CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH- People love lies, myths and feel-good beliefs, but we shun facts. The sooner we recognize that our lives are founded on our emotional attachment to lies and myths, the sooner we can combat their deleterious effects.
One reason humans rely on lies, myths and emotionalism is that we cannot ascertain the facts. But reality does not afford living organisms the luxury to wait around for facts before taking action. Single cell organisms reacted to their environment eons before evolution developed brains that could perceive facts. Even now, at our “advanced” stage, our ability to perceive facts is quite unreliable.
Neuro Linguistic Programing [NLP] posits that while people can take in data via vision and hearing as well as smell and touch, most people make their decisions based on how they feel about the data. Our beliefs, which are usually based on early childhood myths that we accept as true long before we have any ability to ascertain facts, become a major way we accept or reject facts in later life.
Yesterday, Tuesday, December 12, 2017, for example, voters in Alabama elected Democrat Doug Jones as their new Senator. While a tiny minority of GOP voters believed that Roy Moore was a bridge too far, the majority of Alabama Republicans rejected the reliable evidence that Roy Moore had a sexual proclivity for underage teenage girls. Doug Jones’ victory margin is reported as only 1.5%, while GOP voters wrote-in alternative candidates at the rate of 1.7%.
TV pundits are allowing their feelings to run amuck after Jones’ election. Many of the Democratic talking-heads are certain this is a huge change in Alabama politics. People feel better ignoring the fact that nothing has changed in Alabama. The State barely missed electing a sexual pervert who is also a racist, an anti-Semite (despite one of his attorneys being “a Jew!”), and a homophobe who endorsed slavery as a good time in American history. Emotions determined how people voted – a tiny percentage of white GOP voters apparently felt a queasiness in the pit of their stomachs, so they followed Alabama’s senior Senator Richard Shelby and wrote in another name.
Don’t Pat Yourself on the Back, Los Angeles
Angelenos are no better than Alabamians. We also shun facts in favor our own feel-good myths. On the morning news today, I heard a Bel Air resident respond to a reporter’s question about the LAFD’s belief that a homeless person’s cooking fire at the base of the hills touched off the Skirball fire.
Presumably, a middle-aged white male living in super-affluent Bel Air is informed about the city. Apparently not. He said that the fire showed that we need to construct more housing for the homeless. He ignored the fact that the City has destroyed over 22,000 rent-controlled units since 2001. The destruction of poor people’s homes has helped cause the dramatic increase in homelessness – not the failure to construct housing.
Lies and Myths, however, are the basis of Los Angeles’ housing and transportation policies and the class of people we presume would have the best data endorse those lies and myths without question. It feels good to mindlessly repeat buzz words whether we are poor folk in Alabama or multi-millionaires in Bel Air. It feels good to speak about building homes for the poor, but it would make people feel bad to admit that their ignorance has caused thousands of poor people to be kicked out of their homes to suffer and die on the streets or in the brush along our freeways.
If the multi-millionaires who endorse the City’s agenda of lies and myths and victimization of the poor took a few moments to think, they might find that their denial of the dark side in Los Angeles is not so different from the denial expressed by people in Alabama.
Denial is not a River in Egypt
Denial is the predominate way Angelenos deal with facts. While the Nile River flows over its banks once a year, denial in Los Angeles is a year-round event. A prime example is the denial that Los Angeles has no housing shortage. (Double negatives can be confusing.)
Recently, more data has come out showing that Los Angeles does not have a housing shortage. But that fact, however, goes completely against our belief that Los Angeles is so fantastic that hordes of people are constantly moving to LA, creating a huge demand for new housing.
People deny that LA is losing Family Millennials and that our tiny population growth is due to the birth rate and not to people moving to LA as they did during the early 1990s or from the 1960s through 1980s. IRS data has shown that Family Millennials and older middle class Angelenos are moving to places like Raleigh, North Carolina and Austin, Texas. There is a little-known ratio that compares housing permits to increased employment: when people move into an area, the ratio is high as the developers see a real need for more housing and a population that can afford to pay for it. Between 2011 and 2016, Raleigh had a ratio of 0.67 (100.00 is max), Austin’s ratio was a higher than average 0.56, while Los Angeles had a dismal 0.14%.
Los Angeles’ 0.14% rate means more people are not moving to LA. A higher employment rate with a very low housing permits rate means that people are not moving into LA. A 0.14% H/E ratio means that jobs are being filled by people who already live here in Los Angeles; they do not need new housing.
Furthermore, as far back as 2013, LA was experiencing a significant glut (12% vacancy) in the market apartments constructed in the prior decade. Destroying the rent-controlled homes of poor people gives the illusion we need to construct more housing, but the fact is that we should not have destroyed homes where tens of thousands of poor people once lived.
The lies and myths supporting Alabama Republicans’ approach to life has not changed significantly and likewise, Angelenos are not interested in facing their own lies and myths, no matter how much the homeless suffer and die. One thing is certain, though – there will be no more homeless living along the 405 Freeway as it runs past Bel Air and Elon Musk’s home.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. 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.
