2022 City Council District 5

Compare your candidates' answers to our reporters' questions below. You will find a section of each candidate's interview highlighted that editors felt best summarized each answer. Click on the highlighted portion to read the candidate's full answer.
Megan Kerr
Ian Patton

Megan Kerr

→ Read Megan Kerr's complete answers here

What should the city do when confronted with homeless individuals who refuse to go into a shelter or temporary housing? 

The homeless crisis is an issue that’s both a critical quality of life concern for residents of the 5th District and a deeper reflection of long-term policy failures—and we must address both facets. If elected, I will work compassionately to connect unhoused residents with existing resources while also working to expand the opportunities and services we are able to offer so that we are meeting peoples’ needs. This means having shelter beds available including ones that allow families, pets, or storage for a person’s belongings, which can be a barrier to people entering temporary housing, safe parking areas, AND it means providing the supportive services that keep people facing housing insecurity in their homes. 

We can also utilize programs like rapid rehousing and Project Homekey to get people in supportive housing as quickly as possible. The council has taken a good first step by supporting the governor’s mental health court proposal. If done well this can be another tool in assisting the chronically homeless before they are arrested. 

How would you address crime in the city?

I understand the importance of feeling safe in the city in which you live and work. I support strong, community-based policing and I am committed to promoting efficient policing through investments in personnel. We must work to appropriately staff and train our police department so they have the ability to respond to calls quickly and in ways that best meet the needs of our diverse community. Maintaining public safety and emergency response times is a primary concern of residents across our city, not just in the 5th District. We need officers to not only respond to calls but to fully investigate them so they can be dealt with appropriately in the courts. I look forward to working with our public safety agencies to innovate and support programs to build community trust, maintain quality of life for all residents, and decrease our crime rates. 

In addition, we know that not every call for service is crime-related and we should continue to utilize and expand the use of our highly trained health department staff to come alongside our officers as they respond to calls that may be related to a mental health crisis or person in extreme distress. These teams have proved an effective way to help de-escalate difficult situations while keeping residents and officers safe. 

The state is requiring Long Beach to make room for 26,502 new housing units by 2029. How should the 5th District be a part of that plan? 

First of all, it’s absolutely critical that we continue to create new homes in Long Beach. We are facing an acute need for housing across the income spectrum and shortsighted policies of the past have left us in the position of needing historic home development to remedy this shortfall. For us to meet this challenge, we need a continued multifaceted approach. This starts with existing efforts to continue building new housing units where it is appropriate and aligned with the city’s Land Use Plan, Urban Design plan and Housing Element.

I believe we should also take the opportunity provided by the recently-adopted California H.O.M.E. Act and look at ways both property owners and our housing stock can benefit by encouraging responsible development like A.D.U. [accessory dwelling unit] conversion and duplex construction. The entire city as a whole is responsible for the housing goals set forth and equitable development should include parts of the city that have been traditionally less dense. Reasonable solutions like this both benefit our whole community and give homeowners the tools to further capitalize on an incredibly strong rental housing market to supplement their income.

What would you do about the high cost of housing in Long Beach? 

High housing costs are due to a lack of inventory. As we continue to grow our economy and add jobs, we need to make sure that we are increasing housing availability and not displacing current residents. In the long-term, adding to our aging housing stock is the best way to combat rising prices. In the short-term, we must continue to find solutions that prevent folks from falling into housing insecurity and homelessness.

Do you believe the city is doing enough to alleviate climate change and the effect it’s having on the city? If not, what additional actions should be taken? 

As a coastal city, Long Beach is more susceptible to climate change and sea-level rise and our more densely populated areas and inland areas are becoming increasingly hotter due to fewer parks and open space. The city should maintain its strong and strategic Climate Action and Adaptation Plan and the other environmental plans endorsed and approved by the City Council. If we are going to be serious about lessening the impact of climate change, then we must increase our staffing capacities to effectively build out the programs we have in place and ensure we are meeting our climate and air quality targets.  

I will work to protect, expand, and create more open space in our city as an additional way to address this issue. I believe as a city we need to continue to actively search for solutions to the climate crisis that intersect between job creation/preservation and improving the quality of life for residents of the city. I’m particularly interested in working with our city leadership in ensuring Long Beach benefits from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by Congress—particularly the provisions that will make our community more sustainable and equitable for our neighborhoods most impacted by the legacy of fossil energy.

Ian Patton

→ Read Ian Patton's complete answers here

What should the city do when confronted with homeless individuals who refuse to go into a shelter or temporary housing? 

Having participated in the recent Long Beach Homeless Count, I can tell you that our ongoing response to the homelessness crisis in this city is a completely dysfunctional utter disaster. The problem is spiraling out of control, not because we don’t have resources to address the problem, but because our city hall has intentionally chosen to look away from the problem, tolerate the problem, abet the problem, exploit the problem for a few momentary political photo ops, and deflect from the truth of the problem.

We live in a clearly progressive, compassionate, humane city, yet there is absolutely nothing humane about allowing individuals to die on the street. From the epicenter Downtown to the more recent metastasization to uptown neighborhoods, the danger both to the housed and the unhoused has skyrocketed.

The only solution is a complete reorientation of the city’s approach.

We have to enforce our anti-camping ordinance. We are already in compliance with the 9th Circuit Boise decision, as we offer services and shelter prior to any enforcement action. But the enforcement follow-through has been severely lacking. Allowing folks, in violation of the law, who suffer from mental instability and/or drug addiction, to slowly and unintentionally commit suicide on the streets of our prosperous city is the true violation of human rights we should be concerned with and outraged about. They must be put under a roof with support services.

We need to STOP WASTING our homelessness dollars. We need to form a regional joint powers authority, like SCAQMD, to tackle homelessness, and locally we need to sell and relocate the boondoggle city shelter on the border with Compton and relocate the Multi-Service Center, make it 24-7, and invest in the highest quality staff, who need to work both there and out in the field.

How would you address crime in the city?

We need to restore, indeed more than restore, our 1990s police force which peaked at over 1,000 sworn officers. Today, we have closer to 800 policing our streets.

Back in the 1990s, under Mayor Beverly O’Neill, we were on course to achieving the ultimate objective of having a “community-oriented policing” model. We also had a field anti-gang unit that needs to be restored.

Simply put, if you want to get serious about crime, successful policing models have proven that you need both quantity and quality.

You need to have the raw numbers to afford each individual officer enough time to get out of their car, walk their beat, and get to know small business owners and many residents personally. 

They cannot, as is currently too often the case, be working the 20th or 22nd hour of overtime, be utterly exhausted, and be expected to perform safely and effectively for the public. You cannot have a police force with no time to do anything but burst down streets with sirens blaring, responding to 911 calls, and expect cops to build interpersonal relationships with the community or to get to know problem spots in order to engage in proactive crime prevention.

We also need to have higher standards for recruitment, considering how high our compensation levels already are compared to other departments. And we need the absolute highest quality training, not just a GED, six months in the academy, and you get your badge and gun.

It is also absolutely essential that we have true police oversight and that we put a stop to the officer-involved shootings which have unintentionally cost lives and tens of millions in City taxpayer payouts. A reconfigured police oversight commission, made up of citizen commissioners, must have final authority over the new Inspector General proposed for LBPD.

The state is requiring Long Beach to make room for 26,502 new housing units by 2029. How should the 5th District be a part of that plan?

There is nothing equitable about greenlighting the kind of greedy developer, quick buck profit-driven development that for a time was allowed to overrun neighborhoods in southern and central Long Beach in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Back then a loophole in planning codes was exploited by developers to destroy single family zoned neighborhoods with “crackerbox,” substandard multifamily complexes, without accounting for strained infrastructure. There were no attendant increases in parking, park space, public safety services, sewer upgrades, etc. And of course there was no compensation to families who had invested their life savings and sweat equity into their homes, communities, and mortgages. Those who remained found themselves literally in quasi-canyons, a single family home sandwiched between cheap complexes, with far less daylight and diminished quality of life and property values.

Allowing that pattern to repeat, now that Sacramento has passed extreme, anti-environmental zoning deregulation laws like SB 9 and SB 10, and is attempting to impose highly questionable RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Assessment) numbers (requirements for cities to add large numbers of new housing units), despite a stagnant if not declining statewide population, would be abhorrent.

Simply put, well over 90% of the 5th District was planned as single family detached housing, is already built out that way, and common decency dictates that it needs to stay that way. 

Yet our City Council thus far has done nothing to prevent developer exploitation under SB 9, not even so much as passing a local implementing ordinance to impose parking and beautification standards.

While there are a few multi-family zoned corners of our district, where additional units could be added, and ADUs (if done properly) can be an option for low impact additions, by and large it is neither feasible nor equitable to pack far more housing density into this district.

What would you do about the high cost of housing in Long Beach? 

We need a sea change from the course we have been on regarding rental housing policy in this city. In recent years, policy decisions have increasingly veered toward the utterly perverse: Instead of supporting and raising up our thousands of small mom and pop rental housing providers—the folks actually providing the vast majority of our most affordable housing—we have been doing everything humanly possible to drive them out of the business, eventually leading to redevelopment, gentrification, tenant displacement, corporatization, much higher rents, less flexible terms, and less humane management.

As a result, while the inflation-adjusted cost of monthly mortgage payments (under the historically low interest rates of the last decade) has risen but not yet peaked compared to historical heights, the cost of rental housing is increasingly moving in the direction of super high cost rent control-model cities like Los Angeles. 

The perverse effect of the burdensome suite of regulations, generally discussed under the heading of “rent control,” is that newer, younger renters, those least able to afford the highest rents, have to subsidize—through a higher market rate—the rents of older leaseholders with rent levels artificially restricted far below market rate.

The vast majority of economists, nearly since the dawn of modern economic science, have agreed that such policies are catastrophic over the long term for any rental housing market, leading only to higher rents, poorer management practices, and the general degradation of housing stock. 

Eventually, under such circumstances, many of the mom and pop housing providers give up, and you get the tale of two cities we see in places like LA. They sell their properties to corporate developers who gentrify out both the working class renters and mortgage-bound landlords. And in their place they put sky high towers with sky high rents.

Do you believe the city is doing enough to alleviate climate change and the effect it’s having on the city? If not, what additional actions should be taken? 

No. We need to be a leader in building our electric car charging infrastructure and increasing the use of rooftop gardens, reflective cool roofs and rooftop solar panels (lobbying the PUC [Public Utilities Commission] to maintain the subsidy and the Legislature to fix the issue of the shrinking majority of non-solar power customers disproportionately subsidizing the solar customers, an issue for which the Sierra Club, of which I am an active member, has provided proposed solutions).

As a prosperous coastal city, I believe Long Beach must lead the way on climate change. 

We need to more rapidly phase out oil extraction, and we need to have massive public outreach to inform the residents how real and potentially imminent the threat of climate change is and that it could involve major trade offs between preserving expensive low lying coastal areas at enormous cost versus being forced to abandon them. When we convey how real this issue will become to the daily lives of so many, I think we will be better equipped to get the public on board with taking a leading role in greenhouse gas reduction and sustainable practices.

To the extent we continue to take in oil extraction revenue, we need to focus those dollars on climate adaptation strategies, like figuring out whether we can save Belmont Shore from inundation and what are the most sustainable locations for new assets like the proposed pool.

I also believe strongly in Community Choice Aggregation, in order to include greener options for electric ratepayers to source their preferred utility providers.