Posts by Take Back San Jose

Image by Wikimedia Commons California labor groups have their list of priority bills and the California Chamber of Commerce has a list of “job killers” it wants to defeat. Sometimes the two lists collide. The inestimable Dan Walters comments in Calmatters. An annual political ritual was repeated Wednesday when the California Chamber of Commerce released…

Albert Goodwin: Apocalypse. Image by Wikimedia Commons Regular readers of Opp Now have noticed that SJ’s Housing First orthodoxy—in which the solution to basically all civic problems is new, free, subsidized, no-barrier housing costing $1m/unit—is finally giving way to saner, faster, more efficient interim shelter solutions. It’s even happening at the statewide level, reports the…

Image in Public Domain For this installment, Opp Now visited the office hours of three econ professor–researchers (San Jose State dept chair Matthew Holian and prof Tom Means, and Stanford prof Alvin Roth) with one big question: What books could yield the most acumen for folks digging into economics, whether as novices or savants or…

Image by DPP Law Mark Powell posits in Times of San Diego that Prop 47, passed a decade ago to downgrade certain property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, has created a serious case of crime and (virtually) no punishment. Despite its kind intentions, Powell says Prop 47 has stuck the knife in innocent citizens, retailers,…

Image from Moneyball (2011) Modern progressives misunderstand what makes capitalism work, entrapped as they are in a worldview that suggests only greed can drive the sort of developments that have lifted the world out of eons of abject poverty. George Gilder, in a seminal National Review piece, posits that what makes capitalism deliver—for all—is its ability…

Critics like SJ’s Assemblymember Ash Kalra claim Newsom’s CARE Court initiative and local encampment restrictions harm an already vulnerable, stigmatized community. But Reason magazine asserts that helping people off the street and into shelter actually lowers violence involving homeless folks, and cities’ violent crime overall. Below, Reason’s data analysis of two big cities. A recent…

Rembrandt Peale: The Court of Death. Image by Wikimedia Commons Taxpayer advocate Susan Shelley shines a light on California’s Proposition 19, which nullifies existing protections for parent–child property transfer, thereby treating a gift of property like a sale. Shelley wonders if many Californians—who voted against one-time estate taxes in 1982—truly want their yearly property tax…

Image by Jeffery Scism Ninth circuit ruling Martin v. Boise only allows cities to remove illegal encampments (read: enforce existing laws) if every homeless resident has the “option” of sleeping indoors. The ruling’s vague wording has inspired numerous debates and lawsuits, but the City of San Bernardino sweeps the controversy to the side, pointing out:…

Image by Randy von Liski Everybody knows that building new housing to solve local affordability crises is brutally expensive, and requires vast, ongoing, unsustainable subsidies. Former D10 Councilmember Johnny Khamis posits that taxpayer money would go a lot further—and our homeless and needy neighbors would get housing relief a lot faster—if the City simply purchased…

Image by Roger W Cal and Stanford aren’t the only prestigious colleges driving off folks who oppose Hamas and support Israel’s right to exist. In December 2023, MIT lecturer Mauricio Karchmer stepped down from his dream job after observing his administration affirm antisemitic hate, while keeping mum on explicit terrorism. In a moving Free Press…