The City of Los Angeles through their planning staff has imported East Coast Mentality on how people should get to work and that is by public transportation. An unholy alliance has developed between the Air Quality Management District (AQMD), the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the CRA. This triangle of malevolence has a common goal of getting people out of their cars and into trains and buses.
There are linkages between these three agencies everywhere. The goal of the AQMD is to cut smog to zero. Older cars are being forced off the highways through smog checks. These are the cars that lower income workers are forced to drive. With the price of new cars rising every year, poorer people have fewer cars they can afford to drive and will have to rely more on mass transit.
However, the MTA has its own problem. The subsidy on light rail in L.A. is running about 9 to 1. For each dollar received in rider fares nine dollars in subsidies have been spent. These are dollars that have been diverted from the freeways and other highway uses. The MTA believes they can provide replacement transportation. They can along a few limited corridors but at a price that is mind numbing. MTA’s goal is to increase ridership to lower the apparent subsidy rate, which would at least make the subsidy rate look less outrageous.
The last piece of the triangle is the infamous CRA. The CRA, who by law must now build low and moderate income housing, is looking for places to build this housing, and what better place than along the rail lines in South Central L.A. Four story housing is planned for the intersections. The housing steps down to three and two story with single family by mid-block; it’s called node development.
It is easy to see how this replacement housing is going to uproot and otherwise displace a lot of existing housing to implement some planners’ concept of how a city should be built, and that’s where the rub comes in. The theory is to create affordable housing. However, a lot of those people who will be relocated already own their own home free and clear with a pre-Prop 13 tax base and do not have any desire to move. How much more affordable can these homes be? They just want to be left alone. But, they happen to stand in the way of "progress", i. e. condemnation for Redevelopment. It will replace home owners with high density renters. I think it is called public housing.
From that meeting Saturday I could tell there are a lot of people from South Central who don’t want to be forced to move anywhere by some bureaucracy. Once again the battle is joined. The cancer of Redevelopment is spreading, and the people of South Central are saying, "Not with my land!"