Month: December 2019

by Anthony Rizzo

Our City is in the process of updating its General Plan. Part of the plan focuses on our zoning and housing development. 

In anticipation, some councilmembers and their supporters have been showcasing Culver City’s hstoric racism. 

Some are advocating that the council make a formal apology for its racism while others have gone so far as to suggest rezoning single family residential neighborhoods to allow for “affordable” housing as a form of reparations.

In my opinion, minorities of Culver City do not want an apology for the racism of the past nor do we want rezoning for “affordable” housing.

What we want is a commitment from our elected council to protect our rights to have the same quality of life that the past residents of this beautiful suburb enjoyed during its heyday. 

Culver City has overcome racism. And, the people in Culver are evidence of it. The diversity in our City reflects this.  As a minority, I was not prevented by laws or intimidation from purchasing a single-family home in Culver City. The couple that sold the house to me was white and they were excited for me to make this City my new home.  However, what I have observed is that the City has steadily reduced its commitment to protect residents’ rights to have the same quality of life as those who began this great city.

For example, I purchased a home in Sunkist Park – a single family residential neighborhood. It has beautiful, quiet, tree lined streets. At the center of this perfectly planned neighborhood is a small elementary school and park. However, over the past 10 years the City (school district and city) has stopped protecting our right to enjoy the same quiet, low density neighborhood for which it is zoned and was designed.

Every week after school and during the weekends, the streets around the school are flooded with cars coming in and out to use the school field.

The City, without notice, consent, or proper planning repurposed the field as a recreational park.  

Permits are sold to sports associations to use the field as a recreational park. The volume of traffic in the neighborhood has tripled, the level of pollution in the neighborhood has increased 10-fold, the streets are no longer quiet, and kids cannot safely ride and play in the streets.

Sunkist Park neighborhood is not a recreational park.  It was built for single family homes. It is designed for families to walk their kids to the small elementary school and for families and kids to walk or ride their bike/board to play at the neighborhood park.  

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only area the City has fallen short:

• Traffic in Culver City in now a crisis. In neighborhoods and on the main streets. Encampments in our parks and streets and the sale and use of drugs is permitted.
• Kids’ safety is a major concern of parents – playing outside or traveling to school.
• City regulations have increased exponentially i.e. requirements for building/remodeling your home, bans on plastic bags, straws and e-cigarettes, rent control (proposed rent control board), ban on certain utilities (proposed ban on gas appliances), etc.
• Local taxes have been on a steady rise with the looming debt of pension liabilities.
• Government growth is out of control for a small City like ours.  We are flooded with increased costs to implement the avalanche of state laws and special interest programs; i.e. the planners to hire for the planning department, costs for programs to come out of the revised general plan, homeless czar, etc.

Isn’t it ironic that the same City that prevented minorities from purchasing homes is now preventing minorities from having the same quality of life.  

As a matter of fact, it’s not just minorities that suffer, all residents are prevented from experiencing this same quality of life. 

Instead of an apology, I am suggesting our City go back to the drawing board and take care of the basics:

• Enforce the laws on the books to remove encampments, and drug dealers from our streets.
• Manage growth and traffic so we can enjoy the peaceful oasis of Culver City.
• Reduce crime in our City so our streets are safe.
• Stop the state and surrounding cities from forcing their agenda on us.
• Solve our financial crises and get a handle on our pension liabilities.

The truth of the matter is that the minorities disenfranchised by the historic racism of Culver City’s housing policies are now living in Culver City neighborhoods, in single family homes.  Once the discriminatory laws were removed, we were able to purchase homes wherever we wanted.

The issue was never “affordability” it was “accessibility”. 

Therefore, save the apology and the progressive agenda to “up-zone away poverty”.

Please just protect the beautiful City we love and preserve the amazing quality of life it has to offer us all.

Some months back in August, parents of Lin Howe’s students received a note from CCUSD telling of an untoward incident that the children had been witness to. Naturally, the newly appointed principal of the school found herself bombarded with enquiries. What exactly had happened? What had the children seen?

To her credit, Principal Eva Carpenter provided a detailed response via email. Since the message was sent out to every Lin Howe parent, I have no hesitation reproducing it here:

I have gotten inquiries about the details of today’s events.  There was a man who was believed to be mentally ill walking down the street in front of our school acting erratically.  The police were called as he was also seen walking on to neighbors’ properties.  The police came and tried to quell the situation but had to subdue him forcefully.  Unfortunately some of our students saw what happened but were moved away from the area safely.  The suspect was taken into custody without incident, staff members who witnessed the event gave their eyewitness statements. I am working closely with CCUSD Security Director, Superintendent Lockhart and the culver City Police to ensure we keep all students safe. 

Note some key words and phrases here. The man was “mentally ill” and merely “walking down the street.” The individual, referred to as the “suspect” was “taken into custody.”

But being “mentally ill” isn’t a crime. Neither is walking down a public street. So, why was this person arrested? Why was he violently subdued when there were children watching?

Now Globe Avenue residents would never call about a “mentally ill” person simply “walking down the street.” There’s not much point calling about one of these individuals sitting on your property drinking from an open container, either.

• 

• 

• 

Police dispatch—who will rush one of CCPD’s finest to your home if your cat’s stuck up a tree or your neighbor’s using his camera and the flash disturbs your afternoon nap—invariably ask: “But what’s he/she doing?”

In other words, what’s the crime?

You can be mentally ill. And you can walk down the streets. Well, all right, as long as you’re not endangering either yourself or others. At any event, one doesn’t expect such people to be arrested. One merely expects them to be confined in an appropriate asylum and to receive the treatment they so badly need.

Now we have called about the mentally ill when we’ve witnessed them accosting passersby or relentlessly following pedestrians, while shaking their fists and acting aggressive. We’ve seen and called about the mentally ill violently reaching out and trying to grab moms walking their babies, growling at and clearly scaring them.

We’ve called because it was the civic-minded thing to do.

Do the police come? No. After dispatch has finished arguing with you about whether you’re well and truly a Culver City resident, you’ll find out—as my husband and I did on one occasion—that your call was never even relayed to the police department.

(In case, you’re wondering, dispatch is outsourced to South Bay, which handles both non-emergency and 911 calls for Culver City and a couple of other cities.)

We’ve also called about mentally ill people blocking traffic, erratically crossing from one side to the other on Venice Boulevard—at risk of becoming yet another statistic in a hit-and-run. But Dispatch has again wondered whether CCPD had jurisdiction or LAPD. Ultimately, no one has been sent out.

The compassion the authorities supposedly feel for the “unhoused” doesn’t apparently extend to saving the lives of the mentally ill and the “unhoused” they profess to care for. Who knows, maybe it’s more compassionate to let them die!

Why is there one law for Police District 1—the Mayor’s neighborhood—and quite another for the rest of Culver City?

The Constitution guarantees equality under the law and equal treatment by the law. But Mayor Sahli-Wells and her council are doing everything they can to undermine those constitutional guarantees.

Build more shelters, of course!

It’s a no-brainer. At least, according to Mayor Sahli-Wells and her brethren of four.

This past Monday, a neighbor spoke at the council meeting of receiving not one but three threats from the “unhoused”—to borrow Councilman Lee’s term—members of Culver City. (Never mind that many of these have never rented or owned a residence in Culver City. And for quite a few, their last residence was more likely than not to have been behind bars.

The city council proudly claims them all as residents.) Our neighbor has also narrowly escaped being attacked on two or three separate occasions. And she mentioned this as well.

I spoke of our children seeing people shoot dope; of seeing the “unhoused” openly selling drugs; of our children having to find human feces on our street—a quiet residential cul-de-sac—and used needles; of seeing “unhoused” men using our street as an open-air public restroom; of property thefts and seeing suspicious individuals of the “unhoused” variety peering into car windows and trying car-door handles to see if any of the parked vehicles were unlocked.

• 

• 

To these complaints, the Mayor had but one response: “We have a housing crisis. We’re providing more services and we’re building a shelter.”

What, you might wonder, is the connection between death threats, property thefts, and the like to housing and the availability of shelters?

To be sure, these crimes are perpetrated by the vagrants whom the city council persists in referring to as “homeless.” But other than that what connection is there?

How does more and free housing keep our residents safe? How does it prevent us from receiving death threats?

How does more and free housing prevent substance abuse? What does it do to combat drug dealing?

How is more and free housing an adequate response to the fact that our streets are being used as vast, open-to-the sky toilets?

If the connection eludes you, don’t worry. We’re at a loss to understand it as well.

Some further questions might have occurred to you: Who will build these shelters? Where? How much will they cost? When will they be available?

More importantly: In the interim, what will be done to keep us safe? What is to prevent someone who issues a death threat from carrying it out?

And finally, when those shelters are built, what if the “unhoused” refuse to move into them, citing one reason or another? What happens, then?

We do have shelters and we do provide services—and the “unhoused” frequently refuse them. This happens often enough and poses a sufficiently troubling legal conundrum that many California cities and counties have joined to file a brief asking the Ninth Circuit to provide some clarity on the matter. If the “unhoused” refuse to go into an available shelter, can this be taken to mean that no shelter was available?

Not Culver City, however. Our city council seems largely untroubled by the issue. Who cares when the issue doesn’t touch Police District 1, where police officers can—and do—tackle the “unhoused” to the ground in front of watching children?

The rest of Culver City can just suck it up, pay their taxes, and go to hell!

As promised, our final council meeting of the year delivered quite the goodybag of issues.  Residents spoke out on a number of issues, including some of us at Protect Culver City.  Let’s recap:

To start the meeting, a few of us spoke about our petition to agendize criminal vagrancy at a future council meeting.  Nupur Tustin, and Lisa and Frank Clark gave very impassioned speeches about the state of affairs at the Venice/405 camp and how it’s affecting their neighborhoods. 

I also spoke about the rising threat of criminal vagrancy, distinguishing it from homelessness, and offered PCC’s help to council in combating this problem.  My main point: “If somebody decides to sleep on our streets or in our parks, and we have somewhere to send them, can we move them?”

Council quickly made it obvious they wanted to be no part of the solution.  Mayor Sahli-Wells instead discussed the “crisis of homelessness”, saying “The way you address homelessness is by ensuring people have a home.”  This led to jeers and a verbal altercation between council and the audience.

Both councilman Eriksson and city manager John Nachbar welcomed residents to contact them about dealing with this issue.  PCC has reached out to Nachbar for help.  But make no mistake.  If council addresses this crime issue, which everyone in the area is experiencing in desparate proportions, as a “housing” issue?  This is a total failure of moral clarity about the problem.  It can only result in further freefall and disaster for our city.

I called them out on this issue at the C-13 item, regarding an assistant to the city manager on homelessness.  This is meant to streamline our operations in dealing with vagrancy, and as I mentioned in my earlier comment, we’d be willing to support this.  But, I continued: “I find the fact that we’re discussing as a housing issue is a lie!  …you can’t solve this problem if you call this a housing issue, no matter how many cops we have, no matter how many employees or lawyers we have.  We need the moral clarity to discuss this as a crime issue.”

Item A-1 – discussing the police drone program – was a surprising progress over earlier hearings.  We didn’t have our usual anti-police contingency smearing our PD as murdering cops.  The progress report was very positive, and council was supportive.  It was almost uneventful, except for FD battalion chief Kolhep saying the drone “helped us rule out all non-arson causes” (1:27:15 in the meeting video) regarding the July 22^nd 99c store fire.  We’ll be following up on that. 

Item A-5 was our other major item: discussing the cost of the rent control program.  A few people spoke out saying the cost was too prohibitive, given we’re in a financial crisis as a city.  I don’t think that’s the best argument, which is why I didn’t speak about it.  Sure enough, Mayor Sahli-Wells said “budgets are value statements” implying that if the program yields a net benefit to the city, it’s worth the cost.

The problem with Wells’s arguments about the value of the program (4:09:00) is, we challenge the veracity of all of them. 

She claims “we got here because of a grassroots effort of residents in this city.”  It was such a grassroots effort that candidates Fisch and Lee avoided the issue of rent control entirely, and Fisch claimed outright he opposes rent control.  Indeed, nobody ran on the issue, and even debate moderators said it was off the table. 

She claims the movement was a combination of renters and sympathetic homeowners (i.e. herself and her friends).  It was such a widespread movement that despite months of underground organizing she only managed to get a few dozen signed cards supporting rent control for the June meeting.  Meanwhile, we at PCC are getting such a groundswell of support we’re straining our ability to deal with all the intake.  Unlike the alleged tenant’s fear of landlords, who can face all sorts of legal trouble for retaliation, residents live in very real fear of a retaliatory council and their supporters.

To add insult to injury, Mayor Wells continues to tie rent control to the “extreme moment of high homelessness.”  Even she contradicts herself in her own official homelessness video, when she says the homeless “come to Culver City because they feel safe.”

Such a conflation didn’t stop her from claiming “we need the data … based on facts on the ground, not scare tactics.”

This litany of baldfaced lies prompted Judy Scott, longtime LTMB member, to come up and give an impromptu rebuttal (4:25:00).  “For fourteen years, I’ve done exactly two mediations of over 50% increase, both done by sale of the property…. What you want me to believe is, hordes of people been priced out of their homes, not one of them filed for a mediation request…because in the past three years, the highest increase we’ve mediated was 15%.”

Mayor Wells’ only reply was “I know we have a lot of examples that don’t fall within what was just shared with us.”  And that’s all we ever hear from her.  Always anonymous anecdotes, never verifiable, because they don’t exist.  Her claims that “tenants are afraid” is easily refuted by the fact mediations are confidential.  Her own consultants, Bay Area Economics, pointed out that rents among multifamily units only rose about 3% annually in the past 5 years – contrasted with the 80% increase in home prices over the same period.

These should be our arguments with rent control – not the cost, or what it’ll do to landlords.  Despite throwing around the claim of “fair return”, Mayor Wells prides herself in making enemies among landlords, and said “rent controlled landlords are doing fine.” 

Rather, our contention is twofold.  One, it’s a lot of nonsense. 

But two – and this is the big one for renters – it kills the rental market.  Meghan continued to praise the one eviction they managed to save (from the effects of their own rent control program).  Meanwhile, we at PCC we’re already seeing the disastrous conclusions of just the interim freeze.  One testimonial after another of vacated units, properties going up for sale, renters scrambling for what rare unit is left, etc.

To their credit, we are seeing one high vacancy rate – these new luxury condos being built, way out of anybody’s price range at $3000-6000+ per unit.  It’s certainly a consensus of suspicion that the real goal of rent control is to force the older more affordable multifamily units off the market.  This forces people either into newer more expensive units or onto the new normal of street living.  

But going down that road gets us lost in webs of conspiracy. 

Rather, we should invoke what may be the one public comment that mattered: the very first one by Katherine Makinney (0:07:30): “The broader issue is that council is not going to listen.”  This total failure to face up to facts, to listen and dialogue with residents, this deliberate conflation of housing with crime – these are the red flags of a rogue council with an alien agenda. 

When Harry Culver designed his dream city, he probably never foresaw that local politicians and activists would turn the once clean city that bears his name into a filth-ridden tent encampment that the Los Angeles Times has dubbed the West Side Skid Row.

Residents report—and both Culver City and Los Angeles Police Department officers agree—that Culver City’s skid row is home to drug dealers, who openly deal drugs in the neighboring residential streets, drug users who shoot dope in the open, oblivious to the hapless residents and children trying to enjoy a quiet Sunday in front of their houses, and prostitutes.

• 

• 

• 

• 

No, it’s not. And no one is saying it should be.

But what is criminal is the city’s refusal to enforce basic city codes and laws that keep the streets and residents of Harry Culver’s dream city safe.

Things began to change in 2017, when Los Angeles our neighbor refused to enforce its vagrancy laws, allowing known drug dealers, felons, drug abusers, and severely mentally ill people to set up tents on the north—Los Angeles—side of Venice Boulevard under the 405 freeway overpass.

Residents of Culver City’s Globe Avenue on the south side of Venice Boulevard were already beginning to feel the negative effects of this decision. Residents reported their cars were being broken into, bicycles, tools, and other personal property stolen. Petty crime was on the rise.

On a couple of occasions gunshots were heard—some gang or the other protesting the vagrants’ encroachment of their drug turf.

As Culver City residents, we couldn’t appeal to our city. After all, this was an LA issue. But residents feared that before long the problem would spill over onto our side of the overpass.

But a failure to keep our streets and sidewalks clean is. As is a failure to keep our residents safe.