Tag Archives: CD14

Announcements, Homeless Issues, Public Records Act Pragmatics

A Bunch Of Interesting New Documents: City Attorney, LA Times, And Sanitation Reports From Encampment Cleanups

October 16, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

This is just a quick announcement of some interesting new collections of records, with minimal commentary. First of all, there’s a collection of emails between City Attorney spokesman¹ Rob Wilcox and various L.A. Times Reporters. You can get the whole batch here:

Also I have a full set of reports² from the Bureau of Sanitation on the cleanups of three homeless encampments on March 22, 2016. It took almost three months for them to hand over this material, which won’t surprise anyone who’s been following my recent interactions with them. This is likewise available from:

I don’t presently have much to say about the sanitation reports. At this point I’m collecting as much material as possible in order to (a) figure out what kind of material is available so that I’ll be able to make focused, effective requests in the future, (b) learn what kinds of arguments they make against handing over records so that I can make focused, effective counterarguments against them, and (c) understand all the players in the HE³ game and the roles they’re playing. I hope to be able to synthesize all of this at some point, but meanwhile I want to make the records available because I know smarter people than I are also reading them.

But I do have this and that to say about the emails,⁴ and after the break you will find commentary and links to interesting individual instances.
Continue reading A Bunch Of Interesting New Documents: City Attorney, LA Times, And Sanitation Reports From Encampment Cleanups →

Featured, Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, The Race Card

Business Improvement Districts As A Force For White Supremacy in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles

August 8, 2016 Mike 2 Comments

This is the most obvious and least dangerous form in which white supremacy expresses itself.

My colleagues and I spill a lot of metaphorical ink referring to business improvement districts and their Boards of Directors as white supremacists, and we certainly stand by that position. However, it’s recently come to my attention that not everyone in our audience is familiar with the literal meaning of the phrase. Evidently it strikes some people as a generic, semantically empty insult, or else they’re confused by the fact that the phrase refers to at least two fairly distinct ideologies. Thus I thought it would be useful to explain in detail why BIDs are in a very literal sense white supremacist organizations.

First let’s get the definitions straight. As always, our friends at Wikipedia give us a good starting place. Their article on white supremacy tells us that the phrase has two principal meanings. The salient one for our purposes is that white supremacy is:

…a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial domination by white people

It’s crucial to note that there’s nothing inherently racist about this kind of white supremacy.¹ Now, the history of the racial segregation of real estate in Los Angeles is well-known, and Hollywood was at the forefront of it from the early years of the last century. What’s not so well understood is how racially segregated the commercial real estate market was. In fact² it was certainly more segregated than residential real estate, since white people owned much of the commercial real estate even in areas of the City where nonwhites were allowed to own houses.³ Continue reading Business Improvement Districts As A Force For White Supremacy in Twenty-First Century Los Angeles →

Featured, Hypocrisy, Miscellaneous

How to Destroy a Business Improvement District in California: A Theory

June 14, 2016 Mike 3 Comments

This would be an effective, emotionally satisfying, and poetically just way to get rid of business improvement districts, but I'm hoping for something a little more environmentally friendly. — This would be an effective, emotionally satisfying, and poetically just way to get rid of business improvement districts, but I’m hoping for something a little more environmentally friendly.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not a lawyer. But I’m friends with some lawyers. More than zero of them did not laugh out loud at the idea you’re about to read. That’s all I got.

Business improvement districts in California are made possible by the Property & Business Improvement District Law of 1994.¹ It’s worth reading, or at least skimming through, because there’s gold in them thar hills! For instance, consider Section 36670(a)(1), which states:

36670.(a) Any district established or extended pursuant to the provisions of this part … may be disestablished by resolution by the city council in either of the following circumstances:

(1) If the city council finds there has been misappropriation of funds, malfeasance, or a violation of law in connection with the management of the district, it shall notice a hearing on disestablishment.

Do you see the potential in that statement? The fact that it’s a tool for laying waste the BIDs of Los Angeles like so many Philistines? It’s a little hard to understand statutes, but here’s a clue: when they say “shall” they mean “must,” not “can.” Now turn the page to find out why this little statute, if not more powerful than Doug Henning and his sparkly rainbow suspenders as pictured above, is possibly as effective a BID repellent but much, much more emotionally satisfying than mere poofsly-woofsly magical annihilation.
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Central City East Association

Video of Yesterday’s Central City East Association Meeting Now Available

January 27, 2016 Mike Leave a comment

Edward Camarillo at the January 26, 2016 meeting of the CCEA at 725 S. Crocker Street.

I’m formally initiating coverage of the Central City East Association with some video of yesterday’s meeting of the Board of Directors at CCEA headquarters at 725 S. Crocker Street. You can find Part 1 and also Part 2. Note that the record is not complete because the Board went into closed session and I couldn’t stick around to see them reconvene. Part I consists entirely of CD14 representative Jose Huizar policy director Martin Schlageter talking about homeless issues in the BID’s territory and then, most interesting of all, taking questions from the Board members. The level of micromanagement is astonishing. We hope to write on some of the details later, but check some representative Q&A after the break. Part 2 is mostly taken up by a representative from the Runyon Group seeking CCEA support for entitlements for their ROW DTLA project (this project was formerly known as Alameda Square). Someone here will be writing on this soon in some detail.
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Hollywood BID Patrol, Hypocrisy, Street Vending

Don’t Incarcerate the Ice Cream Man

March 23, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

We have written before about the BIDs’ hysterical, dishonest opposition to City Councilman José Huizar‘s proposal to legalize street vending. We’ve discussed the fact that many of the BID board members who oppose this law are themselves criminals, although not the kind who get prosecuted for their dirty deeds. We’ve written about how their froth-mouth rage at this relatively small move in the direction of sanity puts them in opposition to democracy itself. But we haven’t yet written about the very human cost of continuing to outlaw street vending in Los Angeles.
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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy, Street Vending

Why Does Hollywood McDonald’s Queen Carol Massie Hate America, Mom, Apple Pie, Bacon Dogs, and the Residents of Hollywood?

March 22, 2015 kohlhaas Leave a comment

Why does jittery little psychopath Carol Massie hate America and the residents of Hollywood so much? Only God and her pyschoanalyst know for sure... — Why does jittery little psychopath Carol Massie hate America and the residents of Hollywood so much? Only God and her pyschoanalyst know for sure…

First a little background. Council District 14 representative José Huizar recently proposed a law to legalize street vending in Los Angeles. Predictably, the BIDs are horrified by the thought that this might pass.

In fact, they’re so horrified that the icky-poo Central City Association hired thuggish PR flacks Rodriguez Strategies to help defeat it. We’ll be writing much more on this presently, but for now you just need to know that one of the subterfuges that the BIDs and Rodriguez Strategies are proposing is to get the law modified to allow neighborhoods to opt in rather than the city-wide legalization that’s now on the table.

Rodriguez Strategies PR flackie Jessica Borek at the March 17, 2015 meeting of the SVBID board of directors, calmy contemplating methods to utterly destroy the living culture of Los Angeles and plow salt into the fields where it once grew

This is bad enough, of course, since everyone knows that opt-in regulations kill participation, but even this mild, skewed-in-her-favor form of democracy is too much for jittery little psychopath and big kahunette of the Sunset-Vine BID, Carol Massie. She doesn’t believe in the holy principle of one-person-one-vote. WHAT IF PEOPLE VOTE THE WRONG WAY??!? After hearing a couple of flacks from Rodriguez explain the strategy at the March 17, 2015 meeting of the SVBID board of directors, Carol Massie ranted thusly:

Um…you know, Kerry, uh, one of the things that I think we should consider…and this was something that you mentioned, Marie, was the idea of having a certain percentage of the residents and the businesses. The problem with the residents is that they don’t deal with the things that the businesses do, so they might say “WHOAH! A bunch of great, cheap food and cheap CDs, and they could vote it in, and then all the businesses are outvoted, because there’s a lot fewer businesses than there are residents, and so having the residents in on the opt-ins [unintelligible]
Continue reading Why Does Hollywood McDonald’s Queen Carol Massie Hate America, Mom, Apple Pie, Bacon Dogs, and the Residents of Hollywood? →