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It is customary for bubbleinfo to stand down during tragic events, and yesterday afternoon was one of those, with the Chelsea King case.

While the story will be with our community forever, we should put some immediate attention on it.

We’ve been discussing how we can’t depend on the government to provide as much as before, though many will say that the sex-offender program has been woefully inadequate for years.  Hopefully this case will bring more attention to the program’s failings.

What can we do as private citizens?  We need to be more aware of our surroundings, and take action to protect and defend ourselves from harm.

It is a mandatory disclosure in the real estate industry to encourage clients to review the Megan’s Law website, where registered sex-offenders are listed by name and address: http://meganslaw.ca.gov/

As we’ve seen in Chelsea King’s case, the perpetrators can move around, but let’s note where they are registered today:

What can you do? Here’s a link to an article and video that covers the basics of self-defense. Hopefully the community will also create a non-profit foundation or other entity to which we can contribute, to help further the cause.

Chelsea’s case has deep personal concerns for me, being a parent of two teenage daughters. But there is also another personal tie, going back to the 1950s. As some of you know, my grandfather (I’m his namesake) was District Attorney of Alameda County back in the day. He prosecuted a very similar case that was captured in a book, Shallow Grave in Trinity County, that gripped our family then, and shows that this has been a problem for a long time.

EDIT:

This is the perpetrator’s parents’ home in RB, photo taken from the UT:

From the WS Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123725421857750565.html

An excerpt:

A better idea is to offer permanent residence status to the many foreigners who are clamoring to get into the U.S. — if they buy houses of minimal values (not shacks). They wouldn’t need to live in those houses, but in order to remove the unit from the total housing market, they couldn’t rent them. Their temporary resident status granted upon purchase would become permanent after, perhaps, five years, if they still owned the houses and maintained clean records. The mere announcement of this program might well stop the ongoing collapse in house prices, especially in cities such as Las Vegas, Miami, Phoenix and San Francisco, where prices are down 40% — but where many foreigners like to live.

Each year, 85,000 H-1B visas are granted for foreigners with advanced skills and education, and last year, 163,000 petitions were filed in the first five days after applications were accepted. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation estimates that as of Sept. 30, 2006, 500,040 residents of the U.S. and 59,915 individuals living abroad were waiting for employment-based visas. Many would buy homes if their immigration conditions were settled.

These people tend to be highly productive. In 2006, foreign nationals residing in the U.S. were listed as inventors on 25.6% of the patent applications filed in the U.S., up from 7.6% in 1998. A Council of Graduate Schools survey found that in the fall of 2007, 241,095 non-U.S. citizens were enrolled in graduate programs. Some 55% were in engineering and the biological and physical sciences, compared with only 16% of U.S. citizens. In 2007, more people on temporary visas received doctorates in physical sciences and engineering than U.S. citizens.

There is a high correlation between education and incomes, and in today’s uncertain economic climate, many wealthy foreigners desire U.S. resident status just as a number in Hong Kong secured residences in Singapore and Canada before the British handover to China in 1997. They rapidly became over a quarter of Vancouver’s population, and brought in billions of dollars to buy houses and make other investments.

We could benefit from such an influx. Merrill Lynch estimates that in 2007 there were 10.1 million individuals in the world, 7.1 million outside the U.S., with at least $1 million in financial assets that totaled $29 trillion. If new immigrants bought the 2.4 million excess houses at today’s $184,000 median price with funds from abroad, they would bring untold billions. The immigrants would also buy consumer goods, pay taxes, and start many new businesses.