On the same day it launched a front-page newspaper ad blitz, the Coalition to Preserve L.A. released a poll showing 70 percent of L.A. voters support its ballot measure to fix the broken system that fuels L.A.’s overdevelopment crisis.
“This poll shows that City Hall’s push for heavy new development from Venice to Boyle Heights, from Los Feliz to Valley Village, is wildly out of step with voters,” said Jill Stewart, The Coalition is the sponsor of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative ballot measure.
The phone survey of more than 300 likely voters showed that 70 percent back the measure. The survey was conducted in the last week of March. The Coalition is seeking to have its initiative on the March 2017 ballot.
Meantime, the initiative already has begun to shake up City Hall.
Mayor Garcetti yesterday unveiled a development reform plan meant to steal the initiative’s thunder and confuse voters. “The mayor’s plan only validates what we’ve been saying all along – the system is broken,” said Michael Weinstein, chief architect of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. “It’s like City Hall is now saying it wants to sort of shut the barn door on development. But a lot of the animals already have gotten out. Unfortunately our elected leaders have not been on top of this at all.”
The Garcetti plan falls far short of offering the real reform needed to fix the city’s broken building approval system, Ms. Stewart added.
Voters know the City Hall system makes developers wealthy while “causing serious collateral damage to regular people and their neighborhoods,” said Grace Yoo, Koreatown attorney and community activist. “Voters also know our initiative is the right medicine to fix it.”
Ms. Yoo has been an outspoken opponent of a proposed 27-story luxury building that would dwarf its Koreatown neighbors. The project has been called “wildly inappropriate” by a city Planning Commissioner (the commission voted unanimously against it) but Mayor Garcetti and City Council president Herb Wesson have kept it alive. “This project has killed off rent-stabilized units,” said Ms. Yoo, referring to housing that already had been demolished to make way for the proposed luxury building. “Twenty-thousand rent-stabilized units have been lost to developers in recent years. We can’t afford to lose more.”
Yudy Machado, a Miracle Mile property manager, said developers in her neighborhood constantly hound small landlords to sell their charming four-plexes “so they can put up something much bigger and double and triple the rents.” Machado successfully fought a huge project when she was on the Mid-City West Community Council three years ago and is ready to fight again. “What’s going to happen to our neighborhoods if these developers get their hands on everything?” she feared. “I see a disaster coming if we can’t stop this with the initiative.”
Today, sticky ads promoting the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative appeared on the front page of the L.A. Times. The colorful ads, appearing through Sunday, are entitled “City Hall for Sale,” “Income Inequality: L.A. Style,” “Developer Greed Is Choking L.A.” The first of the ads appeared today. It quotes a passage from a Times editorial: “There’s a perception that the [zoning] system is at best inept, at worst corrupt.”
The so-called sticky or “post-it” note ads are pasted on the top right-hand corner of the Times.
Ms. Stewart said the initiative is needed to stop Los Angeles’ neighborhoods from being wrecked by the real-estate industry, absentee investor-speculators and the City Hall politicians who enable irresponsible building projects. “Developers and the politicians – who are too often compromised by the gifts and campaign money they get from real estate industry sources – are the very last people who should be deciding L.A.’s destiny but that’s what we’re seeing happen,” she said.
Mr. Schwada may be contacted at john.schwada@gmail.com
