CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH-As the Sol Price School of Public Policy noted a few years ago, Los Angeles has ceased to be a growth city and the little population increase will be from the number of births exceeding deaths and number of people who leave. The City is also experiencing a net exodus of more people leaving LA than are coming to Los Angeles. The City has lost more employers than any other urban area and the most affluent portion of the middle class, the professionals and business service workers, have ranked Los Angeles as #60 on the list of desirable places to live. Foreign investment from Russia is shrinking since Putin clamped down on money leaving the country, and China and Brazil are similarly experiencing an economic slow-downs. As a result, less foreign money is looking for Los Angeles real estate in order to launder the money which they have liberated from their homelands.
The worse news for Los Angeles is that Family Millennials are like prior generations. When they age out of the “dorm style” of living, they want detached single family homes with yards and fruit trees. Overwhelmingly, they are done with the high rise in Transit Oriented Districts [TODs], especially in cities with atrocious school systems like LAUSD which ranks near the bottom of the industrialized world. Since the peak millennial birth year was 25 years ago, they are increasingly entering into the family-rearing phase of their generation, while there are substantially fewer young Millennials in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, however, has followed a housing pattern where we have fewer single family homes just as the number of Family Millennials is increasing, but the city insists on constructing more dorm room style high rises. On paper, these small units look financially beneficial to the developer – until he finds out that he cannot rent the apartments or sell the condos. Garcetti’s perennial subsidizing of his developer buddies with billions of tax dollars has resulted in a glut of these higher end, highly dense apartments and condos.
As a result, Los Angeles has hit upon a brilliant plan. They will tear down the homes of poor people in order to manufacture a homeless crisis and then tell people that they can rid their neighborhoods of the homeless by passing a $1.2 billion bond measure to construct homes for the homeless. (For some reason, homeowners do not understand that a bond is actually a tax on their property – they are not getting a free ride on someone else’s back.)
But where do we put the homes for the homeless? Under JJJ developers can be given the $1.2 billion to sprinkle affordable units among their luxury units. In this way, the money homeowners will be paying to help the homeless will go to subsidize the dense projects that are making Los Angeles unliveable.
The money from Measure M promises to construct subways and fixed rail systems. Thus, when it is pointed out that we cannot increase the number of bedrooms in the Valley, they respond that people from the Valley can take the subway beneath Sepulveda Pass to the Westside office towers in the Century City-Westwood-Santa Monica triangle.
Since Valley people have to live within ½ mile of a subway station before they will use it, the Valley will be filled with extra-high density apartment complexes near the subway stations. However, the Family Millennials are abandoning DTLA and Hollywood due to traffic and residential congestion. So why would they move to the Valley to replicate the same unpleasant conditions, only in a place that is hotter, with considerable longer commute time?
As mentioned in previous articles, NYC runs an $8 billion annual deficit for its subways and fixed-rail lines over and above the cost to construct them. Thus, Measure M promises to increase the City’s annual operating deficit by billions of dollars per year. If we try Washington D.C.’s ploy and do not maintain the subways, then we too will end up having to close the system until repairs are made. Meanwhile, the pension costs due to the additional public employees hired by Metro will make today’s pension woes look like the good old days.
So, what is likely to happen as the City continues to deteriorate due to our increasing density which drives away the middle class tax base? It is likely that when many homeowners see the handwriting on the wall, they will realize that it is smart to sell their Los Angeles home for $900,000 and purchase a better one in Texas for only $325,000. There is also Tennessee, and Colorado, Utah, and Arizona and much of the South where the living favors the middle class family.
How long will Angelenos hold on to their high priced homes in a declining market while knowing the costs in the Austin-Antonio corridor, for example, will be only be increasing. We know where the good jobs will be: the places where the middle class can find the best quality of life. Los Angeles ranks in the bottom 10 of areas which offer the best quality of life for the middle class [Chapman University, 2015, Building Cities for People). That is the reason Los Angeles has become an exodus city.
How Long Will Lies and Myths Deceive Angelenos?
The capacity of Angelenos to believe what they are told rather than what they can see is prodigious. Angelenos have known for decades that spending billions on subways and fixed rail transit has coincided with longer commute times and not “15% less freeway time” which Garcetti promised in this deceptive and misleading TV ads.
Judge Goodman and Judge Chalfant told Angelenos in 2014 and 2015 that the city uses false data to justify its decisions. Judge Goodman called this “fatally flawed data” and “wishful thinking,” i.e. Lies and Myths. The Mayor has no shame in his Lies and Myths. The April 2016 Notice of Preparation for the new Hollywood Community Plan said that Hollywood’s population was 206,000 people in 2015, based on SCAG data. SCAG data, however, placed the population at only 204,700 people and that high figure was at odds with a proven annual loss of 12,000 people between 2000 and 2010. Then in November 2016, Garcetti announced that the Hollywood 2015 population was estimated at 210,511 people. Really? Hollywood’s population increased by 4,500 people between April and November 2016? Angelenos are excessively gullible.
Trying to make sense of data which is actually “Lies and Myths” is a fool’s chore. Until Garcetti can lock Angelenos behind the city gates at night to prevent them from leaving, the exodus will accelerate. Tuesday’s election successes of Measures JJJ, HHH and M have hastened the day when the middle class exodus from LA may rival Cecil B. DeMille’s exodus of Jews from Pharaoh’s Egypt.
(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.
The Passage of Measures M, JJJ, and HHH will Hasten the LA Exodus
