A Better Way Forward To House California: Fighting Money with Money

Four noxious bills — SB50, SB1279, SB330, SB592 — are currently up for debate and vote in the California State Legislature, an august body completely dominated by Democrats. For anyone who continues to operate under the misapprehension that there’s a substantive difference between the two major mafias — sorry, political parties — this quartet of bills serves as an eloquent reminder that, in the final analysis, politicians of all persuasions tend to serve not their constituents but their corporate benefactors, the rich and powerful.

Allegedly a panacea for our state’s critical affordable housing shortage. SB50 and the like would preempt local zoning restrictions, ignore historic neighborhood protections and eradicate single-family home residential neighborhoods. This legislation benefits developers and hedge-fund land barons but greatly harms everyone else. Particularly those of us who live in 100-year-old homes that are “within a half-mile of a major public transportation stop.” The bills have been introduced by San Francisco-area politicians Scott Wiener and Nancy Skinner, Democrats we stress, whose rationale for demolishing regional environmental oversight and regulatory autonomy at the neighborhood level includes buzzy words like “homelessness” and “affordable housing,” but whose laws, in practice, would exacerbate both crises while further enriching the Wall Street-backed developers eager to build eight-story apartment towers on every corner.

For the record, most local leaders, including the mayors of Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Pasadena, oppose the Sacramento power grab. So do many members of the Los Angeles City Council, who never met a real estate deal they didn’t like — which should tell you how poisonous are SB50 and its ilk.

We recently received the following missive from a stellar community organizer:

We donated, just like we donated to a fund bringing a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles for attempting to build a branded basketball court in the middle of Runyon Canyon. But how debased has our democracy become that citizens must hire lobbyists and file lawsuits to get their elected representatives to behave righteously? That the only way to fight money in politics is with more money suggests we’re headed to an untenable political future, a comically dystopian kleptocracy where crucial votes inspire bidding wars among the interested parties.