Los Angeles community leaders and activists today are celebrating the kickoff of the Coalition to Preserve L.A. campaign to gather the signatures needed to put the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative on next March’s ballot.
City Hall and the real estate industry’s biggest players hate it. But the initiative is intended to reform the broken and corrupted building-approval system in Los Angeles, said Jill Stewart, campaign spojkesperson.
The system has been fueling an overdevelopment frenzy that is choking streets with traffic, displacing families from affordable housing, upsetting stable neighborhoods and paving over the environment.
About 65,000 signatures of registered voters are needed for the measure to qualify for the ballot. Copies of the petition will be available the event for circulation.
The measure will not affect the hundreds of development projects — and the construction jobs they create — that respect local community plan guidelines.
Responsible, community-sensitive projects have nothing to fear, a spokesperson for the initiative said. Nor will the initiative impact multi-family projects that are 100 percent affordable. What will face a tough time when the initiative is approved are the kinds of giant, rule-bending projects now recklessly swamping neighborhoods with their impacts.
This morning’s launch was in the Elysian Valley-Frogtown neighborhood, on the banks of the Los Angeles River, is an older community, home primarily to Latino working class families. In recent years it has attracted growing number of artists.
Frogtown is now the planned site of a high-end, 117-unit townhome-style project. Many Frogtown residents see the so-called Blake Avenue Riverfront Project as an extreme example of the worst kind of insensitive development, engineered by well-heeled, absentee real estate investors. They fear the development’s aluminum-clad units — selling for almost a quarter-million dollars a piece — will signal the destruction of Frogtown’s unique character and housing affordability.
Mr. Schwada may be contacted at john.schwada@gmail.com
Jill Stewart and her group came to Frogtown yesterday and misconstrued pretty much everything. For those of us who live here we were very insulted. She called out the prior Neighborhood Council as corrupt and pro development. Nothing farther from the truth. A hard working group of local residents along with Councilmember O’Farrell succeeded in passing a neighborhood protective change. It was done in record time. The project she targeted did not have an special back door permissions at all. In fact, it produces less units than allowed, voluntarily restricted height, gave community spaces and paths to the river. It seems that Jill cares more for fanfare than facts. Here we have a case of a”community activist” coming into a community to accuse activist of ill-doing who who have actually succeeded at exactly what she claims to wants to do.
How far off the mark could she be? Well, I guess that depends on the intent. Sadly, Jill learned about Frogtown largely from her interactions with a group called “FROG.” She publicly communicated with the group through facebook (though she has since removed her posts…) You can see some of their rhetoric here where FROG puts a swastika on Mayor Garcetti’s face. https://www.facebook.com/283789435114529/photos/a.283794398447366.1073741827.283789435114529/461996177293853/?type=3&theater
Really Jill is this what you are stooping to? You failed to your research on the issues and history in Frogtown. You increasingly look like a busy-body who shares a characteristics with the worst of developers. You came to take something from Frogtown (publicity) but gave nothing back… just like a carpetbagger developer.
I was interested in this initiative but am now convinced that it would be horrible for Los Angeles.