CityWatch Los Angeles
Politics. Perspective. Participation.
SPORTS POLITICS--To put it mildly, the National Football League needs the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers’ Inglewood stadium, scheduled to open in 2019, to deliver — and deliver big.
It had better, because a seemingly worst-case scenario has unfolded since the league a year ago voted to allow the St. Louis Rams to spurn public funding in St. Louis and relocate to Los Angeles.
EASTSIDER-The Developer vs. NELA Open Space fight is one we Angelenos understand all too well. What makes this dispute different is that there is a rational developer, and based on the respective positions of the two sides, there should be a solution that works for all. Since that hasn’t happened, the question is “why the heck not?” For the scene, the struggle, and possible solutions, read on.
Background
For those of you who don’t know, Glassell Park is that series of hills near downtown LA, bordered by the Glendale Freeway on the west, and the 5 Freeway on the south. Recently overwhelmed by a wave of gentrification, suddenly a small home in these hills is going for something like $600,000 - $800,000 and beyond.
Aside from proximity to downtown, one of the main attractions of what was a sleepy little community is the presence of 4 or 5 (depending on how you count) of the last open space canyons in the City, preserving native species from critters to trees in a natural habitat.
Over the last 15 years or so, these canyons have been ground zero for hotly contested disputes between developers, who see a great commercial opportunity, and a variety of community based groups, such as the Glassell Park Improvement Association (a homeowners group), the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council, the Mt. Washington Homeowners Association, and a coalition of open space groups under the umbrella of Nelagreenspace.
To no one’s surprise, the amount of this open space has diminished to the point that we are essentially left with two large open spaces -- Walnut Canyon and Moss Canyon (Barryknoll is already in the midst of development.)
The Shifting Sands of Northeast LA Politics
Over these same fifteen years, there have been three Council Districts involved with Glassell Park -- CD1, CD13, and CD14. During that time, the political elite of the City have seen fit to gerrymander the area covered by each of these three districts so that there is little political continuity, a fact which I believe has led to the tenuous interest of the current crop of Councilmembers in actually giving a damn about the folks who live here. Two of our three Councilmembers (Huizar and Cedillo) are on the PLUM Committee.
For example, our very own Mayor, Eric the Bold, used to have a good chunk of the community in CD13, but that has now diminished to a teeny area mostly around San Fernando Road and Fletcher Square. The District is now run by his former staff person, Mitch O’Farrell.
CD14, which used to encompass most of Glassell Park when Antonio Villaraigosa was the Councilmember, got shrunk to a pittance after his successor, Jose Huizar, decided he could make more money selling off Boyle Heights and Downtown LA.
And finally, CD1, which was run by that paragon of planning, Ed Reyes, got radically expanded in the last redistricting exercise, and is now under the tutelage of Gilbert Cedillo. His district now includes the bulk of these canyons.
I think the redistricting shuffle is a pretty good variation of three card monte, and gives you a clue as to exactly how rotten the state of politics currently is on Northeast LA.
That said, accompanying the gerrymandering there has been an equal upheaval in how the politicians view Glassell Park. Back in the day, our Three Amigos (Reyes, Huizar, and Garcetti) were dead against building in the hills. They passed a bunch of legally questionable Interim Control Ordinances, Community Design Overlays, Q Conditions and many more bogus “planning tools,” all of which had the effect of stopping virtually all building of single family homes in the hills.
The open space people were ecstatic, but some of us noticed that the real thrust of the Council actions were aimed against the right of individual people like you and me to be able to build our own home on a lot in the hills. They didn’t touch their big time campaign contribution base of large developers. The land was being warehoused.
Of note, the bulk of the people wanting to build were multicultural families who had owned these lots for some time, and simply wanted to build their family a home. In other words, people with no real money and therefore no political power.
Then came the housing crash in 2007-2008, and god took care of the hillsides for a while. Instead of open space, we all concentrated on figuring out how to cope with a 40% drop in the value of our homes, not to mention staying employed to pay the bills.
The Adobe at Glassell Park
Now the worm has turned, and housing near downtown is hot! Silverlake properties are largely unattainable, unless you are running an Airbnb party house, and anything around Echo Park has popped up like pot grown in a hothouse. We in Glassell Park (and to some extent, Cypress Park) have gotten discovered as the next great thing.
In the midst of all this, along came the developers of The Adobe at Glassell Park, a four-acre piece of the 30-acre Walnut Canyon. Unfortunately for those who want to preserve the canyon, Adobe has the legal ability to build 32 single family homes on their four acres. This is because that land was zoned and 32 lots were approved way back when.
With virtually no inventory in Glassell Park and a housing comeback, in 2014 the developers got serious about moving forward with their plan. It’s Unusual for developers, but these folks actually did engage the community and have a number of community meetings. Furthermore (gasp), they were and continue to be open to selling their property as open space, for a park or such, and reaffirmed this willingness last Saturday at the Glassell Park Community Center.
On the other hand, this is a capitalist country (even before Trump), and the developers are interested in making a decent profit out of the deal. Duh.
Saturday’s Meeting at the Glassell Park Community Center
On January 28, a community meeting was held at our community center, a space leased by Council District One. The event (and thank you very much) was cosponsored by the Glassell Park Improvement Association and the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council.
As usual, the crowd was huge, and the rhetoric was as toxic as the bike lane meetings were in Highland Park/Cypress Park/Glasell Park. Toxic indeed. While it is clear that the community will do everything in its power to stop the development and preserve Walnut Canyon, it is equally clear that the owners have a right to build, and the most the community can hope to do is delay the project, not stop it.
I think it is that frustration which has led to the vehemence in attempting to block the project, a frustration over our community’s lack of political power to preserve the canyons.
Of course an unmentioned fact is that most of the groups in our area supported the loser in the last race for CD1: Ed Reyes’ Chief of Staff Jose Gardea. In an almost $2 million dollar campaign, Gil Cedillo won by 52% to 48%. And wouldn’t you know it, the Mt. Washington crowd was prominent in the Gardea camp, many of whom had some pretty incendiary things to say about Mr. Cedillo. I won’t say that elections have consequences, but I haven’t seen a lot of kiss and make up since the election. Sigh.
The Takeaway
The real problem is that public institutions have failed in step up to actually do something to preserve what little open space there is left in Glassell Park. For example, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and its OberGrupenFuhrer ‘Ranger Joe’ Edmiston, has been too busy posturing to come up with the money from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to buy the land.
It also turns out that the spiffy new Measure “A” Parks money which was just passed by the voters won’t really be available until sometime in 2019. After all the hype it turns out that even then the funds will be up for grabs by various denizens of the Supervisorial District. So good luck to our local open space folks.
That leaves the City of Los Angeles. It seems to me that this is a grand opportunity for Council District 1 to see about some fresh ideas on how to keep Walnut Canyon as open space. God knows the rest of LA is turning into a concrete jungle, a place where the only open spaces are the potholes.
There is precedent for the City stepping up for open space. After all, a few years ago Jose Huizar proudly bought Elephant Hill for over $9 million bucks and hailed it as a great victory.
The value of a pristine canyon or two is inestimable to all the citizens of Los Angeles, particularly those people squashed into outrageously priced condos in the downtown area. Maybe Huizar could help out, since he runs the PLUM Committee. He, after all, was the one who gerrymandered his way out of Northeast LA in favor of downtown, and I think his constituents just might like to take a ride and see a tree, or a critter, in a canyon.
(Tony Butka is an Eastside community activist, who has served on a neighborhood council, has a background in government and is a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
REFORMING LA FOR THE PEOPLE-While I can't reasonably speak for all of those who advocate for Measure S, I can reasonably say the following: neighborhood/volunteer/community advocates have been stymied by a Downtown/Mayor/City Council/Planning elite for decades. This elite has thwarted attempts by neighborhood councils and grassroots groups to create affordable, sustainable, environmentally-favorable, and economically-beneficial living conditions in the City of Los Angeles.
Common sense, right? And this same elite is coming out against Measure S. Most of their allies are comprised of the same ilk that has benefited financially while causing the majority of Angelenos to suffer a decrease in quality of life or to flee the City altogether, often after years of fighting against this elite.
Despite the lies and distortions, most of this unholy alliance of builders and developers are the same people who flout the laws themselves or pay off Downtown to flout the laws. They benefit financially while they do this and -- as would be expected -- have overseen a worsening of the environment, economy and quality of life in LA as a result of their actions.
So the same folks who have fought for grassroots voices and for neighborhood councils are fighting for Measure S. Perhaps it's sad we have come to this, but has the City Council elite (those who oppose Measure S) bothered to police itself over the last few decades?
The answer is No. So this is what Measure S is FOR, as per Ballotpedia:
1) FOR TWO YEARS, WE WILL STOP MEGADEVELOPMENTS, ALLOW DEVELOPMENTS THAT DON'T NEED HUGE VARIANCES, AND UPDATE OUR GENERAL PLAN/COMMUNITY PLAN/ZONING LAWS. WE WILL HAVE THE CITY OBEY ITS OWN LAWS, AND THEY WILL BE UPDATED WITH LEGAL/COMMUNITY INPUT.
2) THERE WILL BE A PERMANENT PROHIBITION AGAINST "SPOT-ZONING", WHICH IS WHEN THE CITY VIOLATES THE LAWS FOR A GIVEN PROJECT, BUT THE ABILITY TO PERFORM LEGAL/COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED VARIANCES WILL BE MAINTAINED.
3) THE CITY GENERAL/COMMUNITY/AIRPORT DISTRICT PLANS WILL HAVE A LEGAL REQUIREMENT TO HAVE A PUBLIC REVIEW EVERY FIVE YEARS.
4) ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORTS (EIR'S) WOULD HAVE TO BE PERFORMED BY CITY STAFF, AND NOT BY INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS PAID BY (AND BEHOLDEN TO) THE DEVELOPERS. IN OTHER WORDS, THESE EIR'S WOULD BE UNBIASED.
5) NO MORE THAN ONE-THIRD OF A REDUCTION OF ON-SITE PARKING REQUIREMENTS COULD OCCUR FOR A GIVEN DEVELOPMENT.
So now you have read the basics -- the essence of Measure S. It's a shame that we have to pursue Measure S at this time, but after decades of being lied to, of being "owned" by developers and their allies who want to make big bucks and harm the daylights out of the rest of us, we have no choice.
Measure S supporters are your neighbors, the affordable housing advocates, and the volunteers who want parks and a livable City where children and seniors and families can thrive and enjoy life. They want big projects to remain Downtown where they belong, and for there to be smaller projects in the suburban portion of the City, with accessible jobs as well.
It's what we're FOR. And those who oppose Measure S? What are THEY for?
Vote "YES" on Measure S on March 7, 2017.
A happier, reformed Los Angeles may be coming a lot sooner than you think!
(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.) Photo: LA Times. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
ELECTION POST-MORTEM-If you have found yourself profoundly depressed since the election of Donald Trump, you should have been at Occidental College on Wednesday night -- it would have given you hope. The Reverend Dr. William Barber II not only laid out in painful detail what put Trump in the White House, but also took the time in the clearest of terms possible to lay out the steps we the people can do about it now. It involves coming together and asserting our majority status in this democracy.
Barber’s thesis is that endemic racism is not only alive and well, but is literally the only force powerful enough to get poor White voters in 95 of the poorest counties in the United States and elsewhere in the South to vote against their own economic self-interest.
These poor voters should wonder why some of those pushing Trump or prior Republican candidates make as much as $97,000 an hour while they fight a $15 an hour minimum wage. The "gift" of racism is that it is able to deflect the blame of poor White exploitation by the obscenely rich to the usual Black, Latino, Muslim, and Jewish suspects, which continues to succeed in the 21st century by offering equally poor and downtrodden working class Whites the consolation prize of feeling at least nominally superior.
What this left us with in the latest election -- and many of the ones proceeding it -- is the voting reality that this profoundly poor racist motived the voter core of 13 Southern states to give conservative Republicans and now Trump an almost insurmountable 171 Electoral College leg-up. Republicans then only need to accumulate another 99 electoral votes out of the remaining 37 states.
But in North Carolina, Barber didn't stop at just pointing out the racist fear motivated model that has kept putting conservatives and now Trump in power. His Moral Mondays and other programs coordinated with litigation networked across racial and state lines to engage a multi-racial and ethnic have-not majority that has finally given constitutional "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" a substantive new reality as reflected in the election of a new Democratic governor and other elected officials.
This has been accomplished, while waging a successful judicial confrontation and a reversal of what had been the systematic gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
What I found to be a vindication of Dr. Barber's approach to all exploited people is something he mentioned briefly in passing. In the state of West Virginia where Trump won, Dr. Barber has now been asked to speak before predominantly White audiences ow that these folks have come to realize that the racially tainted Obamacare is actually the Affordable Care Act, and that is what Trump is in the process of taking away from them.
The significance of race in the election of Donald Trump was clearly illustrated when Dr. Barber said, "There would have been no Trump without Obama first having been president for eight years" as a catalyst to White fear expressed in racism. But by the end of the evening it was also clear to the packed audience that if we organize now across racial and ethnic lines, then 95 million Americans will not sit out the next election as they did this one. And a 77,000 vote margin will never again be allowed to put a Trump into office.
North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP | P.O. Box 335,Durham NC 27702 | 919‑682‑4700 | Fax 919‑682‑4711 | [email protected]
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
DEEGAN ON LA-Will David Ryu’s inaction, as alleged by renters, help evict 500 Miracle Mile affordable housing renters to make room for high end developers? What had been thought of as “secured borders” may now be plums ripe for the picking for developers who are aggressively moving into Miracle Mile. They want to transform up to 500 affordable housing units currently protected by the Rent Stabilization Ordinance into massive, high-end apartment and condo complexes.
To accomplish this, they would evict workforce renters and tear down historic structures -- a blow to the community and a blow to the City’s efforts to increase the number of affordable housing units.
This is leading to questions as to whether or not Councilmember David Ryu (CD4) has become a conduit for City Hall’s development plan for the Miracle Mile – a plan that would see it explode with high-end luxury housing taking the place of affordable housing. The upgrading of Museum Row and the installation of the Purple Line Extension subway are driving wedges between the status quo and the future. David Ryu is caught in the crossfire.
The area between 8th Street and Wilshire Boulevard is primarily vulnerable, but properties fronting on Olympic Boulevard, as well as on the west side of Orange Grove Avenue south of 8th Street, will also be impacted.
Concerned renters and building owners in the affected area of the Miracle Mile are upset with what they see as Ryu’s lack of continued backing, if not his reversal, of the original boundaries of the historic preservation plan contained in the Miracle Mile Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) currently winding its way through City Hall hearings. It’s headed for a decisive vote by the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management committee (PLUM) on February 14.
Fears of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre by Ryu and PLUM Committee will hopefully be mitigated by a meeting with affected renters in the Miracle Mile on Monday, February 6. Ryu has been invited there so they can explain what they consider to be his abandonment of the original borders of the Miracle Mile HPOZ: namely, the strip between 8th and Wilshire, a strip along Olympic, and a strip west of Orange Grove to Fairfax – all of which have been hollowed out of the HPOZ and would be made available to developers, they say, with Ryu’s tacit approval.
At press time, Ryu’s office was unable to confirm that he would attend the renters’ meeting, but the clock is ticking. One week after the meeting the PLUM committee is scheduled to hear and discuss the issue that has suddenly caught fire: how and why did the original boundaries change?
On December 8, 2016, the City Planning Commission endorsed the Miracle Mile Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ), but, at the last minute, the Commission rewrote the HPOZ boundaries that had been approved by the City’s Cultural Heritage Commission, recommended by the Planning Department, and endorsed by Ryu. But these boundaries excluded properties fronting on Olympic Boulevard, properties north of 8th Street, as well as properties on the west side of Orange Grove Avenue south of 8th Street.
These carve-outs of areas offering affordable housing, if allowed to stand, will become a developer’s playground.
In March, the Interim Control Ordinance now protecting the Miracle Mile, will expire and without a fully approved HPOZ covering the original territory, the land grab by developers will be on.
Until recently, the renters believed that Ryu was on their side, but in their passionate letter to him requesting a meeting, a copy of which was obtained by CityWatch, the community challenged him, saying:
“We relied upon your promise to protect our neighborhood and your vow to ensure that multifamily residents – especially so many rent stabilized apartment dwellers – from rampant development. Why did you allow your staff to remain silent when the Planning Commission redrew the boundaries, in effect, issuing eviction notices to those of us living in more than 500 historic rent stabilized units? Unless you take decisive action to undo the newly proscribed boundaries unjustifiably drawn and adopted by the Planning Commission, our neighborhood will be left unprotected.”
Ryu has scrambled under community pressure before and may be able to calm down the community with a public pledge to reinstate the original HPOZ borders. He will need to reinforce that by appearing at PLUM and publicly announcing his views since this is the key issue in dispute.
This will not entirely solve his problem: Ryu would then need to explain himself to the developers and his City Hall colleagues. Or, he may just keep it a secret as to why he will not do what the community believes he originally promised them he would do.
(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
WISHFUL THINKING ABOUNDS-Thank you Kellyanne Conway. Now we have a name for the phenomenon, Alternative Facts. We needed a simple term to encompass the lies, deceit, misinformation, disinformation, “fair and balanced untruths,” the fake news, the fatally flawed data, and the wishful thinking that have been plaguing us for years.
When his eminence President Donald Trump tweets about fake news, he too may have a point. The Left loves fake news. The media loves fake news. The Los Angeles Times has perfected Fake News by Omission. That’s why I stuck the LA Times with the motto: “All the News the Elite Wants You to See.” The media can fake the news by using misleading headlines and by omitting crucial facts. The most notorious example is, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” As we now know, Michael Brown was not standing with his hands up surrendering when shot.
President Trump’s greatest contribution to our understanding of Alternative Facts is his ability to “perchance” Tweet From the Hip. I imagine some of his advisers have pasted signs on the walls of the West Wing urging, “THINK before your TWEET.” If that is so, the signs have been ineffective. While Trump presents a clear and present danger to the Union, we should realize that he did not invent the use of Alternative Facts. We are all in this current nightmare because Alternative Facts have become as American as apple pie.
Propaganda vs. Love of Truth
Many decades ago in the build-up to World War II, Alternative Facts ran rampant in the world. Europe had the Nazi Party, but American had its Lindberghs and the American Bund Movement. America also had a couple of Jewish kids, Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, high school students from Cleveland, who created Superman in 1933. Interestingly, Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, was a nerdy guy who worked for a newspaper, The Daily Planet – a rather universal sounding name.
Although Superman’s powers were allegedly involved with leaping tall buildings in single bound, etc., in reality his greatest super power was his belief in “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
Somewhere after WW II, our belief in “Truth Justice and the American Way” waned somewhat. Instead, Alternative Facts came into favor with doctors telling Americans that smoking cigarettes was good for their health and the government warning us that smoking a single reefer would make you commit suicide.
Yet, we Americans had our limits in those yesteryears, as was shown on June 9, 1954, when chief counsel for the United States Army Joseph Welsh brought the McCarthy Era to an end by asking the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” In the 1950's, Truth, Justice and the American Way was not yet a dead.
Are Truth, Justice and the American Way, a Thing of the Past?
With Donald Trump’s cleansing of Jews and Genocide from the Holocaust Remembrance Day, with his claims that Mexicans are rapists and drug lords, and with the banning of Muslims from certain nations while expressly exempting Christians from the ban, Americans are drowning in a tsunami of Alt-Rightism that is emanating from the White House. There is a constant barrage of Alternative Facts about millions of illegals voting for Hillary Clinton, along with Trump’s cropped photo of his inauguration he showed to David Muir on ABC. It clouds our minds to the reality that Trump did not make America safe for Alternative Facts. That happened long ago.
We have become aware of Alternative Facts not because Trump has brought us something new. We are only shocked by the brazen absurdities of his Alternative Facts. Thus, we all need to stop and look at ourselves; we must remember Pogo who pointed out that we have found the enemy and he is us. Let me tweak that -- we have found the enemy and the enemy is our acceptance of Alternative Facts.
Alternative Facts Govern Los Angeles
In January 2014, Judge Alan Goodman warned Angelenos that the City intentionally used Alternative Facts to mislead the public and subvert the law. Judge Goodman’s exact words were, “fatally flawed facts,” “wishful thinking.” The judge said, “…material [facts] are necessary to informed decision-making and informed public participation.” As a result of then Councilmember Eric Garcetti’s habitual use of Alternative Facts, Judge Goodman rejected the Hollywood Community Plan.
In its aftermath, Mayor Garcetti has repeatedly said how important community plans are for the city. Yet, more than three years have passed and there is no new draft of the Hollywood Community Plan. In April 2016, Mayor Garcetti released a foreshadowing of that Community Plan. It was intentionally based on fatally flawed data claiming that Hollywood’s population had grown from 198,288 people in 2010 to 206,000 people in 2016. He cited something called the SCAG 2012 RPT as the source for this “fact.” That SCAG document had absolutely no – nada, zilch -- population data for Hollywood. Lies, deceit, fake news, Alternative Facts are falsehoods are that are found everywhere, too numerous to mention.
Does Garcetti’s perennial use of Alternative Facts matter? He has used them to divert over $2.5 billion to his developer buddies and he is proposing several mega-projects in Hollywood based on his lies about Hollywood’s population.
What did the 15-member Los Angeles City Council do when they were asked to approve the Hollywood Community Plan based on lies? During a council hearing on June 19, 2012, one councilmember asked whether City Planning could redo the Plan with accurate data. Senior Planner Kevin Keller basically said, “Yes, that is possible.” Whereupon Garcetti insisted that his Hollywood Community Plan, which everyone knew was based on falsified data, be approved. The LA City Council then unanimously approved it.
Alternative Facts that the entire City Council knew were false, ended up carrying the day. The Los Angeles City Council is often faced with projects based on Alternative Facts and each and every project is unanimously approved.
While Mayor Garcetti and Donald Trump are habitual users of Alternative Facts, does this pollute America? Or is using them something akin to a used car salesman’s saying, “This car was used only by a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sunday.”
The New Yorker ran an article in its January 30, 2017 issue called “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” in which Evan Osnos noted:
“Even financiers who supported Trump for President, hoping that he would cut taxes and regulations, have been unnerved at the ways his insurgent campaign seems to have hastened a collapse of respect for established institutions. Dugger said, "The media is under attack now. They wonder, is the court system next? Do we go from 'fake news' to 'fake evidence'? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death."
The New Yorker, Mr. Osnos, and financiers are woefully behind the curve. Back in 1992, the California Supreme Court ruled that the court must enforce decisions where errors of fact and law are apparent on the face of the award and where they cause substantial injustice. See Moncharsh v. Heily & Blase, (1992) 3 Cal. 4th 1, 27-28. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Kennard noted, “the majority's holding requires our trial courts not only to tolerate substantial injustice, but to become its active agent.” Yes, the California Supreme Court requires its lower courts to treat known Alternative Facts as true!
The California Supreme Court ruled that some things are more important than Truth, Justice and the American Way, and winning is one of those things. The threat facing America does not come from Donald Trump, from Breitbart, from the corrupt Los Angeles City Council, or from judges who find facts and fiction to be fungible commodities. The threat comes from our acceptance of those lies, deceit, fake news, dishonest judges, dishonest media, lying Presidents, and prevaricators calling themselves Members of Congress while knowing that they are bold faced liars.
After the world economic crash in 2008, the nation accepted the Alternative Fact that certain Wall Street executives took unwise risks. That’s a “liar, liar, pants on fire” type of Alternative Fact. The economy crashed due to intentional multi-trillion dollar frauds perpetrated by Wall Street executives, none of whom went the prison. Why? Because we believed the in the Alternative Realty that criminality was mere carelessness.
Our nation seems to run on Alternative Facts. The use of perjury to convict people is so common that in January 2015, the federal courts said that the California courts had an “epidemic of misconduct” after a prosecutor took the stand and committed perjury in order to convict a defendant. Did U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, who was then California’s Attorney General, do anything about that perjury? No. She just took the credit for another successful prosecution.
As bad as Donald Trump may be, we the American people have created the swamp where Alternative Facts create Alternative Realities. The difference among Trump’s lying Alternative Facts, the court’s lying facts, the media’s lying facts, and Eric Garcetti’s lying Alternative Facts is basically nothing. A lie is a lie is a lie. The fault rests not in the stars nor even in the politicos but in ourselves for pretending that falsehoods are part of Truth, Justice and the American Way.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
MY TURN-This doesn't happen often! Remember college days when you ran to watch "Days of Our Lives" on TV, anxious to find out what disaster befell which member of the cast? Each morning I reach for the news to see what happened. It’s like living in an alternate universe and I keep hoping that, with time, I will be able to look at the "happenings" more dispassionately.
When last I wrote at the end of the year, I was leaving on my annual R&R break, giving me a chance to travel – my second favorite thing…after writing for CityWatch, of course. Getting away is a good way to clear the head and think about the upcoming year. People who don't take a work break are doing themselves harm. No one is indispensable.
I went to see longtime friends in Australia and New Zealand. I would suggest adding both countries to your travel "bucket" list. And it was the perfect time to be gone from all the political noise. Both countries have beautiful scenery, great food and wine, warm friendly people, stable governments and a lot of interest in the political changes taking place in the United States.
In fact, I've not experienced this much curiosity about our country in many a year. They both have an arsenal of cartoonists and journalists who are having a great time at our expense.
My first stop was a lake house north of Sydney that didn't have CNN or Fox News. The first couple of days withdrawing from news was like quitting smoking. But I adjusted and managed to clear my head by reading books and having huge political discussions with four generations under one roof. The patriarch of this family was a big Trump supporter but most of the rest were definitely not. The "Aussies" have always been strong allies of the U.S. but seem disconcerted about what is happening with our 45th President.
That was somewhat surprising because Australia tends to lean more conservative than its neighbor New Zealand, a country that was the birth of Greenpeace and remains very environmentally conscious. During my visit to New Zealand, I stayed with friends living in a forest overlooking a bay. There, they had both CNN and Fox News so my viewing habits returned quickly.
I became accustomed to people asking me if I was from "Trump Land" -- and this was before the inauguration. Some of my fellow American travelers told people they were from Canada so they would avoid the usual comments and questions!
I’ve been home for a short time now, and would say the atmosphere is certainly promoting increased sales in tranquilizers – especially for those who lost the election. Let's hope this will be a lesson learned for 2018: there is no such thing as a "sure thing" and staying involved is vital to a working democracy.
So many words have been written about the national state of affairs. Unfortunately, much of the harsh rhetoric has extended to personal insults on social media. One of my long-term activist friends called me to say that she can't even look at her Facebook account. Many relationships have broken apart due to this Presidential election.
One can criticize a policy but should not insult the person. President Trump was not my candidate but he won the election. No one else has called the voting into question. We need to respect the office and the people who voted for him. I am well aware that this courtesy was often not extended to ex-president Obama, but he set a great example by showing dignity and class.
I have been paying attention to our local elections and have been bombarded by phone calls and flyers. If it was ever important before, it’s now of paramount importance. Never again will local government have as much influence on our lives as it will for the next four years.
And no, I don't think CalExit is an option. I am an American by choice. I love this country and, like a marriage, it’s for better or for worse!
Will we lose Federal funding? Maybe. But I believe we send more money to the Federal government than they remit to us. What are the contingency plans? There are many candidate meetings where constituents have the opportunity to ask the tough questions. The race for City Council seats is rather mild with only District 7 without an incumbent. This is the seat vacated by the infamous Felipe Fuentes where there are now 19 candidates.
Does the Mayor’s recommendation mean an automatic winners? The majority of candidates are civic activists competing against a couple of professionals. One has to decide if political experience counts more or less than new ideas and a fresh outlook. It is really tough to raise money without strong backing.
District 3 has Councilman Bob Blumenfield running unopposed as are Mike Feuer for City Attorney and Ron Galperin for Controller.
More and more I tend to think that in local elections like LA City Council, each candidate that qualifies should have the same amount of money to spend. How they use it will be a good indicator of how creative and financially responsible they are.
We lose good people who would make great public servants because of unequal funding. Several candidates have stated they will not accept money from Real Estate Developers. They should also refuse union money. Both have vested interests in who is elected and have a disproportionate influence on the outcomes.
I am sure that if every LA resident was asked to pay a small "fee"(since tax is a dirty word) to finance our local elections, the majority would do so if it would keep special interest money from gaining an unfair advantage.
Not all "special interests" are evil. But instead of raising money for elections they could hold Town Halls and community meetings. This would give them a better opportunity to educate the electorate about their issues than sending dozens of flyers that often "stretch" the truth.
We are a nation of survivors and if we do our part we will make sure that the next four years will not be the end of the world.
As always, comments welcome.
(Denyse Selesnick is a CityWatch columnist. She is a former publisher/journalist/international event organizer. Denyse can be reached at: [email protected]) Cartoon: Australian Financial Review. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
SAVING A SYMBOL-Not all historic places engender strong positive feelings or associations from the public. Perhaps no place illustrates this better than Parker Center, the 1955 former LAPD headquarters in downtown LA’s Civic Center.
Sometimes a site’s history is so mired in controversial events or personalities that people can’t imagine keeping it. Yet significance can encompass both positive and negative elements in multiple layers of history. Parker Center and other places with such importance can teach us valuable lessons and empower us to face, and own, the totality of our history – both the good and bad parts.
Efforts to preserve places with difficult histories is not a new idea. For instance, the nearly twenty-year effort to preserve LA’s iconic Ambassador Hotel became more challenging without support from the family of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated there in 1968.
We all know that history is not always pretty. It can be painful, and it includes some events, actions, and outcomes that we would like to forget. We need to ask ourselves: are we being honest and preserving the full, authentic story of a place, or only the bits and pieces that form our preferred image of history?
Located at 150 North Los Angeles Street in downtown LA, Parker Center is partly known as the backdrop for television’s long-running Dragnet television series and home to Sergeant Joe Friday. People generally feel good about this association. But there are other layers of history that evoke less nostalgic feelings, ranging from displacement to discrimination. These elements need to be confronted and acknowledged as well.
As Parker Center currently stands vacant and in a prime location, some in the City’s administration are calling for its demolition and replacement with a new, nearly thirty-story tower for City office space.
The Conservancy and our Modern Committee, the City’s Cultural Heritage Commission, and others are advocating for Parker Center’s preservation and reuse. Soon the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee will hear the pending Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM) nomination for the building. The full City Council will have until mid-February to decide whether to designate Parker Center as an HCM.
When Parker Center was built in 1955, the eight-story, International Style building with integrated art and landscaping components was a significant, postwar addition to the Los Angeles Civic Center. Designed by Welton Becket & Associates and J. E. Stanton with landscape by Ralph E. Cornell, Parker Center was then known simply as the Police Facilities Building (renamed in 1966 for Police Chief William H. Parker.)
Exemplifying Becket’s “Total Design” philosophy, the building prominently features art installations, including a piece by sculptor Bernard J. Rosenthal and one of the largest mosaics ever built, the “Theme Mural of Los Angeles” by Joseph Louis Young. The building’s innovative design, which integrated virtually all departments into a centralized facility, was critically acclaimed at the time as a model for modernizing the police force -- as were the state-of-the-art crime labs and communications center. In 1956, Popular Mechanics called Parker Center “the most scientific building ever used by a law-enforcement group.”
By these facts alone, Parker Center’s significance is undeniable. The building has been identified as individually eligible for the California Register of Historic Resources and as a contributor to a National Register-eligible historic district of the Los Angeles Civic Center.
Yet the stories of how Parker Center came to be and what it later symbolized make preserving it all the more challenging and compelling. Before it was Parker Center, the site contained two of the most vibrant blocks in Little Tokyo. It housed many small mom-and-pop businesses and cultural organizations serving the Japanese-American community. Starting in 1948, the City earmarked these blocks as part of a Civic Center expansion plan and an early form of urban renewal. The site was cleared of all existing buildings -- many of which would be considered historic if still standing. The property was remade into a single superblock, with Parker Center’s construction beginning in 1952.
Despite being a federally supported program that ended more than forty years ago, urban renewal remains a touchy subject today, especially for preservationists and for those personally affected. Thousands of historic buildings, as well as part or all of neighborhoods such as Little Tokyo and Bunker Hill, were lost during this era of massive urban redevelopment. Parker Center’s construction was particularly hard felt: in addition to displacing hundreds of Japanese Americans, it spurred feelings that history was repeating itself, as some of these same people had been forcibly removed just a decade earlier and confined in World War II internment camps.
Parker Center’s role in telling the story of Little Tokyo’s history is not without controversy. Yet it is also meaningful -- something many do not want to forget or wipe away through demolition.
In September 2014, the Little Tokyo Historical Society joined the Conservancy in urging the City to support a preservation alternative that calls for preserving the main portion of Parker Center while allowing for an expansion at the rear of the site. In recent months, as the Civic Center Master Plan process has gotten underway, the Historical Society has decided to support demolition. Some in the Little Tokyo community are calling for Parker Center’s destruction as a form of retribution. While understandable, is this a good basis for deciding the future of LA’s Civic Center? If so, it raises similar and complex questions for other urban renewal areas in LA that have very similar origins and also resulted in displacement, including Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine.
In addition to Parker Center’s early urban renewal roots, its subsequent layers of law enforcement history were not always perceived as positive. William H. Parker, who oversaw the building’s construction, was one of the most distinguished -- and controversial -- police chiefs in Los Angeles’ history. During his leadership (1950-1966), he professionalized the police force and developed crime-fighting concepts that are now standard practice. Yet his tenure was also marred with discrimination against the African American and Latino communities, a deep-rooted problem brought into the national spotlight during the 1965 Watts Riots.
Even after Parker’s death in 1966, for many the building continued to symbolize racial inequalities and police brutality in the city. The most visible example occurred in 1992, when violent protesters surrounded the building following the acquittal of four officers accused of brutally beating Rodney King.
Some argue that it is counter-intuitive, or at the very least ironic, to want to preserve a place like Parker Center today. Yet without the physical place in which these events happened, it is infinitely harder to tell the stories and demonstrate just how far we have come. Parker Center has the ability to teach us many things, and perhaps in today’s uncertainty, is more relevant than ever before.
The fact that Parker Center brings out so many strong feelings only underscores its important role in Los Angeles’ history and how it can help us remember our past while also allowing us to move forward. In a recent piece about why old buildings matter, Tom Mayes at the National Trust for Historic Preservation wrote, “[t]he history of an old place may be viewed differently over time -- and interpreted and reinterpreted as our conception of who we are as a people changes.”
The effort to save Parker Center will likely continue to play out over the next month or so, as cases are made for and against preservation and reuse, and demolition and new construction, and which approach makes the most sense. That decision comes down to simple facts of dollars and cents, feasibility, and developing creative design solutions. What is not so easy to measure are feelings about a place and deciding whose feelings are more important than others. However, whether these emotions are positive or negative, there should be no question about Parker Center’s significance.
(Adrian Scott Fine is the Director of Advocacy for the Los Angeles Conservancy.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
RANTZ & RAVEZ-How much does it cost a well-intentioned community-concerned developer to buy off an unscrupulous attorney and a homeowner who filed a court action protesting a much needed eldercare residential facility adjacent to Walnut Acres in Woodland Hills?
A number of years ago when I represented Council District 3, I was approached by a developer who wanted to build an eldercare residential facility on Fallbrook Ave just south of Victory Blvd in a mixed neighborhood. The development was within walking distance of a major shopping center consisting of a Ralph’s supermarket, a Target, a Wal*Mart, movie theaters, restaurants and a host of other retail establishments.
The neighborhood immediately to the south of the proposed development is close to a fire station, retail stores, a medical marijuana store, a gas station, houses of worship, other markets, a restaurant and multiple single-family residences -- all located on a multi-lane roadway with a 45 mph speed limit and traffic lights at strategic intersections. In other words, the area is a mixture of business, commercial and residential.
The prospective development site was a former private school that generated noise from the students; I received complaints from neighbors about that noise and associated factors connected with the students who played in the schoolyard at recess and other times. In negotiations with the community, the developer reduced the size of the structure and made other concessions to gain support from those who filed court actions against the project. When it was finally agreed upon by those who filed the legal action, the facility was ready to begin construction.
To add more support for the development, the City of LA’s Zoning Administrator was in favor of it. Before the first shovel of dirt was turned, a new group of residents from Walnut Acres began to protest the facility and to pressure the current councilman, Bob Blumenfield, to deny it. I bet that this new group of “concerned residents” now wants its piece of the action just like the unscrupulous attorney and resident obtained. And what is their price to remove their objections? In a recent conversation with Councilman Blumenfield about the development, I expressed my continual support for it and urged him to move forward in spite of the opposition from this new group that wants its piece of the Money Pie.
I will continue to report on this matter as progress is made. I may even name the people that have little to no concern for the seniors in our community.
I was involved in the Second Annual Greater Los Angeles Homeless count on January 24
I teamed up with Valley resident Diane Jack Delaney and we headed out to our sector in the western portion of the West San Fernando Valley. We patrolled the area west of Valley Circle and north of Roscoe Blvd. While we did not locate any homeless people residing in the quiet residential neighborhoods, we did observe a quiet community reflective of tranquil mountain living.
On our way back to the Homeless Count command post at the Canoga Park Community Center, we drove down streets in the Canoga Park area and found a number of homeless people living in motor homes and on the street. In one area, the sidewalk was so congested with tents and shopping carts, you could not walk down the sidewalk. While the good people of the city are counting and providing information on the homeless population to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the number of homeless is increasing and we see little reduction in the number of people living on the streets, sidewalks and parking lots in Los Angeles.
Those of you who voted for the $1.2 billion Los Angeles Bond measure to address homelessness in Los Angeles may want to think twice before you vote for the pending Los Angeles County Tax measure to provide supportive services for the homeless. Money alone is not appearing to help reduce the homeless population in and around Los Angeles.
While we are on the subject of LA’s homeless, let me share with you the latest city plan for the homeless living in vehicles on our city streets: LAMC 85.02.
As of January 5, 2017, there is now a map for “vehicle dwelling” on the streets of Los Angeles.
There are three areas listed:
1) No vehicle dwelling at any time. These are Red Zones.
2) No vehicle dwelling overnight between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. They must comply with all posted parking restrictions. These are Yellow Zones.
3) Vehicles are permitted but they must comply with all posted parking restrictions. These are Green Zones.
The areas approved for vehicle dwelling are along major roadways.
For additional information go to: goo.gl/79tLQc
Upcoming City Elections
The Mayor, City Attorney, Controller and the odd numbered council district offices are up for election. This will be a very sleepy election cycle. After the recent Presidential election and the turmoil associated with it, few care about Los Angeles’ local elections. I will be reporting on the races in the near future.
Building Developments and Los Angeles Politics
Developer Rick Caruso is a former LA Police Commissioner and someone who can influence local politics. While his campaign contributions are significant, he is well connected with local elected officials. In a recent project Caruso is pursuing on the Westside, the community expressed concern about the size of the development. Being a man who likes to win, Caruso modified his project and gained the support of the local councilman and city council to approve the project. Councilman Paul Koretz supported it, then pulled his support, but then supported it once again. Talk about a councilman that can blow with the wind…Paul Koretz wins the title! He is facing a strong opponent in his re-election bid from Jesse Creed. I have met with Jesse and he is determined to beat Paul in this race. Is it time for Paul Koretz to move on? Time will tell.
Los Angeles Traffic and Housing and Measure S
I recently took my son and granddaughter to Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park on a Saturday. Traffic from the San Fernando Valley to Buena Park was congested both going to and returning from the park. Orange County, Los Angeles County and this entire region is smothered by excessive traffic congestion seven days a week, day and night. While the public transit system is not the answer for most of us, we continue to get more and more frustrated with the lack of traffic relief. Our elected officials can only give us false promises with no real relief or improvements in sight.
Remember the billions of dollars spent on the 405 expansion and improvements? Not much has changed from before the construction until after it was completed. That brings me to Measure S and what it will do to force our elected officials and planning departments to deal with the traffic and shrinking quality of life we are all experiencing in this region. I say YES on Measure S. A Yes Vote on Measure S will offer an opportunity for city leaders to finally deal with development and traffic in the city.
More election news will be coming in future editions of RantZ & RaveZ.
(Dennis P. Zine is a 33-year member of the Los Angeles Police Department and former Vice-Chairman of the Elected Los Angeles City Charter Reform Commission, a 12-year member of the Los Angeles City Council and a current LAPD Reserve Officer who serves as a member of the Fugitive Warrant Detail assigned out of Gang and Narcotics Division. Zine was a candidate for City Controller last city election. He writes RantZ & RaveZ for CityWatch. You can contact him at [email protected]. Mr. Zine’s views are his own and do not reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
GELFAND’S WORLD--It's 1968 all over again, except that this time people are marching in favor of science, women's rights, and the freedom of Muslims to travel. It's different than the chants of "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh," but the emotion is right up there. Oh, and there's one other difference that is as the night to the day.
As the eleven o'clock news came on Sunday night, local television stations had something live to cover, and for once, it wasn't a car chase on the 405. For the second night in a row, large crowds of protestors gathered at the Tom Bradley international terminal at LAX (photo above). By now everyone knows about the Trump administration's moves to freeze international travel for people from a few countries. (Ironically, the countries that provided the participants in the September 11 attacks and hosted Bin Laden weren't affected.) Los Angeles has a huge Iranian community, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and it was inevitable that some local families were going to be affected.
So there they were, thousands of protesters with signs and chants, or just being there to make a point. They filled sidewalks and parts of the terminals and from time to time interrupted traffic flow on the airport's main roads.
And that, you see, is where that big difference between 1968 and 2017 became apparent. Blocking a street or an intersection in 1968 was a whole different affair. An earlier generation remembers the police reading out the words, "This is an unlawful assembly." There was an official script that was colloquially referred to as "reading the riot act." Failure to disperse led to the police firing tear gas and, often enough, moving forward with clubs against the crowds.
June 23, 1967: Los Angeles residents remember the so-called police riot at the Century Plaza hotel. More than ten thousand demonstrators began in Cheviot Hills Park and walked over towards the Century Plaza Hotel to protest the presence of President Lyndon Johnson and the escalation of the Viet Nam War. The crowd got jammed in front of the hotel and backed up for blocks along the street. I remember the noise of motorcycles being gunned and people screaming, then crowds retreating back towards Pico Blvd. Middle class, middle aged white people from all over the city were shoved around and hit with clubs. The event soured relations between Angelenos and the LAPD for a decade and more.
Sunday night was different. As one reporter explained, the police had worked out an agreement with the protesters which allowed the crowd to close down the airport road for fifteen minutes of each half hour.
Imagine that. No tear gas or swinging clubs. The police and the protesters kept the peace. This is not to say that the situation won't break down at some point, but the attitude on the part of the city's leaders is worlds away from how things used to be.
There are a couple of differences between 1967 and 2017 that help to explain the change in outcomes. The biggest difference is that Los Angeles in 2017 is semi-officially in rebellion against the existence of the Trump administration. It isn't surprising that residents and elected leaders are on the same side in being annoyed with how the administration is toying with the lives of our own residents.
Los Angeles in 2017 is enormously multinational, with dozens of Asian nationalities and probably an equal number of nationalities from the middle east and Africa. A lot of this is fairly new compared to the Los Angeles of 1967 -- if you add up the Iranians and Koreans you are looking at somewhere between half a million and a million Los Angeles residents. Add Jews, Latinos, African-Americans, and Armenians, and you have a disparate population that has in common the propensity to self-identify as members of minority populations.
The 1960s were an era in which a smaller group of white, middle class people found themselves on the wrong side of the police barricades. There was a lot of anger on both sides. Somehow, much of the bad feeling has slowly evaporated. Perhaps it's the result of changes made since the federal court consent decree, but a lot of it is just time passing since a war that much of the current population wasn't around for. There is also the fact that we no longer have to deal with people like Chief Parker, who used the police to enforce racial separation and wasn't shy about saying so.
This obviously doesn't mean that the LAPD is without issues, but at least it has learned to deal with a serious demonstration in a constructive way, a negotiated settlement that allowed both sides to retain their dignity and pride.
The leftside Tea Party develops
Recently, CityWatch referred to the development of the left wing equivalent of the right wing's Tea Party. The two sides are comparable in their total opposition to an elected president and their willingness to protest. The movement has recently become symbolized by a banner that said "Resist."
This week, Eric Loomis in Lawyers Guns and Money wrote:
I spent the afternoon celebrating my birthday by protesting with about 2000 fellow Rhode Islanders in support of our Muslim and Latino comrades.
Standing out there today, I realized that what we are seeing is the opening of the left Tea Party. Or at least that’s how it feels in Rhode Island.
When we start to see demonstrations, even small ones, in Alabama and Mississippi and Kentucky, we will know that change is coming.
What would scientists march for and against?
This is a question that merits a detailed response, possibly a column (or a book) of its own. But there is one topic that needs to be explored, and a group of scientists and people who respect the process of science would be just as good as any others to push it. We should be getting really sick and tired of this administration reveling in its lies. Whether you call them alternative facts or just plain lies, the problem is clear. We might also add, "How can anybody trust a president and his administration when they can't even deal with something as trivial as the number of people who came to the inauguration?
What are we going to do when something serious -- like an escalation of the tension with North Korea -- lands in our lap? People remembering the 1960s may also remember that Lyndon Johnson began to suffer from what the news media called the credibility gap. It seems to me that Trump has always had his own credibility gap, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
On January 6, the Housing Committee of the L.A. Neighborhood Council Budget Advocates led by Barbara Ringuette met with Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) for a brief rundown of their program and funding. LAHSA is an independent agency established by the County and City of Los Angeles whose primary goal is to coordinate funding in providing services to homeless people throughout the City and County of Los Angeles.
“We are a pass-through entity,” said Stuart Jackson, Chief Finance Officer of LAHSA. “We receive funds from the City, County, and the federal government –U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and we pass it on to nonprofits in the community to do the foot work.”
LAHSA works with the City and County of Los Angeles, and HUD partners to do an Annual Needs Assessment for the community. Last year, their collaborative effort culminated in the County Homeless Initiatives and City Homeless Strategies. Additional partners include the County Department of Health Services, County Department of Mental Health and the United Way.
“We came together with a needs assessment of what types of programs are needed to address homelessness in our community, and created the Homeless Initiatives and Strategies that were approved by the County Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council,” said Stuart Jackson. Based on the programs of need that were identified, the County and City provided funds to LAHSA.
“We fine tuned the programs of need. Put them into a working process, then asked our nonprofit partners to submit proposals for funding following the guidelines of the program that they’ll be doing,” said Stuart Jackson.
The challenge is the timing of going through the process with the nonprofit partners: Creating a list for proposals, opening a window for submission, and the scoring of the proposals that require both time and the funding. Most of the programs were ready to be funded by October 1st, said Jackson. He added that because of the lengthy process, in a sense it seems as though “we’re just getting started.” Nonprofits that were funded have experienced growth in a short period of time, as LASHA has also, he said.
Agency funds services that range from street outreach to several different shelter types for families and singles. It includes several housing intervention types – from supportive rapid and transitional housing with short-term financial assistance to permanent supportive housing with in depth services and ongoing rental subsidies, explained the Director of Programs Paul Duncan.
Jackson added that the main increases in funding this year have been for Rapid Re-Housing accommodating Singles and Youth Systems. In the past, United Way funded these Rapid re-housing through fundraising and other activities as a pilot program. Now that Rapid Housing has become a proven system of excellence for the community, it’s been incorporated into our government structure. Last year was the first year that the City and County funded rapid housing for singles and youth, Jackson said.
Staffing
This year, LAHSA’s staff increased 100 %. Personnel doubled from 100 to 200 to manage the increased funding we have received from the City, County and HUD, said Jackson.
Director of Communications Tom Walden added that LAHSA has 80 emergency response team members in the field, “a doubling from last year.” There are now more field workers dispersed throughout the City and County of Los Angeles engaging everyday with the homeless in the streets, and especially where there’s a concentration of homelessness such as Venice, Downtown, and Hollywood, said Walden.
Funding Increase for Fiscal Year 2016-2017 (Per Records viewed on 01/06/17)
Coordinated Entry Systems
The fastest growing homeless population is women said Walden. We’ve seen an increase in the last three years, and often single women with kids, he said.
Walden explained that using the Coordinated Entry System (CES), LAHSA is able to coordinate the different populations serviced: Homeless Families, and the Singles and Youth System. It tracks histories, shows where individuals are in the process as well as the assistance each individual received.
“This is a better way to coordinate our services throughout the continuum of care for individuals,” he said.
Service Planning Area (SPA)
There are seven Service Planning Areas in Los Angeles County. Each SPA covers nearby communities. For example, SPA 4 ---North East Los Angeles (NELA)--- encompasses 13 neighboring communities. LAHSA allocates funding across the county based on the geographical need of the particular SPA, said Duncan. “We try to distribute funds based on our homeless count,” he said.
Winter Shelters
LAHSA’s Winter Shelter Program provides homeless adults with overnight shelter, meals, showers, and case management services from December 1 – March 1. Free daily transportation is available to and from the shelters by going to any of the pick-up locations. Shelter Hotline: 1(800) 548-6047
“I can’t force someone to move into housing. Therefore, I have to build a relation and through that relationship, hopefully, I built a trust that I’m looking for their best interest,” Paul explained. “We have success that we can quantify.”
(Connie Acosta participates in the neighborhood council system and frequently reports on Neighborhood Council matters.)
@THE GUSS REPORT-Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz has a new way to squander the city’s already strained legal and financial resources on a solution in search of a cause, namely his floundering re-election campaign.
At a time when the City of Los Angeles faces really big problems -- when does it not? -- ranging from the usual crime, traffic, housing, homelessness and how to pay for public pensions to the very real possibility of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars when it has to borrow money to pay wrongful death claims, Koretz wants to force gun store and shooting range owners to post suicide hotline notices -- force being the operative word.
Koretz did not provide any hard statistical data, opting instead for his standard vague claim: “suicide is the leading cause of death among Californians who have purchased a firearm within a year.”
The specifics Koretz failed to provide are:
So what is that other story? It’s how Koretz enabled wealthy real estate developer Rick Caruso to build yet another oversized luxury building in his Council District despite an affordable housing crunch, and despite an outcry about its quality of life impact by Koretz’ constituents and opponents in the upcoming City Council primary where he seeks a third and final term.
Recently, when pressured, Koretz (who never met a real estate developer’s donation he didn’t embrace) reversed his earlier support for Caruso’s luxury project, but then voted in favor of it when some square footage was lopped off -- even though it still violated long-established community guidelines. That is Trump 101.
If Koretz is genuinely interested in pursuing nanny-state interests, as he has done throughout his career, perhaps he will consider doing it in ways that might have far greater benefits for Los Angeles.
For instance, he could try to force Jack-in-the-Box, Fat Burger and other fast food joints to post messages about how fat, sodium and cholesterol in its products lead to obesity, diabetes and heart attacks. This is another form of suicide that impacts infinitely more Angelenos, especially in the poorer reaches of the city. Former Councilmember “Hamburger” Jan Perry tried to ban new fast food restaurants a few years back. How did that turn out?
Maybe City Hall can force CVS and Target to post overt notices warning of opiate addiction, sexually transmitted diseases and sugar in the pharmacy, condom and candy aisles -- just to cover all bases.
If Koretz really wants to save us from ourselves, he should first force Verizon, ATT and T-Mobile to warn of the hazards of texting while driving. They already do, but Koretz’ love of having government creep into our lives should make it mandatory; he could also dictate the size, location and color of the signs.
Koretz would serve us much better if – rather than spending copious amounts of money on lawyers forcing private business owners to take action – he simply created a program where posting such notices is voluntary. Cooperative awareness is more affordable than attorneys, and it is probably as effective.
For what it’s worth, I don’t own a gun and never have. I believe we need infinitely more effective gun control laws, crisis screening and stronger, mandatory penalties for people possessing guns without a license.
It isn’t Koretz’ message that is objectionable. It is his priorities, method and motive.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a contributor to CityWatch, Huffington Post, KFI AM-640 and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
ALPERN AT LARGE--It's very cute, if not a bit appalling, to see our local and state leaders falling over each other to prove how "with the people" they are while making laws and backroom deals that fly in the face of fiscal transparency and good government. And obeying the law. So we're supposed to believe that the local/state anti-Trump pols are ANY better than the Orange Man they're pillorying?
You like big projects? I like big projects. Most of us like big projects. Except when they're unnecessarily (and potentially harmfully) big. And when they're too darned expensive (NOT as in, they cost a lot but worth it, but costing 2-3 times or more the reasonable cost of those big projects.
1) You like high-speed rail? I like high-speed rail. Most of us, in the right setting, want those trains we ride (or hear about, at least) to go as fast as is reasonable and as safe as possible. Amtrak and Metrolink and Caltran to be speedy and cost-efficient...of course!
A California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) blasting through budget projections. Well, the outgoing Obama Administration might have cut the CAHSR Authority some slack, but it's doubtful the Trump Administration will be any kinder to cost overruns than they are to Boeing or other air/military contractors who charge too darned much to the taxpayers.
And it's doubtful that the contracts for the CAHSR to Senator Feinstein's husband's firm, or to bait-and-switch extraordinaire Ron Tutor will make too many of Trump's opponents too happy, because they want the high-speed rail built cost-effectively as well.
So to the high and mighty state authorities who love the CAHSR but hate Trump (but who will certainly want him to approve money for this Trump-style big project), maybe you should just...go...Trump yourself!
2) You like the Wilshire Subway? I like the Wilshire Subway. Most of us, for that matter, want that project built like...yesterday! So who does the Metro Board of Directors vote to give the construction contract to extend that project to Century City?
Why Ron Tutor, of course! He of the bait-and-switch, substandard construction and master of the "better to ask for forgiveness than for permission" style of doing business! After his legal battles with Metro for his past subway work, why he'd be even allowed anywhere near Metro is anyone's guess.
Funny how this was approved AFTER Measure M was just passed.
So for those who are now flush with taxpayer dollars (from those, like myself, who hesitatingly supported Measure M), maybe you should just...go...Trump yourself!
3) You like Good Planning? I like Good Planning. You like Good Government? I like Good Government. You like the City obeying its Bylaws and Charter? I like the City obeying its Bylaws and Charter.
So imagine why those of us community/volunteer activists have concluded that Measure S, which would force updating of Community Plans (rules for zoning and height and density in each region of the City), and which would force megadevelopers to pay for traffic analysts who are impartial and not just "hired guns" to accurately predict impacts of development, is the only way to go.
Obeying the law. No longer threatening our environment, finally establishing affordable housing, creating a sustainable infrastructure. Imagine having reasonably tall and dense development throughout LA in a matter of years to address the housing shortage, and to address affordability and access to our City. All do-able with respect to quick, easy, approvable projects that obey the law and establish neighborhood-friendly and neighborhood-compatible new projects, and which create gobs of jobs.
And yet WE who support Measure S--the neighborhood council and neighborhood association leaders, and the affordable housing advocates--are the ones pilloried by the "fake news" by the high-and-mighty City Council.
So while the Mayor and City Council are ramming lawless overdevelopments down our throats (which are ALWAYS thrown out in court if they ever are challenged), and while they're giving us all sorts of "head fakes" to show us how they'll protect us from President Trump, maybe the REAL question is:
WHO WILL PROTECT US FROM THE MAYOR, THE CITY COUNCIL, AND THE PLANNING POLITBURO?
So for you Downtown clowns, and you Sacramento clowns, so very used to stepping on the necks of the taxpayers and residents of our city, county, or state, maybe enough of us are finally on to you, enough to tell you to:
GO TRUMP YOURSELF!
(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties. He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)
DEEGAN ON LA-It’s hard to find building projects that create no public outcry about zoning variances, no destructive impacts to neighborhoods, and no challenges to developers and politicos. But these projects are everywhere – hiding in plain sight -- in downtown Los Angeles. The reason they are unseen is because all of the work is being done inside already constructed buildings.
While downtown Los Angeles is exploding with lots of new construction projects, it is also recapturing the past through adaptive reuse of many old buildings. These projects provide an increase in housing stock and remind us that there are many forms of development. Repurposing what's already there does not generate the type of community blowback and the bad vibes caused when developers announce new projects that set off struggles with communities opposed to uncontrolled growth -- especially when the developers destroy older buildings to clear the way for the new ones.
Specialists in the adaptive reuse of buildings are capitalizing on new laws such as the city’s Adaptive Reuse Ordinance with dozens of downtown projects. While this ordinance was designed to cluster housing, retail and workspaces around transit stops, theoretically lessening traffic, it is also establishing multiple “new urbanism” hubs in downtown. This is transforming repurposed buildings into mixed commercial and residential uses where you can work, play, shop and be entertained within easy reach of each other. Cutting down traffic may be a planner’s goal; living in a cool, adaptively repurposed building with some embedded historic character with many of your needs locally met, could be a tenant or owner’s dream.
The city’s Office of Historic Resources describes the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, approved for DTLA in 1999 and extended to a few other neighborhoods in 2003, as “one of the most significant incentives related to historic preservation in Los Angeles, facilitating the conversion of dozens of historic and under-utilized structures into new housing units,” pointing out that “it provides for an expedited approval process and ensures that older and historic buildings are not subjected to the same zoning and code requirements that apply to new construction.”
The impact is that “several thousand new housing units, with thousands more in the development pipeline, [are] demonstrating that historic preservation can serve as a powerful engine for economic revitalization and the creation of new housing supply.”
Architects and designers face a new hurdle, though, in aligning historic codes and principles with modern requirements for building safety and fire department codes.
"Regulations of LAFD and Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety are my biggest challenges, not neighborhood blowback,” explains Karin Liljegren, the Principal and Founder of Omgivning Architecture and Interior Design. “Trying to find the fine line between liability and historic codes that allows a project to go forward with historic integrity can be difficult. Sometimes, developers will pull out of a project when it becomes too much.”
Those stress points have not slowed down Omgivning, as evidenced by a visit to its downtown office that is overflowing with workstations, workers as well as several friendly dogs roaming through the space. A look at their project list is exhausting. While Liljegren does not follow the Frank Lloyd Wright practice of building and then furnishing structures in holistic harmony, her teams of architects, designers and urbanists are capable of providing everything from the heavy lifting of architectural visioning to the tiniest design details.
Off-menu is exorcisms, like expunging the ghosts from one of their projects, the Cecil Hotel, (photo above) which has had a reputation over the past 90 years as a very creepy place -- allegedly home to murders, suicides, missing persons and serial killers. This building needed not only some adaptive reuse, but some proactive P.R. There will likely be a waiting list for occupancy after its makeover.
The new urbanism is experienced on an intimate scale at the rooftop “farm garden” at the repurposed 801 S. Broadway building, providing fresh vegetables to the several restaurants on the ground floor. One of Omgivning’s biggest projects (at 1.1 million square feet) is the former Hamburger's and May Company Department Store which has also seen service as a garment factory and a branch library on its third floor. According to Omngiving, it is being repurposed into “a large and small retail, a market collective, creative office, and hotel, with a 110,000 SF rooftop that will include a public park, two pools and seven restaurant/bars.” Talk about new urbanism and having everything local: all they need is a curb cut for Uber pick-ups and drop offs.
New Urbanists, a lifestyle group slowly progressing from cult to broader acceptance, will find lots of opportunities to live, shop, work and play within a small radius at any one of the several repurposed buildings adapted by Omngivning and others in DTLA.
Best of all, the new urbanists will move into unique and historic housing stock that has not been marred by the contention between communities and developers, negative energy that has affected a great swath of Los Angeles. All those bad vibes, much like what once suffocated the Cecil Hotel, will not be part of their move-in package.
(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].)
CAPITAL & MAIN SPECIAL REPORT-Fernando E. Hurtado scrolled through photos on his mobile phone in a pristine new examination room of South Los Angeles’ federally funded St. John’s Well Child and Family Center. Nearby, his wife, Amy Areli, waited with two of their four children as the younger boy fidgeted nervously.
“He’s getting his immunization shots today,” Hurtado grinned at the 3-year-old before pausing at a close-up of a woman’s forearm and what looked like a mosquito-bite-sized bump surrounded by a patch of ruddy inflammation. The next image revealed a gaping, half-dollar-sized crater where the bump had been.
“My wife got a tiny cut on her arm that became infected,” Hurtado explained. “It was [Methicillin-resistant] staphylococcus. She spent nine days in the hospital. They told me that if we hadn’t had Medi-Cal, the bill would have been more than $100,000. If this would have happened without medical coverage, there would have been no way for us to afford to pay that kind of expense.”
On the same day that congressional Republicans set the stage to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the 35-year-old father, who installs artificial lawns, grimly reflected on the shadow that his family and the majority of St. John’s patients have been living under since the election of Donald Trump signaled the coming end of the law that has dramatically transformed California’s health-care landscape. “Before my wife got the infection,” Hurtado said, “our 2-month-old baby was also in the hospital, with an infection for [chicken pox], when he got an infection in his head and he was hospitalized for four days for the same [staph] bacteria. I imagine them not having medical coverage. Yes. Of course I’m worried.”
Though the form that Trumpcare will take remains vague, for Hurtado and his family -- and the more than 50 percent of their newly insured South LA neighbors, who now rely on the state’s ACA Medi-Cal expansion for their health coverage -- the future remains frighteningly uncertain. They are not alone.
Over five million Californians have received coverage under Obamacare -- 3.7 million through Medi-Cal and 1.4 million through Covered California -- and the state has logged the largest percentage-point decline in its uninsured rate of any state, dropping from nearly 17.2 percent in 2013 to 8.6 percent in 2015.
St. John’s alone has enrolled over 18,000 previously uninsured Angelinos, nearly all of them black or Latino, and more than doubled its insured-patient base. The health center has aggressively embraced the new ACA population to dramatically expand preventative and primary care throughout the region, which before the law had been ground zero of California’s uninsured crisis.
“We provide free medical, dental, mental health and support services, and case management in about 300,000 patient visits a year at 14 sites and two mobile [clinics],” St. John’s Well Child and Family CEO Jim Mangia told Capital & Main. “We provide health-care services to the homeless. We serve thousands of homeless folks through two mobiles that go into the riverbeds and to help buy homeless shelters. And we’re the largest health provider in South L.A., which is the largest area of contiguous poverty in the United States.”
But with Trump now in the White House, those gains are in the crosshairs of the new president and the Republican congress. At stake for Californians is $20.5 billion a year in federal ACA subsidies. The murkiness surrounding what will happen next has left the state’s political and public health leadership with little choice but to brace for the worst and hope for the best.
“It is almost impossible to develop a contingency without knowing exactly what we are dealing with,” state Senate Health Committee Chair Dr. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) told Capital & Main in an email. “A loss of federal funding would be devastating for low-income and middle-class Californians who rely on the ACA for their health insurance. We plan to do everything we can to protect the people of our state and ensure stability in the health insurance market and Medi-Cal program.”
St. John’s spotlights a lesser-known aspect of the Affordable Care Act — namely, its role as a conduit for $12 billion in construction infrastructure spending and operational funding for the expansion of private nonprofit health centers, which are known as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC). These provide low-income and immigrant communities with quality health care, regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. That makes the center both an exemplar of how much California stands to lose, as well as an unexpected harbinger of what resistance to the abolition of the ACA might look like.
“I started that literally the day after the election,” Mangia said about planning for the Trump era, “and now I’ve got all of these players. There’s a lot of special interests that benefited from the Affordable Care Act. … We’re talking about, ‘Okay. What’s our advocacy need to look like? Who do we need to be talking to? Who do we need to bring to the table to craft a solution in the state?’”
Forty-five percent of St. John’s patients are ineligible for insurance under ACA because of their immigration status. According to Mangia, who was part of President Obama’s health policy committee when the Affordable Care Act was first being drawn up, addressing the plight of those ineligible for Obamacare because of immigration status was always part of the plan. Care for the undocumented is partially paid by My Health LA, a no-cost health-care program run by L.A. County. Private fundraising makes up the rest.
The FQHCs have been instrumental in braking the country’s decades-long expansion of America’s health-care inequality gap, which continues to be one of Obamacare’s most significant achievements.
Even more transformative, perhaps, is the quality of the medical care and the innovations that ACA has delivered. The law reorganized payment methodology and radically re-prioritized the health-care system with pay-for-performance measures that shifted the focus of providers from end-of-life and sick care to prevention and primary care. It encouraged innovations like the patient-centered “medical home” -- a holistic delivery model designed to improve quality of care through team-based coordination of care, for the “whole” patient. Tying Medicare payments to the quality, rather than the quantity, of care that characterized the pricey, pre-Obamacare fee-for-service model, created efficiencies and surpluses for health centers like St. John’s that could then be used to serve California’s estimated 3.3 million uninsured, along with its undocumented population.
“These relatively modest reforms actually ended up being revolutionary in all sorts of different ways,” recalled Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy coalition Health Access California. “There was all this really exciting work to provide people medical homes, and have early intervention to keep people healthy before they got sick in the first place. There was exciting work about how to treat issues around substance abuse and behavioral health medically, rather than criminally, which was starting to have profound benefits to not just our health system but to our criminal justice and corrections systems. If we undo the Medicaid expansion, we undo all that progress in one swoop.”
Preserving that expansion has been the focus of California resistors, including consumer groups, labor unions and Democratic lawmakers, since election day, both in the current campaign by patient advocates, to bring public pressure on Trump and Republicans, and in anticipating the full extent of the damage to California’s Medi-Cal expansion that will need to be controlled.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to resist what is still unknown. And the extent of that damage won’t be clear until the plan is unveiled sometime after Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Georgia Representative Tom Price, is approved by the Senate.
Recent promises by Trump for a speedy and concurrent repeal and replacement of ACA with “insurance for everybody” that is “much less expensive and much better” have only further muddled the picture. The broad strokes remain at odds with what has been outlined in separate ACA alternatives by Price, who opposed ACA’s fundamental reforms, and by House Speaker Paul Ryan. And Price’s Tea Party antipathy to federal entitlements makes future attempts to cut Medicare and Medicaid likely.
“Both of [the plans] would repeal most of the regulations under the ACA, but they would restore some aspects of the law, including subsidies for people to buy health insurance,” explained Gerald Kominski, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and director of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Health Policy Research. “But their subsidies would be substantially lower than those currently available under the ACA, and would [go] back to a market that’s largely regulated at the state level rather than [have] the layer of federal regulations [that has standardized] the individual insurance market. So it’d be a little bit of a free-for-all.”
California resistors are divided as to whether the state would have the political will or financial wherewithal to make up the federal government’s $20 billion share of the Medi-Cal expansion and Covered California, should it be cut, or to even go it alone with a version of single-payer.
“I have always believed that health care is a right for everyone in California and the country,” state senator Ed Hernandez said. “The dilemma arises on how to finance it and whether the public supports it. … The state would be unable to backfill the loss of $20 billion in federal funds without massive tax increases or major program reductions.”
Wright illustrated California’s difficulty in translating a moral imperative into a health-care entitlement by pointing out that the recent passage of Proposition 56, the two-dollar cigarette tax that, beginning in April, will generate a billion dollars annually for Medi-Cal, had faced three ballot fights — and $200 million in opposition spending by tobacco companies — to become law.
“Before we get to what California does,” he cautioned, “we all need to be focused on the federal fight. The framework and financing that they provide is going to be very determinative about what is possible for California to do, whether it is an Obamacare lookalike or single-payer or anything else.”
Mangia expressed what might be the ultimate vision of California resistance. “I think it would make a very, very strong political statement across the country if the Republicans repeal [Obamacare] and California says, ‘Okay. Well, we’re going to keep it.’ Democrats control two thirds of the legislature. There’s a Democratic governor. I think we have a real opportunity.”
(Bill Raden is a freelance Los Angeles writer. This article was first posted at Capital & Main.) Illustration by Lalo Alcaraz. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
EDUCATION POLITICS--Why a vote for Steve Zimmer in the LAUSD Fourth Board District is like bringing to life an avatar for RESISTANCE.
Apply to the County Registrar before the close of February for your ballot to be counted here!
Point of order:
‘Resisting’ means here: Refusing to be manipulated deviously by plutocrats. (Plutocrats are those whose power derives from their wealth.)
Resisting signifies here: Refusing to abdicate your vote, which is your portkey to democracy.
Several “Independent Expenditure’s (IEs) have been made by Political Action Committees (PACs), and unlike forcing notrump in the game of Bridge, these are no paeans to subtlety or finesse.
Everyone should be aware that former-mayor Richard Riordan just plunked down $1m to establish a PAC brazenly titled “LA…Opposing Steve Zimmer for Schoolboard”.
Remember Dick Riordan? He’s LA’s octogenarian, thrice-divorced, Irish-American, Republican, self-styled “tough-guy”, the 39th Mayor, who reigned from 1993-2001. He has been agitating to emasculate Los Angeles’ popularly elected schoolboard for decades. He’s not the only major contributor to IEs opposing Zimmer, and there are more such crocks of gold. Riordan contributed $15,000 to an IE for Nick Melvoin and donated $22,000 (total), the maximum allowable personally to each of Steve Zimmer’s other two LAUSD4 opponents. Like this race, his political machinations are nonpartisan.
And unbounded by moral compunction either; just last summer Riordan was fined $11,250 by LA’s Ethics Commission for shenanigans of incomplete disclosure during the previous LAUSD elections.
Dick Riordan’s net worth is estimated at a mere $100 million, which sadly doesn’t put him anywhere near Forbes’ Fortune 400 list, home to so many of today’s other Education “advocates”.
But nevertheless he is a card-carrying member of the über-rich, a constituent of the immensely wealthy upper echelon, where a wide swathe among the 1% have lately become preturnaturally obsessed with Education Opportunities for the rest-of-us. In particular, this national cabal of multi-millionaires and billionaires is inordinately interested in throwing the outcome of a local populist candidate, to a populist post, in a populist election: Steve Zimmer.
So every single last one of us recently-Berned, Left Without, and rendered outraged electorate should be asking ourselves: Why? Why are the super-wealthy so intensely interested in Public Education? And why are they *particularly* eager to see Steve Zimmer unseated? What does it mean to vote for the plutocrats’ pick?
We should be excruciatingly vigilant against unwittingly empowering yet another pivotal sycophant.
But more to the point, we should be acutely sensitized to beholden money and the consequences of empowering a politically compromised leader.
Ironically, simply having the most money does not immunize against indebtedness; operating through firm moral grounding with an ideology derived internally – not externally – matters.
Independent expenditures may be employed properly to support a candidate but the donors ought never to shape, own or direct the elected’s ideology.
That external rogue influence is what characterizes our Trump crisis, and resisting its furtherance is what understanding the power working to undermine Zimmer’s candidacy will inoculate us against, protecting us from the jeopardy we now face nationally.
So that is why voting for Zimmer is an act of resistance: it protects us from stealth, undisclosed and pernicious, gratuitous agendas.
What clues signal threat from among the supporters of Zimmer’s opponents?
The funders of the PACs supporting Zimmer’s two opponents are constitutionally ambiguous; the same organization chips in $20,000 for one, $25,000 for the other (1/1/16-1/26/17), seemingly without care or ideological conviction regarding which paired endorsee exhibits stronger ideological compatability. From this funder’s dispassionate point-of-view the goal is not to recognize or identify merit but to draw votes from Zimmer thereby forcing an expensive, inefficient electoral run-off less likely to advantage the incumbant than in a primary. This outfit seeks to elevate any non-Zimmer, the better to secure that board seat for their staff. The actual corporeal realization of Zimmer’s loss is irrelevant to them; their indebtedness is not.
And the group running this ambivalent opposition? It is the California Charter School Association (CCSA), equivalently and disingenuously – if not illegally through copyright infringement – conferring advantage through a front group aka “Parent Teacher Alliance”.
Do not imagine for a moment this is the iconic “PTA”, the national Parent-Teacher Association in whose shadow your parents raised you. This copycat Parent Teacher “Alliance” is a Gorgon of a wholly different composition and end-game. It should be enough to note the unapologetic and deliberate replication of the CA State PTA’s moniker, (“CAPTA”, as it’s known here in this state). Observe the palpable difference between this CCSA-“sponsored” and funded, professional web-presence and PTA‘s – a genuine grassroots parent-organization powered by volunteers, who give freely of their time (from many into the thousands of hours sometimes) in service of “children, families and education”.
In contrast CCSA’s “PTA” is a group supported by IEs, dedicated to CCSA’s special interest in seating LAUSD board members. This disclosure anchors the homepage in small print but the implied association clearly piggybacks on the 120 year strong reputation of PTA – and that connection is simply not valid.
So far CCSA has invested $94K toward this special interest of theirs in the LAUSD election. Half this devotion supports the ‘lets-see-who-sticks’ candidate-pair opposing Steve Zimmer. Despite authorizing more charters than anyone anywhere, even in the face of defiance and deception, CCSA deems it intolerable that LAUSD should exercise the oversight of charter schools which it is mandated by election and law to conduct.
And in addition to this “PTA” wannabe group, CCSA funds a network of associated but shrouded special-interest support groups. SpeakUp.com is a parent-branded ‘alternative-news’ website that evades PAC rules for transparency because they are nominally informational and not political. The personnel among these and previous iterations of the same ineffective Edu®eform tropes are abidingly static. But the connection with Trumpism remains: who funds CCSA and why do their initiatives betray common cause with destructive billionaires like Bill Gates, the Walton family and Trump’s nominee for the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos?
While excoriating Zimmer’s acceptance of PAC money from legitimate interests that never were “special” or tangential to teaching and education – that is: Teachers (via their collective association, UTLA), meanwhile “special interests” that truly are dark, obscure and undisclosed actually do underlie Zimmer’s opposition. Ten times that scraped together by his fellow education-professionals – an entire order of magnitude more money – has been spent (so far) by America’s wealthiest-of-the-wealthy to occlude Steve Zimmer, via money funneled through private contributions and the aggregated-money PACs of CCSA and others.
Refusing to accept the cherry-picked candidates of the 1% is precisely the resistance to Trumpism we must engage.
Zimmer’s opposition are all candidates hand-picked by the billionaires. We must resist the temptation to empower them no matter how slick the astroturfed literature that champions support from the faux- or misled grassroots
(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor, who blogs at redqueeninla.com)
I certainly appreciate the resourcefulness of the real estate moguls opposing Measure S, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. It is easy to appreciate their dilemma. They can’t exactly go to the public and state the truth. “We have a successful business model, and we want to keep it. Paying off elected officials so we can build our lucrative real estate projects where we want them is working out just fine for us, so why upset the apple cart?”
Instead, they have to pay big bucks to PR firms to create AstroTurf organizations that then claim their unplanned and therefore illegal projects are actually creating a tidy, well planned city. As for the supporters of Measure S, they are then tarnished with the claim they are clandestine advocates of urban sprawl hiding behind support for a strong General Plan for Los Angeles. Creative and convincing to some low information voters? Yes. Correct? Absolutely not. It is just more of the fake news and “alternative facts” we have recently heard so much about.
So, what is a wrong with their roundabout claim that LA’s General Plan, both existing and presumably when Measure S accelerates its update, is really a blueprint for urban sprawl? And what is wrong with their parallel argument that left to it momentum, land use decisions based on developers maximizing profit for individual parcels will somehow produce a Los Angeles that turns its back on sprawl in favor of a planned and sustainable city?
The answer is plenty!
The claim that supporters of the General Plan and its update – the essence of Measure S -- are supposedly opposed to density and instead really want sprawl is absolute nonsense.
Measure S supporters, such as myself, have clearly laid out what we want, directly and by implication:
Measure S supporters have also clearly stated what we do not want:
None of this remotely translates into support for urban sprawl, and, in fact, LA’s adopted plans have been distinctly anti-sprawl since the 1970s Concept Plan. This early plan evolved into the General Plan Framework, and its Transportation Chapter is also anti-sprawl, and is the new Mobility Element that the City Council recently adopted.
Furthermore, there is not the slightest chance that the update of the existing General Plan triggered by Measure S will somehow promote a decentralized, sprawl-prone city. That era is long gone, and this allegation is just the contrivance of worried beneficiaries of the status quo, those who are funding the opposition to Measure S.
While I see no evidence that this information about the actual anti-sprawl content of the prior, current, anticipated General Plan will have much impact on the true believers who imagine that unrestrained market forces beneficially shape LA’s land use patterns, I hope this information will sink in among those who sensed but could not quite identify the deceptive arguments from the anti-S groups.
(Dick Platkin regularly reports on planning issues for CityWatch. Please send any comments or corrections to [email protected].)
CORRUPTION WATCH-President Donald J. Trump and his adviser Kellyanne Conway use “Alternative Facts,” which Meet the Press host Chuck Todd correctly identified as “Falsehoods.” In 2014, our own Judge Allan Goodman made the same observation about Eric Garcetti and his use of Alternative Facts when His Honor rejected Garcetti’s update to the Hollywood Community Plan. As judges often do, Judge Goodman used polite legalese, saying that Garcetti used “fatally flawed data” and “wishful thinking” -- which we know mean Lies and Myths.
How Lies and Myths and Alternative Facts crashed the economy in 2008.
Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts (LMAFs) resulted in the Crash of 2008 which devastated millions of Americans. The crash grew out of the ethos of Alternative Facts which originated from corrupt business practices right here in the Los Angeles area. Mortgage lenders like Countrywide and Indymac Bank were selling defective mortgages to Wall Street. (A defective mortgage is one in which the lender knows that the homeowner cannot pay off the loan and will default.) Wall Street would then bundle together defective mortgages and sell them to pension funds, foreign countries, etc. (Goldman Sachs executive and Trump’s Secretary of Treasury-designate Steven Mnuchin made his multi-million fortune by buying Indymac Bank after the Crash of 2008.)
We need to focus on how LMAFs crashed the economy in 2008 because, once again, they are at work both nationally and locally. Unless we stop this massive and near perpetual disinformation, life will become much worse for everyone.
Normally, a Wall Street investment firm like Goldman Sachs selling junk mortgages would result in investors not buying any more products; but the nature of defective mortgages was covered up by a second corrupt practice: The investment houses would guarantee the buyers that if the income from the bundled mortgages dipped below a certain amount, the investment firm itself would make up the difference. Thus, all those pension funds, foreign countries, etc. felt safe in buying the bundled mortgages.
However, there was a third level of fraud. The insurance sold by the investment houses to guarantee that the bundled mortgages would pay out the benefits was not insurance. Insurance should require the investment house to set aside insurance premiums to pay off the claims. Goldman Sachs et al were not putting those “premiums” into accounts so they would have the cash to pay future claims. Rather, they counted the premiums as regular income and spent the premium money. If State Farm spent all the premium money it collected, it would have no money to rebuild your home if it burned down. Likewise, when the investment firm spent all the “premiums” from the “insurance” it sold to buyers of the bundled, defective mortgages, it had no stock pile of cash to pay the claims.
Then, there was the fourth level of fraud. Insurance may only be sold to people with an insurable interest in a house or person. Thus, I cannot take out fire insurance on my neighbor’s house and my neighbor may not take out insurance on my life.
This is what occurred with bundled defective mortgages. Wall Street executives who created the defective bundles bought the “insurance” that would pay executives when their bundles failed. How long do you think you would be alive if MS-13 owned a $25 million dollar life insurance policy on your life? This is the criminal core of the Crash of 2008. Wall Street executives intentionally created defective bundled mortgages, then bought “insurance” on them. It’s the same as betting against a race horse you just drugged.
Since the bundles of defective mortgages had been designed to fail in order for the “insurance” to pay off, Wall Street executives started buying worthless mortgages from Countrywide, Indymac Bank and similar mortgage lenders. The faster the bundled defective mortgages failed, the sooner the Wall Street executives would collect on their “insurance.”
Because so many mortgages were being “sold,” the public erroneously assumed that people were buying all these new homes. Thus, billions of dollars were diverted to housing construction. All the mortgage companies wanted was a signature on a piece of paper, then they’d sell it to Wall Street with no regard as to whether the home “buyer” was employed or even existed. It got to the point that mortgage companies were inventing buyers and selling fake documents to Wall Street.
Wall Street executives did not care if homeowners could not afford the homes or that these homeowners were non-existent. The worse the mortgages became, the faster the bundles crashed and the faster the executives would put in their insurance claims. They called the insurance “credit default swaps” solely to evade any insurance regulations.
Because these Wall Street executives sold trillions of dollars of “insurance” on defective bundled mortgages, investment firms were faced bankruptcy unless one of two things happened:
(1) The U.S. government could immediately insure all mortgages.
Then no bundled mortgage would fail and no one could make a claim under the “insurance” (credit default swap.) No investment house would face failure as there would be no insurance claims based on defective mortgages. The cost to the government to start up such a program overnight could have been as high as $100 billion.
(2) The U.S. Government could bail out the Wall Street firms.
Using this approach, all the bundled mortgages would fail and Wall Street executives could collect their trillions of dollars through “insurance claims.” That is why the Obama-Geithner chose to bail out Wall Street – to make certain Wall Street firms had enough cash to pay off the crooks who had perpetrated the greatest economic crime in world history. Trillions of dollars flowed to Wall Street firms while Main Street went bankrupt. This corruptionism is also the origin of the Politics of Revenge that has brought us President Donald Trump.
Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts underlie the current LA housing market.
The current high prices for Los Angeles residential real estate is similarly based on Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts.
LMAF #1: There is no high demand for housing in Los Angeles.
Just as people incorrectly believed there was a huge demand for housing between 2002-2007 because it appeared that so many homes were being purchased, the high price of Los Angeles houses does not mean there is a demand for housing. As we learned in 2008 and forgot by 2009, crooks can manipulate markets thereby deceiving millions of people into believing there is a demand for housing. But there is always a crash.
LMAF #2: There is no single LA Housing market.
In reality, Los Angeles has several markets for homes and what happens in one housing market does not always affect another market. Each situation requires analysis based on real facts.
Families who want to buy a home in Echo Park are not driving up the cost for mansions in Bel Air. There is a stratification by price range for Los Angeles housing, but there is bleed over between nearby prices ranges. For example, after the City had 22,000 rent-controlled units destroyed and allowed judges to improperly eject poor people from their rent-controlled homes, four things resulted:
The forces threatening Middle Class neighborhoods are more deceptively insidious.
As written in previous CityWatch articles, the worse threat to Los Angeles Middle Class is that homes are no longer valued by their value as Living Space but rather by their value as Speculative Investments. Because developers know that they can re-zone any property to anything that they want, they buy homes in lower priced residential areas where they plan to build two to eight houses on a single family lot.
The lot where the developer plans to put a Granny Flat is worth more to him as Speculation than it is worth to a family as Living Space. Because the developer knows that he can bribe his way to a Small Lot Subdivision, the price of the “family home” zooms into the stratosphere. A small parcel with 8 homes, each separated by 6 inches, is worth far more money to a developer than the family can afford.
A middle class family does not have to be in direct competition with a developer to be faced with a detached home’s Speculative Value. The realtor who sets the listing price researches recent sales prices for comparable homes. If two streets over, a home which was worth $300,000 for Living Space sold for $1.2 million on its Speculation Value, then the new home is priced at around $1 million even if the Living Space value is less than one third as much.
The evils which flow from residential properties’ prices being based on Speculative Value.
People, who pay attention to facts and the laws of economics, as opposed to Lies, Myths and Alternative Facts, know that certain evils always follow the “market dislocations” caused by LMAFs.
(1) The Middle Class moves away.
It’s a form of osmosis where upwardly-mobile middle class families move away from the High Cost, Low Opportunity cities like Los Angeles to Low Cost, High Opportunity cities like Nashville, Denver, or Austin, Texas. Los Angeles is already experiencing a significant net loss of its Family Millennials too this trend.
(2) The reduced demand for housing does not lower housing prices.
Prior to the Crash of 2008, there was virtually no demand for housing, yet the prices continued to increase. Mathematically, all financial frauds collapse; but until they do, prices show little or no indication of the bust that is a few months or weeks away. Prices remain high because they are based on the public believing the LMAFs. Eventually, however, people see reality and the crash arrives.
(3) Millions of homeowners who bought high are stranded in homes worth far less than the equity they have in those homes.
This drop in prices often wipes out families’ “nest eggs” since they have dumped all their cash into mortgages for homes which were inflated by two, three or four times of their true value by the Garcetti Administration’s disinformation. They can neither sell nor renegotiate these mortgages.
People who purchased homes based on inflated Speculative Values live in finance hell. They must continue paying these mortgages based on old values that are much higher than the new lower values. Since they dumped all their extra cash into their homes, they do not have adequate insurance or stocks, pensions or other investments. They are often “house poor” – with every cent tied up in the house. They just have to pray they can hold on until a better economy returns.
When the economy turns down, people are laid off. If a lay-off happens to a family that is “under water” with its mortgage, it may be headed for the streets. There will always be a kind and loving Steven Mnuchin ready to foreclose on that family, even if it was only 27 cents short in a payment.
The need for Residential Mortgage Insurance.
Since Obama-Geithner refused to institute Residential Mortgage Insurance (RMI,) once people are laid off, they needlessly lose their homes. Sure, they may find decent jobs – a year after their homes’ foreclosure -- but that’s of no help to them or the economy. Residential Mortgage Insurance is like fire insurance where the insurer makes up the short fall in the mortgage payment due to a financial disaster.
For example, if the Mom is laid off and the family lacks $1,500 on the $4,000 mortgage, the insurance pays the $1,500. This government insured program is good for the general welfare of the nation because it will stop a crash in the housing market like what happened in 2008. But Obama-Geithner thought a complete crash was preferable, and thus, they refused to institute RMI on even an emergency basis. Now, the nation is again vulnerable.
The Big Lie on which the LA residential housing market rests.
It is fraudulent to insist that there is demand for dense housing, that people want to live in mixed-use projects next to freeways, that people want Granny Flats or that people want to pay $850,000 to live in a house six inches away from another with no yard, no garden, no place for a dog, and no room for the kids to pitch a tent. Thus, we are paying taxes on billions of dollars of city bonds to construct the very type of dense housing which is emblematic of the fraud eating away at our economy.
We know that Garcetti is still feeding us a diet of Lies and Myths, just as we know that Family Millennials are moving away from LA to places where they can afford to buy a detached home with a nice yard with fruit trees and plenty of space. Worse yet, the decent employers are following the Family Millennials out of town.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Cartoon: LA Times. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
BUTCHER ON LA-On Saturday, January 21, 2017, an estimated 750,000 people took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles in support of the Women’s March on Washington organized as a day of action, celebration, and protest in cities across the country and world. A local announcement billed it as an event for: “Everyone who stands for human rights, workers’ rights, civil rights, and compassion for our shared humanity.”
It was wonderfully festive, totally unorganized, peaceful as could be. About half of the participants, by my observation, were young (mostly) women who'd never marched before; the rest were all the rest of us. It was joyous and magical!
Said one participant, echoed by many, backed by so much pink: “There was an incredible politeness from the majority of the protesters. People were so close and I had never had so many boobs bump into me but everyone was saying ‘sorry’ and ‘excuse me.’ It was amazing! There was a variety of people there from old to young and of all races. The women who spoke were amazing. Janet Hahn was great and I think made us proud to be Angelenos.”
There was no appreciable parade route. My adult son Steven, his friend Raj and I walked from City Hall to Pershing Square, got as close as we could, and along with a mass of other people, turned around where we were to march back to City Hall. I saw bunches of LA City traffic officers but no police. Of course there was no need as it was peaceful, safe for babies and children and dogs, and so many women. Everywhere you looked, in every direction. I’ve been in large marches and rallies and this was by far among the largest of LA gatherings.
For me, it felt historic. To march with my son – on the weekend just before my 60th birthday – felt glorious and so very hopeful!
(Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch, is a retired union leader and is now enjoying her new La Crescenta home and her first grandchild. She can be reached at [email protected] or on her new blog ‘The Butcher Shop - No Bones about It.’) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
MUSING WITH MIRISCH--In a city in which an election was won four years ago by seven votes, every vote should count. But only the votes that should count should count. And that’s a problem in Beverly Hills.
Voter fraud is real. It’s alive. It’s happening. And we have to stop it. Whether or not it happens at the federal level, we know it happens at the local level. We have seen it ourselves and our own investigations have proven it happens.
Last night at a marathon City Council meeting, the Beverly Hills City Council at my request unanimously agreed to launch an Anti-Voter Fraud Initiative. The initiative will attempt to use every tool at the Council and City’s disposal to protect the integrity of our local election, the next of which is March 7 (and in which I and the vice mayor are up for re-election).
We will attempt to inform our own voters to help report suspected instances of unauthorized voters (“If you see something, say something”), as well as continue to lobby the Secretary of State, our DA and other officials to take the matter of suspected voter fraud seriously and to take action. The decision to launch the Anti-Voter Fraud Initiative follows a Monday meeting of the City’s Sunshine Task Force which we created to make our city a model of transparency and good government.
Yes, we are frustrated.
Our frustration and the decision to educate, lobby and take whatever local action we can to deal with voter fraud is preceded by two Council study sessions in which we discussed the matter with representatives from the local registrar-recorder and the Secretary of State, one meeting more exasperating than the other. We shouldn’t have to self-police and we are extremely limited as to what we can do locally to put an end to voter fraud.
Some background information is in order, particularly for those who aren’t familiar with Beverly Hills, beyond the stereotype, or suggest that voter fraud doesn’t exist.
In 2008 a local developer won a referendum by 129 votes which granted a controversial building entitlement. The developer spent millions of dollars prior to the election with all manner of expensive propaganda. The grass-roots group opposing the developer’s plans suspected that many voters who had voted in Beverly Hills were not bona fide or legal residents of the City, but nonetheless voted in the election.
In a Herculean effort, volunteers canvassed the city, going door-to-door to investigate the claims of voter fraud. They uncovered 569 documented cases of voters who were not entitled to vote in our local election. The group of phony voters included random people registered at unsuspecting residents’ addresses, non-U.S. citizens, Beverly Hills residents’ adult children who themselves were domiciled elsewhere, etc. That’s right: there were 569 documented cases of illegal voters in an election which had been won by 129 votes. The math is pretty simple.
The citizens’ group turned over their voluminous documentation over to the local DA’s office, which complimented them on their meticulousness and then proceeded to do... absolutely nothing. No indictments. No prosecution. No convictions. Nothing.
Fast forward to the months preceding the Nov. 2016 election: the same developer who had won the tainted 2008 election was now attempting to pass an initiative to build a 375-foot skyscraper in Beverly Hills. As in 2008, the developer spent millions of dollars in campaign propaganda (it turns out that the developer ended up spending more than $1000 per vote in a losing effort), and reports of potential illegal voters arose once again. The City received a list of over 500 voters registered at a few business addresses. As a Council colleague remarked, the limited number of business addresses makes this seem like an organized effort. We turned the list over to the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder, who sent letters out to these 500 registered voters, informing them that their voting status would be placed on hold pending their verifying that they actually lived in Beverly Hills and were entitled to vote here.
It turns out that only two of the over 500 registered voters ended up verifying that they actually live in Beverly Hills.
If we had not been provided with a list of unauthorized registered voters, which we forwarded to the registrar with the request to invalidate the registrations pending further confirmation, we could have had 500 illegal voters in the November election. This is in a City in which, as mentioned, a councilmember won election in 2013 by a mere seven votes.
At our Council study session earlier this month in which we asked for representation from the local registrar, the Secretary of State’s office and the DA, only the registrar seemed to take the problem of voter fraud seriously. The Secretary of State’s representative gave answers which actually decreased our confidence in its ability to protect the integrity of our voting process and raised the frustration levels of the entire Council. After having refused to prosecute the widespread 2008 voter fraud, the DA’s office refused to even send a representative to our Council meeting, even after I followed up the initial refusal with a letter to County DA Jackie Lacey, personally asking her to send a representative to discuss this serious issue. Their job is not just to prosecute voter fraud (something they evidently refuse to do, as was the case in 2008) but also to help us avert such crimes which undermine our electoral system. This nonchalance was both shocking and stupefying.
At that meeting, as confirmed by our City Clerk, we pointed out various ways in which voter fraud could occur and evidently had occurred: people could simply register at houses where they did not live, either with or without the bona fide residents’ knowledge or they could register at business addresses, as they had done in the past. At the polls, they could comb through the voter rolls and see who had not voted and simply get replacements to vote in their stead. There is effectively no way under our current system to avoid or deal with most of these situations, particularly if the local DA’s office is unwilling to take action.
According to today’s Washington Post: “Multiple investigations of the extent of in-person voter fraud — someone showing up to vote fraudulently — have found that it’s not a significant problem.” Well, if these “investigations” are anything like our own experience, this is a prime example of a self-fulfilling conclusion. Our Secretary of State’s office and our own DA seem unwilling to investigate or even acknowledge the problem. Small wonder that ostrich “investigators” - in opposition to grass-roots residents - are finding that voter fraud is “not a significant problem.” See no evil. Hear no evil... You get the picture.
Our situation is different from President Trump’s claims of voter fraud in that many (though not all) of the phony voters in Beverly Hills are US citizens who simply don’t live in Beverly Hills and therefore are not entitled to vote in municipal elections. But the problem remains a serious one at any level of government and we deserve to have faith in the integrity of our electoral system at all levels of government.
On Tuesday, the National Association of Secretaries of State issued the following statement: “We are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump, but we are open to learning more about the administration’s concerns.”
How about also being open to learning about the concerns of cities in which elections are won and lost by seven votes? How about taking action in instances in which voter fraud clearly has taken place and in which there are ongoing attempts to rig our elections?
Whatever the situation at the national level, we in Beverly Hills are committed to doing whatever we can to protect the integrity of our local elections, even if we do not receive the support from the authorities who are tasked with doing so. Because if the integrity of our electoral system is not protected, if bad actors know that they can literally get away with voter fraud without any consequences, then we can expect to see this phenomenon spread and grow, further undermining our democracy.
Local government, when done right, is the best form of democracy because it is closest to home. For it to mean anything, though, the elections in which the residents choose their local leaders and decide on local issues must be on the up and up. Sacramento, we have a problem.
And so the Beverly Hills Anti-Voter Fraud Initiative is born. Let’s hope other cities and municipalities join us to create a coalition against voter fraud. Our democracy is too precious to allow its very fundament, our elections, to be subverted.
(John Mirisch is the Mayor of Beverly Hills. He has, among other things, created the Sunshine Task Force to increase transparency, ethics and public participation in local government. Mayor Mirisch is a CityWatch contributor.)
-cw
PLATKIN ON PLANNING-In writing and speaking about Measure S, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, I have recently encountered an emotionally charged argument that Measure S is a ruse by old geezers (baby boomers like myself) living in single-family homes. Apparently the boomers want to maintain their property values at the expense of Millennials -- that is, the 20 and 30 somethings. Curiously though, the old geezers who own and run the four large real consortiums funding the opposition to Measure S and devising the anti-S arguments repeated by these Millennials play no role in this imaginary generational conflict.
While one of the great lessons from the recent presidential election was the enormous support from Millennials for the two most progressive candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders and Dr. Jill Stein, these anti-S Millennials are apparently outliers. Their belief, nevertheless, that market magic can cure urban ills -- especially overpriced rental housing, poor job creation, and inadequate transit ridership -- needs to be addressed.
In their view, since Measure S jump-starts LA’s legally required but moribund General Plan process, and then reinforces the new plans with well-defined rules on how developers can adulterate them, these strengthened land use regulations will stymie vast market forces. If unleashed by even more deregulation, the private market will create a cornucopia of cheap housing and alternative transportation modes for Millennials.
As a parent of two Millennials, let me explain why this bewildering belief in market magic, which we usually associate with Garcetti-type neo-liberal politicians and their developer patrons, is bunkum. Whatever their ages, those who have drunk this Kool-Aid only need to look outside their apartment or house windows to debunk these market magic myths. In LA, they will see what happens when private greed substitutes for rational city planning: homeless encampments, billboards and super-graphics, McMansions in the shadows of luxury towers, crumbling sidewalks, a patchwork of risky bike lanes, gridlocked streets full of potholes, widespread building code violations, demolition of rent stabilized apartments, illegal evictions, sagging overhead wires, treeless boulevards, and barely paved alleys filled with discarded couches.
Then, it they go to City Hall, they will see pay-to-play politics on open display at the City Council. There, every big real estate project, such as the Caruso luxury tower near the Beverly Center, obtains its special spot-planning and spot-zoning ordinances by a consistent 15-0 margin. For them, the LA Times exposes of developer contributions to elected officials to obtain land use entitlements barely registers.
I suppose a few people, whatever their age, welcome these byproducts of deregulation, but most of those opposing Measure S, including Millennials, have not yet come to terms with what actually lies ahead if Measure S fails.
They will rediscover LA’s status quo. Their expected rosy future will be nothing more than the broken present that the corporate funders of anti-S ads wish to maintain. It is the dystopia we already live in, not the utopia they imagine will result from the full-on deregulation of private land in Los Angeles.
The plethora of affordable market housing and low income housing that the anti-S corporate funders promise is just a ploy. It will not appear because, like today, developers want to maximize their profits. That is why they build luxury housing and then repeatedly claim – despite zero evidence – that these unaffordable units actually create affordable housing through filtering and over-supply.
This is why I have also previously suggested that anyone who seriously believes that market magic is a panacea for Los Angeles should screen Bladerunner. (Photo, above) It is an extreme, free market vision of the dystopia we already live in.
Why ‘market magic’ does not work in Los Angeles
Los Angeles is already a city with virtually no effective regulation of land. Yes, land use laws and regulations are still on the books, but they are peripheral to day-to-day decision-making and code enforcement. Nearly every waiver from LA’s legally adopted plans and zoning sails through in unanimous votes, including the spot-zone changes and the spot-General Plan Amendments that the City Council routinely grants through special ordinances.
As for LA’s rampant violations of the City’s zoning and building codes, it up to residents to phone them into the Department of Building and Safety (LADBS). Once there, they apparently disappear into a time warp because nothing ever happens. Developers therefore know they can game the permitting and inspection system because the LADBS code enforcement function is in deep hibernation.
The free market apparently means developers know they are free to do whatever they want: illegal demolitions (that ignore regulations for asbestos and lead paint), billboards, supergraphics, McMansions, bootlegged signs, garage conversions, and even unpermitted remodels have become routine.
This stark reality means that any Angelenos who imagine that a free market utopia is waiting in the wings should stop believing their lying eyes. The Los Angeles they already live in reveals market magic hard at work, and it will only get worse if Measure S fails on March 7. Then, an even more deregulated Los Angeles will pull them -- including Millennials – down further. Still more expensive housing will appear when the City Planning Department, City Planning Commission, and the City Council continue to sideline the General Plan, adopted zoning, and the California Environmental Quality Act.
The free market is the culprit, not planning and zoning
As for the other part of the free market equation, economic inequality will increase when developers can build what they want, where they want, when they want through easily obtained zone variances, zone changes, and General Plan Amendments. Their underlying parcels will quickly appreciate in market value when planning and zoning restraints are removed. But this windfall does not come out of thin air; it comes out of the pockets of tenants who are painted into a corner by systematic rent increases, overcrowding, and cutbacks in public services. Of course, they are the lucky ones because they do not yet need to live in cars, garages, or on the streets.
Furthermore, the downward mobility experienced by many Millennials does not result from cities sticking to their legally adopted plans and zones. It is exactly the opposite. Apparently some Millennials have succumbed to the developers’ claims that existing zoning holds back housing construction. But, LA’s status quo already has more than enough zoning where developers could build apartments, but choose not to.
There are no legal barriers to the construction of three to five story market rate and affordable apartments on LA’s long commercial corridors. Instead, the barriers are strictly self-imposed. Such buildings are not as profitable as luxury high-rise towers with sky-high rents. The free market adored by Measure S opponents is the real culprit, not zoning and planning rules.
Final word on who benefits from the defeat of Measure S
All we need to do is follow the money since a defeat perpetuates the pay-to-play status quo in Los Angeles. That means anti-S claims about large, unplanned real estate projects (i.e., unrestrained real estate speculation) generating transit ridership, jobs, and affordable housing will be quickly exposed as the disingenuous arguments of self-serving opportunists.
While luxury high-rise towers and shopping centers are certain to appear through spot-zones and spot-plans, anyone who imagines that they will usher in these social benefits will get a harsh dose of reality. None of these imagined social benefits have appeared in the past and present, and none will appear in this future.
(Dick Platkin is former LA City planner who recently taught courses on sustainable city planning at USC and CSUN. He is also a former union officer, who worked hard to create labor-neighbor alliances in Los Angeles. Please send corrections or comments to [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
Photo by Karl Schumacher 1/17/25
The 1961 Bel-Air Fire
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