It will clean up City Hall
City Hall is handing out runaway “spot-zoning” exemptions to luxury developers to build whatever they desire, wherever they desire to build it. The result: standstill traffic, environmental damage, pay-to-play tactics and skyrocketing rents.
As a two-term mayor of Los Angeles, I speak from a place of both experience and deep concern for our city. The current political environment is rife with corruption and backroom deals servicing land speculators and luxury housing developers over the needs of citizens.
If passed, Measure S will give the decision-making process back to the people. It will make City Hall work for us, not for the developers, special interests and lobbyists.
Specifically, it will preserve neighborhoods by preventing developers from building as big as they want. It will ban developers from writing their own environmental reports, an indisputable conflict of interest. It will stop pay-to-play dealing between developers and city leaders. It will move key planning hearings out of downtown and into communities. It will set a two-year moratorium on backroom deals that ignore local zoning. And it will require the city, with input from residents, to update the languishing, decadesold collection of community plans as well as the city’s general plan, which the City Council quietly voted to stop updating in 2005.
City officials and urban planners claim we have a housing crisis. They created it by fixating on the needs of global and national developers whose motives run contrary to sensible planning. City Hall has stood idly by while 22,000 affordable apartments have been lost since 2000, pushing out an estimated 60,000 people.
Voters should understand that Measure S will halt for two years only outsized projects that would ignore local zoning. It does not stop 95% of developments that play by the rules, and it encourages developers to build affordable housing.
Measure S will also help to address our homeless problem. Over the last 10 years of the city’s luxury development frenzy, Central L.A. has lost one-third of its properties for the homeless. Previously, we had more than 9,000 affordable single-room units. Today we have only 3,500. Mayor Eric Garcetti, the City Council and greedy developers do not acknowledge that this is one of many of the detrimental consequences of breaking our planning and land-use rules.
Our population growth is moderate and manageable, at about 1.3% annually. But with growth comes conflicts in almost every area I can think of — traffic, jobs, environmental impacts, education and housing, among many others.
Measure S is an opportunity to decide how the city should move forward. Do we want to continue allowing rule-breaking developers to do as they please? I don’t think so. Los Angeles is better than this.