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THE VIEW FROM HERE -
Suppose: Some one knows that the maximum distance you can swim is 100 yards and the tells you that the river is only 100 yards wide and they will be with you in a row boat. After you’ve managed to go 110 yards, you discover that the river is 200 yards wide. As their rowboat recedes into the distance, you hear them laughing, “Lots of luck, Sucker.”
Questions: When have the toxic lies killed you? Will it be the moment your lungs fill with water or when they have destroyed all hope of survival?
That is the situation with Los Angeles. Angelenos have believed so many toxic lies for decades that as a city, LA is de facto dead. To use tortured metaphors, it is not the rats who are abandoning the sinking ship, but it’s the people wise enough to see the handwriting on the wall who are fleeing.
When one looks back over the last 23 years to 2001 when Garcetti was first elected councilmember for district 13, the city has been in decline for one reason: non-stop toxic lies! While the groundwork was laid years before when the developers destroyed the 1930 Olmstead-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region Parks, they did so because they did not want one square inch of land beyond their grasp to develop. One result is that Los Angeles is the nation’s most park poor city.
After WWII, came the truly lunatic idea to adopt central planning like East Germany, and that folly put a dagger into the heart of the new Keynesian form of “capitalism.” In 1948 California passed Community Redevelopment Agencies Act and soon the corrupt CRA/LA was born. Rather than free enterprise deciding which projects should be constructed, the government would fund projects based on corrupt kick-backs.
The naive public thought that they were supporting civic improvements like the Bunker Hill without knowing that none of the high rises would be paying taxes. Planners knew that the density of the new Bunker Hill would be too crowded for people to enter and leave without horrendous rush hours and much worse air pollution. Big lies accompanied Bunker Hill, e.g., the never-ending lie that rapid mass transit will solve traffic congestion. This lie along with excessive densification of Bunker Hill and then adjacent areas caused taxpayers to needlessly spend billions of dollars to fund the Densification-Mass Transit Vicious Circle, which thrives today and is one the major reasons Los Angeles is floundering in the middle of the river far beyond the point of no return.
Each time the corrupt city council, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of developers and Wall Street, authorized excessive density which it knew would make traffic worse, it claimed rapid mass transit was the solution. That was a known lie! Back in 1915, it had been mathematically proven that rapid mass transit in a huge circular city like Los Angeles is an impossibility. At the 5 miles radius from the center, no fixed-rail mass transit system can provide adequate transportation. People will not walk more than ½ mile to a station and as the rail lines extend outward from the center, it is impossible to construct enough stations to be within ½ mile of each home. The next insolvable math problem is the public’s getting around the growing circumference. How does one get from Santa Monica to Atwater? Will we have concentric rings of subway lines every five miles? The city is 500 square miles but the geographic area to be served is well over 5,000 square miles. Then, how does one get home with the family groceries for the week? They knew that rapid mass transit would be slow, arduous, dirty, and dangerous, but the public chose to believe the liars. Now, we all see the reality of rapid mass transit.
What the public still does not know is that a subway line’s reconstruction should begin within 30 years and that the mass transit system will run billions of dollars of deficits. NYC’s system runs about $8 billion deficit per year, and it is the most financially successful in the nation. In addition to its annual deficit, NYC’s system faces a $51.5 billion re-habitation plan. If we had not allowed densification in the Basin and instead allowed free enterprise to construct offices on the periphery, we’d have no rush hours and no need for mass transit, except buses. Instead, city hall allowed the corrupt CRA/LA dictate construction to benefit developers and Wall Street.
A circular urban area with an area of 5,000 sq miles has a radius of about 40 miles, which is 8 times longer than the maximum feasible radius of 5 miles. People tend to focus on the core area like DTLA and think the whole world is like Manhattan. False. Manhattan is rectangle – 11 miles long x 2.5 miles wide for 27.5 square miles. Thus, subway lines from the south to the north of the island do not diverge, but in a circular city like LA, the fixed-rail lines radiate outward so that after the initial five miles, more and more of the city cannot be served. The city knew in 1915 that constructing bedroom communities in the Valleys and the offices in the Basin was a nightmare scenario. The city’s solution was more lies about the wonders of rapid mass transit.
As was discovered during the fight to stop the Beverly Hills freeway from the 2 Freeway over to the 405 Freeway (to service Century City), developers planned to destroy the single-family homes for 4 blocks on either side of the proposed freeway. When the City of Beverly Hills killed the proposed freeway by demanding that it be cut and covered for the entire length of the Beverly Hills and that no freeway ramp could be on city property, the freeway became too expensive and the goal to serve Century City was destroyed. While the nightmare of the Beverly Hills freeway was averted, the developers adopted a new lie – more mass transit along corridors where high rises would be built.
The Corrupt Subway Con Works like This
The only solution to congestion is rapid mass transit. False! Projects like the Subway to the Sea, which is now destroying West LA residential homes, would add enough high-density apartments to equal 125 linear miles of single-family homes. “Linear mile” means if each apartment were a single-family home and lined up, side by side with 60-foot frontage, the homes would stretch 125 miles! Between Santa Monica and DTLA, the developers proposed construction the equivalent to 125 linear miles of homes which would add 1,650,000 more people. Adding over 1.5 million people will not reduce traffic congestion.
The people who could afford to live in such high rises (1) will not live there, and (2) if they did, they would drive rather take the subway. When one takes a subway, one can only go to destinations along the subway’s route. That means anyone who would live in one of the high rises along the Subway to the Sea will have own a car which makes the traffic congestion near the subway lines a nightmare. This fact is the basis for Judge Chalfant’s rejecting the Millennium Project in Hollywood. It would attract so many cars that traffic congestion with turn Hollywood into gridlock near the Hollywood Freeway. Also, freeway congestion would so bad that Valley residents could not reach DTLA during rush hour. About a year early, Judge Goodman had rejected the Hollywood Community Plan Update on the basis that the city uses lies, i.e. intentionally flawed data.
The Viciousness of the Lies Grows Each Day – Redistricting
The final kill shot appears to be Redistricting Commission. City Council President Krekorian is now promoting the most destructive lie to hit Los Angeles. As horrible as all of the prior lies about (1) a housing shortage, (2) mass transit will solve traffic congestion, (3) the FBI’s faux lawsuits to protect the city council’s criminal vote trading system (Penal Code §86), Angelenos are being stampeded to turn every inch of the city over to the developers to do whatever they want behind closed doors. If you think that there are back room deals now (and there are), they are nothing compared to the hideous disaster of the proposed redistricting.
The sole and only purpose of the redistricting scam is to allow developers to place their “made men” on the redistricting commission which will then in secret divide up the city as the developers want. One likely change will be to increase the number of districts from 15 to 25. The purpose is not to provide more representation, but to distribute the graft more evenly throughout the city. The defect in the City Council Vote Trading Scam which the FBI tried to remedy with its lawsuits against Englander and Huizar was that some districts got huge projects with hundreds of millions of dollars to be spread around. Councilmembers whose districts were not getting lucrative projects were tired of being forced to vote for mega projects and getting none of the loot. Thus, Englander and Huizar were using the PLUM Committee to hit up developers for more payments to councilmembers nowhere near the district which would have the project.
The genius the Vote Trading System was that a developer had to bribe only the councilmember where he wanted to build – the One of Done Rule. But Englander and Huizar were using the PLUM Committee, in which a project has to pass before getting to the city council where it had been guaranteed an unanimous approval, to demand more payments to other councilmembers.
Redistricting’s purpose is not to benefit voters, but rather to institute a developer-chosen commission which will operate in secret to divide up the city into more districts in order to spread out the graft. The political battle from which the Angelenos are excluded is whether the state or the city shall create the Commission and place its henchmen on the Commission. If the State’s redistricting bill prevails, then the corrupt dollars will flow to the state legislators like Scott Weiner and not to the city council. Either way, Angelenos will have zero input, and everything will be done in total and complete secrecy. Voting for councilmembers will be worthless since developers can easily spend enough money to make certain that more developer shills like Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martinez are elected in all 25 districts. There is an alternative districting plan which would kill corruption, but all the bigwigs oppose it. February 7, 2016, Zwartz Talk, The Corruption Eradicator, The 3/15/45 City Council, by Scott Zwartz
Whoever said ‘crime doesn’t pay’ has not been to Los Angeles.
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected].)
