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In less than five weeks, California voters will decide on Proposition 10, a ballot initiative that would allow cities and counties across the state to expand rent control.

Supporters of the measure say it will offer relief for tenants during a time of unprecedented housing affordability problems in California. Opponents contend it will stymie housing construction — the levels are already low — and further increase costs.

Here’s a rundown of some of the difficulties renters face and how Proposition 10 would affect them and broader affordability issues.

Just how dire is the situation for renters in California?

Very. Nine and a half million renters — more than half of California’s tenant population — are burdened by high rents, spending at least 30% of their income on housing costs, according to a recent analysis of U.S. census data by UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.

Rents have jumped since the end of the last recession as many areas of the state have seen strong job growth but little housing production. In Los Angeles, the median one-bedroom rental is $2,370, according to real estate website Zillow — an increase of 43% over the last eight years. Similar rent hikes have hit San Francisco and the state as a whole.

Rents in California have far outpaced rents in the rest of the country. Nationwide, the median one-bedroom rent is $1,299, according to the Zillow data, increasing 25% over the same eight-year period.

High housing costs have left millions of Californians poor. Nearly 1 in 5 California residents lives in poverty when housing and other costs of living are considered, helping give the state the distinction of having the nation’s highest poverty rate.

As economic pressures on renters have increased, tenant activists have ramped up their promotion of rent control as a way to hold down costs.

Does rent control help with housing affordability?

Economists of different political stripes rarely agree on much. But there’s consensus, even among liberal economists, that rent control doesn’t help with housing affordability.

Economists generally believe that when government limits the price landlords can charge for housing, there will be fewer houses produced, which in turn drives up prices.

“When you have a price ceiling, it induces a shortage,” said Christopher Palmer, an MIT economist and coauthor of a study on rent control in Cambridge, Mass. “The common wisdom is that rent control reduces the quantity and quality of available housing.”

Instead of rent control, Palmer said, economic research contends the primary solution to housing affordability problems is to build lots more homes and have the new supply force prices down.

But what about California tenants who are struggling now?

By one estimate, developers in California need to build an average of about 320,000 new homes a year to address the state’s shortage and make a major dent in affordability problems — a rate roughly triple the current pace of construction. The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said the state would need to increase subsidies by billions of dollars a year to finance enough low-income housing for those most in need.

But these goals will be very hard to achieve, and some researchers say rent control is necessary to protect tenants from the continued threat of rising prices. The UC Berkeley Haas Institute report contends that rent control is the only way cities and counties can keep costs down cheaply and immediately.

“This is really the one thing that can be implemented most quickly,” said Nicole Montojo, a coauthor of the report. “The building is not going to happen fast enough. It’s just not possible.”

Cities and counties can also tailor rent control rules to limit negative consequences for new construction and other potential downsides, said Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and author of a forthcoming review of existing rent control research.

“For the life of me, I can’t think why you would give up rent stabilization as a tool given the extent of the crisis,” Pastor said.

How would Proposition 10 work? And what is Costa-Hawkins?

Fifteen California cities have some form of rent control now. But local governments are hamstrung when it comes to implementing most new rent control policies because of a 1995 state law, the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.

That law restricts city and county rent control efforts in three ways. Local governments are not allowed to:

• Implement rent control on single-family homes.
• Take away the right of landlords to charge what they want for apartments after a rent-controlled tenant moves out.
• Control rents on buildings constructed after 1995. The law also locked into place rules in cities with rent control when Costa-Hawkins passed. For instance, Los Angeles ties rent hikes to inflation on apartments built on or before Oct. 1, 1978, and is prohibited from applying its provisions to more recently constructed properties.

The 1995 law chilled cities’ and counties’ passage of new rent restrictions. In 2016, Mountain View and Richmond in the Bay Area became the first communities to implement new rent control rules in more than three decades.

Proposition 10 does not change existing rent control policies — it simply repeals Costa-Hawkins. So passage of the initiative would not, in most cases, immediately lead to new rent control rules. Instead, it would allow cities and counties to craft policies without restrictions.

Proposition 10 also would be hard to undo in the future. The initiative includes a provision that says any effort to implement statewide restrictions on rent control would have to be approved by California voters. The authors of Proposition 10 say they wrote the measure that way to prevent state lawmakers from undermining it. But the provision has faced criticism from those who contend any negative consequences from the measure would be very hard to fix.

How has rent control affected San Francisco?

Researchers at Stanford recently published a detailed examination of rent control’s effects in San Francisco, where the policy is restricted to apartments built on or before June 13, 1979.

Among the biggest beneficiaries: longtime tenants who would have been forced out of the city without renter protections. The study found rent control especially helped older and black and Latino tenants from being displaced.

Landlords who weren’t able to charge higher prices lost out. The study also found that landlords responded to rent control in San Francisco by converting their rental properties to owner-occupied condominiums, which decreased available apartments in the city and increased prices overall. The research contends that the system added to gentrification in San Francisco by increasing the number of older rental properties being made into units that were typically sold to wealthier residents.

“It may seem like a solution in the short run, but in the long run it really hurts renters and the rental market,” said Rebecca Diamond, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford and the study’s lead author.

Rent control supporters believe the study unfairly blamed the system for fueling gentrification and said the city could have worked to lessen some of the negative effects.

“Even though the costs they found are substantial, those costs could have been contained by the city of San Francisco having tighter controls on condominium conversions,” said Stephen Barton, a coauthor of the UC Berkeley Haas Institute study.

If Proposition 10 passes, what happens next?

Expect a lot of new local battles over rent control.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has said he wants to expand rent control in the city if Proposition 10 passes. And Berkeley voters will decide in November whether to bolster the city’s own rent control policies — the new rules would take effect at the same time as Proposition 10.

Fights at the city and county levels are likely to be long and contentious. Mountain View, which in 2016 passed a limited version of rent control that’s allowed under existing state law, has had a continuous struggle over rent control policies for the last three years with no end in sight.

Two months ago Liverpool’s huge summer transfer spend looked like it had made the Premier League title a formality.

Arne Slot’s side were five points clear at the top of the table after only five games, having strengthened their squad with £415m worth of talent.

Florian Wirtz was signed from Bayer Leverkusen for an initial £100m, rising to a possible £116m. Newcastle United striker Alexander Isak joined on deadline day for a new record transfer fee of £125m, which could be £130m with add-ons.

Nothing could go wrong, could it?

Both signings have struggled and Liverpool’s form has nosedived, leaving them 12th in the league.

Wirtz has no goals or assists in 11 Premier League outings. Isak has yet to score a goal and has one assist.

It is way too early to write off two of the most expensive Premier League signings of all time.

After all, Thierry Henry scored only two goals in his first 17 appearances for Arsenal. By the end of that season he had netted 17 times in the Premier League, 26 in all competitions and went on to be one of the league’s greatest-ever players.

But curiously, when you look down the list of the Premier League’s biggest incomings, there are not too many ‘huge’ successes.

How do you judge this? I’ve looked at each deal and given my verdict relative to their own achievements and that of their clubs. Fees shown are without add-ons.

Of course this is very subjective and you are free to disagree (or agree) in the comments below!

The price of olive oil has been soaring.

Strolling through an olive grove in southern Italy, surrounded by trees, many of which were more than 200 years old, I was bathed in sunshine and calm with only the warm breeze floating through to branches to break the idyllic silence.

Frantoio Mafrica is a family-owned olive mill, which has been handed down from generation to generation. While it looks like little more than olive trees in a sunlight dappled grove to us visitors, to the owner they’re his family heritage. When he looks at them he sees his grandfather, who also worked the land.

The mill also uses donkeys to help transport the olives after picking, which is done in the traditional way by shaking the tree when they’ve 50 percent green and 50 percent black. And meeting the baby donkey who wanted nothing more than cuddles was one of the highlights of my entire trip to Calabria with Great Rail Journeys.

The family secret to processing the olives into the highest quality extra virgin olive oil was also unexpected. Rather than pressing the olives, they’re washed with water as they’re pulped to make sure every bit of Italian goodness goes into the oil. The process is all completed 24 hours after harvesting.

After trying the oil with bruschetta I can confirm it was like nothing available in your local Tesco: utterly delicious. Calabria is one of Italy’s major olive producing regions, with more than 50 types grown there including the only white olive. However, you would have had to have been hiding under a rock to be unaware of the soaring cost of olive oil.

Frantoio Mafrica explained the heart-breaking reason behind this alarming rise, and it’s not the market forces behind the soaring costs of other food. In fact, it’s because huge swathes of Italian olive groves have been hit by a terrible disease, which has killed the trees, many of them hundreds of years old.

As olive trees take so long to grow, the devastation of burning huge numbers of the diseased and dead trees has been a terrible price to pay for a country and region so fiercely proud of its ‘liquid gold’.

Knowing the passion, work and care that goes into making the best olive oil – and the devastation this blight has caused – I’ll complain much more quietly at the price next time.

SACRAMENTO — The day after the last out-of-town TV news bureau was shut down and state capital correspondent Ginger Rutland and her producer-husband Don Fields were fired, the couple got a panic call from their former employer, KRON-TV in San Francisco.

It was the first week of November and real news–not that stuffy, dull legislative dross that blows through the halls of the state Capitol–was happening in Sacramento.

“They wanted us to go out and cover the body search at the landlady’s house. You know the one who was accused of doing in all the old men?” said Fields. “Everyone wanted that story. Nobody wants to know about budgets or bills that might raise their taxes or ruin their water.”

Indeed, TV stations throughout the state–including KABC-TV Channel 7, KNBC Channel 4 and KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles–dispatched correspondents to Sacramento that Friday afternoon in November to cover the Dorothy Puente “Arsenic and Old Lace” case, because not a single out-of-town TV station in California now has its own bureau here.

“It’s an absolute outrage,” said Harry Snider, West Coast director of Consumer’s Union. “We have a state that is supposed to have the 10th largest economy in the world and not a single TV station covering how it’s governed.”

With the shutdown of the KRON bureau, only TV reporters from Sacramento’s own stations cover legislative news on a regular basis.

“California is only one of three states in the country that don’t provide live coverage of debates in their state legislatures. Wyoming and Montana are the others,” said Tracy Westen, a USC professor who is writing a book on media coverage of state and local government in California (see accompanying article).

“Democracy is eroding in California,” Snider said. “Government does not work for the people, and the reason government doesn’t work is that public officials are able to escape the spotlight of public attention.

“All of them, from the governor on down, know that they can ride out a print story or a radio sound bite on the Michael Jackson show. But none of them want to be caught giving away the farm on the six o’clock news in Los Angeles or San Francisco.”

While TV stations have been pulling out, the state’s newspapers have been increasing capital coverage, according to a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco). Currently, 30 newspapers and wire services have bureaus here.

Both Gov. George Deukmejian’s office and state Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti’s office are disturbed by television’s departure from the scene.

“The shutdown of the KRON bureau really is the culmination of a very disturbing trend,” said Kevin Brett, Deukmejian’s press secretary.

“What will be missed will be the original reporting and investigative reporting,” said Bob Forsyte, Roberti’s press secretary. “That kind of reporting can only be done with sustained coverage from a bureau. The viewers will miss what will only come to them now through the print media.”

KNBC News Director Tom Capra said the decision to shut down its bureau six years ago was based on financial considerations–determining how limited resources should be allocated.

“The real crux of this is the expense,” he said. “It costs about $100,000 a year to have someone in Sacramento. I would rather spend that money covering the news in Southern California. I’d a helluva lot rather have a bureau in Orange County or even Riverside than in Sacramento.”

Capital veterans such as Rutland and Fields, who have been in Sacramento for 10 years, and KCRA-TV’s Steven Swatt, who has been reporting state government news for nearly 20 years, say the benign neglect of Sacramento can’t be blamed on rising costs.

“Logistically and economically, its’s easier and cheaper than ever before,” Rutland said. “We’ve got videotape. We’ve got satellites. The fact is stations don’t do it because they’d rather put crap on the air.”

“It’s greed,” Swatt said. “You’ll see them send up people for things like the body search or a plane crash, but why aren’t they here when the Legislature’s trying to raise taxes or the CHP wants to upgrade its radar or there are hearings being held on changing school textbooks or day care?”

When he headed the Sacramento bureau for KNBC a decade ago, Steve Mallory says, it used to cost about $250,000 a year for an out-of-town station to maintain a capital bureau.

“Most stations like to have their own person on the scene, but if they can’t, they’ll take anything they can get,” said Mallory.

That’s what Mallory is banking on, at any rate. Last summer he created the Northern California News Satellite service to fill the void left by the TV exodus from the state capital. So far he has 13 subscribers, including KNBC, and several other stations and networks that buy his daily satellite video feeds on a spot basis. Both KCBS and KABC have bought stories from him, he said.

“If they get it for one-tenth the price from us, they’ll take it,” said Mallory, who, like a newspaper wire service, spreads his costs over a number of clients. “Public service isn’t the prime concern of television news anymore. The bottom line is.”

That doesn’t mean he offers second-rate goods, Mallory maintains.

“We’re their bureau in the state capital,” he said. “Our stories are written for a general statewide audience unless we get a specific request from a subscriber to do something. But we give them what they want.”

A recent typical NCNS news day involved covering a press conference on a new drunk driving bill, comment from Gov. Deukmejian on the Armenian earthquake, dedication of the state Vietnam Memorial and a plan authored by the state Department of Social Services to pressure absentee parents to make their child support payments.

“When the story broke about the woman who planted the people in her back yard, we dropped everything else,” Mallory said “It was the only story we did for three or four days. It was the only one our clients wanted.”

Fields is not surprised.

“Why try to inform the public about issues that are going to affect their lives when life can be made so much easier dealing with a car accident or an unexplained shooting or some bizarre thing on ‘Entertainment Tonight’?” he asked.

KNBC’s Capra maintains that his station gets all the state legislative news it needs–from wire reports, selected satellite feeds from Mallory’s NCNS, its Sacramento sister station and elected officials downstate for a visit to their constituents.

If a bill is controversial or of particular interest to Los Angeles audiences, Capra does what his rivals at KCBS and KABC do: He sends a reporter to Sacramento upstate for a few days to get the story.

“There’s not much in Sacramento that we don’t know about,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with the way Sacramento is covered and I don’t think we’re doing a disservice to the public by not following a bunch of rich lobbyists around. How many times can you cover that story?”

Snider’s answer is fast and angry: every day.

“It is amazing to me that legislators spend $100 million every two years to seek legislative office and TV stations don’t think they’re important enough to cover,” he said.

The voters are the ultimate losers, according to Swatt and Rutland.

“All the surveys say that 66% of the population gets its news from the TV,” said Swatt. “If they don’t even know what’s going on up here, that’s frightening.”

“We live in a democracy where public opinion is far more important than ever before,” said Rutland. “The Field Poll and other polls influence legislators. And the initiative process puts more and more power directly into the hands of the public. But the public doesn’t know what’s going on.”