Passenger Trains > North Bay housing costs have SMART scrambling for engineers

North Bay housing costs have SMART scrambling for engineers
Marin Independent Journal
by Mark Prado

> The high cost of housing in Marin and the Bay Area is making it hard
> for the fledgling SMART commuter rail service to find people to
> pilot its trains.
>
> The Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit agency is set to launch service
> on a 43-mile line stretching from downtown San Rafael to the Santa
> Rosa Airport later this year.
>
> But recruiting engineers, signal technicians and vehicle maintenance
> technicians is proving to be a challenge because of the costs to
> live in the region. In response, the agency board approved an 11
> percent pay increase for those positions.
>
> “The cost of housing has been an issue in recruiting and retaining,”
> Lisa Hansley, SMART’s human resources manager, told the rail board
> last week. “It has been a challenge for us. Our salaries are not
> competitive.”
>
> SMART is up against agencies such as BART, Caltrain, Amtrak and the
> Altamont Commuter Express, some of which offer $10,000 “signing
> bonuses” to accept employment.
>
> “We are competing against the big dogs for the same pool of
> applicants,” said Erin McGrath, the agency’s chief financial
> officer.
>
> Because passenger rail has not existed in the North Bay for several
> decades, the majority of applicants live in counties outside the
> North Bay or in other states. Several qualified candidates have
> declined job offers after being unable to afford or find housing in
> the area, SMART officials said.
>
> The median price of a Marin home was $1.2 million last month, up 13
> percent from the previous June, a real estate information service
> reported last week.

Add to that: SMART is not a participant in Railroad Retirement. It
is a State of California Public Employees Retirement System agency,
and PERS has had financial issues lately. SMART's management
has also recently lowered retirement benefits for new hires...of
course this reduction excludes themselves, and those benefits are much lower
than those for Railroad Retirement.

Pay scale for SMART Engineer/Conductor (dual certification required)  is $26.68 - $40.08/hour.

Full article:

North Bay housing costs have SMART scrambling for engineers



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/26/16 20:15 by GenePoon.

PERS may have had "financial issues", but that's because the stock market was lackluster in 2015.  Now, let's look at another example: Social Security.  Talk about having financial issues -- there's your poster child!  I don't think that stops anyone from accepting a job covered by Social Security.

If PERS needs money to pay benefits, it simply assesses its member agencies and gets whatever moneys it needs.  The same is likely true for Railroad Retirement.  Money doesn't grow on trees.

One, it's CalPERS and they're not in danger going broke anytime soon.

So the high cost of housing is making things difficult in finding employees?  Why, the "solution" might be to do what is happening on a massive scale in Southern California:  People are converting their garages into living space or they're sub-dividing suburban homes, condos and even apartments into boarding houses. Abodes that were originally designed to accommodate, say, five or six people are now housing fifteen or twenty, all of them paying rent to the owner / slumlord.  The large number of renters brings the unit cost for a room back down into an affordable range.  You'd be amazed how many people can fit into a studio apartment when there's bunk beds stacked three or four high.  Slumlords can wring even more productivity if the occupants "hot sheet" -- that is, one batch of people use the beds for twelve hours and another batch of people use those same beds for the other twelve hours.     

Of course, while all this is going on, the municipal code people turn a blind eye and sit at their desks, pondering their retirement date and the size of their pension.  The attitude today is that telling a slumlord that he might be violating municipal codes is an invasion of privacy and it might hurt his feelings. It's easier just to look the other way. 

The area around MacArthur Park in LA offers a good example of this phenomenon.

It's the New World Order.  I'm surprised Marin County hasn't kept up with the times. 

Damn, it started to sound like a possible job as engineer after retirement,since I live close enough. But it won't work if I am already in CalPERS. Oh well.

Gary

Posted from iPhone

And yesterday, a financial newsletter reported that CalPERS currently forecasts the solvency of its huge investment fund and payout on a 7.5% rate of income (earnings). The unfortunate reality is that it is only earning .61%, which is not as much as many stock market funds earn.

There are so many assumptions in pension accounting that it's not possible to focus on just one.  But when you combine life expectancy increases, persistent interest rate failures to achieve target rates, and pressure for lower municipal and government contributions, the outlook isn't very good.

WONK ALERT

People are living longer, and the gradual rise in women's participation has boosted life expectancy for the "average" participant.

Pension plans aren't achieving their expected / target rate of return, so the assets are earning less. Some plans are paying benefits out of assets, rather than earnings. So, fewer assets are in the plan to earn interest going forward.

Governments increasingly bypass or defer contributions.  NJ, for example, earned 20% on its assets in the late 1990s. Way about its 7.5% long term target. So it increased payouts and offered lots of early retirement deals.  So, some people got an extra few years of retirement and the plan got fewer years of contributions from the state.  Both Corzine (D) and Christie (R) took advantage of the opportunity to skip billion dollar contributions to the plan.

The same principles hold with Social Security. The added wrinkle is the contributions in the door, and payments out the door are essentially equal. And the small amount of plan assets earn the interest rates on federal bonds, which is minimal

IF, the railroad industry keeps decreasing jobs and eventually goes to 1 man crews, how can that be good for future r.r. retirement benefits?

66

SN711 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Damn, it started to sound like a possible job as
> engineer after retirement,since I live close
> enough. But it won't work if I am already in
> CalPERS. Oh well.


No, it won't...for the information of other members, CalPERS strictly limits the allowable working time and wages of someone
who has already retired from a CalPERS agency.

So, it's an FRA operation because of the temporal separation with freight traffic, but the employees are not covered by RRB because SMART is not a "railroad."  Seems like they *are* asking for a lot.

BTW, are NJT RiverLine operators FRA too?

Paul Wilson
Arlington, VA

I think the simple fact of them not paying into RRB is putting them even further behind the eight ball in addition to what the housing costs may be in that area. For a veteran engineer, even if you really wanted to move and work there, it is financial retirement suicide to leave a RRB job and go to one without it.

Back on the original topic, it is at least ironic (and maybe more) that a commuter rail operation which seeks to alleviate some of the effects of American urban sprawl is having a hard time recruiting because of, well, uh,  urban sprawl.

Higher density housing (yes, that would require multi-story buildings, with rental units) would help alleviate the affordable housing crunch and would probably also attract more riders on the rail line.  Especially in they were clustered around transit stations.  But in pull-up-the-drawbridge suburban NIMBY communities, nobody is willing to do that.

HYPOCRISY ALERT:  This is posted by a comfortable middle class white guy, living on a 6 acre parcel at the far exurban fringe of a metropolitan area.    I make no claims to hero status on this issue.

irhoghead Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think the simple fact of them not paying into
> RRB is putting them even further behind the eight
> ball in addition to what the housing costs may be
> in that area. For a veteran engineer, even if you
> really wanted to move and work there, it is
> financial retirement suicide to leave a RRB job
> and go to one without it.

you got that right IH ... especially with the ANNUAL max 17k income allowed under RRB ...

CA_Sou_MA_Agent Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So the high cost of housing is making things
> difficult in finding employees?  Why, the
> "solution" might be to do what is happening on a
> massive scale in Southern California:  People are
> converting their garages into living space or
> they're sub-dividing suburban homes, condos and
> even apartments into boarding houses. Abodes that
> were originally designed to accommodate, say, five
> or six people are now housing fifteen or twenty,
> all of them paying rent to the owner / slumlord.
>  The large number of renters brings the unit cost
> for a room back down into an affordable range.
>  You'd be amazed how many people can fit into a
> studio apartment when there's bunk beds stacked
> three or four high.  Slumlords can wring even
> more productivity if the occupants "hot sheet" --
> that is, one batch of people use the beds for
> twelve hours and another batch of people use those
> same beds for the other twelve hours.     
>
> Of course, while all this is going on, the
> municipal code people turn a blind eye and sit at
> their desks, pondering their retirement date and
> the size of their pension.  The attitude today is
> that telling a slumlord that he might be violating
> municipal codes is an invasion of privacy and it
> might hurt his feelings. It's easier just to look
> the other way. 

It is interesting that you bring this up. I live in Rowland Heights which is an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County. (Avacado Heights, Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights make up the largest unincorporated area of Los Angeles County that is considered a normal suberban housing area.) Just yesterday in the mail I received notice of an amendment to the zone laws for the Rowland Heighs area that will specificly ban more than one living area (described as having a seperat kitchen, bath, bedroom and exterior door) on a property unless it is specificly zoned for mulit-family units.

NJ has a feature in the state code which allows towns to create "transit villages" at train stations, major bus park and rides,etc. Basically high rise high density zoning.

Posted from Android

march_hare Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Back on the original topic, it is at least ironic
> (and maybe more) that a commuter rail operation
> which seeks to alleviate some of the effects of
> American urban sprawl is having a hard time
> recruiting because of, well, uh,  urban sprawl.

Yeah, I second that. That was my immediate reaction as well.

This, of course isn't a Marin County only issue. If the folks at SMART are trying to justify additional expenses to their operation by pointing the finger at the housing "market forces" in the Bay Area, I don't blame them.

One solution for a very large organization (private or public sector) is to offer subsidized housing as employee incentive, but that would offend the believers of the American (pipe) Dream.

Real estate interests in the Bay Area used some nefarious tactics to shore up the housing market during the mortgage crisis while our friends down south couldn't avoid it and went through some tough market corrections several years ago. I've already mentioned some specifics, but I don't need to repeat it here (people don't read my stuff anyway). Just take Zillow like drugs, be bliss, and rejoice.

Going back into "ancient history"--a hundred years ago the Market St. Ry. in San Francisco had company housing near the Elkton Shops at Geneva and San Jose Ave. for shop employees.  I'm not sure how the idea of a "company village" near the SMART yard would go over either with the workers or the neighbors, but that's how they did things in the old days.

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> NJ has a feature in the state code which allows
> towns to create "transit villages" at train
> stations, major bus park and rides,etc. Basically
> high rise high density zoning.
>
> Posted from Android

Cool, didn't know anybody had done that on a statewide level.  Any examples of this being implemented?  Seems, (looking out the window anyway), that something like this may be going on at Rahway on the NEC?

I have more experience with Metro North, especially the Hudson Line, and the only real growth around stations that I see is limited to Yonkers and Tarrytown.  Poughkeepsie sort of, but the garage they built is about half the size it needs to be.  It's full by 7:30 AM most days when I'm trying to use it.  Other than Cold Spring, its nearly impossible for an out of towner to stash a car for a quick trip into NYG after 7 or 8 AM.

Morristown NJ has done several projects using the Transit Village concept. I believe there was some push back in the local community about how much farther the developments would expand.

The new North Brunswick train station site is an expansive and expanded version of same.  Offices, residential, retail, parking towers, and some big box stores. Secaucus transfer also has some of the elements.

jst3751 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It is interesting that you bring this up. I live
> in Rowland Heights which is an unincorporated area
> of Los Angeles County. (Avacado Heights, Hacienda
> Heights and Rowland Heights make up the largest
> unincorporated area of Los Angeles County that is
> considered a normal suberban housing area.) Just
> yesterday in the mail I received notice of an
> amendment to the zone laws for the Rowland Heighs
> area that will specificly ban more than one living
> area (described as having a seperat kitchen, bath,
> bedroom and exterior door) on a property unless it
> is specificly zoned for mulit-family units.

The key will be as to how seriously they enforce that amendment.  You can have unlimited laws on the books.  The key is enforcement.

I used to live in the apartment complex on the south side of the Puente Hills Mall.  I recently read where a bunch of the units there got busted for wedging a whole bunch of pregnant Chinese women in several units as part of a "birth tourism" scandal.  I'm sure that's also happening in your area with single family dwellings.  And I'll wager that only the tip of the iceberg has been discovered.    

Somebody needs to crack down on all this nonsense and now.  But there's too many bleeding heart do-gooders that throw up road blocks every step of the way.  And people are making money while thumbing their noses at the law. Money talks.  Common sense walks.