19 10 / 2012
Text of Emanuel’s opening statement at DPSFV debate
Last night, Emanuel participated in the Mayoral Candidates Debate hosted by the Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley (DPSFV). Emanuel, Wendy Greuel, Eric Garcetti, and Jan Perry all participated.
Here’s Emanuel’s opening statement, as prepared for delivery:
Good evening everyone. Thank you all for coming out, and thank you to the San Fernando Valley Democratic Party for hosting this event. Even in the middle of the Presidential Election, everyone here knows how important the next Mayoral election is for Los Angeles.
I’m grateful for the opportunity here tonight to speak with you about the City we all love, my home. We all know our City’s at a crossroads, and we need to decide where we want to be, and how we want to get there. Our current elected officials—some of them sitting on this stage with me tonight—tell us the City’s making progress on their watch. Reality is, that for many Angelenos, progress isn’t happening fast enough. Try telling the men and women still looking for a good-paying job here in Reseda and Arleta that we’re making progress. Try telling the victims of last week’s crimes in Van Nuys that the City’s never been safer. Try telling the residents of Pacoima that don’t have sidewalks or streetlights that the City’s making progress. Try telling our young people who are pushed out of our schools that there’s a City that cares about them and their future.
07 9 / 2012
07 8 / 2012
Example: All the “street art,” commissioned by Open Walls Baltimore (sponsored by PNC Bank), being strategically placed in areas undergoing gentrification so the white yuppies/punx/MICA students from suburbia can exist in a hipster bubble and pretend they’re living somewhere dangerous while they displace everyone and drive up rent.
Destroy all artists/hipsters/future yuppies.
Fuck street art.
If I get around to it sometime this week I think I’ll try to write something longer addressing how problematic, counter-revolutionary, and frankly, liberal, statements such as “Destroy all artists” and “Fuck street art” are. For now, however, I just want to say I’m really fucking tired of people equating artists with yuppies. Yes, some artists are yuppies but you cannot just negate the fact that art objects are still just commodities within the dictatorship of Capital. Also, equating all artists with yuppies only works as an erasure of the entire history of art which is inseparable from the entire history of human existence. Fuck PNC and all banks for that matter. But with the commodification of street art, shit like this is going to happen. The question that arises though, with art projects like this would you rather have a message of subversion against capitalism (and the gentrification created by the capitalist system) planted by the artist with this commodity of gentrification, or just another fucking boring mural?
Destroy all yuppies.
Destroy all banks.
Destroy capitalism.
Art, however, is and always will be inseparable from human existence.
Capitalism contains within it the seeds of it’s own destruction. The same theory applies to the art market as it does with all industries.
ok this is a little better but lol @ Tru Art being *~subversion~* of capital
i mean good point w/ all art (object or not) being “just commodities within the dictatorship of capital”
OP is dumb as heck but graffiti (“street art” being only a cultural position migration of the form) regardless of the whatever the artists program is, is always a reactionary aesthetic form, if only because of the medium
basically lefties need to quit with the fetishism of the idea and finally recognize that both program and aesthetic are important for ~~~revolutionary art~~~
spacebaw knows more about politicized aesthetics than like 99% of the people on Tumblr/that I’ve ever met
(Source: ourtropes, via le-kif-kif)
23 7 / 2012
Los Angeles remains homelessness capital of the US
July 24, 2012Los Angeles is known for Hollywood and glamorous celebrities, but it is also a city where many live in poverty and suffer from hunger.
Even if Southern California is home to several billionaires, the poverty rate in LA County is among the highest in the nation and the unemployment rate remains in the double digits, making Los Angeles the capital of glitz and homelessness.
From exotic cars to extravagant fashion, the rich and famous give Los Angeles a reputation of opulent prosperity, but just around the corner from this glamour is the Los Angeles of utter despair.
On Skid Row the homeless live in third world conditions and things they say are only getting worse.
“They feel like there is no hope for them. They’re afraid of the police,” said Mary Czrepuszko, a homeless Los Angeles resident.
Los Angeles remains the homeless capital of the US with more than 51-thousand people living in shelters, cars or in homeless encampments.
“Staying in a shelter, getting bit every day. Having scars and scratching, it’s really bad. I would rather just be on the street,” said Czrepuszko, who became homeless after losing her job as a nursing assistant.
While Mary Czrepuszko and her neighbors sleep on tattered blankets, just a short drive away are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America.
In this city of extremes, the celebrities and the super-rich enjoy pampered living on palatial, hillside mansions. Huge houses in exclusive neighborhoods give Los Angeles an image of glitz and glamour. Behind high security fences lay multi-million dollar homes with luxuries like Olympic size pools and a staff of maids.
The wealthiest rest safely behind their elegant walls, while some of the city’s poorest face another long night next to a warehouse wall.
A lavish mansion costing more than $50 million in Beverly Hills is unthinkable for most people in a city where 1 in 5 children live in poverty.
“It was 2 in the morning and me and my kids were sleeping on the bus stop. That was the first time we ever had to sleep on the bus stop,” said Antoine Hudspedth, a Los Angeles homeless resident.
After the real estate crash, Hudspeth lost his job as a mortgage loan officer and became disabled. Now he struggles to feed his wife and their three sets of twins.
“I don’t want to see them sleeping on the streets. I can’t have that,” said Hudspeth.
While Hudspeth and his family line-up for a sandwich, Los Angeles’ wealthy dine in pricey gourmet restaurants and inside the massive dining rooms of their sprawling estates
The startling gap between the haves and have-nots is seen in the growing number of families who cannot afford food and housing.
“We’ve had families who have stayed with us for over two years. Yes, that’s sad, but we’re still trying our best to give them the best we can give them and connect them with resources,” said Kitty Davis Walker from Union Rescue Mission Los Angeles.
As financial austerity looms, those resources are shrinking.
It will be those in lines for the soup kitchens, not the grass fed beef and organic arugula, who will feel the pinch of California’s belt tightening.
In this economic crisis, the rich in Los Angeles flaunt their high end lifestyle, while more families fall into poverty, making it likely the city will remain a place of fame and fortune but also of great financial anguish.
17 7 / 2012
"This feeling of being “pushed out” of the city usually manifests itself in the controversial term, “gentrification.” But it’s hard for me to worry about gentrification when you can literally buy a home for $10,000. We have a long, long, long, long, long way to go before the poor are pushed out of the city limits by rising prices. Now will they be displaced from one neighborhood and into another? Yes. I realize that this sucks. And yes, I realize that I have no idea how much it sucks to be pushed to move out of your home by economic forces. But remember, you can buy a home for $5,000-$10,000. You might have to move out of one neighborhood, but you’ll get to move to another one not far away. And still well within the city limits. And, in fact, Detroit is 140 square miles. 90 percent of it will not be affected by gentrification for 10-20 years, even if we’re being optimistic."
Jerry Mangona: Gentrification: Views From Both Sides of the Street
Reading this article was really really difficult. The entire premise of it is based on the idea that “gentrification” is about *feelings* and “misunderstandings” rather than very real resource hoarding and withdrawals.
These paragraphs are probably the most problematic point in a really problematic article—the idea that gentrification isn’t *that* bad because folks who are ‘shoved out’ can just buy another house!
I’m going to leave the most obvious point alone—that to many many people, even a house that is “only” $5000-10,000 is often prohibitively expensive (which is why so many people are renting even when houses are “only” that much), and I’m going to instead focus on the point this article begins with—the story about how exciting it is to see people making over $100,000 a year organizing community potlucks and get togethers.
It takes a stable strong community for community building projects of any sort to happen. Parents don’t generally leave their children with some total stranger down the street who just moved in two weeks ago—and conversely, what are parents supposed to do when the person they’ve trusted enough to leave their child with leaves after three months because they can’t afford their house payment any longer?
Why is it ok to ask the people who need community the most and who use community building as a way to address actual problems in their communities (vandalism, youth violence, schools shutting down, etc) to uproot (that is: destroy) their community integrity to make Detroit “nicer” for people who, through tax breaks, investments, incentives, city policies, and oh, those nice hundred thousand dollar paychecks, can make Detroit “nicer” all by themselves?
The casual treatment by the OP of poor people’s need for stable dedicated community is astonishing, but sadly, not uncommon. As a good friend and local activist pointed out, it’s just taken for granted in ALL areas of heavy gentrification that poor people have nothing of value to offer a city—that they don’t have community driven agendas that actively make those cities “nicer.”
Gentrification is not about “feelings” or “not liking change”—it’s about an actual competition for resources. Lifetime Detroiters are not suspicious of “the suits” (to draw on OP’s example) because “the suits” were too arrogant or blew smoke from over priced cigars in their faces.
It is because the resources different neighborhoods need to survive as those thriving communities that the OP loves so much have been literally taken from them and given to people making a hundred thousand a year. This *causes* bad blood—but the bad blood is not the problem. The taking the resources is. The casual indifference of the integrity and value of poor communities is. Safe, well resourced, stable communities is a human right *even for poor people* .
Not something to be sold to the highest bidder.
(via theaboveground)
This point:
Demonstrate a willingness to participate in the city’s improvement rather than fight it at every turn. You know what’s been great? Seeing community involvement at Detroit Works. It shows that you genuinely care and are more concerned with finding solutions that soothing egos. Let’s put problem-solving over pride… something Detroit (and Detroiters) are not always known for doing.
Is just absolutely stunning to me. This person is talking about the same people who are actively organizing against school closures, heavy industry pollution, and home foreclosures among other massive problems, and who are organizing to create new media economies, youth led movements, food structures that are grounded in justice, health systems that are affordable for poor people…and so so so many other things.
It’s absolutely a sign of the OP’s ignorance that he doesn’t know these things. That he doesn’t know how much of these actions are grounded in the communities that he’s so casual about uprooting.
(via mmmightymightypeople)
Clearly OP and similar folks have never:
1. Tried to live without a car as the only means of transport and how much of life depends on being in the magic triangle of commuting that gives you groceries, work, and access to your kids’ schools/daycare.
2. Tried to get an apartment when you don’t have good credit
3. Had to have family, friends, or neighbors live close by in order to help take care of children, sick, or elderly family
Beyond all that, the housing discrimination. Loan discrimination. This is true both in the downward spiral of Black owned businesses and the ways in which they do not recover from these uprooting.
But let’s also talk about policing. How gentrification doesn’t involve making the neighborhood safer - it involves “increased police presence” which always translates to harassing the people who have lived there for decades in favor of the people who are suddenly moving.
Let’s talk about how cities only redevelop WHEN the plan is to move out the original folks - all the taxes these people paid didn’t go into their communities- it was shunted elsewhere to redevelop some OTHER part of the city - now that the land is cheap enough push these folks out so they can do the same thing again.
(via bankuei)
As someone who had to leave the city I loved and called a home (Brooklyn, NY) due to price gouging and gentrification, I have to say that OP has absolutely no fucking clue what it is like to be put in that kind of situation. I hope they never do, frankly.
I had to give up everything I knew - my friends, my father, and my home - because we just couldn’t keep up with increasing rents and how rapidly the neighborhoods (Park Slope, especially) were/are changing to accommodate all of the out-of-towners coming in.
And no, in certain cities (Brooklyn, for example), sorry - you can’t buy a home for that amount of money. What do you do when you’re a local and you can’t even afford the $1,200 rent for a basic studio/ one bedroom apartment?
I know you can make the argument that one can just choose to live the city, that NYC is expensive anyway, etc etc. Doesn’t matter. It was still affordable to live where I lived - Park Slope and Sunset Park - because it was a locals only/ ‘my family has lived here for generations’ kind of deal. It’s my fucking home. I shouldn’t have had to have left because of this bullshit. But I had to.
‘We have a long way to go’, my ass. It’s been happening for decades.
(via smelltheashes)
I’m not going to put words in the mouth of smelltheashes—but i just wanted to point back to the OP and how he says “it sucks” and makes the injustice of gentrification about “feelings”—and i just want to say that I know several people who have been or are getting priced out of midtown and/or got foreclosed on due to predatory lending—and what they talk about is not “feelings”—but *trauma*. “being nicer” to people you are actively traumatizing—a kinder and gentler trauma experience—is just so unbelievably offensive. i can not express how angry the OP makes me.
(via mmmightymightypeople)
(via ethiopienne)
03 6 / 2012
upwardly mobile folks and los angeles inequality
So I’m at a small restaurant spot in the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles just several blocks from the detention center on Alameda, just a couple blocks from Skid Row, and very close to Boyle Heights where poverty remains the norm.
Urth Cafe is full of upwardly mobile and professional folks who (coincidentally) are Asian and White American. The place is just 2 blocks away from Alameda where homeless folks walk along and find their next refuge. Urth Cafe is up against some lofts where the rent is indeed expensive. Now, my problem isn’t with people being successful and enjoying a $15 panini.
My questions arise from as to why the clientelé and demographics of the customers are the OPPOSITE of who the workers are. The workers are mostly brown skinned Latin@s and Black Americans. There seems to be an Asian manager and one white worker. The arrive in their new hatchbacks and mini-coopers. The police regularly visit for their discounted food.
Now the rant - this is what I get mad at people who earn money and run away into an urban spot and think they’re somehow “trendsetting” or “breaking new barriers”. Most of these folks are probably liberals - but why do they love to see LAPD arrive and stay for coffee. Because they want to be protected, because they know deep down inside unless a Latina/o or Black person is not wearing an apron and serving them their lattè - they look at that person of color as threatening or “other” person who’s here.
Yeah there are some Black folks and Latina/os here, but they prob got money and if they don’t then their probably not coming here on a weekly basis. I just hate how these so called “liberal” say they are apart of the 99%, say they want equality, but if you don’t look like you got money or act like the 1% with a 99% front, THEN YOU’RE TREATED LIKE AN OUTSIDER.
This is why I really believe that mainstream Democrats and “liberals” are just like Malcolm X talked about. People who are progressives on paper, but when it comes down to sharing the land/wealth/lending out a hand - “oh i don’t believe in that” - fuck liberals.
19 5 / 2012
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THIS DYNAMIC DUO.
“If you don’t know where your people have come from and who you are, how will you know what direction to go?” - Malcolm X
“Remember that consciousness is power. Consciousness is education and knowledge. Consciousness is becoming aware. It is the perfect vehicle for students. Consciousness-raising is pertinent for power, and be sure that power will not be abusively used, but used for building trust and goodwill domestically and internationally. Tomorrow’s world is yours to build.” - Yuri Kochiyama
Happy B-Day to these magnificent two souls. For those of you who missed it, Yuri was present and was kneeling over Malcolm’s deceased body, she was getting involved with the OAAU. RIP El Hajj Malik El Shabazz and Yuri still rocks on! HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!
18 3 / 2012
Wheatpaste by Tatiana Von Der Schulenburg from 2007 on 940 E. 2nd St. building (Arts District - Downtown Los Angeles)
P.S. Here’s a link to a feature article in the Downtown News that published on May 8, 2006 about her previous art installation incorporating ties, which preceded and inspired her subsequent “Gentrification” wheatpaste project.
(Source: downtownmuse)
