LA, Councilmember Embarrass Themselves on National Stage

California is among the worst offenders in the country when it comes to building housing. For decades, wealthy single-family homeowners have strangled opportunities and walled off their communities, resulting in some of the most obscene housing prices in the nation. As a consequence, 24% of the nation’s homeless people live in California, which has only 12% of the population. 

SB 79 is a housing bill that has advanced through the California Senate and is now in the State Assembly (their “House”). The bill focuses on building housing around transit by making it so cities have to zone for medium sized apartment buildings next to big transit investments like light rail stops.

California is spending billions on expanding its transit system, and with this effort is trying to make good use of that money by doing what is known to work - putting lots of housing nearby. That way their tens of billions in public investment don’t go to waste, people pollute less because they have easy access to transit, and housing supply starts to catch up so prices can mellow.

It’s a relatively modest piece of legislation that only applies to major transit, which doesn’t cover all that much land area, and it comes with affordability requirements and displacement prevention. It also leaves far more local control in place than is ideal, but this is how compromises get done. Overall, I’m quite supportive.

So I was extremely disheartened when I saw that the Los Angeles City Council voted to pass a resolution urging the State Assembly to reject the bill, and even more saddened when I read that their Mayor signed it. I had thought of Mayor Karen Bass as a progressive in the past, but she has clearly decided to side with the wealthy over the working class. She should be primaried in her next election. Her former opponent, a billionaire centrist, surprised no one when he too agreed with the shameful keep–California-expensive resolution. 

Bass has now joined a too-long line of do-nothing Democratic “leaders” who make it easier for the fascist Trump administration by failing to address people’s basic needs and by making blue states so expensive that people move to red states and we lose electoral votes. With “leaders” like this, the effort to save the US from the blood and soil authoritarians is much more likely to fail. We need fewer of these feckless do-nothings and more people who are willing to fight and push the envelope on behalf of their constituents.

Fortunately, mainstream Dems are finally starting to tune into the issues that housing leaders have fought for for years. The pod bros of Pod Save America, the ultimate mainstream Dems, criticized Los Angeles’ move and then invited a debate on their show.

They brought on the bill’s sponsor, Senator Scott Weiner, who represents San Francisco, to debate Los Angeles City Councilmember Imelda Padilla. The understated back and forth between the two politicians was almost a sideshow to the hilarious reactions by the host Jon Lovett to the insane statements made by Padilla. 

First Padilla called this an “unfunded mandate,” which is silly, because the bill doesn’t require governments to put out money. The mandate is to let people choose to build some stuff if they want, and even lets cities charge them fees for doing so. 

Second, she kept talking about local control. While there are certainly issues that local government is better at addressing, this is totally not true when it comes to housing, or really any issue related to who gets to live in a community or have rights in that community. There is a long and ugly history of slaveowners, segregationists, and classists using local control to exclude certain kinds of people from full participation in their communities, or exclude them completely - and this effort by Padilla and Bass is, even if inadvertently, very much in keeping with that tradition. 

While the words “unfunded mandate” and “local control” aren’t themselves going to raise eyebrows with anyone who isn’t already super political, the Councilmember really started to go off the rails at 15:47 when she said: 

“a council member's number one job description, especially in the city of Los Angeles, is land use decisions. People get elected for the conversations that they have with folks about what they're going to do to keep their neighborhood looking and growing the way that they want it to be.” 

I’m sorry what? A councilmember’s top job is to prioritize local NIMBY wall-building?

She then bragged about reducing an affordable housing development from six stories to three stories, sparking this increasingly viral post online:

And then she said the quiet part out loud, complaining about her colleagues that stood up for affordability (25:25): “Get to work and stop siding with state policies that technically would reduce my job description.”

What I hear here is that she thinks her #1 job is to represent her constituents’ worst impulses to exclude others, she thinks she has done so best when drastically reducing the amount of affordable housing added to her neighborhood, and she really wants to protect her power.

Given that she’s in Los Angeles, I’m assuming she’s registered as a Democrat. But her policy here is a direct reflection of the Project 2025 focus on local control for the sake of cultural preservation and exclusion, is disproportionately going to hurt poor, working class, younger, people of color, and seems mainly to serve the preservation of her own power.

So at least on this issue, I’d love to know how we can distinguish her from a Trumpian Republican.

She and the others that voted with her, including the Mayor, should all be voted out of office.