CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--California is trapped—caught in the dangerous space between two menacingly authoritarian regimes that want to fight each other.

One regime is headquartered in Beijing, and the other is about to take power in Washington D.C. But when viewed from the Golden State, it’s striking how much they have in common.

Both are fervently nationalist, full of military men, and so bellicose they are spooking neighbors and allies. Both, while nodding to public opinion, express open contempt for human rights and undermine faith in elections and the free press. Both promote hatred of minorities (anti-Tibetan and anti-Uighur stances in China; anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim stances in the U.S.).

And both regimes are captained by swaggering men (President Xi Jinping in China; President-elect Donald Trump in U.S.) who tend to their own cults of personality and pose as corruption fighters while using their power to enrich their own families.

Most frighteningly for Californians, both regimes seem to see advantage in escalating conflict with the other. Both leaders have encouraged hatred of the other’s citizens (Xi has embraced ultranationalists who compare American treatment of the Chinese to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, while Trump has called China a “deceitful culture”). The incoming American administration is threatening to raise tariffs and label China a currency manipulator, actions that would likely start a trade war. The Chinese administration is provoking confrontations in the South China Sea while the new American strongman embraces Taiwan—actions that could start a real war.

All this leaves California with the enormous challenge of navigating U.S.-China tensions in a way that protects our people, our economy, and our values. And that will require tricky diplomacy that doesn’t take sides, for we need to maintain relations with both regimes. After all, we live under the laws of the United States, but are irretrievably linked to China, a vital partner in the trade, culture, technology and education sectors that distinguish California in the world.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California. Our public universities rely both on federal funds from D.C. and top-dollar, out-of-state tuition fees from Chinese students to subsidize the education of Californians. So any Trump restrictions on foreign visitors—or retaliatory Chinese limits on overseas study and travel—could blow up the University of California’s business model. It also would damage the University of Southern California, the city of L.A.’s largest private sector employer, which heavily recruits Chinese students.

Our state’s signature industries—Silicon Valley and Hollywood—depend on consumers who live under both regimes. And our most promising ventures—from virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies to major developments (like the San Francisco Shipyards in Hunter’s Point, to just name one)—rely on our ability to bring together manufacturers, investors and technologists from China and the U.S. In a trade war, both regimes could decimate innovation and development with restrictions on foreign investments.

And with both regimes so quick to escalate nationalist rhetoric, it’s quite possible that both Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans in California could become targets of bigotry and hate crimes. Our housing market relies on Chinese buyers, who spend an estimated $9 billion a year on homes here. A backlash against Chinese investors buying homes (and using them only part of the year) could produce discrimination and hurt our housing market, which in turn would damage the already underfunded public schools our taxes support.

How then can California handle such a conflict?

First, by protecting our people (especially Californians of Chinese ancestry) and our institutional connections to China with the same fervor the California government is rallying to protect our undocumented immigrants against Trump’s threats of mass deportations. This California diplomacy will be especially hard given the hyper-sensitivity of the autocrats in Beijing and D.C. to the slightest of slights; just as Trump lashes out at Saturday Night Live parodies, Xi and his loyalists see the Kung Fu Panda films as American warfare against them.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California.

And, second, by reminding both regimes—in friendly but firm ways—that we are opposed to conflict because the U.S. and China need each other more than they appear willing to acknowledge.

Californians who doubt this would do well to consult John Pomfret’s masterful new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. Pomfret, an American journalist long posted in China, employs telling details (the tea thrown into Boston Harbor was from Xiamen; an 1860s California attorney general campaigned against Chinese prostitutes while importing his own) to show how profoundly the two countries have shaped one other’s development, and just how vital their relationship has become to the world.

“The two nations have feuded fiercely and frequently, yet, irresistibly and inevitably, they are drawn back to one another,” he writes. “The result is two powers locked in an entangling embrace that neither can quit.”

California’s role in this difficult period should be to tell the story of its own deep ties to China, while serving as a model for a productive relationship, argues Matt Sheehan, author of the forthcoming book Chinafornia: Working with Chinese Investors, Immigrants and Ideas on U.S. Soil.

Sheehan, who also publishes the weekly Chinafornia Newsletter and provides communications consulting for Chinese and U.S. companies, says now is an important time for California officials and businesses to seek out areas of productive cooperation with Chinese counterparts, especially in areas like manufacturing and fighting climate change.

“I think of California as a living laboratory for a more practical, productive version of U.S.-China relations,” he says.

But not all collaborations with China would be helpful. Our technologies companies shouldn’t be aiding the U.S. surveillance state or assisting the Chinese government in suppressing human rights, as Facebook is reportedly doing by developing a newsfeed that would empower censors.

We also shouldn’t play to anti-Chinese prejudice, like some California unions have done in opposing trade agreements and advancing union organizing. One noxious—if ridiculous—example is a current push by the hotel workers’ union to block the sale of the Westin Hotel in Long Beach (where the union has an organizing campaign) to Chinese interests on grounds that it’s so close to that city’s port that Chinese ownership would threaten national security.

One possible model for California’s strategy going forward might be Anson Burlingame, whom President Lincoln dispatched to Beijing to represent the U.S. during the Civil War. Burlingame’s approach, as described by Pomfret, was to commiserate with the Chinese (we have our terrible rebellion with the South, you with the Taipings) as a basis for collaboration. His work ultimately produced the Burlingame Treaty, which banned discrimination against Chinese workers in America, welcomed Chinese students to U.S. educational institutions, and opened the way for Chinese immigrants to become American citizens.

Today, Burlingame’s accomplishments are mostly forgotten, but his name belongs to a highly desirable suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region boasting one of America’s most prosperous populations of Chinese Americans.

(Connecting California Columnist and Editor, Zócalo Public Square … where this column first appeared. Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).)

-cw

WEALTH FORUMLA, PART ONE-The City of Los Angeles has intentionally destroyed the housing market and the result is devastating the entire city. Here we have a prime example of a City government that has so screwed up the Price System for housing that builders are constructing for a market segment in which there is a glut while ignoring the segment that has a shortage.

Developers have been misled into constructing high-end luxury apartments when the demand for that type of housing is falling. Since the City has a net exodus of Middle Class people over people who come here, more housing is available even if no one builds anything. The slight rise in LA’s population is due to the birth rate being higher than the number of people who move away or die. But newborns do not demand more houses and elderly Baby Boomers already have homes. Since people are not “taking their houses with them,” our housing supply is increasing. 

Housing costs, however, continue to escalate causing more people to move away, especially Family Millennials who should be the Number One segment of the population to stay here and demand more housing. 

Frauds in the Los Angeles Housing Market. 

With Family Millennials leaving in droves, why aren’t housing prices falling instead of constantly rising? What are the frauds that falsely deceive Angelenos into thinking there is a huge demand for housing, when in fact the demand is falling? 

For a short while, it was the securitization of residential rental income, but it appears that this scam was too much like the fraud that caused the Crash of 2008; financial institutions backed out of this folly. 

Although we know the City has been destroying rent-controlled units -- and this fact alone would cause an increase in homelessness, placing upward pressure on rents -- it does not explain the huge increase in the market segment that is over built: higher end apartments. 

While younger Millennials still in the Dorm Room Phase of life have been doubling and tripling up in order to rent over-priced apartments, there has still been a 12% glut of these units, per the City’s own data. Yet, rents have continued to increase between 2013 and 2016. The false reporting of alleged vacancy rates has misled people into believing that there is a housing shortage when there has been none. (In order to accurately report rents, they should have been adjusted “per person.” When three single people chip in to pay for a $2,000 apartment, the rent per person is actually lower than when one person pays $800 per apartment. Thus, on a per person basis, rents can be falling while the “per apartment” rents are increasing.) 

Belief is Stronger than Fact. 

Belief in a housing shortage is another reason for prices to increase year after year while demand decreases. People pay what they believe is the market rate. As in the 2000s, developers have continued to build under the misconception that there has been a housing shortage. 

Rental prices are generally provided by real estate companies motivated to keep rents high. Thus, their rental reports are usually based on what they advertise and not on the actual rents collected. Those who saw “The Big Short” will remember how no one was taking the time to go and actually look at all these new homes. When one guy did, he discovered that they were vacant and some people were buying three, four or five homes in the belief they could be flipped in an eternal up-market. Just as Wall Street made people believe there was a huge demand for homes, landlords have issued statistics that make people believe there is a shortage of apartments due to huge demand. 

The City of Los Angeles is heavy into this fraud. It keeps lying about the fantastic increases in Hollywood’s population. In April 2016, LA issued a report that the Hollywood population had jumped to 206,000 people and cited the Southern Association of Governments (SCAG) as its source. SCAG had no data about Hollywood population. 

Then, in October 2016, the City released an even more mythical figure: Hollywood’s population was 210,511 people at the end of 2015. Wow, that’s a lot of people, but people who had any memory knew that in April 2016 the City had said the population was only 206,000 people. Did the City lose 5,511 people in the first few months of 2016? Of course, since the City’s data is composed of Lies and Myths, no one should expect any of it to make any sense. 

There is nothing new Under the Sun. 

We have seen this phenomenon previously, prior to the Crash of 2008, when housing prices were rapidly increasing faster than the population was growing. Under the classic laws of Supply and Demand, a downturn in Demand generates reduced Supply as builders realize that the prices for which they can sell new homes will soon be substantially less than the cost to produce them. Yet, the housing market boomed in the face of falling demand – just as we see today. 

The boom-bust phases of the business cycle were an immutable fact until John Bernard Keynes wrote his General Theory in 1936. But after fools like Bill Clinton, the U.S. Congress and lastly Obama’s little Timmy Geithner exiled Keynes, we have reverted to the boom-bust phases. 

When the government fails to protect the Price System from fraud, no one knows what anything is worth. After Congress’ and Bill Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall and the legalization of Credit Default Swaps, massive fraud destroyed the Price System for homes. It turned out that demand for houses had been exhausted until we raised the productivity of more Americans. Rather than shift investment so that the middle and lower classes could become wealthier, Wall Street rigged the system so that people falsely believed there was this huge demand for residential housing. 

The residential housing market was similar to a Ponzi scheme in that the fraud required more and more putative home buyers in order to keep the scam afloat. In time, Ponzi-type schemes always end up demanding more buyers than there are people in the universe. 

The Formulas for Wealth. 

One need not know that PV = Rn / (1 + r)n and Ck = Rn / (1 + MEC)n are what I call the Wealth Formulas, (but most economists say “marginal efficiency of capital.”) Despite their formidable look, they simply mean that in order for a business to produce wealth, a business must sell its products for more than it costs to produce them. 

There is one vital addition -- time. Investments generate wealth over time. Thus, an important principle is not to destroy your business while it is still generating wealth. 

Since money is the abstraction by which we figure out what different things are worth, money is the great common denominator of everything a business uses to generate wealth. In other words, if a business person wants to provide for his family, he has to make certain that whatever he makes and sells costs the buyer more than it cost him or her to produce it. This is obvious, and I hope readers are saying, “Duh!” 

The Government’s Duty, LA’s Failure. 

While businessmen use these concepts daily, most people do not realize the government’s fundamental duty to make certain the formulas actually work. While defending the nation from aggression may be the government’s most important foreign function, protecting the economy is its most vital domestic duty. 

The government must make certain that the Price System accurately translates the value of different services and things into dollars. Without a way for a business person to know the value of an employee’s labor, the value of the building he or she rents for his or her business, or the value of the equipment he or she purchases so that his or her employees have the tools to manufacture the product, there is no way for the business person to calculate how much “wealth” his product will generate.  

When no one knows the value of goods and services, then no one wants to loan a business person any money, and he or she does not want to borrow any money lest he or she be unable to repay it. 

A failure of the Price System means poverty. A correctly functioning Price system means wealth. Thus, the role of all governments is to protect the Price System so that people make sound business decisions. 

The City of Los Angeles, however, is guilty of gross dereliction of duty in this regard. 

Conclusion of the ‘Wealth Formulas’ Part I. 

No one can faithfully serve two masters. The government’s proper role is to provide for the common welfare, not to be beholden to one segment of society. For too long, the City of Los Angeles has been owned by real estate developers. Thus, the City has no process to provide for the quality of life of Angelenos. 

The Planning Department has no section on macro-economics. No one knows Adam Smith from Adam West or John Maynard Keynes for a Keys Drug Store. As a result, housing prices are chaotic and we have thousands of units which no one wants, all while suffering a shortage of the type of housing people actually need. The lack of rent-control has swollen the homeless population, while the war against the single-family home has raised prices so high that we have driven away the emerging Middle Class. The situation is beyond critical and there is no reason to forecast any improvement.

(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.

AND A PARTRIDGE IN A PALM TREE--I'm a typical American Jew--my tribe came up with most of the Christmas carols we love so much (we also came up with Superman and Batman ... so there!), and I just LOVE Christmas.  I love the lights, I love the spirit of giving and family togetherness, and I love the slowing down to just breathe a little.  I also appreciate the Christian spirituality, which really isn't so far removed from the rest of us. 

But as a father and husband, a transportation/planning advocate, and a pro-family advocate (and that includes kids!), I've got my own "wish list" for the twelve days of Christmas.  I could have gone for a Hannukah/Chanukah/Hanukkah (choose your favorite spelling) wish list, but that would only be eight days ... and what fun would that be when I could have twelve wishes instead: 

TWELVE parks for the City of Los Angeles--and I don't mean pocket parks, but rather BIG open spaces that is the size of about 1-2 blocks.  I'm spoiled by Mar Vista and Palms Parks, and I want a new one for each sector of the City, with a mega-big Downtown Central Park for the two districts serving most of the Downtown area (we could make this 13 for each district, right?) 

ELEVEN days of a rescheduled LAUSD school year that allows for a school year starting closer to Labor Day (NOT mid-August, you knuckleheads!), and/or allowing for a balanced school year with a two week (or perhaps 10-day) break in the spring combined with a smaller winter break.  The LAUSD Board promised a fix to all this, and then they lied to us by reneging on that promise. 

TEN Community Plans a year updated as is consistent with the Bylaws of the City of Los Angeles, to preserve single-family neighborhoods, place height limitations and direct moderate densification along our major commercial corridors to properly allow for an increased population.  No excuses! 

NINE redeveloped industrial zones to create jobs for Angelenos and other Southern Californians. Industrial isn't always ugly, and even if some folks believe it is, then the jobs those zones create will mitigate for that "ugliness". Not everyone is a lawyer who will work at home--people need middle-class, sustainable, and stable careers involved with manufacturing. 

EIGHT new transit lines to serve the Westside, the Eastside, the South Bay, the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, the Southeast Cities, the Harbor/San Pedro region, and Downtown regions. 

SEVEN more required years of work before any City, County, or State public worker can retire with full benefits--unless these workers have either saved more, given up vacation time, are physically unable to work or be retrained for other jobs demanding less physical labor.  Maybe we all "deserve" to retire in our mid-50's, but we can't afford to pay for pensions as we're doing now. 

SIX percent as the assumed earnings that public sector pension funds should presume before demanding that the taxpaying base be charged for the extra costs of pensions.  We're going broke, folks, and this isn't a game--unless city/county bankruptcies, and insufficient state funds to meet our budgetary requirements is something we all want to see more of. 

FIVE percent switching from our K-12 budget to our state college budget, in that our bloated, horrifically and tyrannically self-serving public education unions would have to live within their means while allowing taxpayers contributing to our UC and Cal State colleges a chance to affordably pay for their children to get a college education. 

FOUR new smart bus stations (not just benches or stops) each month for our most frequently-used bus connections to establish a roof/shelter, appropriate seating (or not) that doesn't encourage homeless encampments, advertisements for local neighborhood councils, LED announcements for when the next bus is coming, and with plug-in features for cellphones.  Bus riders deserve respect. 

THREE stories as the goal for our City (with the exception of Downtown and a few major commercial corridors) to focus on as the limit for housing projects to achieve affordable and desirable housing for our growing population.  Unless we're talking luxury high-rises, anything over three stories isn't a home...it's a crud-hole.  STOP it, overdevelopers and enabling politicians! 

TWO new county supervisors, and with a redistricting that allows for more appropriate representation for the geographies of our very large L.A. County...and knock it off, you racist cretins, if redistricting is something desired by ethnicity and not geography.  Our county and city is race-obsessed (a New Racism, if ever there was one) enough as it is. 

ONE new wonderful Neighborhood Integrity Initiative to pass in the spring to put the brakes on overdevelopment and require a legal and sustainable and environmentally-friendly development process in the City of the Angels. 

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Holidays and New Year to All!

(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.)

-cw

IMMIGRATION POLITICS-Two weekends ago, in the working class city of Lynwood in southern Los Angeles County, hundreds of anxious immigrant rights activists packed into the banquet hall of a Mexican restaurant to discuss the next four to eight years under President Trump. Nanette Barragán, the district’s newly elected Congresswoman, proclaimed her intention to fight Trump tooth and nail on the harshest elements of his famously hardline immigration agenda, including his proposed border wall. However, Barragán continued, should President Trump and Republicans in Congress propose a bill that would “afford the protections we need,” she would consider it. In particular, she referenced a recently proposed bipartisan bill that would extend by another three years a temporary reprieve from deportation that the Obama administration granted in 2012 to immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. 

“I know the danger,” she told the crowd, describing relatives in Texas who had enrolled in the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. “It’s very personal to me.” 

This subpopulation of immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” occupies a special status in the moral outlook of many politicians and of much of the public when it comes to immigration enforcement and reform. Even among Republican politicians who see unauthorized immigration as a criminal act, there are those who regard the Dreamers, unlike their parents, as essentially blameless. The Dreamers have long offered one of the only slivers of potential compromise and agreement in Congress in what is arguably the most polarizing political issue in the country. 

Obama and congressional Democrats have reached for this bipartisan brass ring repeatedly, introducing the Dreamers’ namesake bill, the Development, Relief, and Education for Minors (DREAM) Act, which would legalize the Dreamers’ status, four times over Obama’s two terms. In characteristic fashion, however, the president always counterbalanced his embrace of the Dreamers with an enormous concession to his hardliner adversaries: the erection and implementation of the most aggressive deportation regime the country has ever seen. 

The impact of this bargain on undocumented immigrants has been almost exclusively negative. The DREAM Act has yet to pass Congress; Obama’s support for it, and for immigration reform generally, remains theoretical. The millions of deportations his administration has overseen, on the other hand, are anything but that. 

If the privileging of certain classes of immigrants over others has served the undocumented population poorly under Obama, it’s likely to get much worse under President Trump. With the president-elect just a few weeks away from assuming office, California’s Democratic lawmakers have been pushing a slate of bills at the state, county and city levels to insert a layer of protection between federal law enforcement and the state’s undocumented immigrants. One of those bills is designed to move the debate over immigrant rights away from what its proponents characterize as a false dichotomy between those who deserve protections and those who do not, by extending guaranteed legal counsel -- non-citizens are not currently entitled to an attorney by right -- to every person in a deportation proceeding, regardless of their background. 

“If we create a system where we’re providing representation for some categories of people because we consider them ‘deserving,'” Emi MacLean, (photo left) an attorney with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network told me, “we’re just reinforcing this really hateful, fear-mongering rhetoric of the incoming Trump administration.” MacLean’s group is pushing the measure at the city and county level in Los Angeles. In the face of the full frontal attack that immigrants expect will follow Trump’s inauguration, MacLean believes that the proper strategy is to lock arms and allow no one to be thrown under the bus. 

Obama’s line on deportations, outlined in a 2014 speech, is that his administration targets “felons, not families.” Rhetorically, it’s a distinction with obvious appeal: Who in the world likes felons and doesn’t like families? But procedurally, immigrant advocates say, it has been used as an excuse to deny due process to a broad cross-section of people who do not conform to what Democrats have long held up as the types of immigrants that deserve priority protection, such as college-bound Dreamers, undocumented parents of U.S. citizens who have lived here for decades, or undocumented immigrants who have served in the military. 

In practice, the “felons” label is boundlessly elastic. It can mean summary deportation for an immigrant with a drug charge from more than two decades ago for which he has already served time. It can cover a grandmother accused of being a gang member by a single police officer on the basis of essentially no evidence whatsoever. It can include an old DUI or marijuana charge, or a citation for street vending without a license. Or based on no criminal history at all, or on a criminal record whose only offense is illegal entry or re-entry, which as a basis for priority deportation creates a circular argument. According to a recent study by the Marshall Project, those last two categories made up 60 percent of the 300,000 deportations that have been carried out since Obama first made his “felons, not families” speech. 

Obama’s good immigrant vs. bad immigrant language, MacLean believes, helped usher in Trump’s vilification of all undocumented immigrants. During the presidential debates, she pointed out, Trump noted that his proposed policies merely followed practices put in place by Obama. “Obama’s rhetoric of ‘we’re going to deport felons, not families’ created the mentality and the reality that we’re living today,” she told me, “where our president-elect, in his initial speech announcing his candidacy, talked about Mexicans coming into the United States as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals.’” 

Trump has already proclaimed that there are between two and three million immigrants with criminal records who he will instruct Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport immediately upon taking office. By comparison, Obama has deported about that number of immigrants -- 2.5 million -- over the course of eight years. That was more deportations than any other president in history, and more than all of the presidents of the 20th century combined.  

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa believes that Trump’s figure is a red herring that indicates just how broad a net he plans to cast over the undocumented population. After addressing the Lynwood meeting, while walking from storefront to storefront, chatting in Spanish with their patrons about his gubernatorial campaign, Villaraigosa told me there is “no evidence” that there are two to three million undocumented immigrants in the United States with criminal records. The real number, he claimed, is closer to 800,000. Trump’s invocation of the larger number, he told me, indicates to him that the president-elect plans to go “far, far beyond” merely focusing on immigrants who pose a legitimate public safety threat. 

One immigration attorney told me that two to three million seemed to her to be a reasonable estimate of the number of immigrants already “in the system” -- through arrests and convictions, but also through DACA enrollments and asylum requests and old removal orders that were ignored or never made it to their recipients in the first place -- who the government can track down and deport without much trouble. If you’re an undocumented immigrant or an asylee and you’ve ever been fingerprinted for any reason, she explained, the federal government has your biometric data and probably a paper trail to your residence. There’s no “hiding in the shadows” under such circumstances. Trump’s two to three million priority deportation cases, then, may have nothing to do with criminal status; they’re just ICE’s low-hanging fruit. As under Obama, the “criminal” label is just an excuse to expedite deportations with a minimum of judicial oversight. 

The distinction between “felons” and “families” has already been stretched to the point of legal farce under the Obama administration. If undocumented immigrants are to have any protection from deportation under Trump, many immigrant rights advocates are convinced, it is incumbent upon Democratic-controlled states like California to undermine what has become a tool for summary deportation by purging contrasts between “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants from their own laws and policies. 

Yesterday morning, in the administration building named after her father, Janice Hahn settled into her seat, alongside her colleagues on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, to hear more than 100 members of the public speak in favor of, or in opposition to, a measure Hahn helped write. The measure, co-written with Supervisor Hilda Solis, Obama’s former Labor Secretary, would pitch county money into a $10 million legal defense fund, jointly financed by the county, the city and private donors, to provide attorneys to immigrants in deportation proceedings. 

Similar funds are being considered in San Francisco and New York City, and a smaller fund has already been put into place in Chicago. In Sacramento, a bill is moving through the California legislature that would create a legal fund at the state level. 

Stripped of power in Washington D.C., Democrats have embraced these rear-guard actions in an effort to defend their communities, proactively or desperately, depending on your point of view, against the expected deportation onslaught from the Trump administration. In California, the bill before the state, which is entitled “Due Process for All,” makes no distinction between immigrants’ criminal histories in determining who is eligible to make use of the fund -- a victory for immigrant rights advocates who aspire to let the divisive “felons, not families” rhetoric fade into oblivion. 

At the Board of Supervisors meeting, the city attorney, a Los Angeles school district board member and a spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Garcetti voiced their enthusiastic support for Hahn and Solis’ measure. It passed by a 4 to 1 vote. 

The language determining the allocation of the funds, however, has yet to be written. If it mimics the state version, California will be on its way to codifying into its laws a unanimous commitment to extending a universal right to due process to all undocumented immigrants, regardless of past arrests, convictions or allegations by the police. It would send a strong message of solidarity at a moment when division could prove catastrophic to millions of the state’s residents. 

If it instead adopts the language of the Obama administration, allocating the right to legal counsel only to certain groups of immigrants deemed more worthy of protection than others, that solidarity could unravel. Immigrants have seen what the results of that division have been under a Democratic administration. Under President Trump, they can only imagine.

(Leighton Woodhouse is a Los Angeles journalist, filmmaker and graphic designer whose work has appeared in the New Republic, the Intercept, Gawker, VICE News, the Nation, Salon and the Awl. His latest feature documentary is Trumpland. This piece was originally posted at Capital& Main.)  Photos by Leighton Woodhouse.

Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PRESERVATION POLITICS-Well, now that you’ve read about the Lytton Savings building at Crescent Heights and Sunset -- and its placement on the City’s “historical register” -- maybe you’d be surprised to find that there’s another “1960s Lytton Savings” worthy of saving. It’s an orphan of a building in Van Nuys at 6569 Van Nuys Blvd. and it has an equal but different story to tell. 

A tale of two buildings, a tale of two different cities: a trendy Los Angeles versus its distant relative, the San Fernando Valley. It’s a tale of community disinterest, proof that even the professionals will “sell out” buildings in the suburbs over a building on Sunset Blvd. It’s a tale revealing that “preservation is a dirty word north of Mulholland Drive.” 

Photos of both the Crescent Heights “Lytton Savings” and the Van Nuys “Lytton Savings” show a great similarity, a love of modern architecture by Bart Lytton, one of those l960s savings and loan tycoons who pyramided the building of the suburbs into a chain of S&Ls. He had a stylebook but he wasn’t building those Home Savings structures that look like mausoleums (I’m surprised no one ever put their ashes into a safe deposit box at Home.) Lytton, a benefactor of the County Museum of Art, used clean modern lines and had a “stylebook” for his banks, but over past 50 years, they’ve disappeared. Maybe you can find one more but, to my knowledge, only the “honored” Crescent Heights and the “soon to be trashed” Van Nuys buildings remain. 

As a member of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, I grew up in Van Nuys admiring the Lytton Savings building. There were only two well designed buildings in Van Nuys: the Paul Revere Williams Bank of America, and next door, the Lytton Savings building with its 40 foot high atrium, skylights, a floating staircase and the loan department suspended on a balcony under the atrium. Yes, like the friends of the Crescent Heights bank, I had my $12 there 50 years ago; I’ve also had a love affair with the building ever since. 

But as a Van Nuys Neighborhood Council member, I’ve never seen the Crescent Heights Lytton Savings and that’s where a bureaucratic story begins. 

When I tried to discuss nominating the Van Nuys Lytton building for “landmark status,” I found that, like the Crescent Heights building, it is subject to demolition -- immediately. 

PROPOSITION M seems to be bringing a land rush to tired Van Nuys Blvd. where most storefronts date from the l920s. Talk about a light rail on Van Nuys Blvd means that everything is in play. And because the Lytton building had parking, four stories with 200 units can be built there. There’s such a land rush now with 400 units at the corner of Kittridge and Van Nuys -- that very same corner. 

As a member of the Van Nuys NC Plum Committee, I tried to talk up the building, but was “blackballed” from the committee. “Thank you for your interest in preservation. (You’re now off the committee.”) 

The fine art of the building isn’t worthy of discussion, but there is talk about the struggling Salvadoran market, La Tapatulcheca (photo above), now occupying it, and that the illegal vendors the market encourages bring the “wrong look” to Van Nuys. Instead, there are wild hopes of gentrification and a “SPROUTS” that will never sprout here. If you think that’s funny, you should feel what I felt when I pursued the matter. The “Lytton Savings” in Van Nuys is on the City of Los Angeles’ “SURVEY LA” list -- an architectural study project of all the City’s buildings of architectural value, including “orphans” like this one that are worthy of “saving.” 

So, ask the City Attorney, “Doesn’t the Neighborhood Council have to at least get a presentation about why the building is on the Survey LA list?” No answer. 

Ask Ken Bernstein, City Historical Preservation Officer, “Won’t you defend your SURVEY LA list of buildings of interest or concern?” No answer.   

Ask LA Conservancy for their help and you hardly get encouragement because the Crescent Heights “fight” seems more interesting. Perhaps “saving two of a kind” is just so difficult to explain that they won’t even “come over the hill” to defend my advocacy -- or SURVEY LA -- or even tell me about their Crescent Heights battle. 

I wish the Crescent Heights people well. I think their building is worthy of preservation, as I do the Van Nuys building. It’s the rare situation where “preserving two of a kind” over one of a kind makes sense. I’d welcome synergy between the groups. 

But the success (such as it is) in Crescent Heights troubles me. I’ve been given a view of City politics suggesting that there is a different threshold for honest discussion of preservation in the City. One cynically sees some sense that the Crescent Heights battle is as much about those Hollywood-Beverly Hills types riding down Sunset Blvd. in a top down convertible, either celebrating the Gehry building to come or the Lytton Savings to be “saved.” 

But if you try, as I did, to get the City’s million dollar “SURVEY LA” discussion of the building inserted into the Van Nuys NC record, you’ll find that you can’t. The City acts as if their own “SURVEY LA” guidance is a “secret” -- a bureaucratic secret for their own convenience. It’s their secret and they’ll decide when and if they want to use it. 

And as for discussion in the Valley on preservation issues -- those who built out the Valley with single family homes in the l950s will build out the Valley now with four story apartments. (Even my single family home sanctuary is being surrounded by those 4 story apartments.) When you can’t get your neighborhood council to respect you enough to make the preservation presentation, you’re not in a good place.

(John Hendry is a neighborhood council activist who lives in the San Fernando Valley.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

VOX POP--LA City Hall’s shady, underhanded ways have become a serious hot-button issue in the city’s March 2017 elections — and now City Council District 5 candidate Jesse Creed has jumped into the fray.

“As reported by the LA Times, ” Creed wrote in an email to supporters, “special interest lobbyists were at the center of a corrupt and illegal campaign finance scheme, collecting over $600,000 in illegal contributions for City Hall politicians. Do you think the politicians care about the people when the lobbyists are the financiers of their campaigns? Please. The people get hosed.”

Since early 2016, the Coalition to Preserve LA, the grassroots movement sponsoring the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, now known as Measure S, has been leading the charge against City Hall’s unfair, dishonest methods, which favor greedy developers over ordinary Angelenos.

With the City Council and mayoral elections coming up in March, numerous candidates running against City Hall incumbents are now sounding alarm that it’s time for much-needed change. Jesse Creed (photo left) is one of them. 

Creed is running against Council District 5 member Paul Koretz, who serves Hollywood, Bel Air, Fairfax, Century City and Westwood, among other neighborhoods. In a recent email to supporters, the challenger wrote:

Lobbyists are responsible for a culture of special interest dependency and corruption in City Hall, resulting in politicians who ignore the needs of the people. Meanwhile, problems like our broken streets and sidewalks, illegal dumping, and flagrant violations of building codes go unfixed.

We owe it to the people of LA to break this culture of special interest dependency. The people of LA help fund our city elections with a matching funds system that gives candidates up to $100,000 in taxpayer funds. We owe it to the taxpayers of LA to run an ethical campaign.

Coalition to Preserve LA has noted for months that developers spend millions on politically connected lobbyists, who then woo City Hall politicians and bureaucrats for special spot-zoning favors that negatively impact the rest of us through ruined neighborhoods, gridlock traffic and displacement of longtime residents.

It’s why community leaders across LA are asking Angelenos to vote “Yes on S” in March. 

For his own campaign in Council District 5, Creed vowed to not take developer or lobbyist money.

Join the Coalition to Preserve L.A. by clicking here right now to donate any amount you wish, and follow and cheer our efforts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For more information, you can also send us an email at [email protected].