MY TAKE -
“The most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.” — Louis D. Brandeis, April 14, 1903; later U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Executive directive. Executive order. Edict.
Legally, they are different things. But when an executive directive can remove discretionary review, eliminate a public hearing and fundamentally change the way major development projects are approved in your neighborhood, the folks in Lake Balboa can tell you it feels like an EDICT.
And increasingly, it is the public hearing itself that appears to be on California's endangered-species list.
That matters because a public hearing is not some ceremonial obstacle standing between a developer and a building permit. It is where residents bring information that doesn't fit neatly into an application: the dangerous intersection, the overwhelmed evacuation route, the school traffic at 3 p.m.
Eliminate the hearing and you haven't merely streamlined a process.
You've eliminated the public's place in it.
Mayor Karen Bass called hers Executive Directive 1 — ED1. It began as an emergency measure intended to accelerate desperately needed affordable housing.
And I give the Mayor credit for trying.
Los Angeles was confronting a genuine housing and homelessness crisis. City Hall moved painfully slowly. Bass wanted to get affordable housing built faster.
But a mayor can only be as effective as her support team—and in Los Angeles, that includes a City Council whose members are supposed to know what policy looks like when it lands in a neighborhood.
And that is where this City Council failed both the Mayor and its constituents.
What began as an emergency directive did not disappear when the emergency ended. The City Council made the streamlining permanent through what is now called the Affordable Housing Streamlining Program.
And there can be no suggestion that eliminating the public hearing was an accidental consequence buried somewhere in the fine print.
The ordinance says it explicitly:
“No public hearing shall be held.”
Five words.
No ambiguity.
Sit with that for a minute.
Imagine a 194-unit development in two five-story buildings across from your child's school, near an intersection you already know is dangerous.
And then imagine being denied the one project-level public hearing where you could tell the decision-maker what an application cannot: what it is actually like to live there.
The project qualifies. The standards are objective. The approval is ministerial.
And when residents turn to their elected representatives, what are they likely to hear?
“Our hands are tied.”
Those were the words CD12 Planning Director Dan Rosales used with me in another planning fight.
Remember them.
Because the hands did not tie themselves.
On December 9, 2025, the Los Angeles City Council voted to make the Affordable Housing Streamlining Ordinance permanent.
The vote was 15–0.
Every councilmember voted yes. Nobody voted no. Nobody was absent.
They had alternatives. They could have expedited the public hearing, environmental review and Site Plan Review while imposing firm deadlines on City Hall.
Instead, they streamlined us right out of the process—leaving the public standing outside the circle yet again.
So Who Is Inside the Circle?
If residents are being pushed outside the circle, who is still standing inside it?
California's own lobbying disclosures provide at least part of the answer. Building and development interests have reported lobbying on AB 130 and other housing and streamlining measures. In fact, California Building Industry Association lobbying reports were among the records produced by the Secretary of State in response to my Public Records Act request concerning AB 130.
There is nothing improper about lobbying. Industries affected by legislation have every right to advocate for their interests.
But so do the people who live there.
Developers have lobbyists. Residents have public hearings.
Take away the hearing and it becomes painfully clear who has been streamlined out of the process.
Vote. Pay your taxes. Fund the government. Then stand outside the circle—and be quiet while you do it—as we decide what your neighborhood will become.
That isn't streamlining bureaucracy.
That's driving the public hearing—and with it, the public itself—toward extinction.
Then Take a Drive to 17100 Victory Boulevard
If all of this sounds abstract, take a drive to 17100 Victory Boulevard in Lake Balboa.
This is what ministerial streamlining looks like when it leaves City Hall and lands in a neighborhood.
The project consists of 194 apartments in two five-story buildings. Of those, 192 are income-restricted units and two are manager units.
And just 66 parking spaces.
Proximity to the Metro G Line may reduce automobile use for some residents. But in the San Fernando Valley, a car remains a practical necessity for many.
And the surrounding neighborhood matters.
Across the street is Birmingham Community Charter High School, serving more than 3,200 students within a larger educational complex. Thousands of students, teachers, parents and vehicles already move through the area every school day.
It is an intensely used corridor. That is precisely where planning is supposed to begin—not with a checklist, but with the roads, sidewalks, parking, emergency access, utilities and people already there.
And this isn't Gladys Kravitz peering through the curtains, complaining about too many weeds in the neighbor's lawn.
This is Los Angeles. We have watched wildfires move with terrifying speed and evacuation routes become overwhelmed. Asking whether school traffic, emergency access and infrastructure can accommodate additional density is not obstruction. It is responsible planning.
Los Angeles has already been reminded what happens when aging infrastructure and an emergency collide. The West Hollywood water-main rupture damaged or destroyed roughly 150 to 200 vehicles.
Cars can be replaced.
Children cannot.
These are foreseeable questions involving real streets, real infrastructure and real people. When children are part of the equation, shouldn't our threshold for careful planning become higher, not lower?
Apparently not.
Because the system our City Council unanimously chose to make permanent says:
“No public hearing shall be held.”
But the Community Wasn't Silent
Lake Balboa residents did what communities are supposed to do: they organized, showed up and fought back.
Among those who have continued to lead that effort is Linda Gravani, President of the Lake Balboa Neighborhood Council and Chair of the Valley Alliance of Neighborhood Councils (VANC), an alliance that brings together neighborhood councils throughout the San Fernando Valley.
Until these laws and policies are amended to restore meaningful public participation, organizations like neighborhood councils and VANC are vital. They give communities a voice when the formal process increasingly does not—and they send City Hall and Sacramento a message that the people who live with the consequences are not going quietly.
Finally, Affordable Housing
There is an important distinction between this project and many housing-streamlining laws I have examined: this one actually delivers affordable housing.
At Victory Boulevard, 192 of the 194 apartments are income restricted—the kind of housing ED1 was created to produce.
I've quoted my father before, and his words are especially relevant here: the ends don't justify the means.
Affordable housing is unquestionably a worthy end. But eliminating public hearings and meaningful community participation should not be the price.
Affordable housing does not make traffic disappear, create parking spaces, enlarge sewer lines or make an intersection safer.
And Then There Is the Money
If the public has been streamlined out of the process, the public's resources certainly haven't been.
HACLA's latest financing documents put the total development cost of 17100 Victory Boulevard at approximately $155.9 million—more than $800,000 per apartment. And that is for a project using modular construction specifically intended to reduce construction time and costs.
That is not all taxpayer cash; the financing combines debt, private tax-credit equity, public loans, tax-exempt financing and housing subsidies.
It includes approximately $78.7 million in HACLA tax-exempt bonds, nearly $20 million in California low-income housing tax credits and a $750,000 HACLA loan.
And the public support continues after construction. 163 of the project's 194 apartments are tied to a federal project-based rental-assistance program.
Government has decided this housing is important enough to finance, subsidize and support for years.
Then why are the people helping support that public policy considered so unimportant that they don't merit one project-level public hearing about how it lands in their own neighborhood?
“No public hearing shall be held.”
And Then Nobody Looks Back
There is another missing piece in too much of the streamlining experiment: the aftercare.
Streamline first → Approve faster → Remove hearings → Reduce review → Move on to the next bill.
If lawmakers are going to ask Californians to surrender ordinary planning safeguards in the name of solving a housing crisis, they should have an obligation to come back and show whether the medicine worked.
No meaningful public participation on the way in. Too little public accountability on the way out.
What Happened to the Planner?
There is another casualty in all this: the city planner.
Professional planners are supposed to do something computers, algorithms and checklists cannot: exercise judgment.
Looking at Victory Boulevard, a planner should be able to ask the most elementary question:
Does this project work here?
The answer need not be no. But somebody ought to be allowed to ask.
Yet when qualifying projects are reduced to ministerial review, the planner who might otherwise examine the peculiarities of a location, hear from the people who know it, consider competing impacts and recommend project-specific changes is diminished to something much closer to an application-processing unit.
Think about what we are doing.
We are not merely removing residents from planning decisions. We are removing much of the planning from planners.
The public hearing disappears. Discretionary judgment disappears. Project-specific consideration disappears. And the professional planner increasingly becomes the person who determines whether the boxes have been checked.
We haven't streamlined planning.
We've streamlined the planner out of planning.
And when legislation simultaneously sidelines the public and diminishes the professional judgment of planners, there ought to be a very high burden on lawmakers to demonstrate that the sacrifice is accomplishing what they promised.
Too often, that demonstration is missing.
Which brings us to three words:
Dangerous. Disrespectful. Defective.
Dangerous because foreseeable local conditions can be removed from meaningful consideration.
Disrespectful because it treats residents—and increasingly professional planners—as impediments rather than sources of information and judgment.
Defective because the bargain itself is broken. Some streamlining laws require too little affordable housing; others require none at all.
And the salt in the wound is that too often there is no corresponding system of compliance, tracking, follow-through or public accounting to determine whether the promised affordability was actually delivered and maintained—or whether the legislation accomplished what lawmakers said it would.
And perhaps that explains why those five words keep bothering me:
“No public hearing shall be held.”
Hunted to Extinction
The Los Angeles City Council can still correct what began as an emergency measure and became permanent policy.
Amend the Affordable Housing Streamlining Ordinance—or rewrite it. Expedite hearings and environmental review. Establish firm deadlines. Streamline Site Plan Review.
But stop driving the public hearing toward extinction.
Because when the hearing disappears, something much larger disappears with it.
The resident loses a place at the table.
The planner loses the ability to exercise professional judgment.
And planning itself begins to look less like planning and more like application processing.
Mayor Bass asked Los Angeles to move faster to house people.
She did not ask the City Council to make the public disappear.
The Council could have streamlined bureaucracy while preserving a meaningful place for planners, environmental review and the public.
Instead, it chose five words:
“No public hearing shall be held.”
So when the next councilmember tells constituents that their hands are tied, remember who tied them.
The City Council did.
Planning wasn't the problem. Environmental review wasn't the problem. Public participation wasn't the problem.
And the public hearing certainly wasn't the problem.
Yet one by one, those are the things being stripped away.
First the hearing. Then the planner. And finally, the public.
That isn't responsible streamlining.
It's planning by extinction.
About the Author
(Eva Amar is the Granada Highlands Community Coordinator and a West Valley community advocate. She is also a national campus sexual violence advocate.)
