What you most miss in the continuing debate over bringing football back to Los Angeles is any hint that anyone, apart from potential investors, really cares whether it returns. To return pro football to Los Angeles, and make it stay here, you need more than glib accounting. You need someone with the kind of charisma […]
Category: LA Times
A Diesel-Powered Intrusion
To hard-core environmentalists, it was as though John Muir had suggested clear-cutting Sequoia National Forest. “We have confidence that, given past history, the auto industry will rise to the challenge and we will have light-duty diesel in California.” This was Alan Lloyd, longtime electric-car champion and president of the California Air Resources Board, recently declaring […]
The Politics of Downtown Survival–It’s Silly Season
A woman best known to TV news viewers for her frog-suited protests against wetland development has attacked the ecological record of the major backer of the proposed downtown sports arena. Representatives of an inner-city Sierra Club chapter asked, more seriously, why the arena backers didn’t foresee the project’s effects on the surrounding poor neighborhoods. And […]
L.A.’s vanishing vacancies
Last week’s City Council vote to double and possibly triple relocation fees that condominium developers must pay tenants before evicting them is not a real solution to Los Angeles’ condo-convers- ion crisis. The condo still gets built, and the unit is off the rental housing market Source: L.A.’s vanishing vacancies – Los Angeles Times […]
A ‘green’ industrial belt should run through it
An idea to create jobs along the L.A. River deserves a public hearing. Source: A ‘green’ industrial belt should run through it – Los Angeles Times […]
The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up on City Hall
The July 4 holiday being what it is, Los Angeles won’t get to use its new City Charter, which kicks in Saturday, until July 5. Source: The Great Charter Awakening Sneaks Up on City Hall – Los Angeles Times […]
Solis Challenges the Democrats’ Seniority System
U.S. Rep. Matthew G. “Marty” Martinez (D-Monterey Park) isn’t famous for his sagacity or much else. Source: Solis Challenges the Democrats’ Seniority System – Los Angeles Times […]
Why Antilabor L.A. Embraced the Striking Janitors
Los Angeles, harsh company town with an antilabor reputation and a strike-busting, organization-killing old guard, opened its heart to a well-organized walkout of some of its lowest-paid workers seeking better pay. Motorists endured congestion and waved their fists, not in rage but in solidarity with thousands of marching, striking janitors in their shirts of bright […]
Why We Have More Bad-Air Days
It was grim reading for the breathing. Eleven California counties are among the nation’s 25 dirtiest for ozone pollution, according to the latest survey of the American Lung Assn. Just a few years ago, bad air was a local problem here–in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties… […]
What comes after Baca?
The 18 acting and former deputy sheriffs charged with federal crimes in connection with the running of the Los Angeles County jails have yet to stand trial. But whether or not they are convicted, the arrests make one thing perfectly clear: As presently structured, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jail division is a failed […]