LOS ANGELES

NEW GEOGRAPHY--Twenty-one businesses have closed in less than two years since the city of Los Angeles reconfigured a 0.8 stretch of Venice Boulevard in the west side’s Mar Vista neighborhood.

GUEST COMMENTARY--More than two weeks ago, a group of over 50 neighborhood council leaders sent a letter to the Mayor and to the City Council asking to have a citizen’s interview panel created to do pre interviews of new general manager candidates for the Department of Neighborhood Councils. 

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-Even though LA City officials were taken aback by the city’s recent 16 percent increase in homelessness, they shouldn’t be.

ONE MAN’S OPINION-If robbers invade your home and steal your jewelry, the criminals are at fault. 

FIRST PERSON-The longstanding endemic corruption at the dysfunctional and nearly bankrupt Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will not be cleaned up until the school district’s operational practices – both financial and academic -- are finally addressed, eliminated, or radically changed. 

COMMUNITY ARTS-Watts is a village, not a riot. Poet, playwright, actor and world champion in blind judo, Lynn Manning, (photo above) had a vision powerful enough to transform the way people would see his people and his city.

GELFAND’S WORLD--It's time once again for the Hollywood Fringe festival and this year, CityWatch will be ramping up its coverage with at least two reviewers following the action.

NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS-After over half a year of intense struggle, the Hillside Villa Tenants Association is close to a major victory. All that stands in the way presently is the greed of the landlords, Tom and Chloe Botz, as well as that of their sleazy lawyer, Brandon Dimond.  

ALPERN AT LARGE--Let's face it: we just loooooove writing for new measures to tax ourselves, but we suck at demanding that the taxes get spent in a measurable and cost-effective manner. I mean REALLY now ... are we that blind and childish as to presume throwing money at a problem necessarily fixes it? 

NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS--In a June 4, 2019 letter to the Los Angeles City Attorney, Benjamin Reznik, attorney for the owners of Tom Bergin’s, demanded that Council District 4 representative David Ryu be “disqualified” from the Historic Cultural Monument (HCM) proceedings for Bergin’s. Reznik accuses Ryu of being “personally embroiled in the matter.”

@THE GUSS REPORT-There was plenty of schadenfreude last week as LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s and the LA Times’ beloved Measure EE not only failed to get the needed 67% of votes to pass, it didn’t even get a 50%+ 1 vote majority. 

VIEW FROM HERE--The last time I checked the sovereign nation of Mexico was not an enemy of the United States. Mexico is the 5th largest Christian nation and one of the epicenters of Catholicism in the world.

DEEGAN ON LA-Los Angeles, eagerly looking forward to a summer of Olympic glory in 2028, has won the Gold Medal for failure when it comes to the competition of helping the homeless beat the streets and win housing. 

GUEST COMMENTARY--The streets in parts of Los Angeles now look like (or worse) than some of the streets I have seen in some of the poorest countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean that I have traveled through.  

EQUAL RIGHTS--From the very start of our nation, the most popular forum for debating and shaping our democratic rights was not stately legislative halls, but rowdy beer halls.

ANIMAL ALERT-If you have a dog or cat, I want to alert you to the danger of foxtail plants. We are having an infestation of foxtails this year.   

EDUCATION POLITICS-Carolyn Torres was one of 10 new replacement instructors when she began teaching 10th grade at Alliance Cindy and Bill Simon Technology Academy High School, a charter school in South Los Angeles — a replacement figure, she claims, which represented a 33 percent turnover in one year at Alliance.

ONE MAN’S OPINION -It seems that it takes something like the plague pressing at our doors before we we’ll ever wake up to what’s happening to us.

RANTZ & RAVEZ-The failure of any government in the final analysis must be measured by the well-being of its citizens. Nothing can be more important to a state then its public health, the state’s paramount concern should be the health of its people.” -- Franklin D.  Roosevelt in a 1932 report to the New York State Health Commission. 

ALPERN AT LARGE--Contrary to any accusations or presumptions about mean-spirited joy over the fallen aspirations of another person or group of people (also called "schadenfreude"), neither myself nor most of us who saw the results of Sunday's and Tuesday's elections get any joy over seeing those who lost suffer. 

CAL MATTERS-When Georgia and other red states enacted very tight restrictions on abortions, their political leaders obviously hoped to push the issue back into the U.S. Supreme Court and into the hands of the court’s newly strengthened conservative majority.