By Dick Platkin*, CityWatchLA, October 10, 2023 Planning Watch: Despite a friendly press, LA’s Mayor Karen Bass, like her mayoral predecessors and public officials in other cities, offers homeless programs that cannot hold back the continued growth of the unhoused, overcrowded, and rent-gouged. For some this growth of homelessness is an opportunity to politically blame the crisis on X, Y, or Z. For still others it is a golden opportunity to profit from speculative real estate investments. But these opportunist responses make the underlying causes of the housing crisis worse. Local officials, like Mayor Karen Bass, as well as her counterparts in other cities, have been dealt an extremely bad hand. But they then play this bad hand very poorly. Mayor Bass and the Los Angeles City Council are members of a large club whose nostrums, especially upzoning, make the housing crisis worse, not better. While the underlying causes, especially the lack of low-priced housing and gro...
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