CommentsTHE VIEW FROM HERE - The sound and fury about homelessness and crime during the elections was merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Everyone had the same solution to stop the USS Los Angeles from sinking – drill larger holes in the bottom of the hull and let the water drain out. Everyone who won a seat on the city council and mayor-elect Bass made the Big Lie a significant part of their campaigns, i.e. a failure to build more affordable housing caused the homeless crisis. Their unanimous agreement on this falsehood parallels the city council’s decades of unanimous votes to destroy rent controlled housing (RSO units - Rent Stabilization Ordinance).
A Couple Things Should Be Obvious but Apparently Are Not
(1) If the city had not unanimously approved the destruction of more than 27,000 RSO units, Los Angeles would have no homeless problem. We have between 40,000 and 44,000 homeless. 27,000 apartments would house between 67,500 and 76,140 people. These figures are found by using the lowest and highest estimates of the city’s homeless population and multiplying those numbers by 2.5 and 2.82 as the range of persons per household. If Los Angeles had not constructed a single Affordable Housing apartment in the last 20 years but also had not destroyed 27,000 RSO units, we would have far more RSO units than homeless people. With a surplus of these units, the rents would have remained low as demand would have been low. Since there was no need to construct a single RSO unit, the claim that lack of construction caused homeless is a Big Lie.
(2) Los Angeles is a crimogenic city. Perhaps people who live in a cesspool cease to smell the stench, but the crimogenic nature of Los Angeles is not new.
“Now you know why the City Council votes in unison over 99% of the time. Each councilmember has sold his vote and in return he receives the votes of other councilmembers. If they had the honesty to actually exchange cash in front of us each time they sold a vote, we might catch on to this criminal enterprise. Each councilmember is a criminal who has sold his votes and has, thereby, bought the votes of his fellow councilmembers.”
June 26, 2012, CityWatch, LA City Hall: A Temple to Crimogenics
Two years later in January 2014, Judge Allan Goodman ruled that the city intentionally uses fatally flawed data and wishful thinking to the extent it subverted the law. His decision did nothing to stop the criminality and the city went on to be the nation’s leader in the Homeless Crisis where we now have criminally insane derelicts roaming the city, stabbing children and murdering college co-eds in a Hancock Park store. Nonetheless, everyone running for office proposed more of the same corruption which has taken Los Angeles from the nation’s premium destination city to the least desirable. The downward trend in population was well established when the 2012 CityWatch article was written so that last year (2021) the city actually lost over 200,000 people. Within the year of his decision, Judge Goodman was removed from the bench and the attorney who provided the US census data, Yours Truly, was disbarred. After federal Judge Alex Kozinski stated in January 2015 that the California state judiciary had developed an “epidemic of misconduct,” he too was removed from the bench. January 31, 2015 LA Times, U.S. Judges See 'Epidemic' of Prosecutorial Misconduct in State, by Maura Dolan
Los Angeles’ corruptionism is not a matter of a few councilmembers’ dipping into the till. The system itself is corrupt and involves every councilmember and the mayor. The federal prosecution against Councilmember Joe Huizar, however, has the earmarks of a grand cover-up that the city itself is a criminal enterprise. November 10, 2018, CityWatch, The FBI Seeks…But Will Not Find and January 17, 2019, CityWatch, Pay for Play, Vote Trading: Did Garcetti Want the Huizar’s Gone? and January 28, 2019, CityWatch, Is the FBI-Huizar Probe a Sham to Protect Eric Garcetti? and June 25, 2020, CityWatch, What’s Up with the FBI’s Bizarre Case Against Councilmember Jose Huizar? August 10, 2020, CityWatch, What Are the Chances That Councilmember Jose Huizar Will Be Epsteined? It seems that everything about the Huizar Case has been intentionally structured so that the criminal vote trading system will never be mentioned in court. For the Feds, the problem was never a crimogenic city, but that Huizar was disrupting a smoothly functioning crimogenic system where developers were making hundreds of billions of dollars. The criminally insane roaming throughout the city did not matter. The hideous corruption which fraudulently escalated home prices to the point that Family Millennials and employers fled the city did not matter.
The Insane Mantra of Build, Build, Build
Los Angeles has become similar to a narcodrug state which is dependent on opium, only our addiction is to Manhattanization. If a third-world country ends its drug trade, its economy collapses. Stop LA’s corruption-fueled densification and the city’s economy nose dives. Any councilmember who interferes with the corruption will earn the wrath of the billionaire developers and of the Unions. Like sharks who need to swim to live, developers and workers need to build to survive. Stop all the Manhattanization and Los Angeles’ economy crashes. On the other hand, allow the densification to continue and find the criminally insane creeping around and inside your home at night.
How To Stop Homelessness!
Interestingly, no one running for city council or mayor proposed the obvious solution: Stop destroying rent controlled housing. Homelessness is like a bathtub which is overflowing. The solution is not to bail out water, but to turn off the faucet. If the city had not allowed destruction of RSO units since Judge Goodman’s 2014 decision, the city would have 8,881 more RSO units than at present: 2019 - 1,497, 2018 - 1,878, 2017 - 1,824, 2016 - 1,395, 2015 - 1,073, 2014 - 1,214 Map of Ellis Act Evictions in Los Angeles Eight thousand eight hundred eighty-one (8,881) apartments would house between 22,200 and 25,044 persons. In other words, if the city had heeded the wisdom of Judge Goodman’s 2014 ruling that the city was using fatally flawed data which subverted the law, the city would have stopped destroying RSO units and halted the flow of homeless hordes into LA’s streets. That is the dynamic which turned Homelessness into a Crisis. There would be some homeless people, but the city could manage it with existing resources. Rather, the city intentionally and knowingly created the situation where the entire city is beset by violent and murderous criminally insane derelicts. Which city council or mayoral candidate proposed preventing the destruction of RSO units? Rather, they all sided with the corrupt developers to destroy more RSO units in order to make room for more construction, based on the Big Lie that we need more density. According to the outgoing city controller, the city is already looking at paying developers up to $1 Million of city tax dollars for each new unit rather than stopping the destruction of poor people’s homes.
Speaking of crimogenic entities, what is the substantive difference between the City of Los Angeles with its crimogenic Manhattanization and FTX Collapse, The Subprime Crash, The SubPrime Disaster, etc?
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected]. The opinions expressed by Mr. Abrams are solely his and not necessarily those of CityWatch.)
