President Trump's man in California, how to afford a home in So Cal, and the first East LA Comic-Con

"There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump." 

The younger generations are really known for loving to eat out and for spending their money on travel rather than necessarily homes.



But if they do want to buy a home, they probably should spend more time cooking at home and some time saving.



They need to organize their budgets so that they can afford to pay that mortgage and property taxes and insurance. 

They need to educated about the home buying process, itself, and what they could actually qualify for in terms of a loan.



They're often more serious about getting started with a family, so they can go to their local bank or loan officer about how much they might quality for.



There are tools on sites like BankRate and Zillow that are free and are educational tools about how to buy a house and what you can afford. 

If you have a steady income, it really might be to your benefit to buy a house with a fixed mortgage.



One of the things I worry about is when clients retire, the rent keeps going up but your retirement income does not necessarily keep up with that.



So I worry that my clients are going to be in a rental they love and the increase in rent is going to outstrip their Social Security and other income.

"So the point of these new laws was just to make it easier for people to build these granny flats. One way the law's tried to do this is by restricting the hook-up fees that owners would be charged to connect the backyard home to water and sewer for example. The laws also say if you live near public transit, you don't have to put in extra parking which was what some of the cities were saying that you had to do if you wanted to build a backyard home.



So, the net effect of these policies is just less cost and less headache for the person who wants to build it."

"For something that sounds so benign, 'granny flats,' so harmless, they just bring up a lot of emotions in people because...actually in L.A. they're quite popular. There are actually tens of thousands of backyard homes estimated to be out there but they're not the record...



So, folks are of the mind, 'if it's my property then I should be able to build what I want there,' but then you've got the neighbors who are worried that without adding more parking to these backyard homes, that it'll make the streets more congested and then traffic's going to get worse. And there's also this thing with aesthetics because even though they're in the backyard sometimes you can see them from the street. Especially if you're building on a slight slope and unless you've got tall fences, your next door neighbors are going to be able to see your backyard home."

"Well, the new laws they don't give amnesty to unpermitted units so, folks in this situation have a few options. They can continue without a permit like they have been and then you run the risk of getting in trouble or getting turned in by a neighbor or you can be proactive and get your unit on the books and the good news now is that going legit is way easier to do under the new state law if you meet certain criteria, this is at least what I'm hearing from Matt Glesne who's a city planner for L.A. and according to him if you're unit meets a short list of requirements it doesn't have to meet the kind of zoning requirements that new units would have to meet.



So, let's say you have an existing garage that you converted into a second unit. As long as it has it's own entrance and meets certain safety standards, you should be good."

"At this point, I haven't heard of any restrictions on renting it out on the short term rental market, though I should say the crafters of the state law definitely intended for these backyard homes to go on the long-term rental market. Whether they could be rented out on Airbnb I think would depend on each city, because, some cities like Santa Monica are saying that you can only rent out units on Airbnb or VRBO if you also live on the premises. The idea is to prevent investor types from buying out large swaths of apartments in multi-family buildings and creating so-called rogue hotels. 



But I think with granny flats you already have someone living at the main house so, it shouldn't be a problem..."

"Certainly the lawmakers up in Sacramento think so. Even if a small minority of homeowners putting granny flats, that could go a long way towards creating more housing. There's already tens of thousands of backyard homes in L.A. before the state law passed, most of them illegal. If the state law does what it's intended to do, which is to encourage building of these seconds homes, then imagine how many more tens of thousands of units could potentially come online. It's really particularly hard to build new homes in L.A. because of land costs all the regulations, neighborhood opposition...



Case in point, last year, L.A. built under 17,000 units. But with granny flats, you don't have to make land purchases because the homeowner has the land. So, that gets taken out of the equation. But I should say there's no guarantee that these second homes will be affordably priced. The hope is that by adding them to the mix, to the overall housing stock, that granny flats can help bring down prices overall." 

Peter Mellini: For me, it’s a hometown show…. We’re in the heart of East LA. That was the hard part about putting this show on is that we wanted to find a place that was big enough that was actually in East LA. It’s a free event... which blows people’s minds.

Peter Mellini: For the most part I had to go out of the city. We had to come out to Pasadena or Alhambra. Once we  discovered Frank & Son – when you don’t drive that’s like a two-three hour bus ride.

Peter Mellini: Growing up, I wanted to do two things. I wanted to own a comic book shop and I wanted start a show. I bought a comic book store and this is the year I finally paid off the comic book store, so I was like, it’s time to do a show.

Rafael Navarro: Like many of us in the comic-dom, we grew up reading our Marvel comic books, our superhero characters. There was no, for lack of a better word, representation for who I was at the time. I could relate to people like Peter Parker and certain other aspects, but they just didn’t look like me. As I grew older and I grew a little more sophisticated about things, eventually, it began to bother me.



Let’s flash forward into the far, far future, I broke into comic books. I worked at Marvel myself but when it came to doing my own comic book, I didn’t want to just draw another Wolverine, or another Batman, or another Captain America at all. I just chose to dip into my own fountain of selfness. The fountain revealed, yes I am a Latino. I’m an American citizen of course but of Latino origins and I just needed to express that. So, comics became the medium to do that.

Rafael Navarro: My first monster– I call this my Boris Karloff Frankenstein monster, he still resides around the countryside there being persecuted by the villagers. His name is Sunambulo. I’ve been publishing him since 1994.

Sunambulo is a former masked Mexican wrestler who now resides as a private eye. He has these uncanny abilities to do certain things including reading your mind. Very surreal, very dreamlike qualities. In order for him to investigate what he needs to get out of people, he basically extracts their dreams from their mind. Sunámbulo in Spanish means sleepwalker.   

Rafael Navarro: It’ll be like an all-you-can-eat sampler. There will be mainstream comic book related stuff, as well as independent comic book artists. Ranging from science fiction, to lucha libre, to thing that go bump in the night, so to speak. Various genres for various people, drawn by a plethora of artists who are offering a different perspective, and a different take on the typical square-jawed or swimsuit model superhero and heroine.

Peter Mellini: The big thing is going to be the local artists. We tried to get a lot of people from the area. And not just East LA but the surrounding Los Angeles area. There’s a few artists– this is their first comic book convention they’re going to be doing.

Rafael Navarro: It’s a great way to showcase new talent coming in.

Peter Mellini: Exactly. I think that’s the best part about it. The thing about San Diego is it’s gotten so big that I feel like you can’t really stop and talk to people. And with this show, I’m hoping – I feel like it’s going to be kind of crowded – but I’m hoping it does give the opportunity for people to actually talk to artists, get to meet them, and maybe get some commissions and stuff.



The funny thing is that this got way bigger way quicker than we expected. A lot of companies that we talked about eventually getting to like the El Rey Network, we were like, we’ll get to them in year three or 4… they approach us early on. That’s the crazy thing because it was suppose to be this small show but now we have the El Rey network involved and they’re sending talent from Lucha Underground to the show and we’re going to do a meet and greet with them. So, it’s a little mixture of everything.