ellisonz
ellisonz's JournalPart 121: "A Big, Fat Grenade" - The Housing and Homelessness Crisis in Los Angeles
By Zachary Ellison and Ruth Roofless, Independent Journalists
Published October 18, 2024
“Leadership in L.A., someone is going to have to fall on a big, fat grenade to really change the way housing is produced,” read the quote from “economist and co-director of the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness,” Jason Ward, in the Los Angeles Times story by journalists Doug Smith and Liam Dillon. Repeating the quote outside the courtroom of Judge David O. Carter, himself known for colorful language from his time in the U.S. Marines, suddenly didn’t seem like such a good idea. Most especially, in the presence of the U.S. Marshals Service, which staffs the courthouse entrance. If anyone has tried to jump on the “grenade” though in Los Angeles, it’s been Judge Carter, and he’s taken the blast from trying to tackle the issue.
Only minutes before, Judge Carter had threatened to get the U.S. Attorney’s office involved if the audit launched by firm Alvarez & Marsal didn’t get to the bottom of a hold-up in producing invoice data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) to Los Angeles County to provide to the auditors. The audit was approved by Mayor Karen Bass and City Council last March. The Mayor said at the time, “We’ve reaffirmed our commitment to transparency and accountability,” promising that financial data would become even more transparent within a matter of weeks. Despite the optimism, things haven’t proved so simple at getting at why LA has failed so badly in addressing the crisis of the unhoused, at least in terms of official numbers and spending. Admittedly, the numbers can be more complex than they seem; some people are getting off the streets, but others are landing on them.
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-121-a-big-fat-grenade-the-housing
Part 120: Kevin de Leon vs. The Truth - Will the CD-14 Curse Ever Be Broken?
October 15, 2024
The power of incumbency in politics is strong. Former Councilmember José Huizar had just reported to federal prison in Lompoc to begin his 13-year sentence, and at the end of three debates, one-person and two virtual, it still wasn’t clear that challenger Ysabel Jurado could unseat Kevin de León. The upstart Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate, who had even received the endorsement of the Los Angeles Democratic Party, had struggled across the three in-person debates with De León’s forcefulness, attacking her shamelessly. To be fair, the venue locales were all favorable to De León: Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, and Boyle Heights. Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano had called the performance of De León in the third showdown in Dolores Mission Church, beneath a crucifix, “a man with a huge chip on his shoulder eclipsed by an ego as large as the General Sherman tree.” Comparing him to Donald Trump, who has no actual connection with KDL, as they call him, was probably a mistake.
Kevin de León seemingly has relished in the MAGA energy, so much so you’d like he was almost going to Make The Eastside Great Again; he was, as Arellano had previously cast him, now the ultimate “Eastside politico.” Try as they may, comparing José Huizar and Kevin De León simply hadn’t worked because, well, unlike Huizar, whatever baggage of corruption that KDL carried has simply remained out of the limelight. Even the furor of the LA Fed Tapes, the notoriously leaked recordings in which KDL sat down with former LA City Council President Nury Martinez, former Councilmember Gil Cedillo, and the former President of the LA County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO (the LA Fed). His recovery campaign had worked; despite the turmoil, De León had simply outwaited his critics. Unlike the second debate, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles was simply locked out of the venue hosted by the Boyle Heights Beat to the sidewalk. A few Los Angeles Police Department officers stood across the street chatting.
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-120-kevin-de-leon-vs-the-truth
Don't miss the latest on LA's version of the Watergate scandal!
Part 119: Land Battles and Influence in California - People Power and Civilization Failures
Published October 14, 2024
The atmosphere was celebratory! After two years of organizing, the residents of Altadena and fellow environmentalists had stopped the proposed Poly Fields development by Pasadena Polytechnic School, the toniest private school in the well-to-do city. Poly Fields was to be the solution to its need for more sports facilities and outdoor education, the former a long desired goal of the educational institution. In its public statement, Poly cited construction “requirements drove the development costs to levels that were much higher than anticipated, and far beyond what we believe to be reasonable.” Two organizations had formed to oppose the project, which would have included a 200-car underground garage: Altadena Wild and the Chaney Trail Corridor Project. The latter group had led a direct protest outside the school next to the California Institute of Technology, which was attended by 60 black-clad Altadena residents and one person in a bear costume. Soon after, Altadena Wild had helped organized residents to attend a nighttime meeting at the Altadena Community Center hosted by the Altadena Town Council. Half of Altadena had heard about the proposal, was the word in the packed meeting room.
The representative from the Los Angeles County Planning Department stayed late to answer questions about the proposal. The Chair of the Town Council Executive Committee explained that Poly had only met with them once, behind closed doors, before announcing that they had engaged with the community. Perhaps the project was never quite viable, with the proposed development sited on 13 acres of land currently used for a flower nursery. Altadena, which has only just over 42,000 residents compared to Pasadena’s more than 138,000, was not going to be the primary constituency for Poly, which enrolls relatively few students from the neighboring city. Even if the school had somehow managed to muscle through a second entrance and emergency exit point beyond the narrow two-lane road, which leads to Sunset Ridge and Millard Campground, it would have faced an uphill battle to get through the complex California Environmental Quality Act process, CEQA (see-qwa).
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-119-land-battles-and-influence]
Part 118: Publishing the LA Fed Papers - Trial and Error Justice in the Digital Age
Part 118: Publishing the LA Fed Papers – Trial and Error Justice in the Digital Age
Zachary Ellison
Oct 09, 2024
By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
Link: Kevin de León vs. Santos Leon and Karla Vasquez.pdf (Case No. 23STCV24461)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mfeu5r23cfzcqvpo1drwc/Kevin-de-Leon-vs.-Santos-Leon-and-Karla-Vasquez.pdf?rlkey=3webxkpyanzhgaqqpiohe6x4e&st=w0k2htkh&dl=0
Link: Gil Cedillo vs. Santos Leon, Karla Vasquez, and LA Fed.pdf (Case No. 23STCV24442)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/01mqd58i7m47vz24htq93/Gil-Cedillo-vs.-Santos-Leon-Karla-Vasquez-and-LA-Fed.pdf?rlkey=vethdyh4hov9sg77obkrveu96&st=23ubq5dr&dl=0
Two years ago, Los Angeles was rocked by the biggest political scandal perhaps ever in its history. Outside of valuable reports from Los Angeles Magazine journalist Michele McPhee and this publication, there hasn’t been much other coverage of the two civil cases pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court since they were filed a year after the October 2022 scandal in October of 2023. So I’m pleased to be able to make the complete case files for the lawsuits filed by current Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin de León and former City Councilmember Gil Cedillo fully available. To date, although these records have been quoted by both McPhee and myself, they haven’t been fully published to show the full proceedings. As recent controversy has reminded us, court records are public records, and the publication of such records is essential for a free and transparent press. Spend enough time in Los Angeles, and you’ll come to realize that working together to investigate gets you much further and faster.
Kevin de León’s lawsuit has progressed much faster than Cedillo’s, which has an additional party beyond the two publicly accused leakers of the LA Fed Tapes, Santos Leon and Karla Vasquez, both former employees of the LA Fed, short for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. The LA Fed remains a potent force of union power in Los Angeles politics, even as other unions such as the Service Employees International Union have made gains. In suing the LA Fed itself, Cedillo’s lawsuit is even more of a gamble than Kevin de León’s filing. The LA Fed is no longer led by former president Ron Herrera. Instead, it’s now led by Yvonne Wheeler, who is a veteran of the labor movement and Baton Rouge, Louisiana native. Herrera, along with former Council President Nury Martinez, De León, and Cedillo, were infamously clandestinely and quite illegally recorded on October 18, 2021, meeting in a conference room at the LA Fed’s headquarters for what critics call a backroom meeting.
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-118-publishing-the-la-fed-papers
Part 116: "A Failure of Moral Judgment" - Judge David Carter and the Crisis of the Unhoused
By Ruth Roofless & Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalists
Published October 4, 2024
The city of Los Angeles is undoubtedly going broke, warned Controller Kenneth Mejia on September 26 in social media posts on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter: “In the last year, the City has spent HALF its RESERVES,” he wrote, noting that “Just ONE year ago, the Reserve Fund was historically strong, at $648 million.”
Controller Mejia cited three reasons for the impending financial crisis:
1. Lower revenues (short $222 million)
2. Higher labor costs, starting w/ a $1 billion raise for LAPD over four years
3. Record level liability payouts.
This last Wednesday, October 2, 2024, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA-LA) aligned controller, who won in a landslide victory, was testifying before U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter in another LA Alliance for Human Rights hearing for the lawsuit launched by the City’s business interests. The suit had been filed with the secret backing of real estate developer Izek Shomof, a shadowy figure also known for proposing a mega-shelter in Boyle Heights in the abandoned Sears, Roebuck & Company Mail Order Building. The project has stalled due to community and political opposition. To assuage the concerns of the LA Alliance that the City and County hadn’t been transparent enough about its spending on homelessness, Controller Mejia’s office created a dedicated website cataloging spending as part of the legal settlement.
For the calendar year 2024, according to the Controller’s website, the City of Los Angeles, in response to the LA Alliance settlement concluded on March 20, 2020, under Mayor Eric Garcetti and former City Council President Nury Martinez. Along with Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program and the Freeway Agreement, which is much like the LA Alliance settlement, the deals locked in spending by both the City and County of Angeles to meet the crisis of the unhoused. We’ll be the first to admit, as journalists, one whistleblower, and one unhoused, that the legal landscape here has become exceedingly complicated and difficult for laypersons to understand, but the dollar signs are unignorable.
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-116-a-failure-of-moral-judgment
Part 115: Kevin de Leon vs. Black Lives Matter Los Angeles - The LA Fed Tapes Win Again
Published September 30, 2024
By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
The Los Angeles City Council District 14 candidate forum on Wednesday, September 25 in El Sereno at the Naseong Korean Church, also known as the Los Angeles Christian Presbyterian Church, didn’t go to plan. Unlike the first meeting of the candidates for Council District 14, this time Black Lives Matter Los Angeles (BLMLA) showed up, and what had been scheduled as a two-hour event ended short of 90 minutes into it in disarray. Organizers hurriedly encouraged attendees to clear the spacious hall with cushioned pews out into the lobby and the parking lot, then off into the night. I had arrived to find incumbent Kevin de León in the restroom coiffing his waft of hair before facing off against challenger Ysabel Jurado. Once on stage, De León, who has adopted a dismissive attitude against his opponent, seemed more concerned with his social media production before immediately criticizing Jurado as a socialist who wanted to defund the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on hand.
As in the first debate held two weeks prior on September 11, in nearby Lincoln Heights, De León attempted to use the power of his incumbency to seemingly intimidate Jurado. Except this time it didn’t work. Not so much because of his fairly desperate display of machismo, but rather every time that he would start to speak, BLMLA would stand up and turn their backs to him, drawing the ire of other audience members. Led by organizers Melinda Abdullah and Baba Akili, it wasn’t long before De León attacked BLMLA as a “divisive force from outside of Council District 14.” For her part, Jurado attempted to walk a tightrope, condemning de León for his racism, saying, “Because love is what we need here, and the divisiveness of saying that some people are not CD14, that’s why I ran in the first place, and hate has no place here in our multiracial, multigenerational district.” The audience applauded to the sound of Jurado’s voice; still, despite her best attempts, the event still did not go the distance as the two rehashed policy differences.
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-115-kevin-de-leon-vs-black-lives
SPECIAL: Unsilencing the University of Southern California - Current Failures and Past Scandals
Published September 27, 2024
By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
The University of Southern California (USC) doesn’t want me to talk with you, much less write about it openly and honestly. Just over two years ago, USC’s Vice President for Professionalism and Ethics, Michael Blanton, snarled at me in a Zoom meeting, wondering if I was “going to send any emails.” Mike, as they call him, had come to know me as the staff member from the Office of the Provost unceremoniously questioning him, and for sound reason. One of his own internal investigators had named him in open court, alleging systematic misconduct, deliberate mismanagement of documents, manipulation of investigations, and intentional destruction of what’s known as a “preservation file” related to gynecologist George Tyndall. That still secret whistleblower even went to the press, to KCET, and then she fought a four-year legal battle all the way to arbitration. Now here I was staring him down, and what was he to do other than pull another hattrick out of the legal arsenal? Sure enough, he did, and soon I was on my way into the real world!
First, he made me promise that if he did it, I wouldn’t kill myself. You see, things don’t always end so well for whistleblowers, and the more I stared down, Mike, and the more he growled at me, the more obscene the situation became. Here was a grown-ass man, acting like a child, misguided in his belief that he was protecting an institution by breaking the law, and he knew it. Like the song from J. Cole, “Crooked Smile,” his look wasn’t so good, and I was far from an angel. The fact of the matter was simple: I was standing up to Blanton’s way of doing business. USC denied the allegations, of course, by the anonymous July 2020 whistleblower, and as near as I can tell, the case has now been settled. The truth of it, though, alarmed the faculty; was it true? Was USC really as corrupt as they say? Is the case simply that we shouldn’t trust institutions, Men and Women of Troy, betrayed by powerful attorneys like Blanton acting simply above and beyond the law? New General Counsel Beong Soo-Kim, a former federal prosecutor, couldn’t have been more obsequious in telling the faculty that there was no need for further investigation.
Link: [/excerpt
Part 113: The Great Heat Wave of Los Angeles - Human Desperation and Climate Catastrophe
September 20, 2024
By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist
The heat dome descended on the Los Angeles Basin with unnerving certainty. For five solid days, temperatures rose above 100 degrees across the region before the forecast showed two days of cooling that would inevitably lead to high winds. For much of the summer, I had roamed the mountains, including in prior heat waves in August and July, but this one was far worse because the record-setting temperatures would spell an extreme temperature fluctuation. Already, the area had seen a series of smaller fires, a number of which the authorities had succeeded in rapidly extinguishing, a few after a good burn. The pressure was on to balance recreational access, fire prevention, and policing, including towards the unhoused population that so often is the first to have the finger pointed at them as the source of such incendiary conflagrations, even when it’s not true to the chagrin of advocates.
Even the New York Times reported on the power outages that afflicted such an esteemed venue as the Hollywood Bowl. The grid was becoming strained. The Southern California Edison outage map showed losses of power across the region, restored as quickly as possible by crews. The County of Los Angeles issued instructions on how to make your own air conditioner: “Place a pan of ice between you and a box fan to cool the air down.” The advice wasn’t unsound, but for those on the streets who didn’t have electricity, the advice didn’t apply. Cooling centers were opened, and activists were able to push the City of Los Angeles at least to stop sweeping people, but not more broadly across the County. Then the fires started, first in neighboring San Bernardino, then in the forest above Glendora, and to the south in sprawling Orange County. The great heat wave had brought predictable disaster.
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-113-the-great-heat-wave-of-los
Part 112: Kevin De Leon vs. Ysabel Jurado - The LA Fed Tapes and Election Politics
September 13, 2024
It’s the scandal that never ends, at least in Los Angeles. Most elsewhere, the press has moved on, but not in Los Angeles, where the deep racial divisions and political complications persist well beyond the uproar of late 2022. Ever since the LA Fed Tapes leaked in October 2022, the tsunami of racism and political outrage refuses to end. For the first time on September 11, embattled Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin De León met his opponent, Ysabel Jurado, on stage for direct debate. The primary field had been crowded, but Jurado had come in first, with De León trailing. Challengers Miguel Santiago and Wendy Carrillo had fallen by the wayside. That night Jurado reminded the audience in Lincoln Heights, she had not only the political backing of the Democratic Socialists of America—Los Angeles chapter, but also of the LA County Democratic Party, and KDL did not.
Moreover, as Jurado noted, she also had the backing of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO (LA Fed), “the teachers in our communities, the nurses at the hospitals, the SEIU 721, our sanitation workers, the people and the workers in this city, the list goes on, SEIU-UHW, SEIU 215, the roofers, and the waterproofer entities, architects,” she said. Waving her arm, Jurado declared, “These are all people who get work done that chose me, a first-time candidate, a woman of color, a single mom, a tenant rights attorney, someone who is not supposed to be here, correct?” De León’s response to the scandal, for which Jurado repeatedly attacked him for “not showing up for work” for more than 200 days afterwards, was to plead that he was a victim. Former LA Fed President Ron Herrera, another participant in the conversation, alongside former Council President Nury Martinez and Councilmember Gil Cedillo, were there to support De León. KDL is a former leader of the California State Senate seeking a second term.
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-112-kevin-de-leon-vs-ysabel
Strangely enough, the MAGA types have actually been throwing down for Kevin De León in defense of his right to be racist. This one is going to be close. Jurado has the backing of the LA County Democratic Party. Showdown on the Eastside!
The West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Campus - Housing is Healing is a Battle
By Roofless & Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalists
“The VA is doing everything possible to help veterans and their families remain in their homes…” - Veteran Sarah Kallassy in a video that appeared on the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ official YouTube channel three weeks ago.
On Friday, September 6, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s decisive opinion in Powers v. McDonough firmly reiterated the legal foundations that grant disabled veterans the right to housing on Veterans Affairs properties and the right to not have their benefits counted as income for the purposes of receiving federal housing vouchers. In the 125-page decision, Carter, himself a Vietnam combat veteran, chastises the West LA Veterans Affairs Medical Center “WLAVA” for not making enough “HUD-VASH” (Housing and Urban Development Department-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing voucher) referrals to The HACLA, the City’s Housing Authority. Most importantly, Judge Carter declares “void” leases made to the University of California, Los Angeles, the Brentwood School, a parking company, and an oil drilling operation.
In response to the ruling that these leases did not “principally benefit” disabled veterans, both UCLA and Brentwood School issued statements to Los Angeles Times journalist Doug Smith that they were in fact legal; both stated that they were reviewing the decision. The decision sets up a September 25 hearing for “injunctive relief” that will develop an “exit strategy” for the voided leases. Carter ordered the VA to immediately begin planning for the construction of an additional 1,800 permanent housing units for veterans requiring medical care, including those permanently disabled, and 750 temporary units. Carter sets a timeline of 6 years for the completion of new construction and 12 to 18 months for temporary units. Controversially, Carter also ordered the “active construction” of a project known in the VA’s 2022 master plan for the sprawling campus as the “Town Center,” which would include retail and grocers, as well as a “Wellness Center.”
Link: https://zacharyellison.substack.com/p/part-111-the-west-los-angeles-veterans
Profile Information
Name: Zachary EllisonGender: Male
Hometown: Los Angeles
Home country: United States of America
Current location: Los Angeles
Member since: Tue Oct 4, 2005, 03:58 AM
Number of posts: 27,774