Senate Bill 50, to a lesser extent, touches the same emotion--a homeowner's belief in the sanctity of the home. Aimed at California's shortage of affordable housing and its related homeless crisis, SB 50 would open up single family neighborhoods to construction of high rise apartment houses and other multiple dwellings near transit lines and stations and in areas that produce a lot of jobs. Think how you would feel if a big apartment house went up next door or if your neighbors converted their home to a fourplex?
That is why the measure by San Francisco Democratic Sen. Scott Weiner is likely to end up as one the year's most controversial and hotly contested bills. There are others dealing with housing affordability and homelessness. They include Gov. Gavin Newsom's plans to spend more than $2 billion for homeless housing and a bill exempting low-income housing projects from state environmental laws. While these will no doubt concern homeowners worried about the homeless near their neighborhoods, none promise more wrenching change than Weiner's bill.
A thorough Los Angeles Times series on Orange County’s homeless explores the opposition to efforts to build affordable housing. The five-part series ran from December 30 through January 5. It was by Luke Money, Faith E. Pinho, Hillary Davis and Priscella Vega.
The team of Times Community News reporters interviewed officials and service workers helping the homeless to find out what the county, the famous heartland of California conservatism, is doing in the face of homelessness that has reached such once-sheltered places as Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. There's too much material in the series for it to be adequately summarized in a comparatively short LA Observed column. But two points that will figure in the coming SB 50 debate struck me.
A powerful factor is how people feel about the homeless in their neighborhoods and around their work places. "Do you know much money they can make by just begging on the street?" a Huntington Beach woman asked the reporters. "I'll tell you it's more money that I can make."
Another important part of the series dealt with the difficulty of getting the elected council members of these fiercely independent cities to cooperate on a solution to a problem that extends beyond municipal boundaries.
Should cities allow homeless shelters? Don't council members have an obligation to protect single-family neighborhoods? Should the state penalize cities that will not go along with legislation such as SB 50? Such penalties are being discussed in Sacramento. Should residents of a city like Newport Beach residents be asked to pay for a shelter in another city?
The reporters put it this way: "Who should determine a city's fair share? And what consequences should there be for cities that don't meet it."
As a young reporter, I covered the Rumford fair housing fight. The impending dispute over SB 50 doesn't compare with that volatile mix of race and home ownership but it will not lack for passion. This conflict will occur behind the scenes. Pro-housing builders and developers, their projects already on the drawing boards, are prepared to exert their considerable lobbying and campaign contribution clout to influence legislators. They will be pitted against those who don't want apartments anywhere near their backyards, the NIMBYs.
Add to this the fate of the homeless and those being forced onto the streets or into their cars by increasing rents. And there is the political fate of Governor Newsom and the legislators, whose careers will be affected by the fierce emotions to be generated by SB 50. It will be a fight to remember.
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I drove into the Spectrum News 1 headquarters parking lot Monday, a day after the cable news channel had won four Los Angeles Press Club awards for its coverage of local news. It was a notable accomplishment for a journalistic operation that been in the crowded L.A. media scene for just over a year.
I thought of the significance of my destination. Spectrum News 1 is located in El Segundo, which is also the new home of the Los Angeles Times. The South Bay city of just fewer than 17,000, once best known for oil refineries and aerospace, is becoming a Southland media capital.
I wanted to know what Spectrum News 1 is adding to the diminished number of local news outlets in the Southland.
Spectrum's El Segundo neighbor, the Times, has energized its local coverage under the ownership of Patrick Soon Shiong. But the web of suburban newspapers that covered the sprawling area has been weakened or disappeared and local television has retreated from the serious legal, political and education coverage that made it a force in the past.
Stacey L. Mitch, senior director of sports and news communications, who had invited me to check out the Spectrum operation, greeted me in the lobby. She introduced me to Cater Lee, vice president for news and content and a veteran of local television news. Another journalist joined us, senior news director Scott Warren, who also has long experience in L.A. news.
They told me their goal was to offer the viewers a look at Los Angeles unlike the crime and chases that are a staple of local television. "What could we do that is different," Lee said. "You don't need more of the same."
Spectrum in Los Angeles is one of 31 news and sports networks around the country. Spectrum News 1 is available to Spectrum subscribers. Spectrum also shows the Dodgers and the Lakers.
The operation has a staff of between 125 and 130, including 28 reporters, multi media journalists who shoot, report and write. They are assigned geographical areas and must live in the vicinity. Journalists must come up with their own stories, a few a week.
Spectrum is upbeat and tries to capture an L.A. that usually doesn't exist on local TV news. The characters in a Spectrum story have a neighborhood, person-on-the street quality, looking like my fellow shoppers at Ralphs.
A story on a Koreatown restaurant included reporting on Korean American culture. A piece on the new Los Angeles city council president, Nury Martinez, told about working class Latino L.A. neighborhoods through her experiences. Two stories on flu shots featured an older man patient and a smiling, positive Kaiser doctor. Weather is a constant, with many reports illustrated by sharp graphics.
Instead of filling the air with one fire report after another, Spectrum did a piece on the grueling day of busy fire station 9 in Skid Row, showing life among the homeless as well as the lives of the emergency workers in the nation's busiest fire house. But when the big fires exploded recently, the entire staff was mobilized, divided into 12-hour shifts.
Communications executive Stacey Mitch said in the past year, Spectrum "has increased viewership relative to competition."
Like Spectrum, I had struggled with the problems of portraying life in L.A. when I was a reporter, bureau chief, columnist and city editor at the Times. The place was too big, sprawling and diverse.
Now Spectrum is in the fray. Good luck. It's a tough world out there.
Looking sharp in a dark blue suit and white dress shirt, he combined introspection and political salesmanship when he spoke to a packed banquet room at political consultant Emma Schafer's Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon at the Palm downtown.
Garcetti offered the good news--the Olympics on their way, two National Football League teams (both to play in Inglewood), raising the minimum wage. He dived into the bad--homelessness, the price of housing, the worst traffic, and the worst air.
Then he talked about his staff, the team that has been absorbing much heat for the failures.
He warned them, and himself, not to be trapped into "imposter's syndrome," described in Psychology Today as a term "referring to a pattern of behavior where people doubt their accomplishments...and fear being exposed as a fraud."
"We push ourselves toward the darkness," he warned.
Rather, he said, look toward what Los Angeles will become and "here in Los Angeles we have to make sure your reach exceeds your grasp."
But the realities remain. I asked about homelessness, particularly Steve Lopez' column in the Los Angeles Times that morning in which he quoted Sarah Dusseault, chair of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, as saying that much maligned organization should be given more power. The question prompted his longest answer, not surprising since homelessness is his greatest problem.
The authority, Garcetti said, "is very imperfect." But he was skeptical over Dusseault's suggestion that the authority, which now has little power, be given the wide-ranging authority of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, run by city and county elected officials who decide where the trains and buses go.
"Homelessness (involves) everything," Garcetti said. "Transportation is one thing." Still, he said, he believes homelessness can be eradicated.
That certainly is reaching toward the heavens.
That experience came back to me recently when I visited Crosstown, a non-profit news organization run out of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, in cooperation with the Integrated Media Systems Center at the university’s Viterbi School of Engineering and mappers from SC's Spatial Sciences Institute.
It is a fascinating effort to dig into L.A., neighborhood by neighborhood, with data, computer science, mapping and journalistic curiosity.
The Crosstown staff collects statistics from the many public agencies that comprise local government in the Los Angeles basin. The stats are scattered around the county, unavailable except for those who have the time and skill to root through them. Crosstown makes available in one spot the numbers on crime, traffic, air quality, schools, mass transit and other functions of local government.
"We want to be able to connect people to their neighborhood, we want to make them feel part of their neighborhood," USC journalism professor Gabriel Kahn, publisher and editor of Crosstown, told me. As Crosstown's website explained it, "We want you to use it to hold local government accountable and to help people make choices about where to live, work or send your kids to school." The website is xtown.la.
Crosstown uses intricate information-gathering methods. Traffic data comes from 14,000 sensors embedded in 5,400 miles of Los Angeles County freeways and roads. In addition, sensors in every bus and train report their locations every 30 seconds. USC Viterbi engineers built a system to process this trove of information.
Information such as this has permitted Crosstown to reveal facts about Los Angeles traffic that could influence policy. For example, it takes an hour to travel from Santa Clarita to downtown Los Angeles, compared to 46 minutes four years ago. This is the sort of data--compared to gossip and gut feelings--that should shape debate over more transit lines, freeway and street modification, limits on driving and eventual elimination of gas-fueled vehicles, all part of the fight against air pollution and the climate change it helps cause.
Debate over climate change could also be influenced by Crosstown's almost one-year-long, hour-by-hour study of pollution in 251 neighborhoods, cities and towns in Los Angeles County.
How will these neighborhood-by-neighborhood pollution studies influence public policy?
On the local level, they could show Angelenos exactly how lousy their air and traffic is. When they or their neighborhood groups complain to city hall or their neighborhood councils, they will be armed with enough information to demolish bureaucratic excuses and frighten their elected representatives into action. From this could come grassroots movements for the fight against climate change, locally and throughout the state.
I've seen this happen before, in the pre-computer days. Activists, gathering data from documents by hand, saw beyond their own neighborhoods and joined together in powerful movements. Their work saved the Santa Monica Mountains from further development and created the coastal commission. If the Crosstown community expands and more Angelenos participate, receiving and sharing data, they could comprise the latest chapter in the story of saving the Southland.
]]>Barger was expressing the mixed feelings of many county and city officials as they contemplate public reaction to the growing number of homeless living in sidewalk tents, public parks and under freeways. She spoke Thursday at a lunch at the Palm downtown at the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum, organized by public affairs consultant Emma Schafer.
Barger, whose Fifth District reaches from the San Gabriel Valley to the Antelope Valley, is one of five county supervisors. They are in charge of social welfare policy in the nation's most populous county and are on the cutting edge of dealing with the homeless crisis. With the Board of Supervisors support, county voters in 2017 approved Measure H, which raised the sales tax a quarter of a cent to raise $355 million a year to provide mental and physical health aid to the homeless as well as some housing. At the same time, voters in Los Angeles passed Measure HHH that authorized $1.2 billion in bonds to build housing for the homeless.
But bureaucracy moves slowly, even to spend money, and the homeless increase.
Thus Barger, a moderate Republican, joined with two liberal Democrats on the board, Janice Hahn and Mark Ridley-Thomas, an African-American who represents some of the county' s poorest areas, to support an appeal of a federal court decision that would continue to permit the homeless to camp in public areas. Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Hilda L. Solis, both liberal Democrats voted against the appeal.
Barger said she felt compassion for the homeless. "I never thought I would see a person lying on the street and people walk by," she said. She added that she has done it, herself.
But if the ban on camping holds up, she said, Los Angeles County would have to provide beds for 50,000-60,000 to comply. And many would be for the mentally ill, at a high cost. At present, she said, "We have no way to stabilize these people." Camping would continue until government provided housing.
Angelenos are divided, too. It was a big surprise that voters approved the two big homeless care financing measures. But Barger is correct in predicting that if they don't see results, they will feel ripped off.
Galperin, the city's elected chief auditor and accountant, was definitely challenged last month when he tried get his arms around the problem with a scathing audit of the city-county agency leading the battle against homelessness, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
As reported by news media, Galperin said the authority failed to meet the goals of the contract it signed with the city of Los Angeles to work with the homeless, link them up with supportive services and find housing for them.
With 800 field workers talking to homeless people, the authority could make but a small dent in the nearly 60,000 homeless in the county. More than 36,000 of them in the city and a quarter live on the streets but in the fiscal year that ended in June, the authority fell substantially below the goal of placing people in housing and linking them up with services. “The goals that were set by the city are not unreasonable,” Galperin told the Los Angeles Times. “Quite frankly, they are [setting a] pretty low bar to begin with. If you can’t meet the low bar, that’s a problem.”
But Mantle, who has followed the homeless issue closely on his influential KPCC radio show, reminded Galperin of the difficult job confronting the field workers, who roam the streets and tent encampments, trying to persuade the homeless, one person at a time, to enter a treatment and housing program. "Anyone who worked with homeless Angelenos and tried to address their problems, they are so multi-faceted," he said. "Working with one individual and trying to help that person meet all the different challenges in his or her life. It is very time consuming work and that's very important to stress."
That's what Los Angeles Times reporter Thomas Curwen and photojournalist Francine Orr found in their extraordinary four- part series on the city and county's efforts to find apartments for seven homeless people. Curwen wrote, "It is important to realize that homelessness is not a monoculture. It can change anyone’s life: those with severe mental illness and those exhibiting no greater disability than sleeplessness and fatigue. Assessing need is like assessing compassion; with so many variables, it cannot always be measured."
Galperin deserves credit on focusing his office's attention on homelessness. But there's much more to the story than his numbers. As Larry Mantle told him, it's a big challenge just "to get one's arm around this thing."
]]>Chan, Times deputy managing editor for news, spoke to the OFS monthly gathering of Times retirees Saturday at Victorio's Ristorante in the San Fernando Valley. He talked at length of the paper's efforts to reach all parts of the region's diverse population, filled with younger people who don't run out to the driveway for the paper, as their parents and grandparents did.
Chan is a key member of the team that owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and editor Norm Pearlstine are assembling to rebuild the paper so it can be a journalism force in the era when most Times readers will get their news on-line.
"We are not reaching as many people as we could," Chan said, He talked about efforts to increase the number of online subscribers, efforts hampered by the reluctance of new customers to sign up with the Times. Or they quickly drop their subscriptions when they do.
"I'm discouraged," said Rawitch, who was suburban editor and then executive editor of the Valley and Ventura editions. "Much of what you are saying was true 30 years ago." Noting that Chan had spoken of the new team's drive to get more readers in the Latino, Asian American and African American communities, Rawitch recalled many meetings and campaigns to do the same. And at that time, news was limited to the Times, the Herald, the Daily News, a few other suburban papers and local television and radio.
"You are trying to make the paper indispensible when people can get the news elsewhere," he said. He said, "it almost seems insoluble."
Insoluble was a word Chan wasn't ready to accept. He conceded "journalism is going through a wrenching transformation." The task ahead "is daunting." But the Times, he said, now has "a public spirited owner with a long-term commitment" and will be up to the challenge of covering "one of the most important cities of the 21st Century."
Chan got several tough questions, such as why there are so few ads in the new food section. He answered them all in a friendly, open manner. He concluded by requesting the alums to keep track of what's happening at their old paper. Their help, and connections in the community, were needed.
Such reaching out is a big change from the pre-Soon-Shiong era, when the erratic ownership had no connection with L.A. or even much of the journalism world.
]]>I bet Feuer wishes he had gone down the hall for a city lawyer instead of employing New York attorney Paul Paradis and Beverly Hills lawyer Paul Kiesel for a lawsuit against the big consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which implemented a disastrous Department of Water and Power billing system in 2013. The rollout resulted in hundreds of thousands of DWP customers being overbilled by $67 million. Already mad about previous DWP foul-ups, customers sued.
It's an incredibly complicated lawsuit and would take me considerable space to explain.
What I have puzzled about is why Feuer went outside his office for legal help. His decision created a furor and may have interfered with his thoughts about running for mayor.
The whole idea of the city attorney hiring expensive private lawyers has always mystified me. I feel the same about the county counsel, another public agency that hires many private lawyers, known as outside counsel, to represent Los Angeles County in lawsuits and other legal matters. Much of the $145 million the county paid out for lawsuits last year went to private firms.
Why not give the work to lawyers on the public payroll?
I asked my friend Bob Stern, co-author of the state political reform act, former chief counsel for the state fair election practices commission and an expert on the confluence of public and private law.
"Some cases," he said, "require a specialized attorney." When the election commission was getting started, he said, it lacked an experienced legal staff to handle groundbreaking enforcement cases. The city and the county, he said may be confronted with complicated cases involving millions of dollars and needs real experts in the field. Or their cases may rise to the U.S. Supreme Court, the major league of legal practice, home of complex cases and impatient justices.
The first question someone in Feuer's position should ask, Stern said, is there anyone in the office who have handled such cases in the past or who has the talent to undertake it?
Those are good questions for Feuer. Did he search his office for talent in the Department of Water and Power billing case? How did he pick the outside counsel he hired?
It's not as though the DWP is new to the city attorney's office. The city attorney has been representing water and power since L.A. stole the water from the Owens Valley early in the 20th century. There must be someone in that storehouse of water and power law who knows how to handle a billing dispute.
]]>But as I heard Feuer speak to the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum on Tuesday, his positive words had a too-familiar sound. Like other reporters writing about homelessness, I had heard them before from the women and men who lead the vast number of government and non-profit agencies given the job of getting people off the streets.
I've never been able to get my arms around the myriad agencies involved in the effort. They are generally run by well intentioned and hopefully smart people, extending from Mayor Eric Garcetti's administration to little-known organizations. But there are so many of them, and they express themselves in such a complex way, that it's hard to sort out what they do.
For example, the master agency, supposedly in charge of it all, the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA) hands out more than $300 million a year in federal, state, county and city funds for shelter and services to the homeless, among other funds. It was created years ago to organize the county and city bureaucracies into one massive fight on homelessness.
Rather than leading us with a Roosevelt-like battle cry, LAHSA explains its work in high bureaucratese. From its web site: "Through LAHSA, funding, program design, outcomes assessment and technical assistance are provided to more than 100 nonprofit partner agencies" that assist the homeless. All the voters know is that they approved a huge bond issue and a tax increase to provide housing and services for the homeless and have seen no results.
I asked Feuer about the multiplicity of agencies, including his own, putting out plans while the number of homeless increase. Why doesn't someone "knock heads" and come up with a cure-all plan?
"There is more than the knocking of heads" needed in the process, he said.
As an example, he cited the increasingly intense controversy over where to build temporary and permanent housing for the homeless. He said there was a "need to streamline the process" through which sites are selected. But Feuer also talked about a dispute in Venice where efforts to "streamline" has stirred huge neighborhood opposition. He praised Garcetti and Councilman Mike Bonin for their efforts to build housing on city owned land. The project, however, has been a target for local NIMBYs, who also berate Garcetti and Bonin for the large number of homeless living on Venice streets.
You'd think Feuer would want a vacation from such heat when his two terms end in 2021. But, no. He obviously believes he can succeed whether so many others have failed. Asked by a member of the Current Affairs Forum audience about running for mayor, he said it is "something I am looking at very seriously."
The next mayor, he said, must have the "ability to lead and inspire," and be willing to take risks. All this is true. But such words are also a truism, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "a statement that is so obviously true that it is almost not worth saying."
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In the early 1980s, Judith Michaelson, a talented reporter in the Los Angeles Times city-county bureau, told me about a startling new development. People were living under freeway bridges. Michaelson pursued the story and on July 11, 1982, she and Louis Sahagun reported their findings under the headline, "New Wave of Homeless."
They wrote of "the growing band of the homeless" caused by a deepening recession and federal and state budget cuts. These were families and individuals unexpectedly hit by unemployment-- "economic refugees." They constitute "an added layer to those who traditionally make up the bulk of the homeless--alcoholics, the mentally ill, the disabled..."
Everything that was wrong 37 years ago has gotten much worse. Income disparity and impossibly high housing prices are wiping out Los Angeles' middle class and putting working people on the streets. Blue collar jobs all but vanished with the decline and closing of aerospace and other manufacturing plants. Medical care costs are out of reach for working people. In addition there is growing addiction to drugs unheard of in 1982.
I don't want to let Mayor Eric Garcetti off the hook but in confronting homelessness, he is dealing with a decades-old tragedy that is woven deeply into Los Angeles' fabric.
His homeless message June 11 was both an apology for failing to solve the seemingly intractable problem and a recitation of ideas and plans that have been repeatedly proposed without success.
"As mayor, I take full responsibility for our response to this crisis," he said. "And like everyone who has seen families in tents or spoken to a homeless veteran in need, I am both heartbroken and impatient."
Garcetti's message, in the form of a letter to Angelenos, no doubt was prompted by the stinging criticism from Times columnist Steve Lopez, who wrote, "More than ever, the job calls for someone bold, maybe even a little reckless, the kind of leader who rewards friends and punishes enemies, knocks heads, detests blue ribbon panels, leads caravans of triage workers to every encampment, and takes a blowtorch to red tape."
Garcetti reminded residents of the many millions now available for housing for the homeless and for care, including counseling, through voter approval of city and county bonds and revenue measure. But, as Elijah Chiland reported in Curbed Los Angeles last month, the money "hasn't yet produced a single completed project though several are now under construction." NIMBYS, a reduction in federal housing funds, governmental inertia and lack of treatment for the addicted and mentally ill are all part of the problem.
Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable, described the complexity of the issue in an op-ed piece for the Times: "The most frequent explanation homeless adults give for their lack of housing is the loss of a job ...Not having enough money to pay rent contributes to homelessness just as much as the lack of affordable housing does."
Flaming could have written this almost 40 years ago when Judith Michaelson told me there are people living under the freeways. The only thing that has changed is that the situation has gotten immeasurably worse.
]]>The measure by Sen. Scott Weiner was very much on the agenda last Thursday when Los Angeles City Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson spoke downtown at the Palm at a luncheon of the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum, organized by public affairs consultant Emma Schafer.
SB 50 would permit multiple dwellings in big swatches of neighborhoods near commuter train and bus lines. Los Angeles has a limited version of this and we Expo line riders already see the impact with apartment houses going up around train stations. But SB50 would cover much more of L.A. and would affect suburban cities now zoned mostly for single-family developments. It was put aside for the year by the suburban chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. But its opponents fear that, like a vampire, it will never die.
I asked Harris-Dawson about something that has bothered me about the new L.A. residential high rises. Although city laws require them to include low cost housing, some of them seem to have gotten away with exemptions and others have just a few units affordable to the working poor. I told him that I notice a building with maybe 250 units would have only 20 low cost apartments, if that. "Why not more?" I asked.
Harris-Dawson will have much to say about the outcome. He is the new chairman of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, which determines zoning in the city, and he is close to the powerful City Council President, Herb Wesson.
The city, he said, is torn between neighborhood advocates who want a return to the Los Angeles of the 1970s and those who want to trample over everything. He said he is trying to figure out "what works for all." Neighborhoods from predominantly African American Crenshaw to the Westside and the San Fernando Valley are worried about the demise of the old L.A.
He spoke of "inclusionary zoning across the city." This is when builders are required to include a specific numbers of dwellings renting below market rates in their development before they are granted city zoning. This would differ from SB50 in that it would not target specific areas but would apply to the whole city, and would raise as much controversy. It would be a way of achieving Harris-Dawson's goal of housing for low-income workers near their jobs. Why should a maid, mechanic, schoolteacher, office worker or others have to travel miles to work?
This was Harris-Dawson's first appearance as chairman before the lobbyists, lawyers and transportation bureaucrats who attend Current Affairs Forum events. These tough-minded behind-the-scenes movers and shakers will be watching his every move.
]]>The chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Anthony Portantino, a Democrat representing suburban La Canada Flintridge, put the measure in what amounts to a legislative deep freeze. It appears he will not let the bill out of his committee this year.
“We need bold, statewide solutions to our housing crisis, " Garcetti said Friday in a statement issued through deputy press secretary Ana Bahr. "SB 50 wasn't perfect, but we can’t wait another year to work out our differences. It's past time for the state to break down barriers to creating the affordable housing production that Angelenos and all Californians need and deserve.”
I asked for comment from another key Los Angeles County player in the fight over the measure, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. Rendon had expressed skepticism over the far-reaching provisions of SB 50. "Because the action was taken by a Senate committee, he's not going to have a comment," said Rendon spokesman Kevin Liao.
The appropriations committee action takes Rendon off the hook for the year. If it had passed the Senate, SB 50 would have ended up in the Assembly where the influential speaker would have a big say in deciding the bill's fate.
Portantino's dumping of the bill shows the strong opposition it has provoked in districts like his, an area of single-family homes. Rendon's south Los Angeles County district, while more working class than Portantino's affluent area, also has many owner occupied single- family homes that would be affected by SB 50.
Garcetti, on the other hand, is responsible for Los Angeles, where there are 31,516 homeless, the largest number in Los Angeles County. There are 53,195 in the entire county. More multiple dwelling housing construction is a major part of his strategy to reduce homelessness.
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Highly controversial legislation encouraging the building of tall multiple dwellings around transit lines in single-family neighborhoods, SB 50, may be in for a rough time as it makes its way through the legislature.
The measure would create new incentives for developers to build apartments and condos near train and bus stations, even in areas zoned strictly for single-family homes. The impact on Los Angeles would be huge as well as in the suburban cities that ring Los Angeles and in other parts of the state.
A key player, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, seems skeptical, which could be bad news for the bill. Rendon appoints the chairs of the committees that will hear the bills and will have a big say in determining a final Assembly vote on the measure by Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat. It has passed a Senate committee. In the end, Gov. Gavin Newsom will have to sign the bill for it to become state law.
Rendon's spokesman, Kevin Liao, emailed me the speaker's view: "Speaker Rendon has not taken a position on SB 50. He agrees that building higher-density housing near public transit is an effective way addressing the housing crisis while minimizing environmental impact. However, one-size does not fit all in housing and land use policy and we need to be mindful of that as we have discussions around what levels of density the state mandates. There's still work to do, but we're hopeful we can keep working with Sen. Wiener on this and other efforts to address the housing crisis."
Mayor Eric Garcetti seems ambivalent, to put it mildly. Weiner needs his support, along with that of other mayors. The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-0 for a resolution opposing the Wiener bill. Garcetti returned the resolution to the council without signing it. His letter to the council made it clear Wiener will have to work hard for his support:
"I share the concerns of the City Council and it is critical that any state housing legislation, including SB 50, build on our progress, not undermine it. Key elements of the bill that may address our collective concerns still require clarification and refinement, and the bill’s author continues to incorporate amendments that address outstanding issues. I am hopeful that legislation will emerge that strategically addresses the need for heightened urgency in growing our state’s housing stock, while also protecting renters from displacement, (and)incentivizing maximum affordability."
Garcetti is torn between preserving single-family neighborhoods and ending a shortage of affordable housing that contributes to the city's growing homeless population. Such pressures have resulted in support for the Weiner bill from Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a leading Weiner bill advocate, the mayors of San Francisco and Oakland and other mayors.
But Rendon's insistence that "one size does not fit all in housing and land use policy" is a warning they have a long way to go.
]]>Jeffe apparently drowned April 10 in the Galapagos Islands while on a cruise with his wife, Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, the noted journalist, analyst and longtime USC political scientist. I received details of his death in an email from the Jeffes' friends, actors Ros Ayres and Martin Jarvis of Jarvis & Ayres Productions:
"Sherry told us that it was a tragic accident. A party from the cruise was walking along the beach by the ocean. Douglas walked into the water to around knee level and was suddenly caught by a very strong current. Despite the fact that he was wearing a life jacket, before anyone could get to him he had drowned. That is all the direct information we have." They added, "She is being remarkably brave, but at present it seems she is not answering her phone or responding to emails. Which is understandable."
I've known the Jeffes since early in the 1960s. They were protégés of the late Assembly speaker Jesse M. Unruh. From him they learned the nuts and bolts politics just as the business was moving from printed campaign brochures to computers. I immediately liked Doug because he was funny and a good storyteller. He also understood reporters and what makes a story.
Doug was a practical idealist. I saw that in 2002 when he had been hired by doctors at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center to help with a campaign for a $175 million a year tax increase to save the county's shrinking network of trauma centers. Harbor, serving a working class South Bay clientele, had one of the centers. The doctors, realizing the facts weren't enough to win a tax increase, thought they'd better call Doug.
Jeffe, from his Unruh days, understood health policy but he knew more was needed to sell the tax increase. "People listen but they do not hear," he once said. "Sometimes (consultants) make things more colorful to make a point. There is a tendency to exaggerate a point for emphasis, almost to caricature it."
He didn't need to caricature a bad situation at the trauma centers. He knew, however, the doctors' story needed people, not charts. I had retired from the Times by then but wrote occasional pieces for the Opinion section. He knew I had written about the county hospitals for years. He persuaded me to visit the hospital. I talked to Dr. Gail Anderson Jr., the medical director. "The story is the profound underfunding that has gone on for years, and finally caught up with us," he said. Most important, I spent time in the emergency room, saw all the waiting rooms and the examining rooms filled. Patients were seated on the floor and on gurneys. Waits could last up to eight hours.
Doug did not accompany me, as some media consultants might do. He figured I'd get the story without a minder. I've always thought this piece and others like it played a part in the tax increase's 73 percent victory.
Doug was active in many other good causes. He was president of the board of Los Angeles Theater Works and was on the board of the Venice Family Clinic.
Nancy and I remember him as a good friend. We went out to dinner with him and Sherry, visited them at their Carpenteria beach condo, enjoyed their annual Christmas party and watched the Oscars at their house. The old Unruh people were usually at Oscar night along with new generations of political junkies. No matter the shape of their politics, they shared the opinion of consultant Stu Spencer, who faced Doug in many a campaign. When I told him the news, he emailed a fitting tribute, appreciated by all who understand their rough business: "An honorable opponent."
]]>The impact of this gap has been obvious for some time. Government's failure to provide for the disabled, mentally ill and substance abused people who make up the homeless population is a graphic example. The fortunate don't want to share their neighborhoods with housing for these people.
Bonin discussed this Friday at a Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon at the Palm downtown, arranged by public affairs consultant Emma Schafer, who also runs the Emma's Memos website.
Bonin talked about his advocacy of the plan, beloved by Mayor Eric Garcetti, to put bike lanes on some heavily used streets. This, advocates say, would reduce traffic, and encourage use of bikes and public transportation. Some neighborhoods and businesses are strongly opposed but Bonin said he's gotten a positive reception for the bike lanes he has backed in Mar Vista, a neighborhood in his Westside district.
"The rationale behind a lot of these projects is safety," he said. He said there's an economic class factor involved. Bonin said that those mostly likely to die as pedestrians or occupants of cars are children, the elderly, the disabled and the foreign born.
Look at a map of the city, he said, and you will see that the neighborhoods with the highest number of deaths are the poorest. Any measurement of poverty correlates with such deaths. For example, neighborhoods with few markets -- the so-called "food deserts" -- have a high number of deaths.
Another proposal where the debate is being influenced by income inequality is for congestion pricing, levying a fee for driving in congested areas. The Southern California Assn. of Governments has proposed a study of creating one of those zones in Bonin's district.
Residents would have to pay just 10 percent of the $4 fee and workers in the area 50 percent. Bonin, who opposes the idea, said rich Brentwood residents would get off almost free while their gardeners and housekeepers would pay much more.
Class differences such as these, seldom mentioned in city hall debates, help explain the fury that makes compromise so difficult.
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