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FIRST PERSON - Dictators come in all shapes, sizes, genders, and anything else you can think of. They are people who want absolute control, think they know better than the rest of us, can bend us to their will or crush us if we don’t bend.
Recently Mayor Karen Bass stepped up to try out the position of dictator. I’m not sure she meant to take on the title but if the shoe fits as they say. You be the judge. In case you missed it and most of us did there is a new ordinance that allows her to declare a state of emergency for homeless or housing issues. It’s a fairly quick read, 5 pages, and frankly had I not been distracted by the housing element fiasco and several other projects I would have caught it. It gives her broad powers to commandeer property deemed necessary to meet interim and temporary housing needs and binds the City for the fair value of the property. It requires the emergency service of any City officer or employee and requisitions necessary personnel or material of any City department or agency. It suspends competitive bidding, what can go wrong there. Order any action relative to the procurement of construction contracts, service provider contracts, supplies, and equipment for homelessness facilities to safeguard life, health or property caused by the emergency. That’s a whole lot of power for just one person.
So, what triggers this action? The mayor is empowered to declare the existence of a local housing and/or homelessness emergency when the mayor finds that: The City’s housing supply is projected to be at least 40 percent below its annual housing production goals as established in the Housing Element approved by the State Department of Housing and Community Development. Given the outrageous RHNA numbers provided to us by the state we will always be below that mark. Also, if homelessness in the City has reached a crisis as indicated by either: (1) The unhoused population in the City is greater than two times the total number of interim beds as established in the annual Homeless Inventory Count or (2) There is a citywide increase by more than 20 percent in a single year as reported in the annual Point-in-Time Count. It will be easy to hit one if not all of those points so the mayor will have lots to do and the authority to do it.
So, to be clear we do have a housing crisis, an affordable housing crisis, but THAT IS NOT THE PEOPLE’S FAULT. We do have a homeless problem, but again THAT IS NOT THE PEOPLE’S FAULT. They are the fault of the politicians in Sacramento, our Mayor, our City Council, the DA, the Federal Government, and a federal judge who thinks he is Oliver Wendall Homes. It is also the fault of worker’s wages not keeping up with inflation and the loss of middle-class jobs that has been going on since the mid to late 90’s. That is what priced most people out of the housing market.
Every person I know turned themselves inside out trying to help the homeless. Meeting after meeting at Neighborhood Councils, Chambers, Residential groups, Block clubs, people came together to see what they could do to help. We tried but the problem only got worse. It is getting worse because those in power and those that benefit from that power want it that way.
I had been waiting for the mayor to step up and do something, to fight for the people. This was not the answer. Maybe she could have urged the city to sue the State over the fraudulent RHNA figures requiring the city to build half a million new units. Maybe she could have raised a question many of us have been asking for some time about the homeless problem. That question is when is enough, enough? Do we have to take in every person from across the country and more recently across the world and give them shelter? To me that is a question that needs to be asked because unless someone says stop, we will get generations of people flooding into Los Angeles and California, forever.
That’s not what the mayor did, and we have to ask her why? I don’t know if we will get a satisfactory answer, but we need to try. If that doesn’t work then we need to organize, block by block, to un-elect these people who do not have our interest at heart. There must be a broad coalition of workers and bosses, homeowners, and renters because we need each other. I have always believed that for a neighborhood to thrive there must be commerce to support it and for commerce to thrive there must be a neighborhood to nurture it. We need each other. We need to embrace that fact and each other!
(James O’Sullivan is the retired ex-president (25 years) and current ex-officio of the Miracle Mile Residential Association. He is Vice President of Fix The City Inc., currently in court with the City over their adoption of the Hollywood Community Plan and we are pushing the City to be more transparent with RSO units.)
