CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH-Which should rule the decisions of the Los Angeles City Council – Quality of Life or Profits of Developers? Since every developer project receives unanimous approval of the LA City Council, we know that Quality of Life plays no role. In fact, when ruling that the criminal bribery system that controls the LA City Council was above the law (i.e. non-justiciable), Judge Richard Fruin accepted as true the proposition that the LA City Council decade’s long violation of Penal Code § 86 was criminal. His ruling was that criminal behavior by the City Council was nobody’s business. Thus, the situation shall not be changing unless the federal courts decide that criminality is a bad thing.
What Would Los Angeles Be like If We Were Not Ruled by Developers?
(1) Housing Prices Would Be Dramatically Lower
Because a developer knows that he can bribe his way to spot zone his property, developers ignore zoning, specific plans etc. when purchasing property to develop. As a result, Los Angeles residential property is now priced at its high Developer Value rather than its lower Living Space value.
If Quality of Life mattered, then developer bribery could not allow them to build whatever they want. The City would stop up zoning properties which inflates the sales price of all nearby residential properties. Families could afford to buy in Los Angeles and with reasonable values based on families competing only with other families, housing prices would reflect what families could pay.
(2) There Would Be No Bunker Hill or Century City
Since we have known for over 100 years that offices should follow people as they move away from the core, there would be no Bunker Hills or Century City or other masses of high rises in The Basin. Nobody said, “I’d love to live in Granada Hills and drive one hour to work each morning in DTLA rather than drive five minutes to a nice office park in Chatsworth.”
Low rise office parks are compatible with single family neighborhoods. They are not nosey, nor do they pollute. When their density is limited as well as their height, they are very good neighbors. They do not peer into back yards and are quiet in the evening and on weekends. They usually pay for extra security.
Residential office parks spread the wealth. There is no rational reason for us to aggrandize the profits of a tiny number of landowners. When office parks are spread throughout the area, right up to and into the foothills, then the wealth is spread over many thousand more families. Why do we feel that it is our obligation to make the owners of CIM Group into multi-billionaires?
(3) There Would Be No Traffic Congestion
Traffic congestion results from placing office towers in limited spaces so that the men who own that land can build 30 stories. There is a mathematical relation between the square footage of an office tower and the number of cars which can easily reach it at the same time. Thus, Bunker Hill guarantees horrible traffic congestion. If Quality of Life mattered, then we would not intentionally create traffic congestion. Instead with offices spread all through the area, no one area would attract enough cars to create traffic congestion.
(4) Buses Would Be Efficient
Buses are the best form of mass transit in a huge geographic area. When traffic congestion is gone due to there being no excessive concentration of office complexes, buses would flow at a reasonable rate. While buses do not completely solve the portal-to-portal problem, buses get much closer to people’s homes than do subways. Also, buses can go virtually anywhere a car can go. In addition, buses require no tracks on which to run. A bus can use the freeway like a car. Let’s see the subway use the Hollywood Freeway.
(5) LA Would Not Be Becoming a Third World City
If Quality of Life were a guide in LA, we would not be becoming a third world city. Los Angeles has the seventh worst GINI Coefficient in the nation. Basically, that means we are a huge city with a gazillion poor people and a handful of Austin Beutners and Donald Sterlings.
Quality of Life does not matter in LA. Every decision is based on how it will increase profits of developers. We know this to be a fact since 100% of developer projects are unanimously approved. Who cares if over 22,400 poor people’s homes are destroyed. It is all for the 1%. Does anyone think that the City will start demolishing homes on Bellagio Drive ½ mile north of Sunset in order to construct a mixed-use project? What about at 1170 Brooklawn in Holmby Hills? (Here’s poetic justice: Sen. Wiener’s SB 827 would require five story affordable housing projects in both Bel Air and Holmby Hills. That’s why SB 827 will not pass in its current form.)
Since corruption attracts mindless sycophants, the billionaires make foolish decisions – well, foolish decisions, if you are a regular Joe living in LA. For a 1%er whose goal is to loot the city for every possible cent, then these pro-developer decisions are wunderbar.
What Good Can Come from All this Corruption?
If the Family Millennials who are fleeing Los Angeles understand that corruptionism rots a society, then hopefully they can stop similar deterioration from occurring elsewhere. Even Austin Texas has it developers pushing mass transit on Austin, but its seems that the people in Austin simply ignore the train. Subways and trains, however, are not as disruptive as the TODs. Sure fixed-rail is bad, but the real harm comes with the increased population density of mixed-use projects. While Judge Fruin has sealed Los Angeles’ fate of eternal corruptionism, those who escape can warn others of the dangers of placing Profits of Developers before Quality of Life.
(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.
