PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

DICK PLATKIN     30 NOVEMBER 2017 LOS ANGELES PREVIOUS ARTICLE Affordable Housing Meets Free-Market Fantasy NEXT ARTICLE What’s Wrong with This Picture? UC’s Napolitano Gets Scolded, but Keeps Her Job! TOOLS  PRINT   EMAIL PLATKIN ON PLANNING-On Saturday, December 2,  City Watch  readers are invited to attend the  Resist Gentrification Action Summit . The conference, sponsored by  Housing is a Human Right.org ,  takes place at Audubon Junior High School, 4120-11 th  Avenue, Los Angeles, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.  Facebook   Twitter   Google+   Share According to Damien Goodman, the conference organizer, the gentrifiers have a three-word mantra for every problem facing Los Angeles, “Build more housing!” For those who listen carefully, their hymn has a second verse. It calls for rolling back zoning and environmental regulations on high-end real estate projects. This  not affordable housing  is the actual focus of their build-more-housing crusade.  Little do thes

DICK PLATKIN     14 DECEMBER 2017 LOS ANGELES PREVIOUS ARTICLE Loser Trump: Uniquely Awful and at the Tipping Point NEXT ARTICLE First-Person Report: Cancer-Causing Chemicals Endanger SoCal Kids TOOLS  PRINT   EMAIL PLATKIN ON PLANNING-In the fanciful world of high school and college “civics” and political science classes, government is portrayed as a neutral force blindly balancing many competing interest groups. While a few gullible students might fall for this claim, a quick look at the City of Los Angeles puts this notion to rest.  Facebook   Twitter   Google+   Share When it comes to land use decisions, City Hall places a very heavy thumb on the scale in numerous ways to help real estate developers, while simultaneously placing a host of barriers in the way of community and neighborhood groups. Let us, therefore, take a closer look to see how this game is fixed from the start.  How City departments place many barriers in the way of community grou

Talk is cheap when our local pols offer press statements about climate change instead of taking clear actions. http://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles-for-rss/14411-dropping-the-ball-on-climate-change-it-is-a-big-club DICK PLATKIN, CityWatch LA,     22 NOVEMBER 2017 LOS ANGELES PLATKIN ON PLANNING-- For those who care about the planet’s future, it has not been a good week.  There are no shortages of public officials who have dropped the ball, despite their power and bully pulpit to do good.  (Graphic above:   Maps of planet earth documenting observed global warming.)   The most egregious example took place at the recent United Nations Climate Conference in Bonn, Germany, where holdouts Syria and Nicaragua finally signed the Paris Climate Accords.  This leaves the United States as the sole country that is not a signatory.  At Bonn the U.S. delegation also made the peculiar case for the continued burning of fossil fuels, including coal, as a mitigation

By Dick Platkin* If your email box is like mine, it is filled with invitations to Saturday’s Climate Change march and rally in Wilmington’s Banning Park.   This rally begins at 11 AM, and it will be followed by a march to the nearby Tesoro Refinery, 1331 Eubank Avenue , in Los Angeles. If you are already going to this rally, the three articles I discuss below will give you a deeper understanding of why this march is so important.   Plus, I end with specific suggestions about what you can pursue locally to adapt to and, more importantly, to mitigate climate change. If you haven’t thought about going to the rally, or on the fence, then please check out the articles I link to below.   I consider their authors – Bill McKibben, John Bellamy Foster, and Michael Klare -- to be the best U.S. writers on climate-related issues.    What I appreciate is their accessible writing style and thorough scientific knowledge about climate change.   But, more importantly, all three writer