Sunday Morning Mimosa

Happy new year, baby!

Joseph Mailander a guy in la • elsewhere • email

To be a Writer you have to be a good reader, so it may take a while for the Writers to read the deal points and formally end the strike, even though the NYTimes reported a "tentative deal" last night. It won't be over until Nikki Finke says it's over anyway, so check her for any updates. You have to give her extra points for calling Joel Stein an "unreadable humor columnist."

In the Downtown News, Anna Scott chronicles all the baseline-level affordable housing projects in the downtown containment zone. They pencil out at between $190,000 a unit and $290,000 a unit. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that $190,000 pays a $633 rent for twenty-five people for ten years (much more if you let it garner interest through that time), thereby servicing twenty-five times the people that will be served by this housing. But urban planners call the baseline-level developers "progressive"---because they turn the housing into a lottery and with their tony architects drive rents around the shiny new projects a little higher.

Steve Lopez says on the surface it's Hillary's experience, but suggests it's also the fact that she ain't black, that curried such favor for her in the Spanish speaking Latino community. But the copy ed waffles in the headline.

The Daily News had the best reporting of the felled SWAT officer, and now they examine the way police departments from LA and the City of San Fernando are sharing resources and personnel. The cops on the periphery are teaming with LAPD gang unit officers from Foothill and Mission.

DWP raises rates. Don't we do that story every six months or so? "I think of this as an exercise in building trust with the people of Los Angeles, and with the City Council and with neighborhood councils," H. David Nahai said. Even as they're draining Silver Lake Reservoir for concern over a prospective carcinogen they discovered mid-summer. And who's asked this: If they discovered the elevated level in June, why didn't they start draining in June? Why didn't we stop drinking the stuff the day it was first discovered? Why did we have to wait four months before being told about it?

While you're clicking around town, you might like to read my review of Christoph Eschenbach conducting Mahler's Sixth at the WDCH, posted at LA Opus. I saw the Friday night performance, which was very good; and I'll bet the Saturday and today's performances are even better. Also, for those of you ready for those coming Gentlemen's Club ads in the Times, as well as you those partial to theatre, my review of Marat Sade at Knightsbridge Theatre in Silver Lake is there too.

Sunday Morning Mimosa

JM, Philippe's 10 a.m., 12.14.07

Joseph Mailander a guy in la • elsewhere • email

You could have read this one coming coming in braille, as Chick Hearn used to say. LAUSD payroll system price tag balloons. The estimate for how much the problem is going to fix: $210 million. To put that into some kind of context---God knows the District won't---that's about how much the Cathedral cost downtown.

That's right. For the same amount of money, you can either build a complex that will be the spiritual locus of a region's faithful for 500+ years...or you can fix the LAUSD's screwed up payroll system.

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Another stunner issue from the Downtown News. Any one of these stories is intriguing: owning up to a softening loft market, the fashion district v. taxi dance halls, and an editorial on the failures of the cab system. And this headliner on the 80's club scene downtown seems to move in a bit on the Weekly's turf: you know, fiftysomethings in denial about being fiftysomething.

There have been a few stories about the Getty turning ten---Christopher Hawthorne's is the latest---but none of them have been hard hitting so far. And that's a shame, because there's a lot that deserves to be hit hard. Barry Munitz, anyone? Getty Trust moves? Curatorial disgruntlement? Etc.

Reviewing a building ten years after it opens seems a bit indulgent and a bit off. It seems like all the fishwraps want to say something more caustic, but can't quite find a way to say it..

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Today is Huizar's Winter Wonderland day in El Sereno. Santa will be there, so be nice.

Sunday Morning Mimosa

Our expectation as citizens is that the City operate better on less money. But do the math and the City has been trending in the opposite direction, the Daily News says this morning.

Since 2000, Los Angeles workers' costs have surged 53 percent - to $4 billion a year - rising an average 7.5 percent every year.

General fund revenues also grew strongly but only at an average 5.7 percent a year.

The result is a swing of almost $1 billion, pushing the city from a surplus to an anticipated shortfall of $300 million next year.

The article blames the influence on unions. But don't you get the feeling that unions are digging in deeper because of the missing rungs in LA's housing ladder---something every City Council member and especially the Mayor's office and Planning Department shares blame for? If we were incentivizing the construction of more workforce housing for cops rather than million dollar condos for out-of-towners, the unions might be able to loosen their death-grip on the City a little.

Don't give the City an affordable housing bond. You already give it enough money. Give it better leadership.

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Uniquely tone-deaf to such matters, the former fishwrap of record brings you an unsigned left rail ed this morning stating that the City's pay-raise system works.

For real. Almost wickedly insane, here's part of the ed's lamentable laughingstock of a conclusion:

Every penny of these new pay raises, whether they are accepted or not, must buy a recommitment by City Hall watchdogs and L.A. residents to break the system that too often keeps elected officials focused on fundraising and political advancement rather than the best interests of the city.

Oh, sure. The seven percent of City voters who voted in the last school board election aren't just committed, they're anxious to recommit.

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Zuma last night took on Jan Perry's fast food restaruant moratorium proposal for South LA. So did Tony Pierce at LAist. But fast food zoning has already hit tonier parts of the country (York County, Maine, and Calistoga, for a couple) and a more Republican incarnation of the debate (liability) hit the House of Representatives in 2004.

As fast and fatty food has been abundantly available South LA for more than two generations, it seems more logical to blame sedentary lifestyles (Internet, dvd, etc.) and an ironic health trend---far less smoking---than diet for spiking obesity trends. If something must be blamed---other than human frailty---at all.

Sunday Morning Mimosa

Sensationalism at the Weekly! This Weekly article ("Delgadillo's War") on the demolition of an old dowager of an apartment building in Hollywood is very difficult to parse, and overreached quite a bit. It accuses Rocky Delgadillo's office of "quietly crafting policies" to make increasingly secretive development deals, and of "shutting out Garcetti’s staff on practices that might dramatically reshape the [Hollywood] area."

Those are no mean accusations; but here the evidence is flimsy. It wasn't exactly a group of eminent architectural historians who browbeat the Cultural Heritage Commission (CHC) into recommending historical status; it was---and imagine the most condescending voice of the most condescending westside realtor here---a neighbor group.

To start yelling "Delgadillo's War" when it turns out the "war" is all on the part of the hobbyist-cum-lobbyist group Hollywood Heritage---and the City Attorney's office has in truth but minimal involvement in the demolition process---a little sensational, don't you think? How can Delgadillo be at war for merely defending the City's practices here?

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These tedious, hard-to-follow historic preservation debates---aren't they mostly frivlolous anyway, when you lay them next to schooling, poverty, homelessness? When I was at the LA Conservancy's Ambassador wake last year, I couldn't help but think: gee, why don't these wannabe-beautiful people (there was even a red carpet, and Diane Keaton had been co-opted for the evening) give have as much energy to solving our homeless problem---or even try public transit for a day---as they have spent trying to save this largely irredeemable eyesore?

To me, no group has the capacity to say "let them eat cake" more insouciantly, and no group throws more incongruent wrenches in the civic machine as persistently, as an historic preservationist group. The LA Conservancy's bad enough---so much effort, so little return---can you think of any major victories on commercial buildings this decade? But I guess this Hollywood group too has Weekly buy-in now, and thus can provide some unsuspecting scribes with some chilling quotes about civic "conspiracies." A shame.

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Much more responsible treatment of a development issue that touches preservation, development, and civic time and money was the Downtown News' ENORMOUS editorial "New SRO Hotels are Well-Intentioned, but Treatment is More Important." Incorporating a new documentary with both buzz and legs---Pras Michael's Skid Row---the Downtown News concludes:

Acquiring hotels feels powerful and assertive, as if government is finally going to make a big difference. Yet the new hotels, either left alone or shiny and rehabbed, will make almost no difference on the Row.

Which is correct; they won't, and everyone knows it. The CRA could also spend the same millions on bringing the homeless more beds and showers, or even on cinder-block units or even yurts for the homeless. It could get people out from sleeping under underpasses. Instead it will perpetuate what already exists: containment zone, and Depression-era-styled bottom-rung housing downtown.

Sunday Morning Mimosa

Just go get some gelato already.

The fishwrap of record has an obit-in-advance on Billy Graham in LA.

The alt quotidien codwrapper---alert the media---reports that citizens find traffic studies conducted by developers suspect.

Yeah, we felt the earthquake too. 4.7, Orange County, east of Santa Ana.

Every time there's a ten-degree aberration or a ten-mile-an-hour wind, of course the power goes out in Silver Lake and Los Feliz. But it's a devastating heat wave! the City protests. Ever notice how usual it is for us to have such unusual weather all the time and that there are power failures galore all year long?

Can we trust you guys with comments yet? Don't let me down. The Mayor will kill me if you screw up this one. We want your news and views, not your personal attacks on people we've never even heard of.