Strangling the Goose

This last Labor Day Weekend Jeanette and I attended the fiftieth Cinecon cineophile film festival held the last several years in the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The films were great. Hollywood, not so much.

Probably billions of dollars have been spent to "revitalize" Hollywood Boulevard and Hollywood since I stopped volunteering at Centrum of Hollywood in 1980. Much of the money came from redevelopment agencies. There is, of course, a move afoot to re establish redevelopment agencies, those funnels through which mass quantities of taxpayer funds are shoved at well connected developers who promise to rid areas of "blight". Blight of course means all the small manufacturing, service, locally owned, non chain businesses and anybody who can't rent a condo for at least $4 grand a month. You, dear taxpayer, are the "blight" to be gotten rid of in favor of multinational corporations and wealthy retirees from out of state, state and municipal employees who get special lower rent rates, well connected (read campaign donors) landlords. There is no place for YOU here in the new Feudal State of California.

As bad as that all is, a walk down Hollywood Boulevard on any Saturday evening will be very educational to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. As one walks east from the corner of Hollywood and Highland, one will be walking past allys, facades and buildings where Chaplin and Lloyd once shot film, where Joan Crawford once went to balls dancing the Charleston and drinking illegal hootch, and where as late as 1990, small local neighborhood based and tourist based businesses that offered quality goods, once held on biting their nails.

One will notice while attempting to dodge a aimlessly walking crowd of people who don't seem to be doing anything but promenading, that the sidewalk, Hollywood's internationally famous "Walk of Fame" feels like a foot roller coaster. It's lumpy from trees poorly planted during the Woo years (no root control systems), from ground settling due to a carelessly built subway line, and ill considered underground condominium parking garages.

 It seems no one bothered with the underlaying geology while bulking up Hollywood. As DeMille pointed out in his retrospective book on Hollywood's early movie colony, at one time this area, Hollywood Boulevard, was a streambed, and that stream runs UNDERGROUND ALL YEAR LONG in a matrix of sand and gravel. Place new solid objects in that matrix and the water runs round it in a new direction and place, undermining the ground below the sidewalks.  This has been CLEARLY happening for a decade, but all officialdom pretends to not notice as they approve ever more dense and high condos, and newer bigger commercial projects. The sewer lines, water supply lines, and natural gas lines all run in this now disturbed moving matrix. It should not take a genius to figure out that these 100 year old bits of infrastructure may be damaged by the inevitable results of all this development. This weekend while I was walking to and from my motel to the film festival there were two emergency underground repairs. Last year there was one, and there were two the year before. So in the last three years I've spent 15 days in Hollywood and seen five emergency underground repairs in one half mile area. This was entirely foreseeable. At least one letter by yours truly was published in truncated form about this infrastructure issue in the LAT and was read by me at public hearings while the subway was under consideration. While I don't have a degree in geology, it seems my amateur knowledge was superior to those who certified EIRs saying "No Problem".

I point this out, not to say "I told you so" or to point out my manifest brilliance. I point it out because every Tuesday throughout California for the last thirty years and going on today, elected officials are betraying the trust the public has granted them by approving projects that risk the public health and safety.

Sure they do this in PART because of the campaign donations the special interests have given them, but there is another reason: California's local and State officials have over promised wages, benefits, and retirements, to the public employee unions that quite simply are out of the realm of reality, especially when compared to what's left of California's non governmental economy. The only way to begin to pay these outsized paychecks and benefits is to increase dramatically the taxation per acre of California land, and the only way to do that is through new building everywhere and driving out of the State through policy everyone whom is not fantastically wealthy.

So as the subsidized private sector mega developments go up where small developments are prohibited, through a system of bribery called the Conditional Use Permit process, and as these projects are always certified by "experts" to have little or no environmental impact, the environment and infrastructure of California constantly degrades as the wealthy developers and government employees ride a gravy train that is dooming all that once was the Golden State. They are strangling the goose.