LOS ANGELES

AFFORDABLE HOUSING--The folks in Sacramento are in a frenzy right now trying to pass legislation to ease the housing crunch.  They realize that housing costs are becoming an extreme burden for Californians, and there's an avalanche of bills cascading through the state legislature that purport to address the crisis.  While some of these bills are thoughtful, reasonable attempts to create solutions, others are poorly conceived and could end up doing more harm than good.

GETTING THERE FROM HERE-I doubt I'm the only transportation advocate who's wondered where our priorities have gone astray. Of course, most transportation advocates (and transportation engineers) focus on policy, providing more options, and numbers-based/outcomes-based results. Unfortunately, transportation policy has been eclipsed by planners and utopians who suffer from too much wishful thinking. 

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--The current political climate has brought a clear divide among states on social and environmental issues. While Governor Brown and the state legislature work to pass bills to bypass President Trump’s agenda, Attorney General Xavier Becerra is also lending his chops to signal dissatisfaction with Kentucky and three other states that have passed legislation that would restrict LGBT rights. 

JUSTICE INTERRUPTED!--Last Tuesday, which the United Nations observes as World Refugee Day, a charter bus full of clergy, religious activists and lawyers was barred from visiting inmates at the Adelanto Detention Facility, located in the high desert 85 miles northeast of Los Angeles. The intention had been to speak to asylum seekers, green card holders held for minor legal infractions and undocumented immigrants scooped up in recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. The nonprofit group CIVIC, which coordinates volunteer visits to 43 of the 211 federal detention centers across the nation, unsuccessfully negotiated for over an hour with prison authorities and ICE for us to get in. (Photo above: Immigrant rights activists en route to Adelanto.)

ANIMAL WATCH-After years of ignoring a burgeoning problem of stray dogs and cats in the streets, aggressive dog attacks and fear of disease have caused China's major cities to replicate the government's reaction to a perceived need for human population control by issuing a one-child rule in 1979. However, since pets can be hidden or just released, enforcement will be challenging -- especially restrictions such as Qingdao's ban on 40 breeds considered "dangerous." 

GELFAND’S WORLD--Saturday was full of irony. The Los Angeles Times published an editorial that raised red flags about the way the city's elected officials are trying to sneak through a large pay raise for employees of the LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP). The Times had previously published a story by David Zahniser and Dakota Smith revealing the sordid details. 

NEW GEOGRAPHY--Amazon’s stunning acquisition last week of Whole Foods signaled an inflection point in the development of retail, notably the $800 billion supermarket sector. The massive shift of retail to the web is beginning to claw into the last remaining bastions of physical space. In the last year alone, 50,000 positions were lost in the retail sector, and as many as 6 million jobs could be vulnerable nationwide in the long term. Store closings are running at a rate higher than during the Great Recession.

CALBUZZ SPECIAL REPORT--Imagine losing days, weeks, or months of your life rotting in a jail cell even though, in the United States, you’re supposed to be presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

DEEGAN ON LA-The parallels are uncannily similar: two different parts of LA, each beginning with an important, historical movie footprint and evolving into a land use bonanza. Century City, once the very busy 20th Century Fox backlot (and before that a ranch belonging to western silent movie icon Tom Mix), became a real estate behemoth studded with skyscrapers, traffic congestion, and high prices. Central Hollywood, once a folksy, low slung neighborhood, is about to be transformed into its own real estate behemoth with the massive proposed Crossroads of the World project. It, too, will be studded with skyscrapers, traffic congestion, and high prices. 

@THE GUSS REPORT-If you live in the Valley, Mayor Eric Garcetti, City Attorney Mike Feuer and the LA City Council have taken this approach to fighting property crime: Do It Yourself. 

THE CITY--On June 19, the Neighborhood Council Alliance of River Communities (ARC) welcomed Nicholas Maricich, City Director of Planning Policy and Development, and Michelle Garakian, from the Mayor’s Office of Legislative and External Affairs, to discuss details of the proposed Affordable Housing Linkage Fee Ordinance. 

WHAT WAS HE THINKING?--Advocates of the single-payer healthcare proposal which has been steadily advancing through the California legislature were voicing outrage and disappointment on Saturday after Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Democrat, announced he was pulling the bill from further consideration this year.

CORRUPTION WATCH-The Hollywood Community Plan has no Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the June 2017 Update. This means that all these super-mega projects being proposed in Hollywood are based on data from the 1960s and the mid-1980s. 

EDUCATION POLITICS--Four days before the end of the school year, Venice High School students, organized by the Black Student Union and the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, walked out of class to protest their principal allegedly firing an African American college counselor. 

JUSTICE--The biggest lie about Proposition (“Prop”) 66, California’s poorly drafted new death penalty law – only missing another “6” in numbering to be properly identified as the devil’s spawn – is speed. 

NEW GEOGRAPHY--“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” —Justice Louis Brandeis

LEANING RIGHT--From all the attention focused on "special elections" in Georgia, South Carolina, Montana, and elsewhere, one would think that we've got nothing better to do than focus on politics in other states, particularly "Red States".  One would also think that our finances and policies are going swimmingly well in California, a "Blue State" which is bleeding its middle class out of existence. 

CREATIVE MINDS MEET GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS--Following news that legislation aiming to power California solely with renewable energy by 2045 passed the state Senate, bestselling author Naomi Klein joined Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz and community leaders on Wednesday in calling for a "World War II-scale mobilization" to combat climate change and lead the way in developing environmentally safe technology. (Photo above: LA Councilman Paul Koretz.)

DRIP, DRIP, DRIP--LA City Planning this week released a backward-looking, slow-moving and poorly reasoned plan — more than a year in the making — that fails to reduce greed-driven evictions of residents, or to preserve thousands of low-rent units being eyed by land-flippers and speculators.

MCDONALD REPORT--After years of alarming studies and in-depth news coverage, the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti have yet to address the devastating health impacts to residents who live in freeway-adjacent housing, which LA politicians continue to approve. On Tuesday, at the Planning and Land Use Management Committee meeting, the Coalition to Preserve LA and other community groups urged council members to finally take substantive action. 

MUSING WITH MIRISCH-It is sometimes both sad and shocking how City Halls throughout the state, along with some of our elected officials, can be in such denial of reality, data and math.