BELL VIEW-Years of banging the podium at City Hall for my allotted sixty seconds of screaming into the abyss have taught me one basic truth: Whenever a problem -- or a "crisis," as most problems are referred to these days – needs fixing, the people trying to fix the problem have to answer one question before anything can happen. Not "How do we fix this problem?" or "How do we solve this crisis?" Not "Where do we get the money?" or even "Can this problem be solved?" The first question that must be answered before absolutely anything can happen in 21st Century America is "How will the rich get richer?" 

Before we decide what we're going to do to, say, cure cancer, or save an endangered species, or stop the planet from killing us off, we, first, need to figure out how the solution is going to make the rich much richer. 

Luckily for us, our elected officials have been working hard at coming up with an answer to this central question of our time. 

War, for example, is a no-brainer. The rich always get richer off of war. War makes money coming and going. The rich get richer blowing things up. Then get richer again putting things back together. The rich have even figured out how to get rich on things like addiction, disease, and poverty: just declare war on them and the cash starts rolling in. 

And say what you will about the qualifications of our current Secretary of Education, at least she has solved the basic conundrum of how the rich get richer off of public education. 

Unfortunately, once the rich have taken their share – there is almost never much left to solve the problem we wanted to solve.

On the local level, the rich have a juicy housing crisis to feast upon. You don’t need a degree in economics to figure out how the rich get richer off of a housing crisis. But homelessness – ah, that’s been a tough nut for the rich to crack. How, exactly, do the rich get rich off of the homeless? For the longest time, I struggled with this question. 

Now, it looks as if Mayor Garcetti and the City Council have found a solution. Remember the $1.2 billion we decided to raise for the homeless in Measure HHH? Remember how the bulk of the funds were earmarked for “Supportive Housing” – the kind of housing the chronically homeless need? The drug addicted, the mentally-ill, the elderly. Remember being told that no more than 20% of the funds raised would go to “affordable housing” – designed to help people who had not quite ended up on the streets, but were headed in that direction? 

Well … that’s no fun at all. And, since it doesn’t make the rich richer, it was basically a non-starter. Now, it turns out, only 50% of the “supportive housing” needs to be supportive housing – and only 50% of that needs to be reserved for the chronically-homeless. Get it? So the 80% of the $1.2 billion that was supposed to be used to help the most desperate of LA’s massive homeless population will now be sliced up into smaller and smaller chunks with only about 25% of it going to the people it was meant to help. 

When I lived in East Hollywood, a real do-gooder rehabbed an old apartment building and put a dozen formerly-homeless families into real homes. These are families with kids that were living in their cars before they got a hand up. No one in the neighborhood even knows the place is "homeless" housing. It's a model that could succeed all over the city. 

But the threesome cooking crack in a tent in the alley behind this place? They're not exactly candidates for this type of solution. 

So, when someone tells me that "studies show" the homeless do better when they're integrated into the community -- I don't disagree. I just need to point out that not all the homeless are the same. Anyone who thinks people are going to pay market rent to live down the hall from a crackhead are smoking something.  

No. Something tells me this new market-based solution to chronic homelessness will peter out just after Job One is accomplished. The rich will get richer and the truly desperate homeless will still be looking for a place to land.

(David Bell is a writer, attorney, former president of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and writes for CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-It goes by many names – the free market, trickle-down economics, supply side economics, market magic, market fundamentalism, and neo-liberalism – but its content is the same. Let the private sector maximize its profits through deregulation, bailouts, tax breaks, and financial incentives. Then the ensuing rising tide of investment will lift all ships. It will create jobs aplenty, while also building affordable housing. The resulting glut in pricey housing will not only drive down all housing prices, but grants to non-profit affordable housing corporations and inclusionary housing programs, such as LA’s density bonus program, will fill LA’s affordable housing vacuum. Just sit back, and market magic will fix what ails us, like a vibrating waistband that peels off extra pounds at the flip of a switch. 

The basic supply-side argument, whether articulated by the Mayor, the City Council, academics, realtors, LA Times editorial writers, dependent non-profit organizations, Chamber of Commerce boosters, or anonymous Internet trolls, is as straightforward as could be. Planning and zoning laws restrict housing production, and this is the main cause of expensive housing in Los Angeles. 

Therefore, if City Hall loosens up land use regulations, developers will march into LA, build oodles of housing, which increases supply and supposedly reduces prices to the point that housing again becomes affordable. 

What trickle-down got right and got wrong. 

Whatever the name, it is a superficially convincing theory, and one part of it is even correct. The deregulation of zoning and environmental laws has allowed real estate profits to soar in Los Angeles. Trickle-down has really been trickle-up, and the market fundamentalists at least got that part of the equation correct. 

But, as for the other part of the equation – fixing LA’s housing crisis – their theory has been a bust. Despite years of granting real estate developers every zoning request they request, as well as notoriously lax enforcement of the City’s building and zoning codes, LA’s housing crisis has continued to worsen, especially since the 2008-9 Great Recession. Gentrification, housing prices, and income inequality have all soared, pricing out many residents and newcomers. 

To begin, there is no evidence that trickle-down generates jobs. Real estate projects built through zoning deregulation -- such as pay-to-play spot-zones and spot-plan amendments, wide-scale up-zoning through Community Plan Updates, Community Plan Implementation Ordinances, re-code LA, or indirectly through slipshod code enforcement -- have not resulted in net gains of short-term construction jobs or long-term building management and maintenance jobs. 

In fact, this often repeated jobs claim has only served two other purposes. The first purpose is to justify City Council votes to deflect dangerous Environmental Impact Report findings with the untested claim that a project is really a major job-generator. The second purpose was to lasso trade unions and non-profit groups to oppose Measure S in LA’s recent March 7 election. 

But, that still leaves the second claim: an uptick in housing construction leads to greater housing affordability. Even if the new units are expensive apartments, condos, and houses, they supposedly pull down all housing prices. The result is alleged to be more affordable housing. In fact, according to this theory, some of LA’s 50,000 homeless  should finally be able to get a real roof over their head. 

Like other missing benefits of deregulation, there is still no evidence that increasing the supply of expensive apartments somehow increases the supply of affordable housing. One of the reasons should be obvious; the widespread gentrification of many LA neighborhoods has not missed a beat. In fact, since 2001 the LA Times reports a loss of 20,000 official affordable units. What took their place? More expensive housing, of course, for the new urban gentry. 

Gentrification: This gentrification process is now painfully obvious in Los Angeles neighborhoods experiencing mansionization, small lot subdivisions, and Ellis Act evictions. In all these cases, older housing, some of which is subject to LA’s rent stabilization ordinance, and all of which is less expensive than the new housing that replaces it, is sacrificed for new, expensive houses, apartments, condos, and townhouses. The evicted residents must then scramble for replacement housing, spending a higher percentage of their income to find a place to live. In fact, in Los Angeles, over 59 percent of renters are now officially cost-burdened because they spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. 

The other reason why trickle-down economics has led to a housing market crisis should also be obvious. Luxury housing and affordable housing are separate housing markets. Developers rake in sizable profits by building, selling, and renting expensive housing. But, they would commit financial suicide if they went into the affordable housing business. This is why they don’t do it. Even when they overbuild at the expensive end, such as in DTLA, they never drop selling prices or rents to the point that their new units become affordable. Instead, they hold on to the vacant units until the market changes, turn to Airbnb short-term rentals, or offer modest incentives such as free parking. But, they never rent out expensive units at a financial loss. Never. 

This is why supply-side economics trickles down to a dry stream bed when it comes to affordable housing. The real process should be called trickle-up, which explains why the supply-side beneficiaries spent $11 million in LA’s recent Measure S election to perpetuate their trickle-up business model. 

Now, with memories of the March 7 fading away, the free market campaign slogans are not faring well. Campaign bluster can go a long way, but ultimately reality asserts itself; Los Angeles has had a continuous affordable housing crisis since the end of most Federal housing programs over 40 years ago. 

More empty claims about beneficial market forces: 

In case there are still a few true believers clinging to their faith in market magic, here are several more realities they should consider when the supply-siders resurrect their empty claims. 

1) They don’t work. Since the elimination of most HUD public housing programs in the 1970s and 80s, every county in the entire United States has a demonstrable shortage of affordable housing. Regardless of supply, demand, local land use regulations, local wealth or poverty, the private housing market is simply not capable of providing affordable housing. It never has and never will. 

2) Measure HHH is trickling-up. Until a few years ago, the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) filled some of this funding gap by devoting 20 percent of its budget to quasi-public housing. But the California State legislature dissolved all CRA’s several years ago. Since then, the closest the trickle-downers have come to replacing the CRA is Measure HHH. But as Patrick McDonald reported in the April 18, 2017, CityWatch, HHH funding is quickly moving into the “croneysphere.” City Hall now wants to use the affordable housing bond issue to bankroll mixed-use buildings and mixed-income housing. The trickle-down from this bond issue is, as expected by critics such as myself, already trickling up to real estate speculators. 

3) Un-tapped zoning potential. The free marketeers also claim that LA's housing crisis results from wide-scale downzoning since the 1980s, but this is bunk. According to detailed City Planning studies from the early 1990's, which are still the most recent official data, Los Angeles could reach a population of 8,000,000 people based on existing zoning. But, led by UCLA's Prof. Greg Morrow, these trickle-downers declare that Los Angeles has virtually no more un-used zoning potential for housing. But, this is simply not true. In addition to lots zoned R-3 and R-4, Los Angeles is filled with long, low-rise transportation corridors (e.g., Pico, Olympic, Washington, Vermont, Hoover) featuring commercial zoning. 

Since all of these commercial zones can be used for by-right R-4 apartments, Los Angeles still has an enormous untapped potential for housing construction. Furthermore, these future apartments could be built up to 35 percent over the zoning code's requirements. Based on SB 1818, developers could set aside 20 percent of their units to become affordable. They then obtain incentives that raise the overall number of market and affordable units. 

4) Developers’ Business model is the real culprit. The basic problem is, therefore, not LA's zoning build-out potential, but the private developers’ business model. They must make a serious profit, and this is only possible through pricey housing. We could totally eliminate planning and zoning laws in Los Angeles, like Houston has, and these real estate investors would still build expensive housing. They would simply build it in more locations.   

5) Short-term fixes. In the meantime, though, there are several things we can do in Los Angeles until the real fix appears, the restoration of Federal and local public housing programs: 

• Eliminate vacancy de-control from LA's Rent Stabilization Ordinance.  

• Apply the Rent Stabilization Ordinance to all rental units, not just those built before 1979. 

• Prosecute the speculators who illegally evict people from small apartment houses in order to demolish the buildings and replace them with expensive housing. 

• Demolish all speculative structures built through code violations. 

• Properly fund and monitor LA’s Department of Building and Safety, LA’s Housing and Community Investment Department, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and LA County Public Housing to ensure that zoning, building, and health codes are enforced.

(Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatchLA. Please send any comments or corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--Since Campaign 2016, a chasm has erupted and the fault lines continue to crack. As protesters gathered on April 15 from Fifth Avenue to Pershing Square to demand President Trump release his tax returns, heated -- and violent -- exchanges ensued between pro- and anti-Trump camps at a Berkeley park that was the scene of a stabbing, as well as at least 20 arrests for assault with a deadly weapon and several felony assaults. 

Police say seven protesters had to be taken to the hospital and at least eleven were injured. Between 500 and 1,000 were gathered in the park at the height of the protests with about 100 moving the fights to a nearby intersection. 

This melee was a three-peat -- following earlier episodes of violence and vandalism in February after UC Berkeley cancelled a scheduled talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor of Breitbart. Last month, a mix of about 500 pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators resulted in punching, spraying and clubbing.

This Saturday, a pro-Trump group had scheduled a “Patriots Day free-speech rally and picnic” in Civic Center Park in downtown Berkeley. Anti-Trump protesters responded with a counter-rally. Police banned any potential weapons, including pepper spray, mace, baseball bats, and glass bottles. A Farmers Market held next to the park was cancelled.

Fights broke out despite the precautions as police in riot gear worked to keep sides apart and members of a citizen militia protected Trump supporters. The two sides were separated by a barricade, which did not stop people from throwing cans and bottles.

While our First Amendment Rights of Speech and Assembly are essential to democracy, the disturbing trend that appears to be happening in Berkeley is hopefully not the harbinger of violent exchanges across the country.

Many of us have experienced divides and rifts between family members and friends over politics and more deeply, over the values that are represented by those politics, whether protection of human and environmental rights or globalism vs. isolationism. The violent protests are symptomatic of these deep divides -- and the divisiveness in our country is profoundly troubling.

With hope, we can heal as a nation and we can put these days of hostility and violence behind us. The 1^st Amendment promises the right to speak freely, not the right to fight. Reminder: Democracy is not a bystander sport. Closing the divide begins with me … and you.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)

-cw

BUDGET ADVOCATES--On Thursday April 20, at 10 a.m., Mayor Garcetti will present the 2017-18 budget at City Hall.

TAX DAY: THE NUCLEAR OPTION-"Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value," said former Vice President Joe Biden, quoting his father. He knew that a budget reflected the values and priorities of our nation. Each April our country funds its priorities. Ultimately, as the Rev. Jim Wallis has said, "Budgets are moral documents." 

Each year Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles calculates how much money the United States spends on nuclear weapons programs for the current tax year. The Nuclear Weapons Community Costs Project has identified that for tax year 2016 the United States spent $57.6 billion on nuclear weapons programs. California contributed more than $7 billion to this amount while Los Angeles County sent approximately $1.8 billion to the federal coffers to fund weapons that can never be used. In Flint, Michigan, where we have allowed our children to be poisoned by lead in their drinking water, $9 million was spent. In the nation’s poorest county, Buffalo County, South Dakota, they spent more than $142,000 on nuclear weapons. 

Every dollar spent on nuclear weapons is a dollar taken from programs that support the health and well being of our country, our communities, and our loved ones. These are critical funds that we can never get back. 

The Trump administration is proposing a dramatic increase in the budget for nuclear weapons while simultaneously proposing a dramatic decrease for social and environmental programs. This is in addition to the nuclear grand bargain of the Obama administration's proposed buildup of our nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1 trillion over the next three decades. This is the opening salvo as other countries follow suit in this new nuclear arms race.  

Having grown weary of our actions and failure to meet our legally binding commitment to work in good faith toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, the non-nuclear nations are refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear states any longer. Taking their future into their own hands the vast majority of the non-nuclear nations will complete negotiations at the United Nations this July on an international nuclear ban treaty that will outlaw nuclear weapons just as all other weapons of mass destruction have been banned. This will leave the United States and other nuclear nations once again in breach of international law.  

Fortunately, a world under constant threat of nuclear apocalypse either by intent or accident is not the future that has to be. But change will not happen on its own. Each of us has a role to play. Ultimately it will take the people of the United States to awaken from our trance and join the rest of the world in demanding that our leaders work to abolish nuclear weapons and to redirect these expenditures to secure a future for our children and address the real needs of our country. 

The time for action is now.   

Contact your representatives at: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

(Robert Dodge is a family physician practicing full time in Ventura, California. He serves on the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles serving as a Peace and Security Ambassador and at the national level where he sits on the security committee. He also serves on the board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions. He writes for PeaceVoice. This piece appeared most recently in CommonDreams.org.)  Prepped for City Watch by Linda Abrams.

@THE GUSS REPORT-Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren D. Price Jr. has been implicated for fraud and perjury, perhaps unwittingly, by his own attorney Stephen J. Kaufman. 

And that’s the least of Price’s problems. 

The backstory is this: In a misdated 2012 affidavit, Price and his then-divorce attorney Albert Robles (who is the current Mayor of Carson, CA) claimed that Price’s first wife Lynn could not be located for the purpose of serving her divorce papers, although they repeatedly tried to serve her at her residence at 4519 Don Arturo Place in Los Angeles. 

The problem is, Lynn Price never lived there.  

A bigger problem is that Curren Price knew that Lynn Price never lived there. 

That’s because the property was and remains owned by Price’s second wife, Del Richardson-Price, since June 21, 2001. 

Yet, as documented in Mr. Price’s and Mr. Robles’ affidavit, they repeatedly sent his process server, Antonio D. Inocentes, to that address on January 18, 19 and 21, 2012 to document multiple attempts to serve her – to a location at which Mr. Price, and perhaps Mr. Robles, knew she never lived. 

A few days ago, I got an email from Mr. Price’s current attorney, Stephen J. Kaufman, in which he echoed a call he made to me a few days earlier, perhaps without understanding the implication of his words. “Lynn Suzette Price never lived at 4519 Don Arturo Place,” he reiterated to me. 

Was it Mr. Price’s goal in misleading the court his desire to obtain a divorce from his first wife Lynn without serving her notice of it? His reason for doing that may have been to shield the assets of his second wife, Del Richardson-Price, and his own assets (worth millions of dollars combined) from being split as community property.

Why would the assets of Price’s second wife, Del, be subject to community property splitting with his first wife, Lynn? 

Because records suggest that Curren D. Price, Jr., a Los Angeles City Councilmember, is concurrently married to both women.

While Mr. Price has denied being a bigamist in media reports, he refuses to state when he married his second wife, Del. According to some of their sworn documents, he and Del wed between August 8, 2008 and April 1, 2014, without his first divorcing his first wife Lynn. The big “if” is whether their sworn statements on real estate and other documents are truthful. 

According to Mr. Price’s LA City Ethics forms, at the time he claimed his first wife Lynn resided at the Don Arturo house, he simultaneously received more than $10,000 in annual rental income (possibly a great deal more) for its occupancy from Dr. Josephine B. Isabel-Jones, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, and her family, whose residency at the hillside home-with-a-view has been confirmed. 

So sit with that for a moment.  

Knowing that his first wife Lynn never resided at the house on Don Arturo Place, Mr. Price still had his process server repeatedly go to that address, disrupting his paying tenants, the Jones family, in order to willfully mislead the divorce court that he was making an attempt to serve Lynn there. 

A few months later in 2012, the Los Angeles Superior Court didn’t buy Price’s and Robles’ claim that they could not locate Lynn Price and denied their request to instead serve notice with a paid newspaper advertisement. Lynn Price’s address was readily available on the website of her Trenton, N.J., law firm, on the California and New Jersey Bar Association websites and through other sources. The divorce file has been in limbo ever since, and is overdue for a housecleaning update, or an “Order to Show Cause,” by the court. 

While District Attorney Jackie Lacey and apparently the FBI investigate Price’s activity in this mess, what those agencies may not yet know is this: 

According to Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder records, the voter registration of Mr. Price’s first wife Lynn has been dormant for all elections from 2002 to the present. But in August 2010, in the midst of Mr. Price’s unsuccessful and dubious attempt to get a divorce from her, someone changed Lynn’s address on her voter registration to – you guessed it – 4519 Don Arturo Place, without her ever living there, and without her using that address to vote in that year or in any year since. (Lynn Price has for years been registered to vote in New Jersey.) 

Mr. Price’s current attorney Stephen J. Kaufman denies that his client or anyone close to him had anything to do with changing Lynn Price’s voter registration, claiming that it was automatically changed through the United States Postal Service’s National Change of Address System.

But that’s not possible, according to both the USPS and the LA County Registrar-Recorder’s office.

“The Postal Service’s National Change-of-Address system does not reach out and ‘change’ a customer’s address” without explicit direction from the person or someone pretending to be her, said Evelina Ramirez, a USPS spokesperson. And the USPS doesn’t change someone’s voter registration, at all. The LA County Registrar-Recorder’s office in Norwalk echoed that sentiment. A voter registration is only changed when they receive a mail-in affidavit or DMV change, which is scanned and saved, or via correspondence, which is not. 

Because Lynn Price’s change of voter registration address has no stored affidavit or DMV transaction, it is believed to have been changed through correspondence. 

Attorney Kaufman, when told that his client Mr. Price claimed on his 2012 affidavit that Lynn Price did reside at the Don Arturo address, stopped talking altogether and did not respond to the following questions:

1. Could he identify anyone other than Curren Price or Del Richardson-Price who stood to benefit from that change of Lynn Price’s voter registration address? 

2. Why, if Lynn Price never lived at the Don Arturo Place house, did the National Change of Address system just happen to choose his client’s second wife’s house as the new address for her voter registration? 

3. Why does he believe that the National Change of Address system changed Lynn Price’s long-dormant Los Angeles voter registration, but not her active one in New Jersey? 

4. Why, if Lynn Price never lived at Don Arturo, did his client have his process server attempt to serve her there three times in January 2012? 

Kaufman’s deflections are not only ludicrous on their surface, but also statistically questionable. 

There are 3.267 million residential housing units in Los Angeles County. The odds of Lynn Price’s voter registration being randomly and illegally transferred to an address owned by her husband and his second wife are significantly worse than her odds of winning a high-end grand prize in a California Lottery scratcher game, which is about 1 in 3,000,000. And this just happened to occur at a time when Mr. Price and Mr. Robles tried to convince the court that they could not locate her at that exact address. 

Further, throughout a five-year correspondence that Del Richardson-Price had with the IRS from at least June 2010 to July 2015, Del used Don Arturo as her address at the time Lynn Price’s voter registration was changed to the same address in August 2010. 

Mr. Price refuses to state where he lived during this time. 

The can of worms that that opens is this: if Del Richardson-Price told the truth about her residence address on her years-long communications with the IRS, why was she registered to vote, and still is, at a different address, in a different LA City Council District, far below her admirable, affluent economic status? 

The Don Arturo house is located on a nicely manicured cul-de-sac in a hillside community with a sweeping view befitting someone of a doctor’s, or Curren Price’s and Del Richardson-Price’s, professional success. But it is located in LA City Council District 8. 

Los Angeles City Councilmember Curren D. Price, Jr., represents Council District 9, aka, “The New 9^th,” and it is illegal for him to reside outside of the community he represents. Just ask former LA City Councilmember Richard Alarcon what happened when he did that. 

According to Curren Price’s and Del Richardson-Price’s current voter registrations, in stark contradiction to their address on IRS correspondence as late as 2015, they reside in a downscale, multi-family rental property in a working class community with a flock of roosters cock-a-doodle-doo’ing across the street and an inexpensive, conspicuously license-plated car, parked where millionaires with two six-figure incomes generally do not live.

Is something that started out as a simple inquiry of whether Mr. Price is a bigamist about to morph into something with far bigger consequences? 

The evolution of this story can be found in my earlier CW articles: 

February 27: “LA’s Own Bigamist-ery.”  

March 2: “LA Sentinel Throws Up a Smoke Screen for Councilman Price on the Bigamy Mystery.”  

March 6: “LA Times Tiptoeing Around the Price Bigamy Allegations.”  

March 27: “Curren Price Plot Thickens: Councilman’s Problems are Bigger than Bigamy.”  

(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, and has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @TheGussReport.  Verifiable tips and story ideas can be sent to him at [email protected]. His opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.