alix Bockelman was appointed to the new position of Chief Deputy Executive Director for MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments. In 2003, she was the principal analyst to oversee the region’s $18 billion transit expansion program. Certainly, no stranger to vast sums indeed.

This is a mere introduction, and I have no doubt more will need to be discovered on these two. Nor do they act alone, for there are many more in this gang of vagabonds: click here. However, these two are just the mere front people. Greater minds lurk further in the shadows avoiding detection. They will not be able to hide forever, however. Their time is coming to an end, for they cannot run from the light of truth!

God Bless.

Your humble servant, Francisco Pereira