Serious Conflict of Interest in the City Budget...and Another Preventable Fire
I don’t trust Mayor Bass, and after reading about an alarming conflict of interest in her proposed budget, I don’t believe anyone should.
(If anyone out there can get their hands on the missing original report, there is such a thing as uploading it to archive.org - just saying. I’ll be only too happy to share it far and wide.)
Getting into bed with Airbnb is a huge conflict of interest for a city with a vacancy/misuse problem, tens of thousands of still-displaced fire victims, and thousands of still-empty Project Homekey units (that Angelenos already paid a $#@%&*! fortune for).
It’s a pity that City Hall wasn’t designed with some sort of flushing mechanism.
Anyway, there was another empty-house fire in Harvard Heights the other day.
1970 South La Salle Avenue is (was?) a big, beautiful 1907 Craftsman, despite the deferred maintenance. (The initial LAFD Alert reports it was 2008 South La Salle, on the next block, but 2008 is a 1960s multifamily building with only one code complaint on file, and it appears to be in good condition. The incident was updated with the correct address.)
There is a list of code complaints, nearly all from the last two years. The usual suspects - unpermitted construction, abandoned/vacant building open to the public, and “building or wall that could fall down” - are all present.
Hoping to find an explanation for the building’s boarded-up state, I dug more, and promptly discovered that the house was not only listed for sale VERY recently, but that it was under contract.
Whether the house is still under contract isn’t yet clear, but if the buyer is a speculator, fire damage won’t matter to them. It was listed as a fixer, which isn’t a deterrent to home seekers on a modest budget, but fire damage might be too much for some buyers to handle.
I suspect the listing was at least partially generated by an AI chatbot, since one sentence reads “Boarded windows and a fenced front contribute to vintage curb appeal.” I’m screenshotting it here in case the listing gets edited.
Boarded windows are charming? Since when?
I wonder how much money the city chooses to leave on the table each year when it fails to penalize those who abuse the privilege of owning property through neglect (or through misuse such as turning an SRO into a pricey hotel.)
To paraphrase punk band Bad Religion, Los Angeles real estate shenanigans are the crummiest book I’ve ever read - there isn’t a hook, just a lot of cheap shots, pictures to shock, and characters an amateur would never dream up.