PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

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...

Two-thirds of Angelinos expect another 1992-uprising. This is why. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/24501-another-los-angeles-uprising-two-thirds-of-angelenos-expect-it

Despite compelling evidence for global and local climate change, the mayoral candidates in Los Angeles could care less. This is why. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/24257-why-la-s-mayoral-candidates-are-so-mum-on-the-climate-crisis

The Los Angeles City Council is unable to act on homelessness, other than making the rich richer through up-zoning and then dispatching the police to the resulting homeless encampments. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/23606-housing-crisis-worsens-while-la-s-city-council-turns-to-lapd-for-political-backup?fbclid=IwAR249453vDO1g1n6oODc9IkvbfVGtHLAkf4UwZxzKk84hXwk9ILcSwmAHbc

2021 was a good year for the gentrifiers in the Los Angeles region. For everyone else, not so good. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/23433-la-s-2021-planning-year-in-review-is-the-glass-mostly-full-or-mostly-empty

Big city planning departments, like LA’s, have abdicated their broad role. Instead they limit themselves to regulating private real estate projects, while ignoring infrastructure and the climate crisis. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/23433-la-s-2021-planning-year-in-review-is-the-glass-mostly-full-or-mostly-empty

The housing crisis – in LA and elsewhere -- results from deliberate decisions at all levels of government. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/22565-a-12-step-program-to-create-a-housing-crisis

The main problem with up-zoning to solve the housing crisis is that is doesn’t work. It makes the housing crisis worse, not better. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/22121-the-latest-false-claims-to-sanitize-speculative-real-estate-investments

Local officials have responded to the elimination of public housing programs and increased economic inequality by promoting expensive, in-fill apartments. This is how they made an imposed housing crisis even worse. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/22027-how-albert-einstein-guides-city-hall-s-approach-to-the-housing-crisis

In Los Angeles the recall of a new Councilmember with a great left head fake to camouflage her objective support for real estate speculators and greater Green House Gas emissions is poorly understood, especially by the red-baiters after her. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/21925-raman-recall-remorse

The urban growth machine has learned how to reinvent its real estate scams, but they mostly fool themselves. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/21787-discredited-planning-concepts-don-t-die-they-just-resurface-at-city-hall-to-promote-real-estate-speculation

The mainstream media, like Hebrew National hotdogs, reports to a higher authority, in this case their corporate owners, when slanting their coverage of the housing crisis and City Hall’s responses to it. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/21436-why-the-mainstream-media-tries-to-fool-the-public-with-its-misleading-reporting-on-the-housing-crisis

Some fauxgressives are duplicitous while others truly believe that the elimination of laws and regulations will solve social problems. Either way, though, the damage is done. Their solutions make social problems, like homelessness, worse. https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/21360-pathway-to-a-dystopian-los-angeles-revealed-in-my-conversation-with-a-local-fauxgressive

The Failed Logic of Planning in Los Angeles: Full Speed Into the Rocks Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA, December 30, 2020 PLANNING WATCH: The many shortcomings of City government in Los Angeles include the inability of City Hall officials to make their cover stories for top-down gentrification programs stick. Despite their congratulatory back-patting about 150,000 new housing units, most of them expensive apartments near express bus lines and subway stations -- population, employment, homelessness, transit ridership, and climate change trends are all moving in the wrong direction. There have been a few winners, however. Property owners and developers have hit pay dirt through induced gentrification. They have built these luxury apartments or flipped their recently up-zoned and therefore, more valuable parcels. Nevertheless, the jerry-rigged numbers that City Hall uses to justify its top-down housing programs do not add up. LA’s population growth is portrayed as a...

The failed logic of planning in Los Angeles. Full speed into the rocks, even when the numbers don’t add up. By Dick Platkin* Planning Watch: The many shortcomings of City government in Los Angeles include the inability of City Hall officials to make their cover stories for top-down gentrification programs stick. Despite their congratulatory back-patting about 150,000 new housing units, most of them expensive apartments near express bus lines and subway stations -- population, employment, homelessness, transit ridership, and climate change trends are all moving in the wrong direction. There have been a few winners, however. Property owners and developers have hit pay dirt through induced gentrification. They have built these luxury apartments or flipped their recently up-zoned and therefore, more valuable parcels. Nevertheless, the jerry-rigged numbers that City Hall uses to justify its top-down housing programs do not add up. LA’s population growth is portrayed as a pe...

The FAIR LA Housing Plan allows real estate speculators to profit from the housing crisis. It is sophisticated nonsense. By Dick Platkin* A reader asked me to review Abundant Housing’s Fair LA housing plan. It contains an elaborate formula, disconnected from the legally required planning process, to up-zone all of Los Angeles, with most up-zoning directed at affluent neighborhoods. If adopted, it would lift the zoning code’s restrictions on density, height, mass, and open space throughout the entire city. I have previously dubbed this approach to city planning urban Reaganomics because its goal is to increase housing supply through deregulation. But, unlike Ronald Reagan, its advocates pawn themselves off as “progressives” so their developer-friendly proposals can gain political traction in liberal Los Angeles. For example, they invoke the name of Bernie Sanders, while totally rejecting his approach to the housing crisis: restore HUD public housing programs and raise wages. ...

Please be in touch to add or delete names from this e-mail service. Links to archived previous columns below. Want to Finally Do Something about Homelessness? Let’s End Phony Solutions. By Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA, December 10, 2020 Planning Watch: When Albert Einstein famously observed, “God does not play dice with the universe,” his insight about universal laws of physics also applies to human affairs. We do not have a worsening homeless crisis because some supernatural being is hurling lightning bolts at us. Instead, the current housing crisis, including homelessness, overcrowding, out-migration, and rent-gouging, has very real lessons about its causes and solutions. (Photo above: Rendering of Cumulus luxury apartment project at Jefferson and La Cienega, near the Expo light rail line.) The most important lesson is to end supposed solutions that visibly make the housing crisis worse. In specific, I am referring to proposals from the California state legislat...

Will Joe Biden become the climate change President? Don’t get your hopes up. By Dick Platkin, CityWatchLA,  December 3, 2020 https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/20855-will-joe-biden-become-the-climate-change-president-don-t-get-your-hopes-up Planning Watch:   Because Donald Trump has a well-deserved reputation for making the climate crisis worse, many pro-Biden pundits believed that Biden’s victory over Trump means the United States government will now take the climate crisis seriously.   They point to Biden’s appointment of former Secretary of State John Kerry as his climate change envoy.   Press reports indicate that Kerry’s first assignment will be orchestrating U.S. reentry into the Paris Climate Accords. But, before anyone prematurely pops the champagne corks, these are several reasons why the ascendancy of a Biden-led Democratic Party will barely impact the climate crisis.   True, Trump’s tantrums and tweets wi...

When it comes to its urban forest, Los Angeles is not a nanny state .   By Dick Platkin*   https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/20808-when-it-comes-to-its-urban-forest-los-angeles-is-not-a-nanny-state   (Please note photos and comments in the published version.)   Even though Los Angeles has a nearly perfect climate, fall is best time to plant new trees and save LA’s existing trees.   Trees, after all, are nature’s way to combat the climate crisis by cooling heat islands and sequestering rapidly rising atmospheric carbon.   In addition, trees enhance rainwater absorption, provide shade, generate oxygen, buffer glare and noise, host urban wildlife, and are beautiful in their own right.   Historically, only five species of trees are native to Los Angeles, but due to LA’s semi-tropical climate, over 1000 tree species now grow here, and the City permits 150 tree species on its parkways (the city-owne...

HOME CWTV ARCHIVE ADVERTISE CONTACT FEATURED WRITERS 30 Mon , Dec Home NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS BE GREEN WELLNESS LA WATCHDOG Budget Advocates 420 FILE When It Comes to Its Urban Forest, Los Angeles is Not a Nanny State Dick Platkin 25 November 2020 ...