PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

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...