Although I don’t really have time to cover land use issues here, sometimes they have an intersection, however tenuous, with public records activity. Also, since BIDs are universally in favor of all development, no matter how illegal or stupid it might be, and they talk about it incessantly at their meetings in between planning to deport homeless people to Manzanar or whatever, it seems useful to collect some material on these issues here. One such instance is the stupidly huge development at 8150 Sunset Blvd.,¹ recently approved by the LA City Council over the objections of freaking everybody.

So an organization called Fix the City² sued the City on Thursday³ over various aspects of the 8150 Sunset project.⁴ I’m going to collect the filings on this case, starting with the verified petition filed Thursday, and you can get them via the menu structure or also:

• This dedicated page for the lawsuit.
• Directly from static storage.

Also, you may recall that in February 2015 I asked the LAPD for material on stay-away orders for the Hollywood Entertainment District. By October of this year they had not yet even responded to my request, leading to my filing a complaint with LAPD internal affairs over this dereliction of duty. There’s no news on the complaint yet,⁵ but they did finally send me a bunch of the actual orders. There’s a lot of material here, so for now they’re only available via our Archive.Org collection. I hope to write on this fairly soon, but perhaps you can already see just how vitally important this information is. Turn the page for a few preliminary⁶ considerations.

• Stay away orders impinge on people’s constitutionally guaranteed right to travel freely. So they’re subject to some kind of heightened scrutiny. Since these orders keep people out of a whole neighborhood, rather than away from a specific location, it’s hard to see how they could survive any kind of scrutiny. Especially because the City doesn’t seek these for most neighborhoods. What makes the Hollywood Entertainment District so special in that regard?
• These orders seem to be disproportionately issued to homeless people who commit homeless crimes. It’s true that on a quick reading there are an awful lot of assault charges involved, when those are applied to the homeless, there’s a lot of potential for bullshit charge amplification. Assault and/or battery charges against homeless people should be considered to be trumped up without convincing evidence to the contrary.
• These orders seem to be disproportionately sought by Neighborhood Prosecutors in Hollywood, especially Jackie Lawson. It’s pretty clear that they’re sought at the behest of the HPOA, which shouldn’t be influencing prosecutorial decisions, especially ones that affect constitutional rights. If these orders are to be sought, it ought to happen as a result of public policy rather than as a part of a privately planned social cleansing campaign to rid Hollywood of homeless people.

I’ll flesh out these ideas and a few others later on, I hope.

Image of 8150 Sunset Blvd. appears here under a claim of fair use.

1. At Crescent Heights, just west of the shopping center where the Laemmle used to be. Note that anyone who even mentions development or indeed anything that passes for progress amongst developers and their chorus of yes-men and groupies without gushing on about how wonderful it is even to the extent of, e.g., stating that if Jesus were to return to earth in these latter days he wouldn’t bother at all with childish nonsense like turning water into wine, but would concentrate on serious miracles like turning Venice into freaking Palo Alto, will eventually be accused of being a past-dwelling NIMBY ostrich who hates all change. Well, for the record, let me just state that, while my colleagues and I miss that Laemmle something terrible, and the fact that the one in North Hollywood is right across the street from the Red Line station only mitigates our pain to a fairly slight extent, we do in fact enjoy the new theatre in the old Laemmle space, and we universally agree that the fact that they serve alcohol there is a huge improvement over the old situation. See?! We don’t hate all progress. We just hate your freaking building, 8150 Sunset LLC! We hate the process by which it was approved even more!
2. I would like to link to something for them, but they don’t seem to spend a lot of time updating their web presence, which is forgivable since they seem to spend a lot of time suing the City of Los Angeles. In doing the research for this post I found more than 10 suits in the LA County Superior Court alone. Ah, that I had the money to get copies of all of them. In any case, their website seems to be really out of date. Their Twitter feed seem somewhat more active, but not that active. However, they are really busy. See this April 2016 suit over a K-Town skyscraper and this September 2015 suit against the City of LA over the transportation plan.
3. December 1, 2016.
4. According to 2 Preserve LA one of the causes of action was that the City withheld records showing that various City employees were opposed to the project until after the Council had approved it. This is what originally made me determined to cover it. However, nothing like this appears in the actual petition, but there’s enough discussion of various City emails in there, which they obviously got via CPRA, to hold my interest. Perhaps this issue will come up later. In any case, I already paid $22 for a copy of the petition, so I’m certainly going to publish it!
5. Although IAD (Internal Affairs Division) does send me regular updates saying that they are working on my complaint and that they take it and all complaints from citizens very seriously. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but obviously the procedure that they’re following is the result of the severe criticism that they have received in the past and continue to receive, which makes it a hopeful sign, whether or not there’s anything substantial behind it.
6. Preliminary to the extensive post(s) I’m planning on the subject.