PLATKIN ON PLANNING-If you think a Hillary Clinton administration, even with another Great Recession and the Democrats in control of Congress, will result in an Urban New Deal, don’t hold your breath. It is not going to happen. This is why. 

Part of the story is the steady decline of the Democratic Party over the past 40 years. It does not just consist of negative campaigning and shallow debates, rigging the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders, smearing Dr. Jill Stein; endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya; flooding the Middle East with US weaponry; and unleashing aerial death squads called drone missiles. Nor is it just mass incarceration of US citizens and refugees, wholehearted support of fracking, and record levels of deportations. 

Less obviously, the Democratic Party’s downward trajectory also includes the total abandonment of the urban programs it once championed, such as public housing. As evidenced by the White House’s recent position paper on affordable housing, as well as a succession of ineffective affordable housing programs in Los Angeles from the 1980s to date, the party’s urban policy has imploded into unrestrained capitalism, also called urban neo-liberalism.  

Long gone are urban programs that included public investment in infrastructure and services, as well as careful regulation of private investment. Since the days of LA Mayor Tom Bradley in the 1980s to date, from Washington, DC, to LA’s City Hall, the Democratic Party’s approach has been a three-legged stool: jettison zoning and environmental laws, abolish government housing programs, and bend over backwards for glad-handing real estate speculators. When challenged, they invariably resort to name-calling. Their critics are always NIMBYs, not supporters of strong planning and environmental regulation. 

So, let’s get into the specifics, including the House LA approach now underway at LA’s City Hall. 

More Revelations from the Mountain Top: Straight from Washington, DC, the Obama Administration has issued a White House Housing Development Toolkit. It identifies two barriers to affordable housing production: local zoning and environmental laws. It never mentions that the U.S. has been in a perpetual housing crisis for the past 40 years and that this crisis coincides with the wholesale elimination of Federal housing programs in the 1970s and 1980s. 

As for the White House’s solutions, they are the same market-based mantras that have been recited by real estate speculators since today’s boomer retirees started paying off their student loans. I have listed them below, with my plain English translation written in italics. 

• Establishing by-right development. (Up-zone commercial properties to avoid discretionary zoning applications, environmental reviews, public notices, public hearings, and appeals.) 

• Taxing vacant land or donate it to non-profit developers. (Thirty years ago Mayor Tom Bradley called for using the air rights above City parking lots for affordable housing.) 

• Streamlining or shortening permitting processes and timelines. (Cutting corners for well-connected real estate investors.) 

• Eliminate off-street parking requirements. (Under-park apartments before a mass transit system is in place.)

• Allowing accessory dwelling units. (Turn single-family homes into duplexes without upgrading public facilities and infrastructure to accommodate a population increase.) 

• Establishing density bonuses. (Allow developers to get free variances in exchange for a handful of unverified affordable units.) 

• Enacting high-density and multifamily zoning. (Permit apartment houses in single-family neighborhoods without upgrading infrastructure and services.) 

• Employing inclusionary zoning. (Require new market-rate apartment buildings to include a small percentage of uninspected affordable units.) 

• Establishing development tax or value capture incentives. (Allow developers of market housing to pay an in lieu fee for off-site affordable units.) 

• Using property tax abatements. (In addition to Prop. 13 provisions that freeze most commercial property taxes to late 1970 rates, any increase in assessed valuations would also be exempt from property taxes.) 

It is my contention, especially for Los Angeles, these programs did not work several decades ago, and they will not work now. The simple reason is that the private sector has never been able to meet the housing needs of lower-income Americans. You can easily enrich the crony capitalists buzzing around elected officials intoxicated by the sweet nectar of laissez faire capitalism, but the cumulative, long-term result is dismal. After several decades, these market schemes have only managed to build a tiny fraction of the affordable housing needed in the United States. In fact, the situation is now so bad that every county in the entire county has an affordable housing shortage.  

Bradley Administration: To understand House LA, we need to step back in time to the Tom Bradley administration, when LA first acknowledged that it had an affordable housing crisis. Like the Depression, in the 1980s, only one family in five could afford to buy a home, 200,000 families were doubled or tripled up, 40,000 families lived in garages, and 150,000 families were homeless at some point in a year. 

Initially slow to respond, Mayor Bradley eventually made it clear that the crisis resulted from the extensive cutbacks in urban programs that began during the Nixon-Ford years (1968-1976), and only got worse under Carter (1976-1980), Bush 1 (1980-84), and Clinton (1984-1992). By the late 1980s, nearly all Federal urban programs, especially housing, had been eliminated. This era marked the end of New Deal liberalism and the beginning or urban neo-liberalism: the myth that the private market could solve persistent urban problem if showered with enough deregulation and financial incentives. 

Beginning in 1988, that is exactly what Mayor Bradley undertook through a detailed proposal whose premise was a quickly discredited low-ball calculation of LA’s residential zoning potential. The Bradley program intended to eliminate environmental reviews of small and medium sized apartment houses, permit apartment houses and second units in single-family neighborhoods, demolish houses with code violations to furnish free building sites to non-profit housing corporations, impose linkage fees on new residential projects to fund affordable housing projects, and build affordable housing in the airspace above 105 city-owned parking lots, beginning with 10 prototypes. 

In response to widespread community opposition, however, the initial Bradley program was modified to include the rehabilitation homes and apartments in low-income neighborhoods and a slumlord task force to target slum properties for criminal prosecution. It also shifted the construction of affordable apartments from single-family neighborhoods to transit corridors and stations. 

The Planning Department’s updated housing calculations also revealed that Los Angeles had sufficient zoning for one million additional housing units, or 25,000 new units per year for the next 40 years. Other Planning Department estimates from the early 1990s indicated an even larger buildout potential. Based on existing zoning, Los Angeles could add nearly 5,000,000 more people, reaching a total population of 8,000,000. In the intervening 26 years, however, the City has never updated any of its zoning build out calculations. Despite claims and counter-claims, the actual changes between 1990 and 2016 are not known. 

House LA - Old Wine in New Bottles: Based on information from the Los Angeles Business Council, House LA appears to be the Los Angeles version of the White House Housing Tool Kit. It mostly repackages old, off-the-shelf market programs. Unfortunately, most of them go back nearly three decades, with little to show for themselves. As before, my translation is in italics. 

• Expansion of Expedited Processing Section in Planning. (Pay to Play: Quick zoning approvals for well-off real estate speculators.) 

• Site Plan Review Modifications. (Zoning deregulation.) 

• Permitting Micro Unit Housing (Increasing density without upgrading public services and infrastructure.) 

• Deferring Fees. (Municipal subsidies for well-connected real estate speculators, like AEG.) 

• Expanding the Use of Shared Vehicles. (Under-parking new buildings prior to the build-out of the mass transit system.) 

• Facilitating Accessory Dwelling Units for Affordable Housing. (Turning single family’s homes into duplexes without upgrading public services and infrastructure and without collecting additional property taxes.) 

• Using City-owned parking lots for affordable housing. (House LA recently added Tom Bradley’s long-neglected program to use City-owned properties, mostly parking lots, as affordable housing sites. Other than a 30 year hiatus, the only other differences is that House LA identifies 100 not parking lots and proposes 11 not 10 affordable housing sites.) 

Why so much hostility from House LA to the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative? Gil Cedillo, the City Councilmember who has campaigned for the House LA market-incentive proposals, has sharply criticized the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. But, his talking points come straight from the Astroturf funders: CH Palladium, LLC and Westfield DD&C, LLC. These Big Real Estate players have every reason to oppose an Initiative that will force the City of Los Angeles to systematically and quickly update its General Plan, including permanent bans on parcel level spot-zoning and spot-General Plan amendments. 

This is because the Palladium and Westfield business models rely on spot-zoning and spot-planning. As they scour Los Angeles for shopping center and high-rise building sites, they inevitably run into conflicts with zoning and planning ordinances. But, they could care less if their projects conflict with the character and scale of existing neighborhoods or exceed the capacity of existing infrastructure.

For them, their criterion is profitability. But, they can hardly go to the city’s voters and fess up that they oppose the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative because it impinges on their bottom line. So instead, they have created an Astroturf organization, the Coalition to Save Los Angeles Neighborhoods and Jobs, that claims spot-zoning and spot-planning is essential to the production of affordable housing. 

It doesn’t matter that they cannot identify projects from the Bradley to the Garcetti eras where affordable housing projects required zone changes and General Plan Amendments. Even their latest gambit, grabbing a hold of the Tom Bradley program of using city parking lots for affordable housing sites, is a desperate act. This is because this option has been around for nearly 30 years, has hardly ever worked, and could be easily pursued on city-owned parcels that did not require the City Council to adopt spot-zones and spot-plans. 

So, with deception in one hand, and a check in the other, they march on to block a voter initiative that would force the City of LA to properly plan, including rigorous criteria for the approval of any deviations from legally adopted plans and zones.

(Dick Platkin is a veteran city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. He also serves on the boards of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association and East Hollywood Neighborhood Council Planning Committee. Please send comments and corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

OPENING UP THE PROCESS-The importance of women's leadership in politics is not only apparent in Democrats' selection of Hillary Clinton to run for President, but also in the candidacy of another talented woman pursuing the top leadership role in the state party in 2017. 

Kimberly Ellis, a progressive Black woman from the Bay Area city of Richmond, is running to become chair of the California Democratic Party. She heads the statewide nonprofit Emerge California and trains women candidates, some inspired by Hillary Clinton, in how to mount effective campaigns for office. She has a remarkable record in fund-raising and building her organization to equip a diverse group of women for public service. As party chair, she would succeed John Burton. 

During Burton's 8-year tenure as chair, the state party has secured its own headquarters and paid it off while championing healthcare expansion, LGBT equality, gun safety, climate protection, vaccination for all, and opposition to the death penalty. Everyone takes his calls -- perhaps to hear a revealing story of politics past, told in his signature salty language, or more likely to touch base with someone who influences politicos and shapes policies in California. 

As former state Senator Burton steps down, a political insider from LA has stepped up alongside Ellis to seek the chair's role. Eric Bauman, the senior adviser to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, is also chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee and male vice chair of the state party. 

Ellis, at age 43, is also a leader in state Democratic circles. She is recording secretary of the state party's African American Caucus and a member of the party's Finance Committee. 

But if she is a queen of empowering women candidates and African Americans, Bauman fancies himself a kingmaker. 

About to turn 58, he has the ear of many elected Democrats and personifies the bullying tactics of an old-school boss. The manner in which he peddles his influence can sometimes be a problem. In June, for instance, the Beach Cities Democratic Club in LA invited him and Ellis to address them to enlighten the club's consideration of endorsement in the contest for state Democratic Party chair. At the event, Bauman modestly claimed it was the first such speech he had given. Yet he was already listing endorsements from 16 clubs on his flyer before that meeting. Shouldn't open and even-handed opportunities to address clubs come before an endorsement -- especially for a role as weighty as state party chair when that election is still a year up the road? 

How does Bauman's style of campaigning promote inclusiveness, diversity, and participation? This is an example of old-boys' favoritism that shows how it can corrupt party politics. We give credit to the Beach Cities Democrats for actually seeking out more than one candidate. 

Using his influence, Bauman has also made connections for his own profit that have attracted the critical eye of good-government watchdogs. His consulting business, Victory Land Partners, solicited and received $12,500-per month payments from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known as Pharma, to stop an initiative to reduce prescription drug prices for Californians, which turned into Proposition 61, the Drug Price Relief Act. All this happened while he drew $145,000, plus benefits, as a state employee. 

President Obama has said the big pharmaceutical companies put Americans' health at risk, writing that they "oppose any change to drug pricing, no matter how justifiable and modest, because they believe it threatens their profits." Trading on his party role for personal profit, Bauman is treading on the same thin ice that has collapsed under past operatives who put self above public service. Do we want the chair of the party to be an expert at this icky kind of manipulation? 

In contrast, Ellis has worked to make the state Democratic Party a bastion for progressive ideas and candidates. She believes that progressive voters -- including people of color, environmentalists, union members, professionals, the disabled, the elderly, millennials, the poor, the tired, those yearning to be free -- make up a largely untapped majority of the electorate. It's the job of the state Democratic Party to seek out those voters, energize them, show that elections are relevant to their interests, engage them as voters, and train promising advocates among them as the next generation of Democratic leaders. 

Commanding a reliable progressive majority in the electorate, California Democrats will have to recruit and support progressive candidates, and overcome resistance to the kind of legislation that aggressively promotes great education for all from preschool to grad school, protects the environment, revamps the criminal justice system, and promotes income equality. That's how California Democrats will write and pass the kind of legislation that can reinvigorate our public schools, our community and state colleges and universities, and our pre-kindergarten programs.
Young voters sent a message in this year's primary election about wanting an open, inclusive party that delivers on policy goals like an affordable path to a college degree for them and the next generation. Ellis is listening. 

California Democrats are about to make a major choice for state party chair. They can take a timid step to dance with the old-boys' club or a bold progressive step to dance with the future. The opportunity to select Kimberly Ellis in 2017 will follow the election this fall, when Hillary Clinton is likely to gain more than 60 percent of Californians' votes. Electing Ellis will send another strong message that the door to leadership for women and progressives in the Democratic Party is finally open.

(Delaine Eastin is a former state Superintendent of Public Instruction who served four terms in California's state Assembly. Ron Kaye is former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News who continues to advocate for honesty in public service and a better informed electorate.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

VOX POP--“Since I’ve been displaced, I’ve seen more people who weren’t here before. Where my house was before, now it’s a fancy condominium.” Caridad Vasquez is talking about the changes that have come upon her neighborhood in the years since Metro – Los Angeles’ transportation system – expanded its subway and light-rail services, and helped turn this working-class, traditionally Latino neighborhood into a desirable new destination for young professionals. She is a long-time street vendor and local resident of the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles. Today, sitting in an office of the East LA Community Corporation, Vasquez is wearing short turquoise flannel pants, a “Legalize Street Vending” T-shirt and sneakers with pink laces, loosely tied and no socks.

Vasquez is a supporter of Build Better LA (BBLA), a ballot initiative (officially, Measure JJJ) crafted by a consortium of transportation advocates and neighborhood groups – including the Alliance for Community Transit-Los Angeles (ACT-LA), the land trust organization TRUST South LA, the tenants advocacy group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) and the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance — along with the LA County Federation of  Labor and another union group, the Building Trades Council. The proposal emerged from a number of policy discussions from 2015 onwards, and was placed on the November ballot to take the steam out of a competing measure – now pushed back to March, 2017 – that would impose a two-year development moratorium in many areas, protecting old housing stock but doing nothing to alleviate the growing lack of access to affordable housing.

Since 2008 America’s second-largest city has embarked on a $40 billion, long-overdue drive to provide itself with a comprehensive public transit system. That system is made up of Metro’s subway, light rail and bus lines, and at long last it is becoming possible and easy to use mass transit to journey from the Pacific to the far eastern suburbs, and from Pasadena in the north to Long Beach far in the south. Yet one of the side effects of this transformation has been displacement of older, poor communities – ironically, the very demographic that most uses public transport — along these rapidly gentrifying corridors.

To attack the problem, BBLA presents two goals. The first is to provide a series of carrot-and-stick incentives to developers along transit corridors to include a large number of affordable housing units in their new developments. This would essentially refuse to allow the general plan amendments and zoning changes that are needed for almost any new large development, along transit routes, unless developers either build a percentage of units to be affordable, or pay into the city’s affordable housing trust fund so as to allow units to be built elsewhere.

It is a recognition of the reality that, despite LA moving toward a higher minimum wage, for many workers the cost of housing remains entirely prohibitive. According to attorney Doug Smith, of Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm that works with affordable housing advocates citywide, a higher percentage of L.A. residents are “rent burdened” – meaning that they are paying over 30 percent of their income on rent or on a mortgage — than any other large city residents in the United States.

“The fight in 2015 was to raise and enforce the wage in the city of L.A.,” says Rusty Hicks, executive secretary-treasurer of the County Federation of Labor. “But it became clear you also had to address issues connected to housing and housing affordability.”

BBLA’s second part, which is being pushed by Hicks and other allies in L.A.’s powerful unions, is a series of labor standards to ensure that workers on these projects are paid decently, come out of union apprenticeship programs, that at least 30 percent are local hires and that 10 percent have to be from disadvantaged communities – that are made up of nine criteria, including foster care youth, single mothers, veterans, the homeless and ex-prisoners.

“We’re making clear what the rules of the road are with regards to development,” Hicks says.

Supporters of BBLA calculate that had these rules been in place over the last few years during the city’s building boom, more than 5,500 affordable units would have been built along transit corridors between 2013 and 2015, and more than 11,000 good-paying construction jobs would have been generated. While these numbers are guesstimates, they are based on an analysis of the development projects that did go through during this time and an understanding of how different those projects would have been had they incorporated BBLA levels of affordable housing into their designs.

Despite some opposition from the Chamber of Commerce, from some tenants’ groups and from the Coalition to Preserve LA , the group behind the competing initiative, with less than a month to go before the election BBLA continues to poll strongly – internal numbers from the campaign suggest support in the 70 percent region, and most proponents are assuming that come next year it will be a core part of L.A.’s affordable housing strategy. In fact, so sure are developers that it will pass that at least some have apparently sought to push through city planning commission requests to approve development projects before November, as a way to get around the anticipated new affordable housing requirements.

City planning officials didn’t respond to repeated requests to comment on this, nor did they address advocates’ concerns that the commission will be holding more frequent, and longer, hearings between now and November in order to process more projects; but Kevin Keller, deputy director of city planning, acknowledges that it’s at least possible that the developers of some projects already close to the approval process finishing line may be trying to sneak in under the wire. “Regulatory changes often do create a little blip, a spike in filing,” he says.

Jill Stewart, campaign director of the Coalition to Preserve LA, argues that the developers actually don’t have much to lose should BBLA pass. “It sets up a series of backroom meetings between individual council members and the developer,” she argues, in explaining her group’s opposition. “All of whom give the council members campaign cash, and wine and dine them.”  It is, she believes, a bad deal for the city, one that would create what she calls “backroom deals on steroids” as a central part of the city’s development strategy. She also argues that the way the measure is worded it would, in fact, give developers plenty of leeway to argue that including affordable housing would unfairly limit their profits, and thus to wiggle out of their promises to provide such units on site. “It’s going to be a disaster. Over-building without affordable housing.”

Amongst housing activists in the city, however, Stewart’s stance is in the minority. Many groups argue strongly that the initiative is a far better way of bulking up the affordable housing stock than other plans that have been put forward in recent years.

Assuming Measure JJJ passes, and assuming that, despite the concerns of Stewart and others, its changes will indeed protect and expand affordable housing, it  won’t come too soon for Caridad Vasquez.

“For me, Boyle Heights is a very humble community,” Vasquez says.  She feels, fairly or not, that “Metro didn’t benefit this community.” She talks of soaring rents, of older buildings demolished and replaced by luxury apartments, of families who have had to move out, and of mom and pop businesses replaced by chain stores. “Right before the Metro came, there were a lot of rumors it would bring change, and a lot of us would be displaced. And the rumors came true.”

What has happened in Boyle Heights is occurring in Koreatown, in South Los Angeles, in Chinatown (along the route of a soon-to-be-expanded Gold Line Metro Rail) and in old communities nestled around the huge University of Southern California campus.

Transit advocates such as Laura Raymond, of the Alliance for Community Transit, estimate that 60 percent of new housing development in L.A. is now occurring near new Metro stations; and the great majority of this housing is unaffordable to low-income Angelenos.

In addition to promoting BBLA, city officials, affordable housing experts, labor unions, transportation advocates and neighborhood groups have been pushing rule changes around development to encourage an expansion of the city’s woefully inadequate affordable housing stock. Mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced a goal for the building of 100,000 more housing units in the city by 2021, of which at least 15,000 will be specifically earmarked as affordable to low-income renters. Los Angeles, explains the city planning department’s Keller, is using an array of zoning tools to incentivize mixed-income developments, “to really produce housing along our commercial corridors.” It’s a good start, but not nearly enough to meet the cascading need as both real estate values and rental prices continue to soar in the City of Dreams.

This is, after all, a crisis decades in the making. Since the Reagan years, the federal government has failed to build up a stock of new public housing. California’s redevelopment agencies, which were once major facilitators of public housing, no longer exist. And while in LA many existing rental units are rent-controlled, recent law changes and court rulings mean that new developments are not subject to such controls. Moreover, the statewide Costa-Hawkins law, passed in 1995, has prevented cities from limiting rents on newly vacated apartments, which has diluted the rent-controlled housing stock. And a legal ruling in a lawsuit filed against the city by one of the region’s leading developers, Geoffrey Palmer, also prohibits LA from mandating affordable housing set-asides in new developments.

As a result, the city’s affordable housing stock is crumbling in quality and, as older buildings are replaced by newer developments, also declining in quantity. All of this feeds into an affordable housing crisis of huge proportions, one that helps explain the city’s homelessness epidemic, the overcrowding seen in apartment buildings in poorer neighborhoods and the increased displacement of working-class residents to the far reaches of the megalopolis.

Alan Greenlee, executive director of the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing, quotes data produced by his members estimating the city has a shortfall of more than half a million affordable housing units. “Dang man,” he says in the organization’s fourth-floor offices in a Koreatown tower block, while explaining why he threw his organization’s support behind BBLA, despite some members’ concerns about the high costs of the initiative’s labor provisions. “That’s an emergency,” Greenlee says. “We’re at a break-the-glass-pull-the-fire-alarm kind of moment.”

Nati R’s (her last name has been withheld at her request) apartment, in South Los Angeles’ Trinity Park neighborhood, is a case study of the risks in play there for long-established residents.

For years, her building has been allowed to deteriorate, with disintegrating, damp walls, floors that periodically collapse in places, an elevator that frequently doesn’t work. For years, too, the streets surrounding the apartment block were home to gangs, to shootings, to what residents euphemistically term “activity.”

The trade-off for these abysmal conditions has been cheap rent for low-income residents who don’t have other options in the city. Nati shares the apartment, whose walls are covered with Mexican artwork, with her husband, her daughter and, at times, her son and his growing family.

Over the last few years, however, Nati and her neighbors have helped reclaim their streets, prettifying the local parks while working to tamp down the violence that for too long plagued their community.

Now, however, she fears that all of that hard work will, ultimately, benefit not her but newer, more affluent residents. Recently her building was, according to SAJE staffers, sold for $2.4 million, and apartments that used to rent for $850 are now going for $1,200. “The biggest fear,” she says in Spanish at her kitchen table, “is to be displaced, to be pushed out, to be left on the edges of the city where we don’t have our community. We make minimum wage. We can’t pay $1,000 rent.”

South of Downtown, at the Tuesday afternoon tenants’ clinic, run out of the SAJE offices that are adorned with banners from an array of tenants’ fights over the years, a middle-aged woman named Sonya tells the volunteer attorney about the eviction notice she received in early summer.

Sonya, who requested that only her first name be used, lives just two blocks west of the USC campus and the city’s Natural History Museum, in a one-bedroom, $850-per-month, rent-controlled apartment complex where long-time residents now find themselves competing with university faculty — who come onto the market with tens of thousands of dollars in housing subsidies given them by the university. Ostensibly, the reason the company that owns Sonya’s building wants her out is so that it can renovate the unit – even though, under the city’s Housing and Community Investment Department rules, that is not a legitimate reason to evict a tenant from a rent-controlled building. The SAJE people suspect that, in reality, the owners want her gone so that they can bring in a tenant who would pay a far higher rent.

The SAJE team and the attorney advise her not to vacate, that the eviction isn’t legal. Sonya, wearing glasses, her hair dyed brown, seems to breathe easier. She knows that at her stage in life, beginning anew isn’t something to take lightly. But then the SAJE team gently brings her down to earth. Be prepared, they warn her — the landlord will almost certainly try again, looking for another excuse to kick her out, looking for some other way to take advantage of the red-hot real estate markets created by the city’s investments in its transit corridors.

“The value of the investment in public transit is diminished if you’re driving transit users away,” argues Sandra McNeill of TRUST South LA, speaking in the group’s cluttered offices in a converted storefront church a couple miles from Downtown. “There’s a tremendous rationale to having a comprehensive policy in place.” With BBLA, she says, there’s finally a chance of stabilizing neighborhoods too long roiled by unconstrained real estate speculation. “We’re just doing what I think the city should have done a long time ago.”

(Sasha Abramsky writes for Capital and Main  … where this column was first posted.) All photos by Pandora Young

-cw

ELECTION 2016--We all like a soap opera, don't we?  Well, this campaign season has been thrilled with antics, debauchery, and backroom sleaze.  But sooner or later, there are issues, and the host of financial issues and societal/moral issues MUST be addressed.

And YOU must address them.  YOU must address taxes, the economy, law and order, etc. 
Will the money be spent well?  Do we have a pension problem, in that we're now paying as much or more for retired state workers than current workers, with equivalent problems for the cities and counties of our state?  Do you think our taxes are at reasonable levels?

There are a lot of city, county, and state governmental hands in our faces, asking for money, money, and more money!  Our money.

Yet if things are better, with unemployment DOWN and the economy UP, then why so many hands in our faces?  There's an answer, but it's only acceptable to those willing to acknowledge the painful, awful, and ugly nature of economics:

This state has exported, if not shoved out, much of our middle class tax base, and replaced it with a two-tier system of very rich and very poor individuals.  And the cost of living is such that it's hard to know the difference between "lower middle class vs. poor" and "upper middle class vs. rich".  Good-bye TAX BASE, hello DEBT.

If you think that socialism, liberalism, and class warfare is just fine, and that the examples of Greece and Venezuela just doesn't apply to our city, county, and state, then vote "Yes" to all the tax hikes.  After all, it's not YOUR problem, is it?

Except that it is.  If you work for a small business and lose your job, any "Yes" votes on new taxes will simply be a result of taking a swing at "the man" and realizing you just punched yourself HARD in the mouth.  That taste in your mouth?  It's your own blood, not that sweet taste of victory (or if it is victory, then it's as futile a victory as any).

So here we go:

• City: This is painful for me, but I recommend a "NO" vote on Measure HHH, the $1.2 billion bond measure that is sponsored by one of my personal heroes (Mike Bonin). In large part, I oppose this measure by saying publicly what I hear privately from so many of my neighbors--the money won't be spent well, because most of LA's city government is NOT as kind or virtuous as Bonin.  Also, I don't want LA to be a homeless magnet.

I oppose the Build Better LA (Measure JJJ) and recommend a "NO" vote because while it has some "feel-good" features of minimum wages for workers and requiring Angelenos be hired as workers for development projects, the top-down approach to governmental requirements repeats the mistake that well-meant socialism always teaches: it doesn't work!!! 

This spring, vote in the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative instead!!!

Measure RRR:  Vote "YES".  It's reform, but only modest reform.  It's a start, though, yet woefully insufficient...yet something is better than nothing.

Measure SSS: Vote "NO".  Yes, LA Airport Police Officers deserve a good pension, but allowing them into the same unsustainable LA City police/fire department pension plan is just throwing more weight on a train that just can't be expected to move forward forever.
And speaking of trains...

• County:  Vote YES on Measure M--It's one of the most defined tax measures we have if not THE most defined measure, and its biggest detractors claim it doesn't go far enough. Yes, I am a "pro-train" guy, but had serious doubts about this measure until I realized how popular transportation still is for our county. And I very much do want ALL of our county to advocate for each of our regions' mobility.

This next one is also painful, because I absolutely LOVE parks and recreation!  Vote "NO" on Measure A because it's a "modest parcel tax" to maintain our parks, recreation centers, rivers and beaches.  Yet if it's a cause good enough for all of us, why is the middle class the one being asked to pay for it all?  I can't think of a better way to create a future draconian "Proposition 13-style" initiative than to keep smacking around homeowners--virtually none of them are in "1%".

• LA Community College District--this is an easy one: Vote "NO" on Measure CC. What the hell is that district doing, asking for more money when they burned through billions of dollars on scandal-plagued, often-subpar work? And what the hell would be OUR problem if we fed that beast more money at this time? 

...aaaaand it's now understood that time and space probably prevents me from addressing other issues (like the state measures) for now.  But educate yourselves! Ignore the Trump/Clinton soap opera long enough to focus on the city, county, and state issues that will really affect your lives!

And vote, darn it, vote!  Even if you hate the two main presidential candidates, the "down" races and measures are more critical and affect you, your paycheck, your family, and your neighborhood more than any presidential race.  Democracy is NOT for sissies, so dig in, do your research, and vote!

(Ken Alpern is 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 Mr. Alpern.)

-cw

DEEGAN ON LA-Many attempts have been made over the decades to empower the voice of communities, often with some success through Homeowner Associations (HOA.) That community voice was organized and amplified fifteen years ago with the creation, through Charter reform, of the Neighborhood Council (NC) system. There are now 96 NC’s with 1,800 board members, representing every area of the city, and there are also countless HOA’s ranging from coalitions of a few members to huge alliances of multiple HOAs. The NC’s often work closely with the HOA’s, and some even share board members. 

Every voice in these NCs and HOAs is important as the city experiences a growth spurt unseen since the end of World War II, when LA’s population exploded and the city went through massive densification. 

Post World War II, it became evident that Los Angeles was experiencing a population boom, and that the formerly quiet neighborhoods would expand, and outlying areas, such as the San Fernando Valley, would also grow. Homeowners began to voice concerns that their well-manicured and sometimes “non-inclusionary neighborhoods” (i.e. neighborhoods in which covenants and conditions, now illegal, were attached to land deeds spelling out “who” could own property) would either be invaded by growth or bypassed for attention as newer communities sprang up to house a growing population. 

In a reaction to this, city officials made a series of attempts over the next twenty-five years to empower communities, starting in the 1950s when the County Department of Community Services created “community coordinating councils” as a way to identify specific neighborhoods, in effect giving them a “pedigree” separate from the “new growth” areas. It also created a system to coordinate county services to those community councils. Significantly, those “councils” were not activist initiators of change, but rather, passive receptors of services who were not called on for advice. 

Following the Watts Riots of 1965, the school board created a system of “neighborhood advisory councils,” to serve as a platform for public calming and give voice to distressed communities after that epochal upheaval. This was more like a super-PTA than an advisory body. 

It was not until 1969 that there was any attempt to add teeth to the empowering of neighborhood communities when Mayor Sam Yorty tried to change the City Charter to create specific neighborhoods that would have what he called “elected neighbormen” to act as local governments. Not surprisingly, because this would cut into their jurisdictions, the City Council vetoed this. 

In 1977, City Planning Director Calvin Hamilton created thirty-five “citizens advisory committees” to be a type of participatory democracy to help develop community plans that would eventually become a new master plan for the city’s growth. The City Council retired the idea, and its originator, leaving a vacuum for how to deal with growth issues. That vacuum was filled by developers who began working directly with councilmembers to get what they wanted. 

The most successful scheme to encourage participatory involvement of communities in city government has been the Neighborhood Council system, now in its fifteenth year, now with 95 NC’s that come under the direction of the City’s Department of Neighborhood Empowerment. DONE is led by General Manager Grayce Liu on its mission of “leading the EmpowerLA team as they support Neighborhood Councils in engaging the community and make government more responsive to local needs.” 

What then is the difference between a homeowner’s association (HOA) and a Neighborhood Council (NC), if both are dedicated to advocating for their respective communities and often work in tandem to meet those goals? In a word: training. 

Every fall, EmpowerLA (the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment) hosts a Congress of Neighborhood Councils that focuses on training board members to be more expert in land use, transportation, public safety and a host of other topics, including many administrative trainings to help NC’s function. On Saturday, September 24, 2016, the annual Congress of Neighborhoods was in session at City Hall, where nearly 1,000 neighborhood council board members assembled. They met first in council chambers and then attended a series of workshops that focused on specific community issues as well as topics addressing how to administratively run an NC. 

The very well attended workshops included “Meet Your City Officials,” “Planning and Land Use 101 and 102,” “How To Make A Difference at City Hall (Lobby Like a Pro),” “Community Partnerships for Better Outcomes,” “Unlocking the Traffic Grid,” “Public Safety in LA,” “The Future of the Neighborhood Council Movement,” “Code Enforcement-Solving Code Violation Problems,” “Persuasion in a Nutshell,” “LA 2040-Our City, Our General Plan, Our Future,” and “Emergency Preparedness.” 

While advisory only, NC board members are elected in City Clerk-run elections, and must meet the same kind of ethics and financial training standards as all city employees. Workshops like “Ethics,” “Leadership Skills,” “Parliamentary Procedures,” “How to Run a Successful Meeting,” “NC’s and the City Attorney's Office,” “Outreach and Events,” and “Board Basics 101,” all provided a basic training curriculum to strengthen the skills of NC board members. 

What differentiates the two groups (NC’s and HOA’s) is the holistic approach to neighborhood and community concerns taken by the NCs -- they look at the bigger community picture with multiple issues that go beyond the traditional concerns of preserving property values. (That’s how HOAs started and it’s still a valuable function of these organizations that often do additional helpful work for their members.) The workshops at the Congress provide valuable training and tools to people who are newly empowered (through election by their community to board seats) but arrive in office often unprepared to deal with the complicated details of land use, public safety, transportation, and education issues. Votes can be squandered by board members who do not take the time to be trained -- one of the truly great advantages of attending the Congress. 

The Congress this year was a success. According to Cindy Cleghorn, Chair of the Neighborhood Council Congress 2016, “…803 registrations and 150 walk-ins signed in. Attendance exceeded 850 throughout the day. Most all workshops were at capacity. This is the sixth consecutive Congress for NCs. There have been others but not consistent. We are anxious for feedback and making the NC Congress better each year.” 

Empower LA General Manager Grayce Liu added, "I love the Congress of Neighborhoods because it brings together all of our amazing Neighborhood Council volunteers across the City to share their successes and to learn how to overcome the obstacles they are facing in their work. It is this type of collaboration that has made LA's Neighborhood Council system so successful and is a big part of the reason why we'll still be here to celebrate the 15th year anniversary for the first Neighborhood Councils in December." 

Looking at the arc of the past six decades since WWII, and the various attempts to bring communities to the table, it’s apparent that having a seat is not the same as having a voice. Having a voice is not the same as having a trained voice. This is the critical advancement of the NC system: it brings professionalism to bear. 

What can you do? Start attending your Neighborhood Council meetings and make public comment. Join a board committee as a stakeholder. Run for a board seat. And become one of the people in the community with the loudest, trained voice.

(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.

HOW IT’S DONE AT CITY HALL--Is the so-called Neighborhood Integrity Initiative really something to be feared?

I think it could be a great advancement for the city of Los Angeles. But business people seem to view the possibility that it will pass in the March 7 election with much the same kind of dread that 14th century Europeans looked upon the arrival of the bubonic plague in the nearby village.

At least, at a Sept. 22 politically oriented luncheon held by the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce, denunciations of the initiative got hearty applause, such as when Los Angeles City Councilmember Nury Martinez said, “This initiative is dangerous.”

What’s more, what’s been called the broadest coalition in LA history to fight an initiative has formed to oppose the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. It is made up of chambers of commerce, developers and other business interests, but also labor groups, affordable housing proponents, a few city councilmembers and others. Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad is among the contributors.

Yes, lots of folks – not just business people – hate the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative.

Why the wrath? It’s mainly because the initiative calls for a two-year moratorium on most major construction in the city of Los Angeles. Well, either two years or until the city updates its general zoning plan, whichever comes first. Opponents say it is nigh onto impossible to accomplish such a mammoth task in less than two years. So, realistically, construction will seize up for that span.

Opponents also imply that the entire initiative is cynical because it was started and bankrolled out of self-interest by Michael Weinstein, the head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and an unrepentant gadfly. (He’s the guy behind the successful initiative requiring condoms on porn movie sets.) Weinstein is irked because the 28-story Palladium Residences towers are going up next to his Hollywood office, blocking the view from his 21st floor window, and that makes his new initiative a selfish and petulant attack against the city, some believe.

Well, maybe so. But Weinstein experienced the same fury and frustration that thousands of powerless Angelenos feel when they wake up one morning to see a tower under construction next door on land that wasn’t supposed to allow such structures. If they investigate, they likely discover that – surprise! – a deal was cut in City Hall.

Indeed, that’s how development is done in Los Angeles. Deals are cut, one by one, in City Hall. Since the city’s zoning map is woefully outdated (intentionally so, the initiative’s backers claim), that means developers must get a variance, an exception to the zoning code, whenever they want to build much of anything substantive. To get that variance – guess what? – they must schmooze the appropriate city councilmember to get his or her sign-off. Weinstein’s group claims city councilmembers and the mayor have gotten $6 million from developers since 2000, and that’s just in campaign contributions. Has anything other than campaign contributions been forked over? Well, I’ll leave that up to you to guess.

By the way, if a business did what the city is doing, that business could be charged with running an extortion racket. And rightfully so.

I agree with the proponents in this regard: The city must be forced, bludgeoned if necessary, to meaningfully update its zoning codes. It needs to come up with a realistic and transparent set of rules to guide what kind of city we want built. That way, citizens and businesses would be forewarned about the type and scale of development that may go up around them. And once the codes are set and understood – and provided they are realistic – developers could simply get routine permits and wave to the elected folks as they walk by their offices. They would no longer have to stop and pay, ahem, homage.

Sorry to be cynical, but this points out why several city councilmembers hate the initiative. If it passes, it would derail their gravy train.

Having said all that, I agree with the initiative’s opponents in this regard: That two-year moratorium is a killer. It is simply unrealistic to presume a meaningful general plan and all that goes with it (think public hearings in every neighborhood) can be done quickly. As a result, we would be stuck with a two-year hiatus for most construction throughout Los Angeles, and that makes the initiative lethally flawed.

Doesn’t this feel like prime time for a compromise? A statesman is needed to come forward. (Former Mayor Richard Riordan, who supports the initiative, pops to mind, but surely there are other candidates.) Someone needs to work with the Weinstein group to help them achieve their goals but not with that two-year prohibition on construction. Perhaps there can be a waiting period of two or three years before the hammer of that punitive construction moratorium comes down, which would provide time and a deadline for the city to come up with a new general plan. Call it a moratorium for the moratorium if you wish, but a compromise of some type is needed.

If that type of solution were figured out, then we’d have the chance to achieve something truly meaningful: a transparent general plan that creates rational building patterns and doesn’t virtually require a shakedown of developers. And it could be done without a two-year construction moratorium.

That would be something not to be feared by businesses. Indeed, it would be embraced by the grateful arms of a relieved city.

(Charles Crumpley is editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal. This perspective was posted most recently at Fox and Hounds.) 

-cw