westchesterchesterian

Build more housing on the Westside

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@CohenSite Wait until you learn about the anti-Ballona restoration environmentalists here. Can’t have anything nice

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@CohenSite They should build the other half of Playa Vista and do the CDFW Ballona Wetlands Restoration

[Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman]

Feel like a lot of right-wing X has not yet internalized that the betting markets think Spencer Pratt is going to lose the first round.

[M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray]

Capital will flood back into LA if the city elects a MAGA mayor presiding over a 100% Democratic council, with no path to repealing ULA, speeding permits, lowering fees/IZ, etc? I get that vibes matter, but this theory holds that policy doesn't matter at all, which is absurd.

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@wong_guey @_lej44 @LA_Multi_Fam Yeah that’s fair. Impossible for me to understand people who are taking Pratt seriously though. The man believes crystals have magical powers.

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@wong_guey @_lej44 @LA_Multi_Fam Austin Beutner before he dropped out. Adam Miller never really caught on. Not a really hard choice for me between Raman and Bass as is. Pratt has zero chance in a general election and guarantees Bass wins again.

[Giacomo Volpe 🌹🤝🌐 @_giacomo_volpe_]

@moseskagan I’m sure electing a notoriously ignorant, irresponsible, and dishonest person who has a history of vocal and dishonest opposition to pro housing measures will set the city bureaucracy right and unleash the cranes

Not that it matters bc him vs Bass just gets us Bass anyway

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@keegan_tweets @AbundantHousing They sent email blasts today to support fixing and amending ULA while also endorsing the primary author who doesn’t think it should be amended.

Endorsing a Park challenger makes sense to me, but they should wait until CD11 has a non lefty non profit lawyer candidate.

[Tommy Vietor @TVietor08]

If you think @nithyavraman is too conservative and therefor are throwing tacit support to Spencer Pratt, I have no idea what that says about your political ideology but it does make clear that you are a stone cold idiot.

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@SukritGanesh @yinyang_yo_ She is big on firefighter support so I think it has more to do with firefighter anti single stair propaganda. Same way she opposed bike lanes and pedestrian safety (HLA) despite it being very popular.

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@SukritGanesh @yinyang_yo_ She is not great on housing by a long shot. She is amenable to complaint projects, but is very firmly anti-density and repeats standard NIMBY talking points. She was the only No vote on the single stair study vote.

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

So Pratt is a vacancy truther? His housing platform seems to be largely generic low-information right wing NIMBYism.

[California YIMBY @cayimby]

LA's mayoral candidates agree housing supply needs to grow, but diverge sharply on how.

Raman wants 60-day permit timelines; Bass says red tape is already cut; Pratt says clean up streets first.

https://t.co/VtAQlMa8jw

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

Swift-boating Scott Weiner on housing is wild.

This guy really sucks and I look forward to him losing.

[Saikat Chakrabarti @saikatc]

Scott Wiener's results on housing:

❌SF median home price doubled
❌CA homelessness at all-time high
❌SF built fewer homes / year than when Scott started
❌CA housing supply gap unchanged at 3 million units
❌Share of Californians who can buy a home decreased by a third

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@Justin_G0rd0n jonnyshotit on Reddit did a write up of one of the debates and indicated that Malik did NOT support amending ULA yet.

Housing is not exactly a wedge issue in this race though because Traci is a more traditional NIMBY herself.

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@yinyang_yo_

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

We don’t build parks anymore, just simulacrum of parks.

[dem haffi gang mi🇵🇸🇨🇩🇸🇩⌐╦╦═─ @jmsshltn]

@bussit_bbLA The dogshit renderings really convey how terrible this is

[Toby Muresianu 🇺🇦 @tobyhardtospell]

This image has a key lesson for housing advocates.

Story time...🍿

I live in Katy's district, and help run a grassroots pro-housing neighborhood group (@WestsideForEv).

In 2023, a 24-story building was proposed near transit in this district (1050 La Cienega). Mixed-use, on a vacant lot, with a public pocket park, would singlehandedly double the amount of dedicated Affordable Housing in the area. Still got heavy NIMBY pushback and wasn't clear if it would get through planning commission even though it would probably be illegal to block it.

We supported it. We were on good terms with Katy as we had endorsed her, were aggressively supporting her key priority (a 30-ish bed homeless housing facility in my neighborhood) and got ~70 petition signatures from people in the area in favor of the 24-story building to counter the argument that the "community was against it".

At the hearing, staff report was that all the NIMBY claims were baseless and approval recommended. Katy said the building was "too tall" but her hands were tied by state law, etc. so she didn't officially oppose.

The building was approved. Okay, we'll take it. We kept working with her (successfully) on the homeless housing project.

Unfortunately, she rapidly became worse on housing, perhaps because she feared a NIMBY challenger. She led the movement to roll back LA’s ED1 initiative (streamlining for 100% Affordable Housing projects) in areas with "Historic Preservation Overlay Zones" (which IRL cover lots of non-historic parts of LA), delayed meeting with local housing orgs who'd supported her until after the rollback was codified, and then offered nothing new on increasing housing despite LA home production continuing to crater and having promised to build a lot of it in her campaign. She voted to oppose SB79 allowing ~7 stories of housing near train stations. When it passed anyway, she led the effort to hobble and delay implementation. Etc. We were getting nowhere.

Then I decided to help campaign against her.

@HenryForLA, a Tenants Rights Attorney, wanted to run on a pro-housing platform. I started helping run the digital operation.

We're very much underdogs (she is an incumbent who has literally 10x our funding) but we have some viral successes, got endorsements from pro-housing organizations, are being recommended in an increasing number of voter guides, and are criticizing her housing record publicly.

Now, suddenly it's night and day.

She is literally posting pictures of 2 *67-story* towers and saying "more of this please."

Someone who delayed legalization of seven story buildings by transit *six weeks ago.” Who largely ignored housing advocates even when we'd actively fought for her key priorities. She hadn't even posted on twitter in years!

All this is to tell housing advocates:

Run candidates.

Organizing around projects, speaking up for them, etc is good.

But if your elected officials aren't giving you the time of day, running candidates against them is like having power tools.

You have no idea how responsive government can be until you are publicly running to take their job and telling people how you'll do a better one.

Oh, and please support @HenryForLA. You can trust we like tall buildings; we also did six weeks ago.

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@_giacomo_volpe_ A lot of (very fair) criticism of Nithya Raman and her record from guys who absolutely eat up this idiotic slop

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

@billiceberg We’re going to build all the housing in only downtown LA is such a standard LA NIMBY take though

[westchesterchesterian @charliem013]

Wait what?

[James Medlock @jdcmedlock]

So funny Matt Mahan didn’t support SB79.