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THE VIEW FROM HERE - The father is the thought of the deed, but none of LA’s high and mighty have any coherent thoughts for the city’s recovery. The Palisades fire is a symptom of the decades of corruptionism, e.g., Garcettism , which has ruined Los Angeles. Today, the same corruption of city government will make certain there is no improvement. Rather, recovery will make the situation worse, while those in charge make billions of dollars.
As has been described for decades in CityWatch and other places, Los Angeles city government is fatally corrupt. See When Pigs Fly The dangers of densification were identified over one hundred years ago when the city civil engineers published the landmark “Study of Street Traffic Condition in the City of Los Angeles.” It’s difficult to read today because people want every thing 15 second sound bites, but those who actually care about how Los Angeles has gone so terribly wrong should take the time to go through The Study . Page 38 is crucial but it requires one to think about its implications.
“N]o municipality is justified in adopting a policy which would tend to retard the removal of business centers to their natural geographical location. Such a policy would be nothing less than a deliberate exploitation of civic resources for the benefit of the limited number of property owners enjoying abnormal incomes from rental privileges . . . “ The Study p 38
Translated into a meme, “densification is death.” Densification serves one purpose, to make the landowners wealthier. The saying that “land should be put to the highest and best” use is most insanely absurd statement ever made about real estate. Those modern readers who take the time to read and study The Study will understand why densification is a civic evil. When the powerful purchase the government, as has happened in Los Angeles, the purpose of government is to densify the city wherever possible so that wealth flows upwards to developers and ultimately to Wall Street.
Once again, Newgeography explains how densification is ruinous to the city in its January 21, 2025 article Smart Growth Burns Thousands of Homes. Densification has also brought LA its Homeless Crisis by destroying tens of thousands of poor people’s homes and replacing them with super dense projects. Every time a property sells for its Developer Value, that value goes into the Comps for nearby properties. Since Developer Value is always higher than Living Value, each sale pushes up sales prices. A key factor pushing up land values for apartments was the Costa Hawkins Act which forbid any property built after 1979 to have rent control. Thus, developers bought older properties and rather than rehab them, they destroyed them so that their new denser projects could charge high rents. By destroying the stock of RSO apartments and modest single family homes for poor people, the Manhattanization Mania under Garcettism made tens of thousands people homeless with no alternative housing. Because an owner of a rent control (RSO) unit knew he could sell his land to a developer for the Developer Value, landlords let their properties fall into disrepair and used a variety of illegal methods for force the poor to vacate.
The gullible public bought the Big Lie that homelessness was the result of failure to build when its cause was the destruction of poor people’s homes. As Newgeography shows, the same densification policy was applied to wealthy areas of Los Angeles by preventing construction of homes and business to expand outward as the population grew. Those, who take the time to read, understand, and think about The Study, will realize that Los Angeles has been run by a criminal enterprise designed to maximize the profits of developers and Wall Street.
Garcettism Has Come Home to Roost
In 2001 when Garcetti was first elected to city council, Los Angeles was the nation’s most desirable destination location, but by 2010, Los Angeles was the least desirable location and Garcetti’s CD 13 had lost so many residents and businesses that it ceased to qualify as the legal council district. Los Angeles’s traffic congestion went from bad to the nations’ worst to the world’s worst. Other cities who followed similar corrupt densification policies were always vying with LA for the title “world’s worst traffic.” The disaster which has become Los Angeles is no longer unique. It has been recreated in Australia and even Canada. Along with his Woke DEI insanity, Justin Trudeau’s densification policies are the main reasons Trudeau resigned. BTW over densification and Woke DEI go hand in hand.
As mentioned in the prior CityWatch article, LA new councilmember for CD 2, Adrin Nazarian, has taken on one of the frauds which has inflated the detached home market in Los Angeles i.e., Wall Street’s cornering the detached housing market after the crash of 2008. The attack on single family homes is the nexus between Developers and Wokeism. Both want to turn Los Angeles from a homeowner society into a renter society. In a renter society, all rents flow to Wall Street and the renters gain zero equity. Yep, DEI says Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion but in practice it means No Equity. The number one proponents of densification of R-1 neighborhoods are CD 4 councilmember Raman and Judge David Carter, whom the federal appellate court smacked down a few years back. Read Woker Judge Carter’s Comeuppance Wokers are true believers that Whites and Jews are the cause of all of society’s ills and detached homes are one of the ways in which Whites and Jews keep Blacks poor. (I did not say Wokeism is sane, which is why the appellate court chastised Woker Carter.)
The long and short of trying to rebuild Los Angeles is that the same corruptionism which we called Garcettism exists today as the Developer Woker Alliance and they lack any ideas how to improve the qualify of life of Angelenos. Their agendas are (1) to funnel as much LA wealth upwards to Wall Street through constant and incessant densification and (2) to make Los Angeles into a renter society wholely dependent upon the government. No member of the Developer Woker Alliance has a single idea, or desire, to improve Angelenos’ qualify of life. The wildfires are merely another opportunity to transfer more wealth from the average Angeleno to the 1%.
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him)
