I’ll be holding another house party tomorrow. Please come by, I’d love to meet and hear about your concerns and ideas for improving the community.
Details:
Sunday, March 1st
2-4pm
216 N. Mariposa Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Via my Twitter feed, how I got around without my car yesterday:
Foot
Bus. 5-6 second wait for it to arrive. Totally empty (but I am at beginning of line). Busiest DASH line in city by ridership usually.
Good and crowded now. Just picked up folks from Cathedral Center on Echo Park Ave who were getting food at the church pantry.
Foot. Walking under the freeway. Transferring to Metro.
Bus. 6 min wait.
At City Hall.
Bike.
Subway.
Carpooling.
Car-free Fridays are the last Friday of every month. I wrote about the first one a month ago. It’s not always easy to leave your car at home, but the benefits to traffic congestion, the environment and your health make it completely worthwhile. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll try it with me next month.
Learn more at LA-Bike.org.
Come out and join us tomorrow for our final precinct walk before election day. We’ll be walking door to door in East Hollywood reminding folks to vote on Tuesday and, more importantly, listening to the issues and concerns on their mind.
Details:
Saturday, February 28th
9:30am-12:30pm
meet at 1057 North Oxford Ave., Los Angeles 90029
(1 block south of Santa Monica and 2 blocks east of Western)
Precinct walking is one of my favorite aspects of my job, which is why I do it even when I’m not running for re-election. For me, connecting in person with my constituents is the purest form of democracy. Eight years ago, when I decided to run for City Council, I bought a pair of shoes, put them on, never took them off until I went to sleep each night and literally walked holes through them as I went door to door introducing myself to voters and listening to their concerns. While tomorrow will be the final precinct walk before election day, I hope voters will give me the opportunity to continue to discover my city and meet you all face to face for four more years.
The Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Blvd. is a true historic landmark. Originally opened in 1940, The Palladium’s first performance was the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra featuring a pre-fame Frank Sinatra. Over the years it has been a premiere concert venue in the heart of Hollywood, the crown jewel of Hollywood nightlife where both established bands and up and comers alike could call home. I recall going to shows there as a teenager — The Violent Femmes show in the famed Palladium ballroom comes immediately to mind.
But in recent years, the venue has been underutilized, a somewhat-rundown remnant of a bygone era and a regular target of developers. I’ve always said that for Hollywood’s Second Golden Age to emerge, we couldn’t move boldly into the future without recognizing and preserving the past. In the end, we decided there was just no way we could allow this Hollywood icon be torn down so we worked hard to bring NCA Green and Live Nation on board to do a year-long multi-million dollar top to bottom renovation to return The Palladium to its original grandeur. I’m thrilled to announce that today I will be cutting the ribbon at the official Palladium re-opening ceremony. It’s facade hasn’t looked this good since it first opened almost seven decades ago. Live Nation and The Hollywood Chamber will be holding a networking event so you can see the renovations for yourself and connect with other members of the community.
Thursday, February 26th
5:30-7:30pm
6215 Sunset Boulevard
$10 for Hollywood Chamber members/$20 for non-members
Returning The Hollywood Palladium to its original glory was the result of a real partnership between government and business and represents the latest in a string of Hollywood renaissance initiatives my office has spear-headed not only to restore a part of Hollywood’s storied past, but also to make the area a premier destination in LA for years to come.
Yesterday I attended a meeting of Hollywood High School’s Young Feminists Club, which was founded by Hollywood High senior Sandy Merida with the assistance of the Hollywood chapter of The National Organization for Women. I arrived at the classroom as a discussion about domestic abuse was underway and I was extremely impressed with the size and diversity of the group (among just under 20 attendees, 3 or 4 were guys) and the level of discussion they were having.
I told them I was proud to call myself a feminist and that I’ve been one all my life. Growing up with a sister and female cousins all around me and being a minority of one, I came to have great respect for women and always saw them as my equal. It’s difficult even to think that someone might not think that way, but the reality is that our society still does not put men and women on equal footing, which is why groups like Sandy’s are so important.
We spoke a lot about power at the meeting and while most of the discussion focused on the abuse of power, I suggested to them that power in and of itself is neutral; in most relationships we’re in, one person has more power than the other, whether it be teacher-student, parent-child, employer-employee, siblings or spouses. That’s not inherently a bad thing. It’s how that power is used that is crucial. Merely by founding this group, Sandy used her own power as an individual and by coming to that meeting, those kids were empowering themselves, not only with information but also by the mere fact of gathering and organizing. They have more power as a group than they think. I invited them to think about what laws they might want passed, whether it be to strengthen teen dating violence laws or change funding for girls’ sports programs versus boys’ sports programs. Imagine if they could say they helped pass a law that made this a more just world. Now that is powerful.
Meet Sandy in a video we put together of my time at Hollywood High below.
With 6 days to election day, we have some events scheduled this Saturday that I hope you will join.
Saturday, February 28th
Community Garden Work Day
9am-12pm
Fountain/Western Community GardenSilver Lake Meet & Greet
11:30am-1pm
2215 Electric Street
Los Angeles, CA 90039Echo Park Meet & Greet
2-4pm
216 N. Mariposa Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
On Saturday, I had the pleasure of meeting with a small group of constituents from Elysian Valley for a house party. Elysian Valley is a small community of about 8,000 tucked between Atwater Village and Silver Lake.
The questions from the group varied from public safety (speed bumps to slow down traffic, an expanded bus route that would pick up kids walking home at night, more police on the streets…) to whether the neighborhood council can pay for a full time staffer and if there’s any way to incentivize markets to move into the neighborhood so that residents don’t have to drive or take public transportation every time they want to buy food.
We spoke about local land development and I told them of an early lesson I learned as councilman: the value of listening to the community when it comes to development and allowing new developments to spring up from communities, not be imposed on them by the bureaucracy. I learned this during the development of a park on Marsh St. in Elysian Valley a couple years ago when the loudest voices I heard from the community were in favor of installing a skate park, which was not part of the original plan. We listened and now instead of being just another pretty space that never gets used, it’s a vibrant hub of activity for young people and one of the skate park’s most vocal champions at the time is now directing it.
As for improvements to Elysian Valley moving forward, I told the group that we’re working with the city-owned properties in Elysian Valley to see what we can do about turning some of the city industrial properties, the sanitation testing yards, etc. into green spaces in the future. Also, we’ve been looking into how we can make Elysian Valley a real model for co-existing with nature. One example: the water restoration we’ve done in the L.A. River has actually brought safe edible fish back to the river. This was met with disbelief from those attending, but it’s true!
Thanks to everyone who attended the house party. One of the most important things any elected official can do is listen to the people he represents, which is why I hold events like this whether I’m running for re-election or not. Please let me know in the comments if you’d like me to hold an event in your neighborhood and we’ll try to set one up.
Last week, President Obama laid out his administration’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan to deal with the foreclosure crisis. I wanted to weigh in on it since, as President of the Los Angeles City Council, it’s been an issue my office has been working extremely hard on for months at the local level.
Obama’s plan would devote $75 billion from the TARP 2 funds as well as $200 billion in additional funding commitments to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help between 7-9 million families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes. This is particularly important here in California where, according to RealtyTrac, in 2008 alone California saw more than 520,000 of its homes receive foreclosure filings, a jump of 110% over 2007.
I was heartened by this plan because, while it’s not perfect, it does several things that I think are very important. 1. It provides incentives to servicers who lower interest rates and to borrowers for keeping current on their loans; 2. It helps restructure loans and reduce monthly payments for responsible homeowners who wish to stay in their homes; the plan does not reward speculators, house flippers or dishonest lenders; and 3. The plan reflects the reality that I’ve been dealing with on the ground here in Los Angeles for months now: that solving this crisis is not just about saving homeowners’ homes, this is about saving entire communities.
From The Treasury’s executive summary:
The deep contraction in the economy and in the housing market has created devastating consequences for homeowners and communities throughout the country. [...]
The plan will help up to 7 to 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages to avoid foreclosure. In doing so, the plan not only helps responsible homeowners on the verge of defaulting, but prevents neighborhoods and communities from being pulled over the edge too, as defaults and foreclosures contribute to falling home values, failing local businesses, and lost jobs.
It goes on:
Protecting Neighborhoods: This plan will also help to stabilize home prices for all homeowners in a neighborhood. When a home goes into foreclosure, the entire neighborhood is hurt. The average homeowner could see his or her home value stabilized against declines in price by as much as $6,000 relative to what it would otherwise be absent the Homeowner Stability Initiative.
The impact of a foreclosed home on its neighborhood can be devastating. Not only does each foreclosed home reduce nearby property values by as much as 9 percent, but a boarded up house invites crime and leads to blight, a particular concern in the Los Angeles area.
While Los Angeles County was not among the hardest hit counties in California (in January, 1 out of every 249 housing units went into foreclosure, nothing compared to San Bernadino’s 1 out of every 87), stemming the tide of foreclosures and preventing the eviction of responsible renters have become priorities for my office. We have already seen more than 20,000 foreclosures in the City of Los Angeles alone (many of them multi-family apartment buildings), and their effect can devastate any street in Los Angeles, where potentially-abandoned homes reduce property values, attract crime, and bring about blight.
To this end, in October I called on Countrywide to cease and desist their illegal eviction practices after they attempted to evict a tenant in my district. Then in December, I authored a new law to stop evictions of tenants in foreclosed properties because we have to protect the innocent victims of the foreclosure crisis.
In addition, my office has worked closely with One-LA, a grassroots coalition of community organizers, religious congregations, and neighborhood groups who have been at the forefront of helping families renegotiate the terms of their loans with banks.
In many ways, President Obama’s plan represents the federal government catching up with what we’ve been doing at the local level for months now. I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a partner in the White House again and a President who really gets it. The thrust of this plan acknowledges that on a very real level, if our neighbor is in foreclosure, so are we and that saving my neighbor’s home saves mine. In other words, it reflects that progressive virtue that drives me in my work every day: that we’re all in this together.
[ED: Slightly edited]
On Wednesday, I was proud to join with dozens of Filipino WWII veterans at the Filipino American World War II Veterans Memorial Park to celebrate the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Contained within the stimulus package is a provision that grants a tax-free lump sum of $15,000 to Filipino veterans of World War II who are based in the United States. The recognition is way too little and much too late for so many of our veterans but it does represent some overdue justice for those who fought right beside American soldiers in the Philipines for our nation’s freedom.
The US government had originally promised Filipinos they would qualify for full US veterans’ benefits if they served but after Congress passed the Rescission Act of 1946, Filipinos who served in the US Army were stripped of their status as US veterans. While the amount they’re receiving as a result of the newly passed stimulus package is well below that which they should have been granted, it’s a long awaited and well deserved recognition of their service to our country.
More than 120,000 Filipino soldiers served under the command of General Douglas MacArthur as enlisted soldiers in the U.S. Armed Services during World War II and the 13th Council District has the highest concentration of Filipino Veterans in Los Angeles. As Councilman, I was determined to celebrate that, which is why in 2006 I was proud to deliver on my promise to erect the nation’s first Filipino Veterans war memorial in Lake Street Park, right in the heart of L.A.’s Historic Filipinotown. Erecting that monument was a cause very close to my heart as my grandfather was in the US Army and fought in the Philipines during WWII; it was as a result of this service that he earned his citizenship when he returned.
I am glad to see our federal government finally recognizing the service of our Filipino veterans.
Since I came into office in 2001, it’s been important to me to empower the public by showing them how city government works. On Wednesday, my office held the latest of our Government 101 workshops where over 50 people showed up to sit in on a city council meeting and learn such things as:
It’s only through understanding the innerworkings of government that we can begin to directly influence it. As our new president is fond of saying, real change can only happen from the bottom up and as a community organizer myself, I consider it my goal to create a more informed electorate and one that has the tools to make that change they desire.
Thanks to everyone who attended, it was a great turnout.
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