I Want My McMansion
The sickness known as anti-mansionization, reported on by both our own Joe Mailander and the folks at CurbedLA, has spread deep to the City Clowncil.Here's a word to the NIMBY, CAVE and BANANA crowd: you might figure out ways to shut down Home Depots or hospitals but you have no right to tell people what kinds of homes they can live in.
Amazingly, in an LA Times article about a City Council plan that will surely be overturned by a court, Jack Weiss sounds positively libertarian.
Interesting too that the "anti-mansionization" movement contains anti-Semitic, anti-Persian and anti-Asian overtones. You could read more about it at Wikipedia.
By the way, the home in the photo above is that of KFI's Bill Handel, who certainly worked his way up to the place in life to afford such a home. Good for him. That is what it's all about right?
Labels: banana, bill handel, cave, los angeles politics, mc mansions, nimby
Posted by Mayor Sam @ 12/12/2007 12:11:00 AM
10 Comments:
Bill Handel refers to his house as a "Persian Palace". Why does Mayor Sam always try to drag dirt into his topics? If you had a decent argument,
it would not be necessary.
"They'll stop me from building a McMansion, when they pry the plans from my cold, dead hands"
Private property exists in a city in conjunction with public space and civic services. In almost all cases, private property has public profile. Hundreds of people share a street every day, even the quietest street.
You can do whatever you want to a house without an address, or a house that isn't on a City street, but as long as a home is on a City street, it has a public profile, and the City has a right to its say regarding its public face.
The average building in Los Angeles is there for over thirty-five years, and often many more, which means whatever is built there is stuck there for a long time. The City must provide the services, serve and protect the citizens through that period and indeed into perpetuity. It has a right to enormous input regarding what kind of development can take place on a a given street, especially on matters of street elevation profile.
As it happens, in Los Angeles, the Planning Department has historically taken far less aggressive measures to protect the public's interest than most major American cities have.
What happened to the photo of Handel's gaudy palace?
Actually that Handel house doesn't look so bad but I bet his couches have plastic covers.
People can live wherever they want, Mayor.
But they can't build whatever they want, wherever they want.
Apples and oranges, dumbass.
Isn't Handel's brother that mega-developer BIll Handel who's made a name for himself building McMansions all up in the down the N.E Valley?
Archive:
http://mayorsam.blogspot.com/2005/11/firms-gave-thousands-for-building-dept.html
Handel's Brother Mayor Sam Archive
Handels brother is also the lowlife trying to put 299 condos on the Verdugo Hills Golf course.
Bill Handel's mansion is a bad example, Mayor Sam - doesn't prove your point at all. His lot's square footage is is 49,000 and and his house's is 8,000. That's over 6 sq ft of land for every 1 sq ft of house.
It's just a plain-old mansion (although possibly a gaudy one), not a McMansion.
No doubt Mayor Sam's little anti Anti-McMansion tirade has little to do with actual big ugly homes and more to do with yet another supposed anti-eminent domain measure. While it appears on the surface to be something most Americans can get behind - eliminating the government's ability to snatch homes for spurious public usage - buried in that little measure is the ability to completely eliminate rent control. Mayor Sam and his GOP rich boys would love to see everyone without a $150,000/yr paycheck - or, as is the case with so many pussy Republicans, mommy & daddy's money - be forced to leave the city, the county, then the state.
Well, be careful what you wish for, little boys. You could get the Howie Rich version of "don't tell me what I can do with my property" law, which basically states a person can put up anything they want. ANYTHING. Like a luxury hotel - yes, right in the middle of your block. Or an auto body shop. A strip club. Even a pig farm. There wouldn't be a thing any of you could do to stop your neighbor's from putting a McDonald's next to your house unless the city agreed to pay the property owner what he/she estimates they'd have earned from the alternate usage. So you either get cities with zero planning and environmental review with business, farms, junkyards etc in the middle of neighborhoods - or you bankrupt the city with the thousands of lawsuits settled out of court.
Funny how Republicans want to dictate what I do with my body but don't think government should have a say in how a city should operate. Freaks.
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