By Dick Plakin : citywatchla – excerpt
PLATKIN ON PLANNING-You don’t need to be a lobbyist for the real estate industry to realize that the entire country, especially Los Angeles, is in the midst of a housing crisis.
We can see it for what it is, without using this crisis as a pretext for schemes and scams carved out for real estate investors, such as free up-zones and loopholes to dodge public hearings, L.A’s 1986 Proposition U, and the California Environmental Quality Act. A basic plan-monitoring program would quickly dispel the most preposterous of these ruses, that rolling back zoning laws wondrously solves the housing crisis, drives up transit ridership, and reduces Green House Gas emissions.
The housing crisis presents itself to us in at least four different ways:…
Roots of the Housing Crisis: The housing crisis did not mysteriously appear one day. It is the result of at least 12 reversible public policy decisions.
- Elimination of HUD (Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development) public housing programs…
- Termination of HUD-subsidized affordable housing programs,..
- Underfunding of Section 8 housing…
- Dissolving Community Redevelopment Agencies…
- Freezing the Federal minimum wage at $7.75 per hour…
- Substituting token affordable housing density bonuses…
- Restricting Los Angeles’ rent stabilization law…
- Spreading data-free narratives…
- Ignoring the end of raw land in Los Angeles as a leading factor responsible for LA’s reduced middle class housing production…
- Failing to compile easily accessible housing databases…
- Slow-walking the formal planning and monitoring processes...
- Claiming the market can meet the need for affordable housing…
Like climate change, the housing crisis is manmade, and we know who the perpetrators are and what they did… (more)
SF CEQA 