2UrbanGirls
  • Home
  • Local
    • Compton
    • Education
    • Inglewood
    • Sports
  • Entertainment
  • Crime and Public Safety
  • Opinion
  • About
    • Advertise
    • Mediakit

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

What's Hot
June 24, 2022

CA Attorney General Throws Lifeline to Indicted LA Councilman

June 24, 2022

Compton Unified to Place Another School Bond Before Voters in November

June 24, 2022

Former Charter High School Student Sues Over 2018 Off-Campus Shooting

Facebook Twitter Instagram
Trending
  • CA Attorney General Throws Lifeline to Indicted LA Councilman
  • Compton Unified to Place Another School Bond Before Voters in November
  • Former Charter High School Student Sues Over 2018 Off-Campus Shooting
  • Authorities ID Man Killed in 710 Freeway Crash
  • OC Probation Officer Convicted of Stealing On the Job
  • LA County Fire Chief Announces Retirement
  • Authorities Arrest Man in Shooting Death in Hollywood
  • Authorities ID Man Killed By Train
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest RSS
2UrbanGirls
  • Home
  • Local
    1. Compton
    2. Education
    3. Inglewood
    4. Sports
    5. View All

    Compton Unified to Place Another School Bond Before Voters in November

    June 24, 2022

    Mistrial Declared in Wrongful Death Suit Against Suge Knight

    June 22, 2022

    Compton City Council Addresses Illegal Street Takeover Issues Impacting Residents

    June 17, 2022

    Compton Sheriff’s Department Says Fatal Accident Wasn’t Caused by Street Takeover

    June 17, 2022

    Las Vegas Raiders Owner Donates to Uvalde School District to Make Their Campuses Safer

    June 16, 2022

    Inglewood Unified County Administrator Out on Medical Leave

    June 14, 2022

    Former Dean From East Los Angeles College Pleads No Contest in Theft Case

    June 10, 2022

    Initiative to Increase School Arts and Music Funding Qualifies For Ballot

    June 9, 2022

    BNLA Opinion Editorial Re: Inglewood’s Proposed Short-Term Rental Regulations

    June 23, 2022

    Inglewood Releases Partial Police Agreement with Hollywood Park

    June 23, 2022

    Inglewood Assemblymember Tackles Housing in First Legislative Bill

    June 22, 2022

    City of Inglewood: A Democracy Interrupted

    June 19, 2022

    Sandy Koufax Statue Unveiled at Dodger Stadium

    June 18, 2022

    Ole, Ole, Ole FIFA 2026 World Cup headed to Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium

    June 16, 2022

    Los Angeles Chargers to Texas? Not Over Jerry Jones Dead Body!

    June 16, 2022

    Phantom Labs Sues Antonio Brown for Unpaid Bill

    June 8, 2022

    CA Attorney General Throws Lifeline to Indicted LA Councilman

    June 24, 2022

    Former Charter High School Student Sues Over 2018 Off-Campus Shooting

    June 24, 2022

    Study Shows Long Beach as One of Worst Run Cities

    June 23, 2022

    Deputy: Man Charged in Nipsey Hussle Killing Surrendered Without Incident

    June 22, 2022
  • Entertainment
  • Crime and Public Safety
  • Opinion
  • About
    • Advertise
    • Mediakit
2UrbanGirls
You are at:Home»Flurry of Development Reform Proposals Fall Short of Reforming L.A. City Hall

Flurry of Development Reform Proposals Fall Short of Reforming L.A. City Hall

0
By 2UrbanGirls on April 14, 2016 Uncategorized

jill_stewart_photo1

By Jill Stewart

While we applaud the mayor and City Council for attempting reforms that try to mimic the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative heading for the March 2017 ballot, today’s City Hall proposal is a half-baked effort that continues to shortchange Los Angeles residents in favor of developers who shower the City Council and mayor with money.

Real reform will come when voters enact it, through the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative that will soon begin gathering signatures for the March 2017 ballot.

The mayor and City Council are clearly unnerved by our 70% support from voters. Voters agree we must end the behavior of individual city council members who take money from developers, and then act as land czars, personally seeing to it that these wealthy developers get their land “rezoned” from two or three stories tall to 6 or 10 or even 30 stories tall.

Los Angeles residents pay for this instant wealth transferred to developers: a massive loss of green spaces, livable neighborhoods, quiet streets and street parking, even as these outsized luxury complexes and skyscrapers suck up our water and max out the surface streets, aging water mains
and emergency services.

Stop-Manhattanwood-billboard-copy

L.A. residents pay dearly, with higher rates, higher taxes and harmed communities.

This is a corrupt system, whether it is legal or not.

The fine words from the mayor today are very gratifying to hear. We do appreciate his, and the City Council’s, unspoken acknowledgement of our citywide Neighborhood Integrity Initiative movement, popular in every neighborhood from Brentwood to Boyle Heights.

But sadly, their own plan falls far short.

Our March 2017 ballot measure ends forever the gaming of land in Los Angeles by the City Council. The mayor’s and City Council’s reforms announced today continue to allow the City Council and the mayor himself to behave badly — by personally seeing to it that developers who shower them with cash can erect giant projects in neighborhoods that don’t want it and can’t handle it.

The City Council’s destructive policies encourage widespread demolition of perfectly sound older buildings. Their own policies are pushing out thousands of longtime residents from Highland Park to Palms, leading to the destruction of more than 20,000 affordable rent-stabilized units since 2001, mostly in favor of luxury buildings that few can afford.

The City Council is allowing developers to destroy neighborhood character from Westlake and Highland Park to Valley Village and Koreatown, and selling out Los Angeles for a future that people here in Los Angeles do not want.

The efforts at reform announced today do nothing to challenge this.

In addition, our Neighborhood Integrity Initiative requires that “Community Plan” hearings be held throughout the city, in every neighborhood, on weekends and weekday evenings only so the public has real access to this important process of shaping the future of their neighborhoods.

As much as we appreciate the mayor’s acknowledgement that L.A.’s  biased system for writing up Community Plans must be fixed, the City Hall proposal contains no tools for meaningful public input into Community Plans.

Our measure does provide these tools: We require the city to hold all Community Plan hearings during times and on days when the real public can attend, and the hearings must be held in the
communities themselves, not downtown.

The related City Hall measure announced today involving Defunct zoning is, unfortunately, not a reform but a land grab, focused largely on the San Fernando Valley. FullSizeRender

The City Council clearly intends to broadly rezone parking lots in the Valley and elsewhere to allow for density. But L.A. parking lots are not defunct zoning areas awaiting giant luxury condo projects or pricey rental complexes going for $3,000 per unit.

What Los Angeles residents want, and have been promised by the mayor and city council again and again, is parks. Parks, not towers.

Los Angeles is the most park-poor big city in America, a shameful ranking that harms everyone.

The “reform” should have said that Defunct zoning parcels will be targeted for parks, and that the  City Council would stop sitting on millions of dollars in unspent parks funds. But nobody asked communities like Reseda, Palms, Venice and Pico-Union what they want.

What the people of L.A. dream of, and what the mayor and City Council dream of, could not be further apart.

One additional reform proposed by the council and mayor today was taken directly from the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, and we appreciate the effort they made to clean up the city’s broken and biased Environmental Impact Report system.

But today’s plan to reform the EIRs falls woefully short:
Our ballot reform will forever ban developers from choosing their own consultants to write the infamous Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs) that habitually overestimate population growth and underestimate traffic, infrastructure stress, environmental harm, noise and other harms caused by developers’ projects.

In contrast to our clear ban on letting developers’ consultants write the EIRs, the mayors’ and city councils’ plan would create a list of private consultants, pre-approved via a highly politicized process, to write the EIRs. The city needs to do better than that.

Finally, we applaud the mayor’s unspoken acknowledgement that the Coalition to Preserve LA, which is funding the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, has hit upon the greatest worry Angelenos share: the frenzied overdevelopment that drives up our skyrocketing rental prices on every block where rule-bending luxury projects too big for the area are granted by the City Council.

But silent agreement about this problem from City Hall is not enough. Our plan creates a highly focused and narrow moratorium that affects only these outsized projects that bend the zoning rules, and begin with private backroom deals made by council members.

Despite some highly creative claims by our opponents, who laughably say the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative “stops development” in Los Angeles, our pin-pointed moratorium goes after only the 3% to 4% of projects that are allowed to stomp on the zoning rules, often after the developer gives cash and gifts to city officials.

These huge projects are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the gridlocked surface traffic, infrastructure stress, loss of green space, and the rash of ugly boxlike buildings that offer children nowhere to play and pave over the very character of Los Angeles.
This City Hall plan released today does nothing to end the soft corruption that grips Los Angeles City Hall. Voters will make that fact clear in March.

 

 

Related

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
2UrbanGirls
  • Website
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

2UrbanGirls has been cited in Daily Breeze, Daily News, Inglewood Today, Intersections South LA, KCRW, KPCC, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Wave, LA Weekly, LA Watts Times, Mercury News, New York Times, Orange County Register, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, and Washington Post. 2UrbanGirls has a recurring column, South of the 10, on CityWatchLA.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Elections
June 24, 2022

Compton Unified to Place Another School Bond Before Voters in November

June 22, 2022

Inglewood City Clerk Announces Dates for Filing Papers for November Election

June 20, 2022

Tina McKinnor Sworn in as Inglewood Assemblymember

June 16, 2022

Republican Increases Lead in Insurance Commissioner Race

Social Media
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • TikTok
Most Read
National
June 9, 20227

Federal Indictments rock St. Louis City Hall

ST. LOUIS – Two current and one former St. Louis aldermen, including board President Lewis…

June 11, 2022

Man Pleads Guilty in ‘Sweetie Pie’s’ Murder for Hire

June 9, 2022

Authorities Announce Reward For Info on Man Suspected of Killing 14-Year-Old

June 18, 2022

Judge Rules Man is Potentially An Heir to Charles Manson

Entertainment
June 22, 2022

Matlin, Reitman Among Newly Elected Motion Picture Academy Governors

June 20, 2022

Chyna, Rob Kardashian Settle Her Revenge Porn Claim

June 19, 2022

`Jurassic World Dominion’ Makes $58.6M to Lead Box Office Again

June 17, 2022

Los Angeles Philharmonic Association Names Arsenio Hall as Host for 2022 Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival

Transportation
June 15, 2022

Lawmakers Seek Federal Funds For Transportation Projects Ahead of 2028 Olympics

June 14, 2022

Bicyclist Hit by Vehicle and Killed in Exposition Park Area

June 7, 2022

Pedestrian Killed in Collision with Metro Train in Hawthorne Area

June 3, 2022

Sudden Strike Strands Antelope Valley Commuters

Sports
June 18, 2022

Sandy Koufax Statue Unveiled at Dodger Stadium

June 16, 2022

Ole, Ole, Ole FIFA 2026 World Cup headed to Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium

June 16, 2022

Los Angeles Chargers to Texas? Not Over Jerry Jones Dead Body!

June 8, 2022

Phantom Labs Sues Antonio Brown for Unpaid Bill

Archives
Categories

Subscribe to Updates

Keep up with the latest on 2UrbanGirls.com

Subscribe

* indicates required

About

We're based in Inglewood, CA! We amplify community voices, share information, and investigate systems.

Recent Posts
  • CA Attorney General Throws Lifeline to Indicted LA Councilman
  • Compton Unified to Place Another School Bond Before Voters in November
  • Former Charter High School Student Sues Over 2018 Off-Campus Shooting
  • Authorities ID Man Killed in 710 Freeway Crash
  • OC Probation Officer Convicted of Stealing On the Job
Recent Comments
  • Is either of the shooter’s family being sued? on Former Charter High School Student Sues Over 2018 Off-Campus Shooting
  • Anonymous on Former Charter High School Student Sues Over 2018 Off-Campus Shooting
  • Tia Walker on Compton Unified to Place Another School Bond Before Voters in November
Copyright © 2011-2022 2UrbanGirls. Powered by I-WOOD.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

 

Loading Comments...