LOS ANGELES

CORRUPTION WATCH-According to the “Osmosis Theory of LA’s Decline,” populations tend to move from areas of high costs and low opportunity (HC-LO) to areas of low costs and high opportunity (LC-HO.) Darwin’s survival of the fittest has a say here too. The smarter the person, the more likely he or she will move away from Los Angeles. In other words, the more talented middle class is “osmosisizing” itself away from “high cost-low opportunity” Los Angeles to “low cost-high opportunity” areas like Texas, the South, Nashville and Arizona. (Photo above: uncollected trash in Koreatown, Los Angles.) 

There are other factors in LA’s plight. Because babies cannot move out on their own, newborns are not renting apartments and buying houses. The elderly often own their own homes and have their costs covered. Thus, the new births and the “not-dying” of the Boomers do not mean LA is seeing an increased demand for housing. 

The crucial element of population mathematics is that Los Angeles is driving out the most vital segment of its population, that is, the family age middle class. As they leave the City, we lose our future. (We have previously discussed in CityWatch on December 29, 2016, why LA has a lower demand for housing while housing prices rise.) 

Two Productive Segments of LA’s Middle Class 

Los Angeles’ middle class of child rearing age spans two “generations.” There are Family Millennials, born between 1981 and 1998. Their peak birth year was twenty-five years ago. Thus, there are fewer younger Millennials each year and an increasing number of the older Millennials are becoming Family Millennials, age 25 and above. 

Los Angeles’ other middle class “generation” is its Generation Xers, who are between the ages of 35 to 49 years old. Los Angeles already is deficient in its number of Gen Xers. While Garcetti and others were raving about the young Millennials living on groups of two and three in lofts in DTLA, they covered up the fact that the Gen Xers were leaving the City. 

Many in this group, who were between 27 and 41 years old when the Crash of 2008 hit, have mostly decided to leave dense urban areas. Although this generation is smaller than the Baby Boomers above them and the Millennials below them, Gen Xers are vital for any urban area for the next two decades. They are wealthier and more entrepreneurial than Family Millennials and their prior departure is one of the reasons Los Angeles has lost more employers than any other urban area over the prior decade. 

People with the entrepreneurial spirt are precisely the type that leaves the high cost-low opportunity of Los Angeles for the low cost-high opportunity areas in Texas. In fact, Austin (the capital of Texas,) was the grand winner in attracting Gen X entrepreneurials. Since 2000, Austin’s Gen Xers have increase by 44.9% despite the fact that the size of this population segment has declined 6.6% nationally and Los Angeles is doing even worse than the national average. 

As Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox wrote in NewGeography.com in December 2016, “This makes sense as this is the age when home ownership is most critical and people are looking for the maximum income relative to costs. Being in your late 30s to 50 does not mean you have lost the ability to dream, but it does make addressing reality far more imperative than when in your 20s.” 

Thus, a significant number of Gen Xers have left Los Angeles and the age group just below them, Family Millennials, is doing likewise. Both generations leave for basically the same reason -- LA is high cost with low opportunity. People want their children to do better than they are doing. Thus, families move to the low cost-high opportunity areas. 

Losing both GenXers and Family Millennials is Financially Devastating to Los Angeles 

According to Val Srinivas and Urval Goradia, writing in “The Future of Wealth in the United States Mapping Trends in Generational Wealth,” for the Deloitte University Press in November 2015, “…Generation X will experience the highest increase in share of national wealth through the forecast period, growing from under 14 percent of total net wealth in 2015 to nearly 31 percent by 2030. In contrast, “The Millennial generation will experience the fastest growth rate of net wealth. However, the generation’s share of national household wealth will remain below 20 percent.” 

By 2030, the Gen Xers and Family Millennials will control about 50% of the nation’s wealth. Any urban area that loses the middle class from both these generations will lack the financial wherewithal to sustain itself. The middle class has proven it will not raise its families in cramped high rises in Hollywood or DTLA or at Gehry’s Folly at 8160 Sunset. The on-going destruction of Valley Village’s residential areas is particularly ominous for the viability of the entire Valley. 

Los Angeles’ Absurd Solution is to Spend Billions on Construction 

Politicos have fallen in love with the disastrous notion that Los Angeles should make construction of extremely dense Transit Oriented Districts [TODs] and Infill projects its main business. This idea is a perversion of the Keynesian principle that during a recession, spending money helps a society to recover. If the government cannot find something worthwhile to construct, then, Keynes said, it can pay people to dig holes and fill them up again. The money paid to the workers will be spent in the stores, that will then make it possible to hire more employees and buy more products from suppliers. 

This principle is sound, but Keynes never encouraged spending money on harmful projects. (If there were a bona fide housing shortage, residential construction would satisfy Keynes’s requirements, but our Crash of 2008 was caused by spending billions of dollars to build into a glut – which is exactly what Los Angeles is doing.) 

As mentioned in a prior article, destroying rent-controlled housing in order to build luxury housing is atrocious macro-economic policy and harms society. Furthermore, the subsidy of unwanted luxury housing harms the Price System by misleading people into thinking that financing more high rises is a wise use of investment capital. Again, this dynamic plus massive fraud resulted in the Crash of 2008. 

It seems that both California’s Governor and LA City leaders think that deficit spending on construction should be Los Angeles’ prime business. While the spending of billions of dollars will have a short term stimulus, the long term impact will be devastating. 

The Crucial Exodus Time is Nigh 

When people expect prices to rise, people buy before the increase. The Family Millennials and Generation Xers are beginning to realize that home prices in Austin, Texas, outside Nashville and Atlanta, etc. are rising. Now is the time for them to jettison LA and buy where costs are still low and opportunity is high. As Gen Xers and Family Millennials see that home prices in other areas of the nation are beginning to increase, their departure rate from LA will accelerate. The few Gen Zers who are still here will soon realize that they need to unload their properties in LA before the next crash as well as buy elsewhere before those housing prices significantly increase. 

The temporary inflation in R-1 prices will benefit the Gen Xers who did not move away prior to the Crash of 2008. As they move to higher management levels, they can afford better homes. They realize that selling their R-1 homes in Valley Village is their last chance to get their money out of their Valley homes. The financial pressure to escape from LA is irresistible. 

A Gen Xer can sell an LA home for $1 million and buy a larger home in Texas for only $450,000. The housing cost differential between Los Angeles and Texas and Nashville and Atlanta, etc. is go great, that the equity in an LA home may allow a Gen X family to buy a better home for all cash. At the very least, the family will have a whopping down payment with a very small mortgage. For Gen Xers, opportunity is knocking twice. 

The Impact of Measure S 

The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative is officially on the March 2017 ballot as Measure S. If it passes, it will halt the most dramatic threat to LA’s future, i.e., the mega projects, which are at the root of the extortion and bribery running LA City Hall. 

Even if Measure S passes, however, Infill developers will continue to bid up the prices of residences way beyond their value as mere living space. If all single homes were re-zoned R-1, no matter what higher zoning surrounded them, families could afford to look for a home in LA. Such a down zoning would prevent the Infill developers from bidding up home prices and a family could feel secure that its residential neighborhood would be safe from developers for decades. The opposite will continue to be the situation for LA. Residential prices will temporarily escalate as Infill developers bid up the purchase prices.   

Science Will Prevail 

Despite misinformation from City Hall and its apologists like Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics and Joel Singer of California Association of Realtors on Channel 4's Conan Nolan’s show, the osmosis-like movement of talented middle class from Los Angeles to the suburbs in Arizona, Texas and the rest of the Sun Belt will prevail. Has there ever been a time in history when people voluntarily moved away from low cost-high opportunity areas to high cost-low opportunity areas?

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

GELFAND’S WORLD--Over the past few days, several of my friends have asked me to support them in their attempt to create a reform movement in the California Democratic Party. This isn't the first such attempt by any means, but the current confluence of bad news on the national level and grass roots rebellion on the local level makes this attempt a bit more likely to succeed. My comment is that their reform platform should go even farther. 

The Blue Revolution, as it calls itself, proposes structural changes in the way the Democratic Party rules itself. Most of what it suggests is valid, but of little interest to the rest of us. But they do get to one topic that is important -- restructuring the way that members of the Democratic National Committee are selected. I would like to suggest a reason why this is important. The DNC plays a critical role in the way presidential primary elections are scheduled. The current DNC has been an utter failure in dealing with the chronic problem of giving great power to Iowa and New Hampshire, two states which fail to represent the United States as a whole or, for that matter, speak for liberal values. 

Our local rebels want to change the way that California's DNC representatives are chosen. More power to them. But let's take it farther. A real reform proposal would be to demand that the DNC change the order of primaries to give the rest of the country a chance. As long as we're at it, how about making California the first or second state in the 2020 primaries? 

We will know that a newly restructured DNC is for real when New Hampshire is kicked out of its first place position in the presidential primaries, and not until then. If our California DNC delegation can't make some noise about this long-overdue change, then what good are they? 

Moving primaries around is a start, but it's still just a small piece of what ails us. I would like to offer a proposal that is both thoroughly radical and yet profoundly conservative. You might say it is self-sacrificial yet ambitious. 

The background: 

Back in the old days, Democrats got money and support from unions and from a few individual donors. The big business interests didn't feel a lot of kinship with Democrats, and gave their money mostly to Republicans. Democrats found themselves outspent, but managed to hold control of the congress for most of a half century. Unfortunately, the Democrats who controlled the U.S. Congress got a little greedy. They figured that business interests had to deal with them anyway because they held the power, so they might as well take money from business. 

It was the perfect example of a short term success that becomes a long term problem. Let's consider one example of how this worked out. We'll do so by asking the following question -- does anyone trust the U.S. congress to represent the interests of the American public when it comes to prescription drug pricing? The answer is pretty obvious isn't it? We're not going to find a lot of people who would say, "I believe that the congress will do what's right for us when it comes to that issue." Notice that Republicans and Democrats are equally damaged (in the moral sense) by their acceptance of pharmaceutical money. 

The Democrats have a real problem when they are not in the majority, because they don't have a simply stated ideology to fall back on. Republicans have it easy. All they have to do is recite, "Less government, lower taxes, a stronger military." Simplistic thinking combined with simplistic rhetoric does have its audience. In a nation that has been watching itself decline as an economic power since the oil embargo of the 1970s, the Democrats don't have a real strong slogan of their own to counter with. 

So how about if the Blue Revolution and those of us who think of ourselves as Reform Democrats create our own litmus test. We will support candidates who refuse to take money from the drug companies, from the casinos, from oil companies and computer chip manufacturers, from Facebook and Google, Walmart and Microsoft. We will support a party that represents workers. We're not necessarily hostile to business -- we'll work with business in terms of legitimate needs -- but we need to understand who we are first. 

We can start here in California. Since this is a CityWatch column, let's also apply the rule to Los Angeles City Council elections. Anybody who takes money from the developers doesn't get my vote. 

I understand that it's easy to poo-poo these suggestions as being impossible to achieve. Allow me to suggest that the internet age has changed things quite a bit. I suspect that plenty of people would donate a few dollars to candidates who pledge to follow the new rule by refusing corporate money. It will require candidates who are willing to join in a new political culture. The opportunity exists for a newly reformed Democratic Party to flourish. But it has to be a party that understands that modern voters will see through insincerity. 

Addendum 

In my previous column, I argued that those of us who are so appalled by the Trump election should not forget our anger. One commenter argued, not unreasonably, that we shouldn't match the hatred we saw applied against Obama with hatred of our own. Fair enough, but let's clarify. I would argue that it is legitimate to be angry about the victory of racism, misogyny, and bullying. This isn't hatred so much as it is justifiable outrage. This does not mean that we should lose our self-control, but that we should stay motivated. 

Someone named Phil Shailer said it much better than me. This reaction to Trump voters has been making the rounds and is likely to go viral because it speaks for so many of us.

Finally, let me thank Bill Roberson, Shannon Ross, and Carrie Scoville for making me aware of the Blue Revolution.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-Several weeks ago in “Can the Cheap Perfume of "Approve with Conditions" Mask the Stink of Bad Planning?”  I explained how the real purpose of lengthy “conditions of approval” for large, controversial real estate projects like 333 S. LaCienega is to neutralize community opposition. These endless promises are intended to defuse challenges to mega-projects, like the one pictured above in a shorter form than proposed. These promises, transformed into “conditions of approval,” are nearly worthless, but often succeed in persuading neighborhood critics to drop their opposition to bad projects. (Photo above: La Cienega and Third Street intersection.) 

This sordid process thrives in Los Angeles because decision makers routinely approve controversial projects once they receive campaign contributions and once community opposition has been sidelined by developer promises. In these situations, the decision makers never bother to ask such obvious planning-related questions as: 

• Does the project conform to the very plans and zones that the City Planning Commission and the City Council legally enacted after an extensive preparation and adoption process? 

• Does the design of the proposed project match the character and scale of surrounding residential areas, as required by the City Council-adopted Community Plans, as well as the design guidelines now included in the General Plan Framework Element? 

• Do public infrastructure and public services have sufficient capacity – per Framework Policy 3.3  -- to meet future user demand stemming from the approved project? 

• Will the project’s Environmental Impact Report conclusions be monitored and updated once the City Council adopts approval ordinances? 

• Will project approvals be phased, ensuring that later phases are contingent on certified compliance with the original Conditions of Approval? 

• Will a developer’s multiple promises to community groups and elected officials, such as job generation and transit ridership, be accurately and regularly monitored? 

• Will there be real-world consequences, such as revocation of certificates of occupancy or partial demolition of structures, if promises are not kept? 

Because these obvious questions are never asked, the legislative actions, such as spot-zoning, blocked by Measure S, the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, predictably lead to truly bad city planning. For example, the proposed luxury high rise at the former Loehman’s site – 333 S. LaCienega -- perfectly illustrates how these bad planning practices proliferate in Los Angeles, with cascading adverse consequences. Consider the following: 

• Clash with character and scale of nearby areas: As should be obvious the rendering above, this project does not comply with the legally required General Plan findings that the structure be consistent with the scale and character of the neighborhood’s residential area. More specifically, the project will be 240 feet high and have a Floor Area Ratio/FAR (i.e., building mass) of 6.0 on a lot where height is restricted to 45 feet and building mass is limited to an FAR of 1.5. As for compatible character, the proposed tower has a nautical design, reminiscent of a cruise ship, while the surrounding residential buildings have Spanish Revival architecture. Admittedly, a cruise boat might come in handy when massive earthquakes and climate-change induced sea-level rises permanently flood the greater Fairfax area, but for now this nautical design is totally at odds with the area’s character. 

• Traffic congestion: The project is located at one of the most congested intersections in Los Angeles. Called the Bermuda Triangle, the site is the convergence point of San Vicente Boulevard, Third Street, LaCienega Boulevard, Burton Way, and LeDoux. No combination of street signs, signal lights, and traffic officers has managed to keep this intersection clear during rush hours, and the construction of an auto-centric luxury tower at this location can only make a bad traffic situation worse. 

• Unconvincing public necessity: Los Angeles City Charter, Section 558, clearly states that to qualify for General Plan Amendments and zone changes, a project must conform to public necessity, convenience, general welfare, and good zoning practice. In this case, the tenants will be extremely rich, paying an average rent of $12,000 per month for lavish apartments in a building with five star amenities, including on-call luxury cars and drivers. These are certainly wonderful features for the 1 percent who can afford them, but the Wilshire Community Plan area has no demonstrated shortage of parcels that can accommodate such luxury apartments. The use of spot-zoning and spot-planning to jack up a 45 foot height limit to 240 feet may meet a private need to maximize profit, but it does not meet any public need. There is no public necessity for a spot-General Plan Amendment and spot-Zone Change to build a luxury apartment tower where it is strictly illegal and unwarranted. 

• Poor Zoning Practices eliminate certainty: The related City Charter finding of good zoning practice is also sharply at odds with this project. The City Council must take three separate actions to legalize this project: a spot-zone change, a spot-height district change, and a spot-General Plan Amendment. Not only is City Charter Section 555 clear that these legislative actions must apply to socially and geographically significant areas (i.e., not single parcels), but these poor planning practices totally eliminate certainty from the planning process. When individuals, families, or companies move into an area, they have clear expectations of what can be legally built near their homes and businesses. But, spot-zoning completely removes this certainty. Cities like Los Angeles then become the Wild West. Spot-zoning through a City Council vote to permit a 240 foot high rise tower where 45 feet is the law eliminates all predictability from the planning process. The zones and plan designations that people assumed about their neighborhood when they moved in can vanish at the snap of a deep-pocketed developer’s fingers. 

• Affordable housing hype: The project claims that it needs a major economic incentive, much greater building mass, to accommodate large luxury apartments, through LA’s Density Bonus Ordinance. More specifically, the developer intends to replace 13 of 145 luxury apartments with low-income units to build a much larger building. Yet the developer has owned this building site for many years and has virtually no land acquisition costs. In this case, LA’s genuine need for more affordable housing has become a thin cover story for the construction of 130 luxury rental apartments where less than half of that figure is legally permitted. 

• Misuse of on and off-site improvements: The project’s conditions of approval, as voted by the City Planning Commission and the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee, include adjacent street trees, bicycle infrastructure, and a quasi-public fountain. Yet in nearby Los Angeles and Beverly Hills neighborhoods, there are many existing pedestrian-oriented projects and corridors. Some have been built and operated as basic municipal services, not as extensions of mega-projects. Others are linked to by-right buildings that conform to plans and zones, and that do not need City Council spot-zoning rescue ordinances to usher in public improvements. 

• Bad Precedents: To justify height and mass far above legal limits, the project invokes other nearby buildings that exceed 45 feet. Yet, most of these over-height buildings also required spot-zoning approval from elected officials to be built. For example, one of these projects, across the street, at 8500 Burton Way, is a prototype for this project and owned by the same developer. Yet, when it was permitted, its neighbors were told it would not become a precedent for more ad hoc zone changes and general plan amendments. Nevertheless, the genie is out of the bottle. If the City Council eventually approves 333 S. LaCienega, it is only a question of time until nearby property owners make parallel requests. They will quickly realize that similar zone changes and General Plan amendments can green light more lavish and lucrative high-rise apartment towers on their properties. 

The take away from this case study is that a few poor planning practices eventually open up the flood gates for more bad decisions. Their cumulative impact is municipal demise, but good planning practices can move a city in the opposite direction. Los Angeles can still become the progressive, highly livable city that most of residents and visitors truly desire. It might even eventually become the global city that its City Hall boosters magically believe can be achieved through real estate speculation.

(Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles City Planner and also a Board Member of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association. He welcomes comments and corrections at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

SUSTAINING THE CITY-Try to ignore the federal election results for a moment, if you can. There is a lot of fear, dread and loathing about City overdevelopment, worsening traffic (as a result of overdevelopment), and worsening environmental issues (also a result of overdevelopment). In short, we have the foxes guarding the henhouse and a Planning Politburo that appears hell-bent towards shredding all law and livability in the City of the Angels. 

Corrupt City Councilmembers and Mayors? Nothing new. Oversized influence of mega-developers at City Hall? Nothing new. But what appears to be a growing trend is that, even when a City Councilmember is doing the right thing, LA City Planning ignores the will of the citizenry and their elected leader, transforming a neighborhood into an environmental and quality-of-life-nightmare. 

ENTER MEASURE S:  This spring's elections (March 7, 2017-- closer than you might think) will feature a measure that -- no matter what the agenda-driven professional liars and self-serving creepies say -- does the following: 

• Developers will have to have to pay for their traffic and environmental impact reports to be done by independent experts, and not by their own hired guns. EIR's have to mean something, and they have to be credible.

• Backroom deals between billionaire developers and City Councilmembers will be made illegal, and City Council rules and laws will be adhered to and enforced. 

• Developers will have to prove to impacted communities that their new megaprojects can absorb the new development with respect to traffic and other environmental impacts. 

• Despite claims by mega-developers that they want to create affordable housing, the opposite has been the result of these at-market and oversized, over-tall projects (which often have over 50% vacancy) that ultimately leave fewer, and not more, truly affordable housing for Angelenos. 

• The City Council will have to (finally) update the City’s legally-required Community and General Plans that balance growth and environmental impacts. 

You know...follow and obey the laws!

After years of being told that we were decades (not years, but decades) behind in our Planning for the regions and totality of our City, it's time we had the ability to catch up in our Planning infrastructure the way we just did with our Transportation infrastructure. 

The City spends gobs of time and resources on lots of priorities, but the basics of planning for a big city that makes scientific and environmental sense? Nope! 

But no longer. 

If the Planning Department can tell the Mar Vista Community Council, its residents and its Councilmember (Mike Bonin of CD11) to go pound sand when a developer (Pamela Day and her Crimson Holdings cronies) consistently lie, obfuscate, and disempower the neighborhoods of Mar Vista...what can we do? 

If the Planning Department ignores the pleas of the Mar Vista Community Council, the CD11 office and planners, and the local residents (who have always been for affordable housing) when they plead for a 3-5 story project but get an 80+-foot tall, 7-8 story project that is the tallest development for miles, and with entirely insufficient parking and infrastructure so that the developer can win the lotto...what can we do? 

And what can you do when this keeps going on in your neighborhood -- black, white, Latino, Asian, mixed, poor, wealthy, etc.? What can you do when the Planning Department gives us the cold shoulder and ignores our legal rights, recommendations and pleas? 

Vote Measure S into law -- we have to STOP the LA City Planning Politburo. We have to STOP the unsustainable, environmentally-destructive madness. We must have a civilized, sustainable city that has rules that are followed. 

STOP the tone-deaf, agenda-driven, wild-eyed, build-build-build group-thinkers at LA City Planning. 

Vote YES on Measure S!

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.  He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDUCATION VUE-In a sign that California is quickly emerging as the nation’s progressive conscience-in-exile, a new Los Angeles education-reform group has launched an ambitious initiative that it claims could close historic student achievement gaps in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). 

Members of Reclaim Our Schools LA (ROS-LA), a coalition of educators, labor unions and social justice organizations, told a December media event attended by about one hundred parents, students and supporters (photo above) in the library of South LA’s Dorsey High School, that the key to substantive school reform is to transform LAUSD into a “community school district.”

Community schools, which have roots in the progressive movement of the early 20th century but have been undergoing a recent revival, look beyond academics to the entrenched, poverty-related social, emotional and health barriers that keep kids in high-needs districts from succeeding in school. The approach redresses those needs by partnering with families, local government and community-based organizations to provide “wraparound services” — health clinics, mental health counselors, after-school programs or parent support services — on school grounds. 

“We believe schools should be safe havens for students and families,” said coalition member Angelica Salas. “Our coalition is committed to making sure that every student can benefit from an education, independent of what school or what ZIP code they live in.” Her group also used the event to unveil a detailed argument for community schooling in a paper called “A Vision to Support Every Student.”  

In addition to Salas, who is the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, nine coalition speakers were present, including union president Alex Caputo-Pearl of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), and Max Arias, executive director of Service Employees International Union Local 99. 

The coalition was short on the details of what an actual community school might look like, saying each would be tailored to specific community needs. But the group noted that LAUSD, whose student population is 80 percent low-income, already boasts a number of successful pilot community schools, including San Fernando High School Community School in the economically depressed North San Fernando Valley, and James A. Garfield Senior High School in East LA, whose on-campus “Wellness Center” offers physical exams, family planning and mental health services. 

Though the movement has been mostly overlooked by the media in their coverage of the 25-year education wars that have pitted the “school choice” privatization movement against traditional neighborhood public schools, it has produced impressive gains in math and reading proficiency, along with increases in graduation and college-admission rates, with the kind of disruptive, high-needs students that the corporate charter school model tends to exclude. Those successes gained community schooling a toehold in the Obama administration’s 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, which included language supportive of the approach. 

“Unlike other models of reform that we see today,” said coalition member John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, “[community schooling] is a model of reform that is inclusive; that doesn’t exclude English learners; that doesn’t exclude foster [care students]; that doesn’t exclude students with special needs. It says everybody is part of our community.” 

According to ROS-LA’s Patricia Castellanos, who is also deputy director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Oakland Unified and Cincinnati Public Schools have already declared themselves community school districts, with Austin, Texas possibly to follow. 

But as the nation’s second-largest school district, LAUSD would considerably raise the profile of community schooling with what Castellanos termed a “new path” to reform, with the potential to impact national education policy. 

That prospect, coalition members repeatedly emphasized, has taken on new urgency in the months since last spring, when ROS-LA began organizing. Donald Trump has alarmed public education advocates with both his campaign proposal for a $20 billion school voucher program and his nomination of anti-public schools radical Betsy DeVos to head the Department of Education. 

“If there were ever a time to invest more in our public schools, it is now,” declared coalition member Tina Trujillo, associate professor at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. 

However, ROS-LA’s ambitions may not only collide with the incoming administration, but also run up against Republican vows to cut federal funding for health services, food assistance and cash assistance for low-income seniors and people with disabilities. 

California currently receives about $69.3 billion in federal support for health and human services, with $7.7 billion going to the state Department of Social Services for child welfare services, foster care and the CalWORKs welfare-to-work program — the kind of assistance to low-income and vulnerable Californians that is at the heart of community schooling’s wraparound services model. 

“We are very well aware that there are financial issues that need to be dealt with,” admitted UTLA’s Alex Caputo-Pearl. “California hovers between 40th and 50th among the states in per-pupil funding. It’s not acceptable. We’ve got to take that battle to the state level, and we will.” 

The exact price tag to transform LAUSD to community schooling remains unknown. Castellanos said that specific budget numbers will be part of ROS-LA’s planning and research for 2017, adding that national community school experts claim the model is less expensive to implement than it might seem, since it is based on leveraging existing community services and grants. 

In the meantime, the coalition will be laying the groundwork for political and economic support by lobbying LAUSD leaders and scheduling parent-student forums in early 2017 to ensure that ROS-LA’s priorities are reflected in the district’s Local Control and Accountability Plan. 

“Our goal is to have LAUSD designate itself as a community schools district and to allocate funds to roll out this model.” Castellanos said. “That will require conversations with the LAUSD board so that community schools are part of the school board’s budgeting process in the next year.”

(Bill Raden is a freelance Los Angeles writer. This article was first posted at Capital & Main.)  Photo by Bill Raden: Dorsey H.S. student Christabel Ukomado addresses Reclaim Our Schools gathering. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NEIGHBORHOOD POLITCS--On September 28, LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin held a community meeting in the Westminster Avenue Elementary School auditorium to present his accomplishments and propose solutions to the problem of Homelessness in Venice. There was a slide show, fliers, city officers and non-profit organization organizers. There were a lot of attendees in the auditorium. A lot of cops were there too.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--Grab a glass of champagne. Then bend your mind around this New Year’s resolution for Californians: In 2017, let’s become more tolerant of political corruption.

Yes, bigotry against political skullduggery is just about the last socially acceptable prejudice in our state. And while the idea of tolerating dirty deal-making may sound perverse or strange, so are the ways we make decisions in California. We rarely consider how all of our rules curtailing the power and discretion of elected officials—rules approved in the name of preventing corruption—have made it so difficult to respond to large scale problems in our state that we no longer try.

Our state’s governance system has long been premised on the notion that our chosen representatives must be extremely naughty people. And so we’ve designed a highly complex government over the last century with the primary goal of preventing corruption, by limiting the power and discretion of elected and appointed officials to make dirty deals—or just about any other deals. That is the channel connecting our state’s rivers of regulations, oceans of laws, and tsunamis of formulas for budgets and taxes that defy human navigation.

All these obstacles have worked to a point: We’re a pretty clean state by American standards, with a relatively low rate of public corruption convictions. And the corruption cases you see here typically involve very small stakes for a big state—minor embezzlements, small-time cover-ups, and politicians who violate tricky campaign finance laws or (heaven forbid) live outside their districts.

The perverse result of our clean but hampered government is that we’ve opted to embrace large-scale, incapacitating societal wrongs, instead of accepting even the smallest rule-bending in the legislature or city hall (what other jurisdictions might still consider part of the cost of getting stuff done).

In California, among the richest places on earth, thousands of homeless people are on the streets, and we tolerate the highest poverty rate in the United States. We have done little to respond to a huge and expanding shortage of housing for working and middle-class people. Our roads, bridges and waterworks are in dangerous disrepair. Our health system makes it hard to get health care, our schools offer too little education, and our tax system, by bipartisan acknowledgment, doesn’t tax us efficiently or fairly.

In hamstringing our politicians, we’ve frustrated ourselves.

And yet, attacking such big problems is considered wildly unrealistic. There are too many rules and regulations standing in the way of large-scale action. And if we got rid of those rules, we fear we would be abetting corruption.

Which is why we so desperately need to adopt a new attitude toward corruption.

A famous observation of Samuel Huntington, one of the 20th century’s greatest political scientists, applies now in California.

“In terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over centralized, honest bureaucracy.”

“In terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over centralized, honest bureaucracy,” Huntington wrote. ““A society which is relatively uncorrupt … may find a certain amount of corruption a welcome lubricant easing the path to modernization.”

California needs lubrication—and a little more corruption that allows us to advance larger public goals.

California must expedite the building of affordable housing, homeless housing, housing near transit, and housing on lots already zoned for housing—even if it means paying off certain interests to prevent their opposition and handing out exemptions to planning requirements and zoning and environmental laws like party favors. The alternative is to let the scandalous housing shortage grow, while we cross all the regulatory t’s and let NIMBYs tie us in knots.

LA voters, for example, just approved money for homeless housing we need now—but it likely will take at least five years to have the housing in place if we follow the usual procedures. And it could be even worse if anti-growth activists, posing as warriors against corruption, succeed in passing a moratorium on certain developments on LA’s March ballot.

The poor state of California’s roads also cries out for some big corrupt deals, damn the environmental reviews. For years, the state has failed to address a $130-billion-plus backlog in state and local road repairs. A legislative report found that more than two-thirds of roads are in poor or mediocre condition, one of the worst records of any state in the country.

But California’s mix of limitations on infrastructure and taxes mean we’ll keep falling behind—as long as we play by the rules. Raising taxes to cover repairs requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of the state legislature and getting to two-thirds in cases like this requires buying votes with spending. But our abstemious governor hasn’t been willing to do the buying. He should resolve to be less righteous and more road-friendly in 2017. (And how fast can we get some contracts out the door and get construction crews on the highways?)

Roads and housing aren’t the only contexts where we prioritize following all the rules over meeting the needs of Californians. In education, state leaders make a fetish of meeting the very low requirement of the constitutional funding formula for schools—instead of finding ways, kosher or not, to lengthen our short school year (just 180 days) and offer students the math, science, arts and foreign language they need, but aren’t getting.

Our aqueducts and water mains so badly need updates and repairs that politicians should be raiding other government accounts to secure the necessary funds. But moving money around brings lawsuits and scrutiny. So no one dares resolve the problem, not even in a time of drought. Now is the moment to break rules and accelerate water infrastructure. Find ways to bully or buy off anyone who objects.

The stakes of our anti-corruption fixation may get higher in 2017. California finds itself in a confrontation with President-elect Donald Trump. Politicians are talking about how they are ready to fight Trump if he attacks California policies or threatens vulnerable people, like immigrants and Muslims.

Fighting may be necessary, but California and its governments are at a decided disadvantage in a battle with the richer and more powerful federal government. Dealmaking might be the better strategy, at least at first. On recent trips to Sacramento, lobbyists and other behind-the-scenes players argued to me that California should find some way to buy off Trump—either personally or in his presidential role—given the president-elect’s love of negotiations and his lack of interest in ethics or legal niceties. Of course, such creative dealmaking runs up against Californian rules and sensibilities.

That’s why the change we need is not legal—it’s cultural. We need to be more politically mature and realize that big progress in governance almost always involves actions that are not entirely forthright. Indeed, some of our country’s most effective officials—like the Daleys in Chicago, or even a California character like Willie Brown, the former Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor—were effective precisely because they didn’t always color inside the lines.

So as we greet 2017, let’s raise a toast to dealmaking that brings real progress, even when it’s dirty.

(Joe Mathews is Connecting California Columnist and Editor at Zócalo Public Square … where this column first appeared. Mathews is a Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).)

-cw

@TheGussReport – Predicting LA’s fortunes requires a decent read on our city and county officials. Dialogue with them and listen closely because what they say matters; their evasion matters more; and their evasion while speaking matters most. (Photo art above: LA’s new skyline?)

“The winds of change blow from the west” is the trite refrain they often invoke when justifying many an ill-conceived idea. Bullet-train, anyone? But in a year with Trumpian-force winds, LA (and San Francisco and Sacramento for that matter) is going to be tested big-time, especially when its desperate need for federal dollars is weighed against its pledge to remain a sanctuary city. And since LA is unaccustomed to being tested by outside forces, there are plenty of balls for it to drop.

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-2016 is nearly over, and that means that 2017 offers immense opportunities for CityWatch writers and readers, including yours truly, to answer important questions. These are some of the stories that I am following and hope to examine in more detail. I look forward to similar research and articles from other CityWatch writers. 

CITY HALL QUESTIONS 

How extensive is corruption at Los Angeles’s City Hall? 

The LA Times Sea Breeze story of $600,000 in campaign donations to get land use decisions reversed is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg. And David Zahnizer’s front-page story on Rick Caruso’s luxury tower at the former Loehman’s site is just as important. While the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative/Measure S staff has broken smaller stories of corruption, there are undoubtedly many bigger stories waiting for careful investigation and publication. The more the better because even if Measure S does not pass in March 2017, this type of investigative reporting will play a major role in ensuring that Los Angeles is well planned. The alternative, an unplanned city, in which real estate speculators determine long-term land use patterns, is a road to municipal ruin. 

What is the residential build-out potential of Los Angeles, based on existing zoning? 

The corporate funded density hawks repeatedly argue that LA has virtually no land left for housing construction, yet the most recent City Planning reports on this exact question – from the early 1990s – concluded the exact opposite. Furthermore, we also need to know how much future housing construction and population growth can be supported by available public infrastructure and public services. 

What is really behind the “no money” excuse for the many projects and public services that elected officials and some of their advocates ignore? 

There is no shortage of low-priority budget categories that qualify for this sorry alibi: urban street trees, careful plan check and code enforcement, updated General Plan elements, sidewalk and street repairs, ADA curb cuts, street cleaning, street lights, recreation program, library hours, climate change mitigation and adaptation, bicycle infrastructure, mass transit station amenities, and much more. For these and many more projects, local government’s constant refrain is, “There is just no money,” yet big-ticket items, like the 55 percent of the City budget that funds the LAPD, go unchallenged. 

What role does local government play in increasing wealth and income inequality? 

Most fingers point to the Federal government because it largely controls tax rates, tax loopholes, minimum wage, and the safety net, such as Social Security and Medicaid. But, City Hall also plays a significant, but overlooked role. For example, every time the zone and/or General Plan designation for a piece or property densifies through spot-zoning, the site becomes considerably more valuable. Yet, this windfall is not taxed in California because most commercial property is never totally sold. Instead portions of the ownership change, allowing the property title to remain fixed and unassessed because of Proposition 13. 

Is METRO advancing mass transit for mobility or to bolster real estate speculation? 

Some scholars, like Allen Whitt, long ago argued that the fundamental purpose of urban mass transit, include MetroRail in Los Angeles, is to resuscitate real estate in older parts of town, such as Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood. Now, several decades later we are witnessing the expansion of mass transit, but with little consideration for mobility. 

In Los Angeles, the MetroRail interface with other transportation modes is missing: buses, cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists. METRO has dropped the ball on this aspect of transit, while City Planning has largely limited its role to up-zoning the private parcels near existing and proposed transit stations. As a result, transit-adjacent public areas have unfunded guidelines, while individual parcels are stoked for an influx of private investment. 

ENVIROMENTAL QUESTIONS 

How is climate change related to economic activity? 

The popular press presents the climate change “debate” as climate scientists on one side and climate change deniers on the other side. This supposed debate is then reduced to one bid question: do humans cause climate change or is it a natural fluctuation? But this this simplistic approach sees the forest and misses the trees. This is because it doesn’t examine the diverse carbon footprints of our planet’s eight billion humans. It equates the carbon footprint of those living in squalor on $2 or less per day with executives of fossil fuel companies, living in energy-intensive estates, driving big cars, and flying on highly polluting planes. 

Will driverless electric cars reduce our carbon footprint? 

Companies such as Tesla and Google tout their driverless and electric cars as a miracle cure for congestion and Green House Gases. But this is a dubious claim for several reasons. First, better cars perpetuate the entire built environment based on cars: the entire car manufacturing process, roads, parking lots, and car-oriented buildings, especially big box retail and shopping centers. 

Second, better cars mean each car uses less energy, but the automobile companies still expand overall production. For example, Toyota does not use the profits from the Prius to make a better bicycle, but to branch out to the Prius C and Prius V. Instead of one Prius model there are now three, as well as other Toyota models with hybrid engines, such as the Camry. As a result overall energy consumption is still expanding. 

A FINAL WORD FOR THE NEW YEAR 

CityWatch readers, in 2017 please share your information about these and other important and overlooked stories. We may have meager resources, but crowd-sourcing our knowledge can and will be the antidote to the neglect of the mainstream, corporate media.

(Dick Platkin reports on local planning issues in Los Angeles for CityWatch. Please send any questions, comments, or corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LA GOVERNMENT WATCH-Over this past year, our contributions to CityWatch have focused on a disturbing pattern that has shown how elements of our Los Angeles City government have been working against the public interest for years. Here’s a re-cap of what needs to change as we move into 2017: 

1. No sole source contracts or private sales of surplus property under any condition. No exceptions. No contracts let without Requests for Proposal (RFPs). Apart from being required by law, they are the life blood of good government, because they secure the best value for the public, while also ensuring that every member of that public gets a clean shot at winning contracts. The same is true of public auctions of surplus property. 

2. No closed sessions of the City Council -- for any reason -- not even those permitted by the Brown Act (i.e. litigation, real estate negotiations and so on.) 

3. No attorney-client privilege for Officers of the City (except in their capacities as private citizens.) Again, all litigation -- regardless of the dollar amount -- should be conducted in open session. This would help prevent the kind of prolonged litigation that has recently cost the City over $250 million. 

4. No contracting with secretive LLCs. If you want to do business with Los Angeles, you have to take your mask off. It is preposterous how many entities there are with whom the City currently does business without knowing the most basic of facts about them, including the precise identity of the owner. 

5. No enforcement role for the Ethics Commission. Campaign finance laws etc. should be enforced by the DA. The Enforcement Division of the Ethics Commission routinely violates the Constitutional rights of members of the public. The part of the Ethics Commission that maintains the database of donations etc. should be kept intact. 

6. No absolute power for the City Council President in making committee assignments. Such power gives the President too much leverage over the rest of the Council and results in a stifling of debate (because everyone has to tow the line or suffer retaliation.) 

7. No use of parking fines in the General Fund. Such fines, not to exceed $35, should go to a fund used exclusively for infrastructure projects. 

8. No back-room lawsuit settlements. These are used as a way to kick-back money to the plaintiff. Settlements need to be dealt with in open session. 

9. No further violations of Rule 93 -- violations which have resulted in the public’s cameras in City Hall that are being operated by public employees -- at the direction of Herb Wesson – so that the members of the public are videotaped from a face-obscuring distance. 

10. No commencing of City Council meetings with the settling of liens against members of the public who suffer humiliation and unspeakably huge monetary penalties.

(Eric Preven and Joshua Preven are public advocates for better transparency in local government. Eric is a Studio City based writer-producer. Joshua is a teacher.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THE WEALTH FORMULA, PART TWO- In a recent CityWatch article, I explained why the City of Los Angeles has escalating housing costs and, at the same time, is experiencing a net exodus of people leaving rather than moving to LA. It took years of corruption and malfeasance, but the City has managed to make Los Angeles the nation’s least desirable urban area. 

The Destruction of Wealth is Not Wise 

Just as the government has laws against people stealing other people’s property, the government has a duty not to encourage the destruction of businesses which are generating wealth. Rent-controlled properties are long-term wealth creators. Los Angeles’ Rent Stabilization Ordinance was relatively effective in allowing landlords to make a profit and provide housing the poor could afford. (I shall not discuss the criminal REAP program. I hope someone does a CityWatch article from the landlord’s perspective.) 

From the macro-economic standpoint, when an honest business is generating wealth, it should not be destroyed. Tearing down rent-controlled units destroys wealth. Not only is the landlord harmed, but the tenant is harmed, and those who end up homeless become a financial burden on everyone. Macro-Economics does not care if the developer believes he can make more money from his new fancy units. Society does not look at only how much “gelt” he pockets, but it must subtract all the wealth lost by the destruction of the rent-controlled units and all the extra costs which society will incur. 

From a macro-economic standpoint, the destruction of over 22,000 rent-controlled units has caused irreparable harm from which the City will not recover. 

In a city operating on the economic philosophy of corruptionism, the city government is unable to institute wise macro-economic safeguards. As a result, we have an economic system that destroys affordable housing, while only 37% of the need is being built and while replacing it with luxury apartments that represent a 12% glut. (11-17-2015 HCIDLA report) The City then gives our tax dollars to the developer because he says his profit is too small. ($17.4 Million to CIM Group for 5929 Sunset Blvd.) Thus, we have a corrupt city government that destroys the homes of poor people, stealing “wealth generators” from small landlords; and then the City gives tax money to the developers who happen to be funding the Mayor’s and councilmembers’ campaigns. 

Where Los Angeles Does Have Housing Shortage 

There is an actual shortage of detached single family homes. One factor is that prior to the 2008 Crash, banks unloaded foreclosed homes as fast as possible onto the market. But after the Crash of 2008, many banks decided to rent homes. This decision reduced the number of homes for sale without reducing the number of available homes in which to live. Withholding homes from the sales market drove up prices without any increase in demand. 

How the City Increases the Price of R-1 Homes

The City’s housing policies, especially in-fills, allow developers to buy and tear down the single family home to construct multiple rental units on the property. As a result, a family who wants to purchase a home for living space often faces a developer who will pay far more than the living space value. 

Because developers can get councilmembers to change the zoning to satisfy their whims, they are confident that wherever they buy, they can build multiple units. In order for many families to purchase a home in Los Angeles, they have to out-bid developers. 

As a result, detached home prices have been “bid up,” thereby reducing the supply of homes for families. A proper government would protect the Price System of detached homes by not allowing any spot zoning or granny flats. A competent city would not permit Small Lot Subdivisions. 

A City Which Decimates its Middle Class is a Failed City 

As a result of making it hard to construct and allowing the destruction of detached homes, the City has driven out Family Millennials, i.e., the new Middle Class. It did not take a genius to foresee that when the younger Millennials wanted to settle down, they would abandon the Dorm Room style of life and do what Americans have done for generations: find a detached home with a yard and decent schools. Intentionally depriving Millennials of the homes they would come to desire has left them no realistic alternative but to move away from Los Angeles. When the most productive sector of the population abandons a city, it becomes an economic basket case. 

The City’s Subsidizing Mega Projects Drives out the Middle Class 

Because Wall Street does not want to be left holding the bag when the next crash comes, it is balking at financing a lot of mega projects. Wall Street has seen that fraud does not deceive the laws of economics. For example, for years the City fooled Wall Street into lending for improvident mixed-use projects by giving the developers an extra revenue stream to repay the Wall Street loans. The City would let the developer keep the sales taxes from the retail stores in the mixed-use projects. CIM Group’s Midtown Project in City Council President Wesson’s district, for example, allegedly gets 100% of sale taxes and business license fees. 

When she was City Controller (July 2001 to April 2009), Laura Chick warned of this folly, pointing out that 50% of the CRA mixed-use projects’ retail space was vacant, but the City ignored her. Without tenants, there was no extra revenue stream for the builders to repay the Wall Street loans. Perhaps, the most colossal disaster was the Hollywood-Highland Project which cost $625 million to construct but was sold a few years later for only $201 million. Projects do not sell for 1/3 their construction costs because they are making money for the developer. Remember, the wealth formula: you have to sell or rent for more than the cost to produce. 

Since then, the City has been giving its developer buddies billions of dollars in financial aid. The private Grand Avenue Project is getting about $197 million. All the projects in Hollywood will end up being subsidized. The City has subsidized Korean Airlines and China. Yes, freakin’ China – the world leader in over-development. When the government subsidizes developers who build crap that no one wants, the government destroys the Price System. 

The Anticipatory Destruction of Wealth 

While some people look at Gehry’s Folly at 8160 Sunset Boulevard and say “ooh and aah,” others see the Anticipatory Destruction of Wealth. The role of the government is to understand this aspect of macro-economics. When hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in bad projects based on falsified data, all those hundreds of millions of dollars are diverted away from productive investments. That means we lose wealth by diverting money from where it should go. All the wealth that wise investments would have created never comes into existence. 

While some recognize this anticipatory destruction of wealth, no one person knows where the funds should have been invested. That is why the nation needs to restrict investment firms to doing one thing – raising capital for productive investments. Investment firms, which can stay in business only by making wise investments in enterprise, are absolutely essential for the nation to prosper.

Prior to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, investment houses were limited to doing the research necessary to know where to invest the capital they raised. Of course, the people who provided the funds for the investments held each investment firm liable for mistakes. After the investment firms no longer had to make a profit by raising capital and investing it for other people, they found that financial manipulation was more profitable for the executives -- even if it crashed the world economy. The vital function of Wall Street’s raising capital for wise investments cannot resume until a beefed up Glass-Steagall is re-instituted and credit default are outlawed and Wall Street’s role in the commodities market is seriously restricted. 

The City’s War on the Middle Class is not Wise 

Garcetti has made no secret of his war on the single family home and against the automobile in his mania to turn Hollywood and now the rest of Los Angeles into a west coast Manhattan. The City would have been far wiser to pass an emergency re-zoning measure 10 to 15 year ago, in which all single-family homes, no matter where they were located, would have a presumptive R-1 status. 

Simultaneously, there should have been a moratorium on any increase in office density in The Basin. That would have stabilized residential housing in the Basin, while allowing offices on the periphery. Traffic patterns would have been reversed, somewhat, thereby allowing for more population without more traffic. Without anyone at City Hall who understood or cared about macro-economics, we have suffered through at least 15 years of economic falderal and corruptionism. 

Que sera sera 

At this point, one is supposed to provide the prescription for recovery. But there is none for Los Angeles. Alea jacta est, the Rubicon was crossed years ago, and we have gone far beyond the point of no return. Here is Los Angeles’ most likely future: there will be a massive dump of billions of dollars of construction dollars into Los Angeles for mega-projects and fixed-rail transit. These improvident expenditures will further erode the quality of life and leave Los Angeles bankrupt, at which time the City will seek a federal bailout.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

BUTCHER ON LA-Within two weeks of moving into our new apartment in La Crescenta, I learned of two substantive, meaningful opportunities to participate locally: a community meeting explaining the new districts for elections of local school board members and notice of a meeting of the Crescenta Valley Town Council where the main topic discussion was construction on the 210 freeway. 

Got a doggie park recommendation for what turns out to be the best dog groomer in the San Fernando Valley (at the corner of Wheatland and Sunland), pulled into the parking lot and found myself parking in front of the Foothill Trails District Neighborhood Council storefront. 

Then we received this notice announcing the City of Los Angeles’ gifting of delicious, free mulch and soil amendment. 

And just as I was feeling most darkened by the shortness of the days after the Election, I read this from esteemed labor activist attorney, our friend Emma Leheny, who now with the National Education Association, America’s largest labor union, sharing a comprehensive organizing resource for local action: 

Anti-immigrant statements by Trump and his supporters have caused anxiety among school children throughout the country. Bullying and harassment in schools have been fueled by Trump’s slurs. Educators have been supporting our schools and students – with guidance, inclusive curricula, and anti-bullying resources.  But given Trump’s stated plan to rescind all Obama executive actions, school sites may soon see ICE agents attempting to enter campus. ICE issued a memorandum in 2011 stating schools were off-limits for immigration enforcement, except in exigent circumstances. We can expect that memo to be repudiated, or at a minimum, ignored in the next administration. So our students and educators are looking for answers: what can keep our schools safe for all of our students? 

NEA has developed this template resolution and policy for use by any school board. It recognizes the constitutional rights of undocumented students to access a free, public K-12 education, as set forth by the Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe. It puts in place steps for district administration to follow if approached by ICE. It re-iterates the support and respect a school community holds for all of its students and families. Several large school districts have already taken steps in this direction – Los Angeles, for example, enacted and re-affirmed a resolution opposing immigration enforcement at school. 

The Tenth Amendment also creates a bulwark against feared efforts by the new administration to overreach by attempting to coerce local and state compliance with an anti-immigrant agenda. This proposed NEA language educates local administrators about what protection they can offer students, even in the face of ICE intimidation. 

They go low, we go local. 

From Noah Zatz’s spot-on piece, The Principle and Politics of Sanctuary:  

What to do? It is easy to feel paralyzed and powerless in the face of President-elect Trump’s announced intention to rain terror on immigrants and people of color with mass deportations, Muslim registration, racial profiling, and so much more. Start somewhere. For me, that has meant staring where I live, by attending my first local school board meeting. I’ve joined with other parents to make my small city’s schools into sanctuaries from federal immigration enforcement and other intrusions. It’s also meant starting where I work, joining with faculty, staff, and students to push similar policies at the university level. 

Sanctuary offers a simple moral idea that draws on rich and righteous histories. It connects us to the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves, the protection offered to Anne Frank and Schindler’s List, and the 1980s religious movement to welcome Central American refugees from Cold War conflicts. 

They go low, we go local. Whenever the social justice arms of our religious communities show up – be it the Catholic Worker or the human rights committee of a reform synagogue -- in South Gate or Selma, the light of God and the goodness of people ultimately bend the arc of justice towards peace -- but we’ve gotta work it. 

There’s an amazing group of organizers gathering on Facebook at “Our Future. The Organizers’ Roundtable.” Sign up now to join the greatest organizers in the country. Find your local page! 

Find a local organization working to protect the environment. For instance, I’ve been inspired by the successful local organizing in my new neck of the woods by Glendale’s VOICE (Volunteers Organized in Conserving the Environment).  

As 48 US mayors say in their November 22 letter to the President-elect: 

On November 8, American voters approved more than $200 billion in local measures, funded by their own local tax dollars, to improve quality of life and reduce carbon pollution. Seventy percent of voters in Los Angeles County, the car capital of the world, approved a $120 billion, multi-decade commitment to public transit. Seattle voters approved transit investments totaling $54 billion; Austin voters approved a record-setting $720 million mobility bond; Boston voters approved investment in affordable housing, parks, historic preservation and more. 

As President, you will have the power to expand and accelerate these local initiatives which the people resoundingly supported. We call upon you and the federal government you will lead to help cities leverage funds for the hundreds of billions of dollars in transit, energy, infrastructure and real estate development necessary to upgrade our infrastructure for the 21st century. We ask that you lead us in expanding the renewable energy sources we need to achieve energy security, address climate change and spark a new manufacturing, energy and construction boom in America. 

We ask that you help provide American businesses the certainty to invest through continued tax credits for electric vehicles, solar power, renewables and other clean technologies. And we ask that you shift to embrace the Paris Climate Agreement and make U.S. cities your partner in doing so. 

While we are prepared to forge ahead even in the absence of federal support, we know that if we stand united on this issue, we can make change that will resonate for generations. We have no choice and no room to doubt our resolve. The time for bold leadership and action is now. 

Sign up for the simple local app Nextdoor and connect with happenings in your community. 

Find your local Patch for local news! 

Order your local newspaper for home delivery -- or BUY an electronic subscription if you don’t need the feel of newsprint on your fingers. 

It’s all local and it’s all personal – I’ll sign up for a Muslim registry. I’ll tell the woman at the DIY store that she’s being rude when she says too loudly that she doesn’t understand a word the cashier is saying because she speaks with a different accent. I’ve got an entire clip of safety pins to wear! 

I ordered home delivery of the LA Times now that we’re back in town! 

A worthwhile read from the Nieman Reports, All Journalism is Local:  

A possible future for journalism is more in the mold of grassroots organizing, where the newsroom becomes a sort of 21^st century VFW hall, the hub of local activity. The current buzz is around audience acquisition through social media. What about audience acquisition through local physical presence, opening up potential trickles of revenue from events and other local activities? 

The danger of social media “audience acquisition” is that it repeats the mistakes of cable television, rendering us captive to celebrity, national news stories, and clickbait. Newsrooms as “civic reactors,” the beating heart of our communities, offers greater promise -- not to mention the skills of grassroots organizing are cousins to traditional news-gathering skills, rather than the alien skills of marketing and public relations. 

“Res publica” means, literally, the “real” people. It is up to us to make sure it is not the kind of “real” in reality television, but the kind of “real” you find at PTA meetings and traffic hearings.

I’m inspired to help organize a bit locally. I accepted a little freelance reporting job with the Crescenta Valley Weekly News, a vibrant, privately-owned local weekly newspaper. Enjoy my first byline: Holiday Happiness Found on Oak Circle Drive. 

They go low … we go local!

(Julie Butcher writes for CityWatch, is a retired union leader and is now enjoying her new La Crescenta home and her first grandchild. She can be reached at [email protected] or on her new blog ‘The Butcher Shop - No Bones about It.’) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CAL WATCHDOG-The campaign to place California secession on the ballot next election year entered uncertain waters as news broke that its mastermind lives and works in a city in the center of Russia.  

“I immigrated to California, and I consider myself to be a Californian,” Louis Marinelli told The California Report from his Yekaterinburg apartment, KQED reported. “I wanted to handle some personal issues in my family, regarding immigration. My wife is from Russia. I’m here handling various personal issues. But at the same time, we have some political goals we can achieve while I’m here.” 

From founding to funding. 

Marinelli’s deep Russian ties, past and present, attracted attention as he took his current stay in the country as an opportunity to start work on a so-called “embassy of California” in Moscow. That undertaking, as Bloomberg noted, has the aid of “a vehemently anti-American group supported by the Kremlin” — the Anti-Globalist Movement of Russia — which Marinelli said supports California’s right to self-determination. “Talking to the Russian tabloid Life, Alexander Ionov, the president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, said that the embassy would serve as a hub to boost tourism and foster cultural and economic exchanges between the Golden State and Russia,” Heat Street reported.  

“We may disagree on several issues, but if we have common ground on one issue, why shouldn’t we have a dialogue?” Marinelli asked Bloomberg. But he has already begun to hit against the limits of that rhetoric.  

“Marinelli’s Russian connection has created a schism, if not quite the Great Schism, in the breakaway movement with members of the California National Party, a group that is formally affiliated with Yes California but has publicly disavowed Marinelli as a Russian marionette. Silicon Valley investor and Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar briefly became another standard-bearer of ‘Calexit,’ as it come to be known, threatening Marinelli’s virtual monopoly on the cause, but backed off, saying he didn’t really support secession.” 

The Trump factor. 

But crisis management was not the only reason Yes California accelerated its timetable to land their initiative on the California ballot in 2018. (According to the prospective measure’s language, voting yes “would trigger a special election the following March in which residents would decide if ‘California should become a free, sovereign and independent country,'” as the San Jose Mercury News observed.) Donald Trump’s election provoked a degree of dismay among some California Democrats intense enough to suggest a secessionist movement could take advantage while passions remained relatively hot. 

“It wasn’t until Trump’s victory last month that mainstream U.S. outlets -- including the Sacramento Bee, the LA Times and NPR -- covered the group more seriously,” KQED noted. “The story got new legs because several influential tech figures took to Twitter to voice their desire for California to leave the union after Trump’s election. Among them was Shervin Pishevar, an investor and co-founder of Hyperloop One, a startup promoting a futuristic new transportation technology.” 

Although no elected officials have promoted the breakaway effort, tempers have flared around the idea that a Trump presidency would try to stymie state Democrats, seen by many party members nationwide as a progressive vanguard on social and environmental issues. 

In a recent San Francisco speech before the American Geophysical Union, for instance, Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to press ahead with the state’s current climate policy regardless of what happens in Washington. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,” he said, according to the IBTimes. “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight.” 

Rough going. 

Despite the flurry of attention from Russia, Marinelli’s personal political reach in California was likely to remain limited. To date, his track record has been spotty. He “filed a handful of statewide ballot measures related to secession in 2015 and none qualified for the November ballot,” the Sacramento Bee recalled.  “He also waged an unsuccessful campaign to represent state Assembly District 80, but didn’t advance beyond the June primary.”

(James Poulos blogs for CalWatchdog.com where this perspective was originally posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EXPOSES NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL INFLUENCE—(Editor’s note: We decided to re-post this possible pay-for-play eye-opener for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a CityWatch kind of story and we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss it. We think that the flow of big dollars from developers to elected officials voting on their projects is a serious ethics violation and should be a violation of the law. And finally, we think the attention paid by Mr. Caruso to the Mid City Community Council was at the least interesting if not extraordinary. Neighborhood councils celebrate the 15^th anniversary of certification of LA’s council this month. NCs have come a long way.)

Real estate developer Rick Caruso has been a reliable benefactor at Los Angeles City Hall, giving donations big and small to the city’s politicians and their pet causes.

Caruso, known for the Grove and other shopping destinations, has donated to all but one of the city’s 17 elected officials. His charitable foundation provided $125,000 to a nonprofit set up by Mayor Eric Garcetti. And his companies recently gave $200,000 to the campaign for Measure M, the sales tax hike Garcetti championed in last month’s election.

Add in money from his employees and his family members, and Caruso-affiliated donors have provided more than $476,000 to the city’s elected officials and their initiatives over the past five years, according to contribution reports.

Now, Caruso wants Garcetti and the council to approve a 20-story residential tower on La Cienega Boulevard, on a site where new buildings are currently limited to a height of 45 feet. Opponents of the project view Caruso’s donations with alarm, saying the steady stream of contributions has undermined their confidence in the city’s planning process.

“I'm sorry, but that’s a lot of money,” said Keith Nakata, a foe of the project who lives roughly five blocks from the site. “That is obviously something that the community cannot compete against.” (Read the rest.)   

-cw

PLATKIN ON PLANNING-In previous CityWatch articles I have spelled out the many long-term and harmful consequences of bad planning. Yet, in Los Angeles truly bad city planning just keeps rolling along, in particular, repeated cases of City Hall decision-makers overriding legally adopted Community Plans and local zoning through speculator-friendly spot-zoning and spot-planning enabled by campaign contributions. 

While we wait for evidence that this bothers the decision makers, it clearly bothers the engaged public. In fact, this is why Los Angeles has had so many planning-related voter initiatives, lawsuits, and Sacramento legislative directives over the past half century. Furthermore, this push back against bad planning and the Big Real Estate interests behind it will continue as long as “legal corruption” is rooted out. 

To cite but one example, Los Angeles voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition U in 1986 to limit the size of commercial buildings. Now, 30 years later, in March 2017, they can bring Proposition U into the 21^st Century through Proposition S, also called the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. As frequently discussed at CityWatch, Proposition S will stop most spot-zoning and spot-planning, while also jumpstarting the update of LA’s General Plan, including the 35 Community Plans. 

An excellent example of spot-zoning and spot-planning in the cross hairs of Proposition S is close to where I live. It is the Caruso Affiliated project at 333 S. LaCienega, the site of former Loehman’s discount clothing store. Located at the “Bermuda Triangle” intersection of San Vicente Boulevard, Third Street, Burton Way, and LaCienega, it is one block south of the Beverly Center and one block west of the Cedar-Sinai Hospital. Now under appeal to the City Council, the City Planning Commission has already awarded this project six separate zoning and planning approvals.  If sustained, these bennies would permit the construction of a 240 foot high rise luxury apartment tower on a parcel whose current height limit is 45 feet. While height is certainly a problem with this project, it also has other serious problems that I highlight later in this article. 

But, first let’s examine how this malodorous project bulldozed its way through a City Council office, a neighborhood council, the Department of City Planning, and the City Planning Commission. Part of the answer is heavy lobbying, as described in another CityWatch article, “How Big Real Estate Manufactures Consent.”  But, a second part of their formula is masking the bad planning that pervades this and similar projects with the cheap perfume of “conditions of approval.” In this case, there are nearly 40 pages of approval conditions all neatly folded into this project’s two determinations.  

This is standard practice since nearly every case that the Department of City Planning handles, including those that the City Council later approves through lot specific ordinances, is weighted down by pages of conditions. Having written some of these determinations and read far more, I now believe that their real purpose of these many promises is to gain the support of community groups who do not like specific projects.   

Flaws in Conditions of Approval: There are, however, eight serious flaws in this Big Real Estate tactic, even though it often succeeds in convincing local planning light weights to begrudgingly support a project. 

1)  The conditions cost the developers very little. They are a tiny fraction of the budget for a major project, and I suspect some conditions also qualify as tax credits or deductions, including those that were added as promises to community groups. 

2)  Most of the conditions mitigate a project’s construction and operational impacts. They are, therefore, not true community benefits. Instead their ostensible role is to buy off opponents to controversial projects. 

3)  A project’s developer and his/her tenants also benefit from conditions to offer on and off-site improvements, such as tree planting.  The improvements spruce up projects, and therefore make them more appealing to potential tenants. 

4)  Some conditioned improvements, such as quasi-public fountains, can be used to offset L.A.’s one percent Public Arts fee.  

5)  Off-site improvements promised through conditions are minimal. They do not address the real infrastructure deficits in most of Los Angeles, including but hardly limited to sub-standard street trees, crumbling sidewalks, missing ADA curb cuts, dangerous pot-holes, thirsty grass in yards and parks, decrepit alleys, dangerous overhead wires, unsightly supergraphics and billboards, lax code enforcement, old and failing water mains, missing bicycle infrastructure, slow internet, and unreliable electric power. 

6) The only conditions that City Planning actually monitors are contained in alcohol permits (CUB’s). As for more powerful discretionary actions adopted through City Council ordinances -- such as Zone Changes and General Plan Amendments -- City Planning has no monitoring staff or procedures. 

7)  The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) also does not have any proactive procedures for enforcing these hundreds of conditions for hundreds of cases.  Like all code violations, it is up to local communities to submit complaints that approval conditions have not been complied with. But, as many Angelinos have slowly learned, these complaints are frequently ignored. In fact, this is why experienced residents resort to City Council interventions in order to get LADBS to finally move on code violations. 

8) Once a building is permitted and completed, there are no consequences for unmet conditions, such on and off-site improvements. In Los Angeles, buildings are not partially or wholly demolished when they fail to meet the building code, zoning code, or compliance with the conditions imposed on all discretionary zoning and planning actions. 

Considering these eight gaping loopholes, my conclusion is that the real purpose of conditions of approval is to assuage community opponents by offering mitigation to their complaints about major projects. It is to get them to approve an otherwise bad project when measured against legally adopted General Plan elements, Height Districts, and zones. 

In my next City Watch column, I will address explain why projects like 333 S. LaCienega are truly awful city planning. For now suffice it to say the following: 

• It sets an ominous precedent for future General Plan Amendments, Zone Changes, and Height District Changes.  If this project is successful, similar requests to build other new high-rise luxury projects in this area will methodically appear. 

• It does not comply with the legally required findings that the project be consistent with the scale and character of the neighborhood. As for scale, the projects will be 240 feet high and have a Floor Area Ratio (i.e., mass) of 6.0 on a lot where the height is restricted to 45 feet and the mass of a building is limited to an FAR of 1.5. As for compatible character, the proposed tower has a nautical architectural style, similar to a cruise ship, while most of the surrounding residential buildings have Spanish Revival design features. 

• It does not comply with the City Charter Section 555, which is clear that the City Council can adopt legislative actions, such as General Plan Amendments, “… provided that the part or area involved has significant social, economic or physical identity.” A parcel that is bequeathed spot-zoning because it allows a more lucrative project hardly has a distinctive and significant identify. 

• It has not demonstrated that there is such a shortage of lots zone for luxury apartments in the Wilshire Community Plan area that the City Council should require adopted zone changes to meet this need. 

• It purports to be a transit oriented project, but the nearest mass transit station – at Wilshire and LaCienega-- will be more than a half-mile from the tower, and the transit station will not open up until 2023. Furthermore, the proposed project has 24/7 on-call, chauffer driven luxury car service for all tenants, making it high unlikely that these high flyers will walk a half-mile to hop on the Purple Line subway to travel 

• It is located at one of the most congested intersections in Los Angeles. Called the Bermuda Triangle, the site is the convergence point of San Vicente Boulevard, Third Street, LaCienega Boulevard, and Burton Way. No combination of street signs, signal lights, and traffic officers have ever managed to keep this intersection clear. 

• It claims it needs large amounts of additional height and mass economic incentives to add new pedestrian oriented features, even though this part of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills has many pedestrian-oriented projects and corridors, with buildings that conform to plans and zones. 

(Dick Platkin is a veteran city planner. He reports on local planning issues for CityWatch, and he welcomes comments and questions at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

NOW AND FUTURE DRUG POLICY-As 2016 comes to a tumultuous end, we look back on the year in drugs and drug policy. It’s definitely a mixed bag, with some major victories for drug reform, especially marijuana legalization, but also some major challenges, especially around heroin and prescription opioids, and the threat of things taking a turn for the worse next year.

Here are the six biggest stories from the year on drugs: 

1. Marijuana legalization wins big. 

Pot legalization initiatives won in California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada, losing only in Arizona. These weren’t the first states to do so -- Colorado and Washington led the way in 2012, with Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C., following in 2014 -- but in one fell swoop, states with a combined population of nearly 50 million people just freed the weed. Add in the earlier states, and we’re now talking about around 67 million people, or more than one-fifth of the national population. 

The question is, where does marijuana win next? We won’t see state legalization initiatives until 2018 (and the conventional wisdom is to wait for the higher-turnout 2020 presidential election year), and most of the low-hanging fruit in terms of initiative states has been harvested, but activists in Michigan came this close to qualifying for the ballot this year and are raring to go again. In the meantime, there are the state legislatures. When AlterNet looked into the crystal ball a few weeks ago, the best bets looked like Connecticut, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont. 

2. Medical marijuana wins big. 

Medical marijuana is even more popular than legal weed, and it went four-for-four at the ballot box in November, adding Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota to the list of full-blown medical marijuana states. That makes 28 states -- more than half the country -- that allow medical marijuana, along with another dozen or so red states that have passed limited CBD-only medical marijuana laws as a sop to public opinion. 

It’s worth noting that Montana is a special case. Voters there approved medical marijuana in 2004, only to see a Republican-dominated state legislature gut the program in 2011. The initiative approved by voters this year reinstates that program, and shuttered dispensaries are now set to reopen. 

The increasing acceptance of medical marijuana is going to make it that much harder for the DEA or the Trump administration to balk at reclassifying marijuana away from Schedule I, which is supposedly reserved for dangerous substances with no medical uses. It may also, along with the growing number of legal pot states, provide the necessary impetus to changing federal banking laws to allow pot businesses to behave like normal businesses. 

3. Republicans take control in Washington. 

The Trump victory last month and looming Republican control of both houses of Congress has profound drug policy implications, for everything from legal marijuana to funding for needle exchange programs to sentencing policy to the border and foreign policy and beyond. Early Trump cabinet picks, such as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) to lead the Justice Department, are ominous for progressive drug reform, but as with many other policy spheres, what Trump will actually do is a big unknown. It’s probably safe to say that any harm reduction programs requiring federal funding or approval are in danger, that any further sentencing reforms are unlikely and that any federal spending for mental health and substance abuse treatment will face an uphill battle. But the cops will probably get more money. 

The really big question mark is around pot policy. Trump has signaled he’s okay with letting the states experiment, but Sessions is one of the most retrograde drug warriors in Washington. Time will tell, but in the meantime, the marijuana industry is on tenterhooks and respect for the will of voters in pot legal states and even medical marijuana states is an open question. 

4. The opioid epidemic continues. 

Just as the year comes to an end, the CDC announced that opioid overdose deaths last year had topped 33,000, and with 12,000 heroin overdoses, junk had overtaken gunplay as a leading cause of death. 

The crisis has provoked numerous responses, at both the state and the federal levels, some good, and some not. Just this month, Congress approved a billion dollars in opioid treatment and prevention programs. The overdose epidemic has also prompted the loosening of access to the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone and prodded ongoing efforts to embrace more harm reduction approaches, such as supervised injection sites. 

On the other hand, prosecutors in states across the country have taken to charging those who sell opioids (prescription or otherwise) to people who die of overdose with murder, more intrusive and privacy-invading prescription monitoring programs have been established, and the tightening of the screws on opioid prescriptions is leaving some chronic pain sufferers in the lurch and leading others to seek out opioids on the black market. 

5. Obama commutes more than 1,000 drug war sentences. 

In a bid to undo some of the most egregious excesses of the drug war, President Obama has now cut the sentences of and freed more than 1,000 people sentenced under the harsh laws of the 1980s, particularly the racially biased crack cocaine laws, who have already served more time than they would have if sentenced under current laws passed during the Obama administration. He has commuted more sentences in a single year than any president in history and more sentences than the last 11 presidents combined. 

The commutations come under a program announced by former Attorney General Eric Holder, who encouraged drug war prisoners to apply for them. The bad news is that the clock is going to run out before Obama has a chance to deal with thousands of pending applications backlogged in the Office of the Pardons Attorney. The good news is that he still has six weeks to issue more commutations and free more drug war prisoners. 

6. DEA gets a wakeup call when it tries to ban kratom. 

Derived from a Southeast Asian tree, kratom has become popular as an unregulated alternative to opioids for relaxation and pain relief, as well as withdrawal from opioids. It has very low overdose potential compared to other opioids and has become a go-to drug for hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. 

Perturbed by its rising popularity, the DEA moved in late summer to use its emergency scheduling powers to ban kratom, but was hit with an unprecedented buzzsaw of opposition from kratom users, scientists, researchers, and even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who authored and encouraged his colleagues to sign a letter to the DEA asking the agency to postpone its planned scheduling. 

The DEA backed off -- but didn’t back down -- in October, announcing it was shelving its ban plan for now and instead opening a period of public comment. That period ended December 1, but before it did, the agency was inundated with submissions from people opposing the ban. Now, the DEA will factor in that input, as well as formal input from the Food and Drug Administration before making its decision. 

The battle around kratom isn’t over, and the DEA could still ban it in the end, but the whole episode demonstrates how much the ground has shifted under the agency. DEA doesn’t just get its way anymore.

(Phillip Smith writes for AlterNet. This piece was posted most recently at TruthDig.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

THE REAL COST OF AMERICAN ED--"We could have hundreds of thousands of American seniors living in poverty due to garnished Social Security benefits if this trend continues," said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Montana. The federal government is garnishing Social Security checks to recoup unpaid student debt, leaving thousands of retired or disabled Americans below the poverty line and setting the stage for an even bigger problem, according to a new report. 

The data from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), compiled at the behest of Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), showed that people over the age of 50 are the fastest-growing group with student debt, outpacing younger generations -- and compared to younger borrowers, older Americans have "considerably higher rates of default on federal student loans." This leaves them open to having up to 15 percent of their benefit payment withheld, in what's called an "offset."  

In 2015, the GAO reported (pdf), the Department of Education collected about $171 million in defaulted student loan debt through Social Security offsets from 114,000 people, the majority of that from borrowers aged 50 or older and receiving disability benefits. About 38,000 were above age 64, and more than three-quarters of older borrowers took out the loans to cover their own education, rather than to pay for their children's schooling. The typical monthly offset was slightly more than $140. And more than 70 percent of the money collected through offsets went toward interest and fees, as opposed to the loan balance. 

"This report demonstrates just how draconian these Social Security offsets are and how there seems to be a failure at all sorts of levels of this policy," Persis Yu, the director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the Boston-based National Consumer Law Center, told MarketWatch. 

Meanwhile, the report states: "Older borrowers who remain in offset may increasingly experience financial hardship. Such is the case for a growing number of older borrowers whose Social Security benefits have fallen below the poverty guideline because the offset threshold is not adjusted for increases in costs of living." 

Indeed, the program -- which itself may be under threat from a Trump administration -- already hands out insufficient benefits, with the GAO noting that "a growing number of these older borrowers already received Social Security benefits below the poverty guideline before offsets further reduced their income." 

As shown in the chart below, this impacts tens of thousands of borrowers: 

In its report on the "disturbing" trend, the Washington Post noted: 

Some people have been granted financial hardship exemptions, while others have successfully applied for permanent disability discharge of their loans through the Education Department. But researchers at the GAO are critical of the agency's byzantine application process that puts borrowers at risk of falling back into garnishment. If people do not submit annual documentation to verify their income, their loans can be reinstated and the cuts can resume. 

In turn, Warren decried the tactics described in the report as "predatory and counterproductive."

"The hard-earned Social Security checks that are the sole source of income for millions of seniors should not be siphoned off to pay interest and fees on student loan debt," she said in a statement. "It's no wonder many Americans don't think Washington works for them: our government is shoving tens of thousands of seniors and people with disabilities into poverty through garnishment every year -- and charging them $15 every month for the privilege -- just so that the Department of Education can collect a little bit more interest and keep boosting the government's student loan profits." 

What's more, with Americans 65 and older seeing their total student loan debt grow by 385 percent since 2005, McCaskill warned that these numbers are merely "the tip of the iceberg of what may be to come." 

"We could have hundreds of thousands of American seniors living in poverty due to garnished Social Security benefits if this trend continues," she said, "and we shouldn't allow that to happen." 

Social Security Works and Student Debt Crisis, two non-profits working on different aspects of the burgeoning crisis laid out in the GAO's report, last year pledged to "always fight in solidarity with each other."

(Deidre Fulton writes for Common Dreams  … where this piece was first posted.) (Photo credit: Kate Gardiner/flickr/cc). Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

CONNECTING CALIFORNIA--California is trapped—caught in the dangerous space between two menacingly authoritarian regimes that want to fight each other.

One regime is headquartered in Beijing, and the other is about to take power in Washington D.C. But when viewed from the Golden State, it’s striking how much they have in common.

Both are fervently nationalist, full of military men, and so bellicose they are spooking neighbors and allies. Both, while nodding to public opinion, express open contempt for human rights and undermine faith in elections and the free press. Both promote hatred of minorities (anti-Tibetan and anti-Uighur stances in China; anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim stances in the U.S.).

And both regimes are captained by swaggering men (President Xi Jinping in China; President-elect Donald Trump in U.S.) who tend to their own cults of personality and pose as corruption fighters while using their power to enrich their own families.

Most frighteningly for Californians, both regimes seem to see advantage in escalating conflict with the other. Both leaders have encouraged hatred of the other’s citizens (Xi has embraced ultranationalists who compare American treatment of the Chinese to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, while Trump has called China a “deceitful culture”). The incoming American administration is threatening to raise tariffs and label China a currency manipulator, actions that would likely start a trade war. The Chinese administration is provoking confrontations in the South China Sea while the new American strongman embraces Taiwan—actions that could start a real war.

All this leaves California with the enormous challenge of navigating U.S.-China tensions in a way that protects our people, our economy, and our values. And that will require tricky diplomacy that doesn’t take sides, for we need to maintain relations with both regimes. After all, we live under the laws of the United States, but are irretrievably linked to China, a vital partner in the trade, culture, technology and education sectors that distinguish California in the world.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California. Our public universities rely both on federal funds from D.C. and top-dollar, out-of-state tuition fees from Chinese students to subsidize the education of Californians. So any Trump restrictions on foreign visitors—or retaliatory Chinese limits on overseas study and travel—could blow up the University of California’s business model. It also would damage the University of Southern California, the city of L.A.’s largest private sector employer, which heavily recruits Chinese students.

Our state’s signature industries—Silicon Valley and Hollywood—depend on consumers who live under both regimes. And our most promising ventures—from virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies to major developments (like the San Francisco Shipyards in Hunter’s Point, to just name one)—rely on our ability to bring together manufacturers, investors and technologists from China and the U.S. In a trade war, both regimes could decimate innovation and development with restrictions on foreign investments.

And with both regimes so quick to escalate nationalist rhetoric, it’s quite possible that both Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans in California could become targets of bigotry and hate crimes. Our housing market relies on Chinese buyers, who spend an estimated $9 billion a year on homes here. A backlash against Chinese investors buying homes (and using them only part of the year) could produce discrimination and hurt our housing market, which in turn would damage the already underfunded public schools our taxes support.

How then can California handle such a conflict?

First, by protecting our people (especially Californians of Chinese ancestry) and our institutional connections to China with the same fervor the California government is rallying to protect our undocumented immigrants against Trump’s threats of mass deportations. This California diplomacy will be especially hard given the hyper-sensitivity of the autocrats in Beijing and D.C. to the slightest of slights; just as Trump lashes out at Saturday Night Live parodies, Xi and his loyalists see the Kung Fu Panda films as American warfare against them.

A sustained conflict between China and the U.S. could produce all kinds of new restrictions on the flow of money and people, with devastating results for California.

And, second, by reminding both regimes—in friendly but firm ways—that we are opposed to conflict because the U.S. and China need each other more than they appear willing to acknowledge.

Californians who doubt this would do well to consult John Pomfret’s masterful new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. Pomfret, an American journalist long posted in China, employs telling details (the tea thrown into Boston Harbor was from Xiamen; an 1860s California attorney general campaigned against Chinese prostitutes while importing his own) to show how profoundly the two countries have shaped one other’s development, and just how vital their relationship has become to the world.

“The two nations have feuded fiercely and frequently, yet, irresistibly and inevitably, they are drawn back to one another,” he writes. “The result is two powers locked in an entangling embrace that neither can quit.”

California’s role in this difficult period should be to tell the story of its own deep ties to China, while serving as a model for a productive relationship, argues Matt Sheehan, author of the forthcoming book Chinafornia: Working with Chinese Investors, Immigrants and Ideas on U.S. Soil.

Sheehan, who also publishes the weekly Chinafornia Newsletter and provides communications consulting for Chinese and U.S. companies, says now is an important time for California officials and businesses to seek out areas of productive cooperation with Chinese counterparts, especially in areas like manufacturing and fighting climate change.

“I think of California as a living laboratory for a more practical, productive version of U.S.-China relations,” he says.

But not all collaborations with China would be helpful. Our technologies companies shouldn’t be aiding the U.S. surveillance state or assisting the Chinese government in suppressing human rights, as Facebook is reportedly doing by developing a newsfeed that would empower censors.

We also shouldn’t play to anti-Chinese prejudice, like some California unions have done in opposing trade agreements and advancing union organizing. One noxious—if ridiculous—example is a current push by the hotel workers’ union to block the sale of the Westin Hotel in Long Beach (where the union has an organizing campaign) to Chinese interests on grounds that it’s so close to that city’s port that Chinese ownership would threaten national security.

One possible model for California’s strategy going forward might be Anson Burlingame, whom President Lincoln dispatched to Beijing to represent the U.S. during the Civil War. Burlingame’s approach, as described by Pomfret, was to commiserate with the Chinese (we have our terrible rebellion with the South, you with the Taipings) as a basis for collaboration. His work ultimately produced the Burlingame Treaty, which banned discrimination against Chinese workers in America, welcomed Chinese students to U.S. educational institutions, and opened the way for Chinese immigrants to become American citizens.

Today, Burlingame’s accomplishments are mostly forgotten, but his name belongs to a highly desirable suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region boasting one of America’s most prosperous populations of Chinese Americans.

(Connecting California Columnist and Editor, Zócalo Public Square … where this column first appeared. Fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It (UC Press, 2010).)

-cw

WEALTH FORUMLA, PART ONE-The City of Los Angeles has intentionally destroyed the housing market and the result is devastating the entire city. Here we have a prime example of a City government that has so screwed up the Price System for housing that builders are constructing for a market segment in which there is a glut while ignoring the segment that has a shortage.

Developers have been misled into constructing high-end luxury apartments when the demand for that type of housing is falling. Since the City has a net exodus of Middle Class people over people who come here, more housing is available even if no one builds anything. The slight rise in LA’s population is due to the birth rate being higher than the number of people who move away or die. But newborns do not demand more houses and elderly Baby Boomers already have homes. Since people are not “taking their houses with them,” our housing supply is increasing. 

Housing costs, however, continue to escalate causing more people to move away, especially Family Millennials who should be the Number One segment of the population to stay here and demand more housing. 

Frauds in the Los Angeles Housing Market. 

With Family Millennials leaving in droves, why aren’t housing prices falling instead of constantly rising? What are the frauds that falsely deceive Angelenos into thinking there is a huge demand for housing, when in fact the demand is falling? 

For a short while, it was the securitization of residential rental income, but it appears that this scam was too much like the fraud that caused the Crash of 2008; financial institutions backed out of this folly. 

Although we know the City has been destroying rent-controlled units -- and this fact alone would cause an increase in homelessness, placing upward pressure on rents -- it does not explain the huge increase in the market segment that is over built: higher end apartments. 

While younger Millennials still in the Dorm Room Phase of life have been doubling and tripling up in order to rent over-priced apartments, there has still been a 12% glut of these units, per the City’s own data. Yet, rents have continued to increase between 2013 and 2016. The false reporting of alleged vacancy rates has misled people into believing that there is a housing shortage when there has been none. (In order to accurately report rents, they should have been adjusted “per person.” When three single people chip in to pay for a $2,000 apartment, the rent per person is actually lower than when one person pays $800 per apartment. Thus, on a per person basis, rents can be falling while the “per apartment” rents are increasing.) 

Belief is Stronger than Fact. 

Belief in a housing shortage is another reason for prices to increase year after year while demand decreases. People pay what they believe is the market rate. As in the 2000s, developers have continued to build under the misconception that there has been a housing shortage. 

Rental prices are generally provided by real estate companies motivated to keep rents high. Thus, their rental reports are usually based on what they advertise and not on the actual rents collected. Those who saw “The Big Short” will remember how no one was taking the time to go and actually look at all these new homes. When one guy did, he discovered that they were vacant and some people were buying three, four or five homes in the belief they could be flipped in an eternal up-market. Just as Wall Street made people believe there was a huge demand for homes, landlords have issued statistics that make people believe there is a shortage of apartments due to huge demand. 

The City of Los Angeles is heavy into this fraud. It keeps lying about the fantastic increases in Hollywood’s population. In April 2016, LA issued a report that the Hollywood population had jumped to 206,000 people and cited the Southern Association of Governments (SCAG) as its source. SCAG had no data about Hollywood population. 

Then, in October 2016, the City released an even more mythical figure: Hollywood’s population was 210,511 people at the end of 2015. Wow, that’s a lot of people, but people who had any memory knew that in April 2016 the City had said the population was only 206,000 people. Did the City lose 5,511 people in the first few months of 2016? Of course, since the City’s data is composed of Lies and Myths, no one should expect any of it to make any sense. 

There is nothing new Under the Sun. 

We have seen this phenomenon previously, prior to the Crash of 2008, when housing prices were rapidly increasing faster than the population was growing. Under the classic laws of Supply and Demand, a downturn in Demand generates reduced Supply as builders realize that the prices for which they can sell new homes will soon be substantially less than the cost to produce them. Yet, the housing market boomed in the face of falling demand – just as we see today. 

The boom-bust phases of the business cycle were an immutable fact until John Bernard Keynes wrote his General Theory in 1936. But after fools like Bill Clinton, the U.S. Congress and lastly Obama’s little Timmy Geithner exiled Keynes, we have reverted to the boom-bust phases. 

When the government fails to protect the Price System from fraud, no one knows what anything is worth. After Congress’ and Bill Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall and the legalization of Credit Default Swaps, massive fraud destroyed the Price System for homes. It turned out that demand for houses had been exhausted until we raised the productivity of more Americans. Rather than shift investment so that the middle and lower classes could become wealthier, Wall Street rigged the system so that people falsely believed there was this huge demand for residential housing. 

The residential housing market was similar to a Ponzi scheme in that the fraud required more and more putative home buyers in order to keep the scam afloat. In time, Ponzi-type schemes always end up demanding more buyers than there are people in the universe. 

The Formulas for Wealth. 

One need not know that PV = Rn / (1 + r)n and Ck = Rn / (1 + MEC)n are what I call the Wealth Formulas, (but most economists say “marginal efficiency of capital.”) Despite their formidable look, they simply mean that in order for a business to produce wealth, a business must sell its products for more than it costs to produce them. 

There is one vital addition -- time. Investments generate wealth over time. Thus, an important principle is not to destroy your business while it is still generating wealth. 

Since money is the abstraction by which we figure out what different things are worth, money is the great common denominator of everything a business uses to generate wealth. In other words, if a business person wants to provide for his family, he has to make certain that whatever he makes and sells costs the buyer more than it cost him or her to produce it. This is obvious, and I hope readers are saying, “Duh!” 

The Government’s Duty, LA’s Failure. 

While businessmen use these concepts daily, most people do not realize the government’s fundamental duty to make certain the formulas actually work. While defending the nation from aggression may be the government’s most important foreign function, protecting the economy is its most vital domestic duty. 

The government must make certain that the Price System accurately translates the value of different services and things into dollars. Without a way for a business person to know the value of an employee’s labor, the value of the building he or she rents for his or her business, or the value of the equipment he or she purchases so that his or her employees have the tools to manufacture the product, there is no way for the business person to calculate how much “wealth” his product will generate.  

When no one knows the value of goods and services, then no one wants to loan a business person any money, and he or she does not want to borrow any money lest he or she be unable to repay it. 

A failure of the Price System means poverty. A correctly functioning Price system means wealth. Thus, the role of all governments is to protect the Price System so that people make sound business decisions. 

The City of Los Angeles, however, is guilty of gross dereliction of duty in this regard. 

Conclusion of the ‘Wealth Formulas’ Part I. 

No one can faithfully serve two masters. The government’s proper role is to provide for the common welfare, not to be beholden to one segment of society. For too long, the City of Los Angeles has been owned by real estate developers. Thus, the City has no process to provide for the quality of life of Angelenos. 

The Planning Department has no section on macro-economics. No one knows Adam Smith from Adam West or John Maynard Keynes for a Keys Drug Store. As a result, housing prices are chaotic and we have thousands of units which no one wants, all while suffering a shortage of the type of housing people actually need. The lack of rent-control has swollen the homeless population, while the war against the single-family home has raised prices so high that we have driven away the emerging Middle Class. The situation is beyond critical and there is no reason to forecast any improvement.

(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

AND A PARTRIDGE IN A PALM TREE--I'm a typical American Jew--my tribe came up with most of the Christmas carols we love so much (we also came up with Superman and Batman ... so there!), and I just LOVE Christmas.  I love the lights, I love the spirit of giving and family togetherness, and I love the slowing down to just breathe a little.  I also appreciate the Christian spirituality, which really isn't so far removed from the rest of us. 

But as a father and husband, a transportation/planning advocate, and a pro-family advocate (and that includes kids!), I've got my own "wish list" for the twelve days of Christmas.  I could have gone for a Hannukah/Chanukah/Hanukkah (choose your favorite spelling) wish list, but that would only be eight days ... and what fun would that be when I could have twelve wishes instead: 

TWELVE parks for the City of Los Angeles--and I don't mean pocket parks, but rather BIG open spaces that is the size of about 1-2 blocks.  I'm spoiled by Mar Vista and Palms Parks, and I want a new one for each sector of the City, with a mega-big Downtown Central Park for the two districts serving most of the Downtown area (we could make this 13 for each district, right?) 

ELEVEN days of a rescheduled LAUSD school year that allows for a school year starting closer to Labor Day (NOT mid-August, you knuckleheads!), and/or allowing for a balanced school year with a two week (or perhaps 10-day) break in the spring combined with a smaller winter break.  The LAUSD Board promised a fix to all this, and then they lied to us by reneging on that promise. 

TEN Community Plans a year updated as is consistent with the Bylaws of the City of Los Angeles, to preserve single-family neighborhoods, place height limitations and direct moderate densification along our major commercial corridors to properly allow for an increased population.  No excuses! 

NINE redeveloped industrial zones to create jobs for Angelenos and other Southern Californians. Industrial isn't always ugly, and even if some folks believe it is, then the jobs those zones create will mitigate for that "ugliness". Not everyone is a lawyer who will work at home--people need middle-class, sustainable, and stable careers involved with manufacturing. 

EIGHT new transit lines to serve the Westside, the Eastside, the South Bay, the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, the Southeast Cities, the Harbor/San Pedro region, and Downtown regions. 

SEVEN more required years of work before any City, County, or State public worker can retire with full benefits--unless these workers have either saved more, given up vacation time, are physically unable to work or be retrained for other jobs demanding less physical labor.  Maybe we all "deserve" to retire in our mid-50's, but we can't afford to pay for pensions as we're doing now. 

SIX percent as the assumed earnings that public sector pension funds should presume before demanding that the taxpaying base be charged for the extra costs of pensions.  We're going broke, folks, and this isn't a game--unless city/county bankruptcies, and insufficient state funds to meet our budgetary requirements is something we all want to see more of. 

FIVE percent switching from our K-12 budget to our state college budget, in that our bloated, horrifically and tyrannically self-serving public education unions would have to live within their means while allowing taxpayers contributing to our UC and Cal State colleges a chance to affordably pay for their children to get a college education. 

FOUR new smart bus stations (not just benches or stops) each month for our most frequently-used bus connections to establish a roof/shelter, appropriate seating (or not) that doesn't encourage homeless encampments, advertisements for local neighborhood councils, LED announcements for when the next bus is coming, and with plug-in features for cellphones.  Bus riders deserve respect. 

THREE stories as the goal for our City (with the exception of Downtown and a few major commercial corridors) to focus on as the limit for housing projects to achieve affordable and desirable housing for our growing population.  Unless we're talking luxury high-rises, anything over three stories isn't a home...it's a crud-hole.  STOP it, overdevelopers and enabling politicians! 

TWO new county supervisors, and with a redistricting that allows for more appropriate representation for the geographies of our very large L.A. County...and knock it off, you racist cretins, if redistricting is something desired by ethnicity and not geography.  Our county and city is race-obsessed (a New Racism, if ever there was one) enough as it is. 

ONE new wonderful Neighborhood Integrity Initiative to pass in the spring to put the brakes on overdevelopment and require a legal and sustainable and environmentally-friendly development process in the City of the Angels. 

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Holidays and New Year to All!

(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D. is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties.  He is also a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at  [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)

-cw

IMMIGRATION POLITICS-Two weekends ago, in the working class city of Lynwood in southern Los Angeles County, hundreds of anxious immigrant rights activists packed into the banquet hall of a Mexican restaurant to discuss the next four to eight years under President Trump. Nanette Barragán, the district’s newly elected Congresswoman, proclaimed her intention to fight Trump tooth and nail on the harshest elements of his famously hardline immigration agenda, including his proposed border wall. However, Barragán continued, should President Trump and Republicans in Congress propose a bill that would “afford the protections we need,” she would consider it. In particular, she referenced a recently proposed bipartisan bill that would extend by another three years a temporary reprieve from deportation that the Obama administration granted in 2012 to immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. 

“I know the danger,” she told the crowd, describing relatives in Texas who had enrolled in the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. “It’s very personal to me.” 

This subpopulation of immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” occupies a special status in the moral outlook of many politicians and of much of the public when it comes to immigration enforcement and reform. Even among Republican politicians who see unauthorized immigration as a criminal act, there are those who regard the Dreamers, unlike their parents, as essentially blameless. The Dreamers have long offered one of the only slivers of potential compromise and agreement in Congress in what is arguably the most polarizing political issue in the country. 

Obama and congressional Democrats have reached for this bipartisan brass ring repeatedly, introducing the Dreamers’ namesake bill, the Development, Relief, and Education for Minors (DREAM) Act, which would legalize the Dreamers’ status, four times over Obama’s two terms. In characteristic fashion, however, the president always counterbalanced his embrace of the Dreamers with an enormous concession to his hardliner adversaries: the erection and implementation of the most aggressive deportation regime the country has ever seen. 

The impact of this bargain on undocumented immigrants has been almost exclusively negative. The DREAM Act has yet to pass Congress; Obama’s support for it, and for immigration reform generally, remains theoretical. The millions of deportations his administration has overseen, on the other hand, are anything but that. 

If the privileging of certain classes of immigrants over others has served the undocumented population poorly under Obama, it’s likely to get much worse under President Trump. With the president-elect just a few weeks away from assuming office, California’s Democratic lawmakers have been pushing a slate of bills at the state, county and city levels to insert a layer of protection between federal law enforcement and the state’s undocumented immigrants. One of those bills is designed to move the debate over immigrant rights away from what its proponents characterize as a false dichotomy between those who deserve protections and those who do not, by extending guaranteed legal counsel -- non-citizens are not currently entitled to an attorney by right -- to every person in a deportation proceeding, regardless of their background. 

“If we create a system where we’re providing representation for some categories of people because we consider them ‘deserving,'” Emi MacLean, (photo left) an attorney with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network told me, “we’re just reinforcing this really hateful, fear-mongering rhetoric of the incoming Trump administration.” MacLean’s group is pushing the measure at the city and county level in Los Angeles. In the face of the full frontal attack that immigrants expect will follow Trump’s inauguration, MacLean believes that the proper strategy is to lock arms and allow no one to be thrown under the bus. 

Obama’s line on deportations, outlined in a 2014 speech, is that his administration targets “felons, not families.” Rhetorically, it’s a distinction with obvious appeal: Who in the world likes felons and doesn’t like families? But procedurally, immigrant advocates say, it has been used as an excuse to deny due process to a broad cross-section of people who do not conform to what Democrats have long held up as the types of immigrants that deserve priority protection, such as college-bound Dreamers, undocumented parents of U.S. citizens who have lived here for decades, or undocumented immigrants who have served in the military. 

In practice, the “felons” label is boundlessly elastic. It can mean summary deportation for an immigrant with a drug charge from more than two decades ago for which he has already served time. It can cover a grandmother accused of being a gang member by a single police officer on the basis of essentially no evidence whatsoever. It can include an old DUI or marijuana charge, or a citation for street vending without a license. Or based on no criminal history at all, or on a criminal record whose only offense is illegal entry or re-entry, which as a basis for priority deportation creates a circular argument. According to a recent study by the Marshall Project, those last two categories made up 60 percent of the 300,000 deportations that have been carried out since Obama first made his “felons, not families” speech. 

Obama’s good immigrant vs. bad immigrant language, MacLean believes, helped usher in Trump’s vilification of all undocumented immigrants. During the presidential debates, she pointed out, Trump noted that his proposed policies merely followed practices put in place by Obama. “Obama’s rhetoric of ‘we’re going to deport felons, not families’ created the mentality and the reality that we’re living today,” she told me, “where our president-elect, in his initial speech announcing his candidacy, talked about Mexicans coming into the United States as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals.’” 

Trump has already proclaimed that there are between two and three million immigrants with criminal records who he will instruct Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport immediately upon taking office. By comparison, Obama has deported about that number of immigrants -- 2.5 million -- over the course of eight years. That was more deportations than any other president in history, and more than all of the presidents of the 20th century combined.  

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa believes that Trump’s figure is a red herring that indicates just how broad a net he plans to cast over the undocumented population. After addressing the Lynwood meeting, while walking from storefront to storefront, chatting in Spanish with their patrons about his gubernatorial campaign, Villaraigosa told me there is “no evidence” that there are two to three million undocumented immigrants in the United States with criminal records. The real number, he claimed, is closer to 800,000. Trump’s invocation of the larger number, he told me, indicates to him that the president-elect plans to go “far, far beyond” merely focusing on immigrants who pose a legitimate public safety threat. 

One immigration attorney told me that two to three million seemed to her to be a reasonable estimate of the number of immigrants already “in the system” -- through arrests and convictions, but also through DACA enrollments and asylum requests and old removal orders that were ignored or never made it to their recipients in the first place -- who the government can track down and deport without much trouble. If you’re an undocumented immigrant or an asylee and you’ve ever been fingerprinted for any reason, she explained, the federal government has your biometric data and probably a paper trail to your residence. There’s no “hiding in the shadows” under such circumstances. Trump’s two to three million priority deportation cases, then, may have nothing to do with criminal status; they’re just ICE’s low-hanging fruit. As under Obama, the “criminal” label is just an excuse to expedite deportations with a minimum of judicial oversight. 

The distinction between “felons” and “families” has already been stretched to the point of legal farce under the Obama administration. If undocumented immigrants are to have any protection from deportation under Trump, many immigrant rights advocates are convinced, it is incumbent upon Democratic-controlled states like California to undermine what has become a tool for summary deportation by purging contrasts between “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants from their own laws and policies. 

Yesterday morning, in the administration building named after her father, Janice Hahn settled into her seat, alongside her colleagues on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, to hear more than 100 members of the public speak in favor of, or in opposition to, a measure Hahn helped write. The measure, co-written with Supervisor Hilda Solis, Obama’s former Labor Secretary, would pitch county money into a $10 million legal defense fund, jointly financed by the county, the city and private donors, to provide attorneys to immigrants in deportation proceedings. 

Similar funds are being considered in San Francisco and New York City, and a smaller fund has already been put into place in Chicago. In Sacramento, a bill is moving through the California legislature that would create a legal fund at the state level. 

Stripped of power in Washington D.C., Democrats have embraced these rear-guard actions in an effort to defend their communities, proactively or desperately, depending on your point of view, against the expected deportation onslaught from the Trump administration. In California, the bill before the state, which is entitled “Due Process for All,” makes no distinction between immigrants’ criminal histories in determining who is eligible to make use of the fund -- a victory for immigrant rights advocates who aspire to let the divisive “felons, not families” rhetoric fade into oblivion. 

At the Board of Supervisors meeting, the city attorney, a Los Angeles school district board member and a spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Garcetti voiced their enthusiastic support for Hahn and Solis’ measure. It passed by a 4 to 1 vote. 

The language determining the allocation of the funds, however, has yet to be written. If it mimics the state version, California will be on its way to codifying into its laws a unanimous commitment to extending a universal right to due process to all undocumented immigrants, regardless of past arrests, convictions or allegations by the police. It would send a strong message of solidarity at a moment when division could prove catastrophic to millions of the state’s residents. 

If it instead adopts the language of the Obama administration, allocating the right to legal counsel only to certain groups of immigrants deemed more worthy of protection than others, that solidarity could unravel. Immigrants have seen what the results of that division have been under a Democratic administration. Under President Trump, they can only imagine.

(Leighton Woodhouse is a Los Angeles journalist, filmmaker and graphic designer whose work has appeared in the New Republic, the Intercept, Gawker, VICE News, the Nation, Salon and the Awl. His latest feature documentary is Trumpland. This piece was originally posted at Capital& Main.)  Photos by Leighton Woodhouse.

Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.