Landlords use Ellis Act to displace people, demolish affordable housing, and build luxury condos, plus other current injustices (Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger to LA City Council 12/15/23)

City Attorney: Next speaker, Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger

1:50:27 (see video below)

Good morning.  Which items would you like the speak to?

SGB:  All items.

 CA:  So, you have three minutes for the items, please begin. 

SGB: Great. Item 33 is just Referencing that closed session items are going to be heard because of significant exposure To litigation regarding three potential cases.

1:50:53

It's kind of amazing how often this body has to recess into closed session to litigate what's usually liability claims where the city has failed to meet certain obligations like making sure sidewalks are safe and accessible, or making sure the police aren't Setting off explosives on the sidewalk or, you know, all these myriad things the city might have a claim against them and they have to pay out millions out In liability and when you want to do something like fix the sidewalk, they say we have no money for that. So it's an interesting sort of cycle.  Item 21 is regarding Funding to support operational and capital costs for Jewish family services.

1:51:38

I really like this motion because this organization is one Of the few in Los Angeles that offers 24/7 support For domestic violence victims. They actually pick up the phone when you Call. I've completed presentations and workshops about domestic violence and what resources exist locally.

We have this thing called dart with the LAPD and the thing is it's pretty ineffective, so it's good we have These programs that are run by private or religious institutions so that Someone has someone to call or a place to go when they're a victim of domestic violence. Because as we Know domestic violence is one of the main reasons why people, particularly women, become Homeless. So, I’m glad to see this on the agenda.

We'll just go to Item 29.  I like this item although I wish it were a little bit more expansive. Also I would appreciate more specific language when We're talking about an interim control ordinance prohibiting the issuance of demolition permits On rent stabilized multifamily housing and converted affordable housing units. 

01;52;50

And then It goes on specifically to mention other permits affecting contributing features Of historical districts and things like that and it mentions Boyle Heights, the Brooklyn Corridor historic center and specific area,. So I’m curious if this Demolition permit prohibition applies to everywhere and then the specific neighbors apply to  second half of that? Or if This is all just within the Boyle Heights region because we really need this throughout Los Angeles. 

We can't keep having landlords using like the Ellis Act as an illegitimate reason to displace people and demolish affordable housing to build luxury condos, and what's affordable to someone making 70 or 80 thousand dollars a year. Thank you.

1:53:46

 CA :          Next speaker, please. 

***

Watch Stacey’s public comment from December 15 in L.A. City Council session on YouTube here:  Https://www.youtube.com/watch?V=uzyzivr2fwy&t=6618s or at the bottom of this post at City of Angels Blog. 

Please come back to CofA Blog soon to read and see more coverage of the L.A. City Council’s handling of L.A.’s homeless crisis.  This blog also covers significant testimony in front of the council during public comment sessions.

I especially want to feature testimony of Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger on this blog, because since I've been watching L.A. City Council meetings online last two years, she stands out with her comments.  She’s always Right On, hits the nail On The Head, and sums up everything that the city is doing wrong in a few sentences, with originality and often even with song.

Since Segarra-Bohlinger  may run for City Council someday, this blogged record of what she says in front of council will live here in perpetuity.  Her comments are almost always brilliant and when I finally come up for the housing I've been waiting for more than five years near my family in my hometown Hollywood CA, I hope Stacey is a city councilmember by then. 

 ***

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Posted by Kay Ebeling 

Producing City of Angels Blog since 2007

More at CofA Blog about recent LACC meetings

• With 2.5 vacant units for every unhoused resident,... 
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• TRANSCRIPT: Public speakers beg for housing; L.A. ...

ADD ON: 

Other comment of interest from meeting: Brock Landers private investigator called in, as he often does, to say:

"On the agenda item 26, maybe the the reason there's been an open seat on the ethics commission for six months is Paul doesn't know anybody ethical.... Why shouldn't the people that own the property be able to demolish what's on the property and build what they want?" 

 "Movements can really scramble your personal life."

-Thom Hartmann this AM amen

Kay Ebeling

like mine 

http://cityofangels12.blogspot.com

CITYOFANGELS12.BLOGSPOT.COM

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Carbon dioxide becomes more potent as climate changes. Phys.org

This article explains in part why climate change is happening so much faster than originally predicted. Since CO2 is becoming "more potent as more released into atmosphere," climate changes we see in near future will likely also be exponential... wow

PHYS.ORG

Carbon dioxide becomes more potent as climate changes, study finds

A team of scientists found that carbon dioxide becomes a more potent greenhouse gas as more is released into the atmosphere.

our uncertain future

So now along with financial / climate catastrophes, we'll have Israeli vigilantes scouring the world for Hamas?

With 2.5 vacant units for every unhoused resident, L.A. developers line their pockets in homeless emergency (Public Comments at 10/31/23 city council meeting)

Blog by Kay Ebeling 

Housing cost keeps me from moving back to my hometown L.A. Meanwhile I've been watching their City Council meetings online from five hundred miles away, to keep track of all the progress, to watch the fast and effective actions council is taking after homelessness was declared an emergency January 2023.  

Progress has been inept and scandalously slow as City of Angels Blog reported  in May. 

However, I've kept watching the meetings, mostly because of the lively Public Comments section, which to me is where the real stories lie, although the city website doesn't even bother to include them in their “minutes.”

Here are some interesting words from the Oct 31 meeting, Video is linked below.

At 01.37.25 Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger, who is circulating petitions to run for council herself, calls in her comment by phone.

Transcript:

On item Twenty three. 

Interesting thing about this emergency declaration, there's no rent freeze, there's no eviction moratorium.  The main function of it is to expedite building contracts. 

Now I don't know what kind of emergency you all have ever experienced where we go, quick, we need to expedite a process that'll take years, even if we start today it’ll take years. 

And in an emergency, specifically, you look around for resources you have like the roughly two and a half vacant units for every unhoused resident that exists in Los Angeles.  And you use that. 

(Two and a half vacant units for every unhoused resident that exists in Los Angeles!)

Stacey, cont’d: 

You look at what capital incentives are profiting off of the crisis and you curb them.  All this emergency declaration does is make it really easy for developers to line their pockets.  Then Item 24 is an emergency action that's super vague but okay thanks, Mayor Bass.  You do those emergency contracts. 

Item twenty six is an economic study about the rent stabilization ordinance.  My problem with these studies is that you get funding for them, you use the public’s time to pass the motions for studies, and then time goes by and we never hear back. 

We're still- waiting to hear back the report on 4118. 

So I don't know if a hundred and eighty some thousand dollars for this study is going to be money well spent.  That's information that would be good to have but I don't know why it's going to cost so much to get that information. 

Item twenty eight is a joke. Let's light up the Sixth Street viaduct for domestic violence awareness month. Those lights aren’t helping. If you want to help victims and survivors of domestic violence, get people off the street,

(Those lights aren’t helping. If you want to help victims and survivors of domestic violence, get people off the street,)

As a survivor of domestic violence, I can say with absolute certainty that those lights aren’t helping.  Domestic violence is the leading reason women become homeless. 

If you want to help victims and survivors of domestic violence, get people off the street, make housing a human right, make health care free, all those things will help D-V victims a lot more than lighting up a bridge and I don't know why we're entertaining Kevin DeLeon’s motions anyway. 

Comments continue at 01.40.25 of video

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[Earlier in the meeting at 01 31 14 public speakers [SOUNDS LIKE] Sandra and James Myers made thus plea to the ever distracted City Council members present:

S:  This is about the homeless [SOUNDS LIKE] nonprofit organization Hopkins. They have you in the program for a year, and we did everything they said and we never received our voucher.  Then they started selling the vouchers for four hundred dollars apiece.  If you're a couple, that's eight hundred dollars we can't afford.  And I'm like well that's not right. 

So we went downtown to the library and the case manager told us to give this to the president of the meeting here today. So he can see the names of the people involved at Hopkins. 

You guys give millions of dollars to them, for them to provide places for the homeless, and they're not doing what they're supposed to do.  And it's time to be heard about that.  The people need help and [the homeless agency] is not giving it to them. If we do the program, why do we have to pay four hundred dollars apiece for the vouchers?

***

A court officer takes her papers and the meeting goes on.

Here at City of Angels Blog we will be covering more Public Comments at city council meetings and other words of interest in the coming months. I used to transcribe for a living and AI has replaced all my jobs, so I finally retired at age 75. But I still want to keep up my skills, dinosaur as they are. Beats dementia…

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The L.A. city council is not making much progress in the homeless emergency,

As City of Angels Blog reported in May: WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2023

TRANSCRIPT: Public speakers beg for housing; L.A. City Council approves a luxury Marriott instead, on site that used to be a public library and had been promised to the community for years.

https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2023/05/transcript-public-speakers-beg-for.html

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The speaker calling in transcribed here, Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger, is now circulating petitions to run for City Council herself after months of appearing before Council with smart, intuitive, problem solving comments in her 1-4 minutes of allotted time, during which most council members are shockingly and shamefully distracted,  In her comments, Stacey also often sings in a theater-trained voice an improvised lyric about city government, a practice I hope she puts to good use in her campaign for council. 

Almost every time Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger speaks at Council Public Comments, she zings a ringer and summarizes everything the city government is doing wrong and how to fix it, with insight and Rogers and Hart clarity.

Watch here in the near future at City of Angels Blog for more coverage of Stacey’s campaign and other public comments to L.A. City Council meetings.

WATCH THE CITY COUNCIL MEETING HERE 

https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2023/11/regular-city-council-103123-quoted-in.html 

*** 

-ke

Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger

 

 

Regular City Council - 10/31/23 quoted in 11/17/23 post here at City of Angels Blog

TRANSCRIPT: Ukraine Indicts Giuliani Pals As Russian Spies: Countdown with Keith Olbermann 11.15.23

"The 2019 memo suggesting Hunter Biden be investigated was made up out of whole cloth. Now we know what that was" 

[Video Below] 

Olbermann: It is still the longest of long shots, but there could still be indictments in this country of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani for their conspiracies with Russian operatives. Because the evidence that the Hunter Biden Burisma story is the product of the G R U, Russian Military Intelligence and the evidence that it might yet claim Giuliani and our Hitler exploded yesterday, when the government of Ukraine indicted on Charges of Treason a member of its own parliament a former member of its own parliament and a former national deputy prosecutor general.

Accusing them of being part of the Russian Intelligence spy network inside Ukraine, inside the previous Ukrainian government and of working with the Russians and Giuliani to falsely fabricate the Biden Administration investigation that Trump tried to blackmail President Zelenski into. 

EVIDENCE NO LONGER BURIED

It appears to be too much to hope that Giuliani will be charged in Ukraine or that this country would extradite him there. On the other hand until these startling indictments were handed down in Kiev, it appeared that Trump’s entire labyrinthine scheme involving untold nefarious elements of Russian society had been completely buried. 

But the Trump Russia investigation has now thrust an arm out of its grave, like at the end of the movie Carrie. And it seems to be looking for Trump but it is closer to Giuliani and it might even be seeking out House oversight chairman James Comer. 

The prosecutor indicted for treason is named Constantine Kulik. He wrote the 2019 memo apparently made up out of whole cloth-- 

"a covert influenced campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives in 2020 election"

--suggesting that his country should investigate Hunter Biden and his work while a member of the Board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. [He and two colleagues] were considered so dirty, so in league with Russian spy and intelligence operatives that [SOUNDS LIKE] Derkach was sanctioned by U.S. Treasury Department in September 2020 during Trump’s presidency… for a covert influenced campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming presidential 2020 election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the U.S. designed to culminate prior to election day. Now we know what that was.  

{Update Nov 17, found out Olbermann runs a transcript of all his podcasts here so scratch this idea for CofA Blog, back to stream zone... ]

KEITH OLBERMANN's Nov 15 2023 podcast: 

 

Great time to be alive if you dig science...

Converging air masses, people riding the wind down a sidewalk- in China a snowstorm this week marks beginning of winter in our global climate crisis. I'm just sitting here at six thousand feet watching on two monitors with the glory of Tahoe out the window in the background. The footage of snow wiping out everything for days all around China in this video is amazing. Great time to be alive if you dig science...  

Great time to be alive if you dig science...

 

-ke

Bill Maher on Catholic schools being so much better than public today: “How fucked up is this country that to get a no bullshit education now, you have to go to the place that's completely based on bullshit?” Nov 10 2023 at end of show 

 i can't believe i have to live through another illegal war by my country.

Don't settle for censored news about Gaza

Secy of State Blinken does not want Americans to see Al Jazeera coverage of war on Gaza... Click here and watch Al Jazeera live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCNeDWCI0vo 

Trump misspells 'US" claiming that U.S. Is Spelled 'Us'

Anyone who reads a lot would know that USA is spelled U.S. when abbreviated per AP news style, which is updated yearly & used by all professional publications in USA. So Trump is spelling U.S. incorrectly:

Wonder if weapon sales in Ukraine and Israel is the reason U.S. economy is rising

Within days of Acapulco and Europe from Spain to Scotland going underwater with unexpected hurricanes, a climate change denier takes over as speaker of the house USA. It's Biblical, the arrogance and ignorance and ... 

I never leave my doctor's office feeling better

American doctors won’t prescribe drugs that actually make you feel good. They claim it's to protect us from getting addicted. They instead write an Rx for psychotropics or uptake inhibitors or derivatives of snake venom, etcetera, which come with a warning, Do Not Stop Taking Abruptly or you could die from “discontinuation syndrome” which leaves me shaking my head saying, um, you mean withdrawal? At age 75 I’d rather be addicted to something that actually makes me feel better than the pharms I get today. Most the drugs my doctors prescribe have such awful side effects that I'm distracted from the initial illness, so I guess you could say the drugs work. Such bad medicine we get in USA. Thank god for cannabis…

Finally becoming just another human

I wish I had more energy I say to myself then think again. After a lifetime of being busy all the time, a workaholic who prided myself on being able to function on four hours sleep a night, an advocate so passionate that once I signed onto a project, I ate drank and slept it- I got up in the middle of the night to write press releases, gulped coffee while reading dozens of news sites in first hours of the day- I work-work-worked starting around age fifteen and don’t regret a minute of it: But now I'm tired At age 75 I want to linger over first cup of coffee and get around to making the second cup an hour later, sit sometimes like in a trance binge watching series on Prime or YouTube, laughing at senseless jokes; indeed I'm often mindless nowadays after decades of being so sharp I developed razor's edges all over my personality- I'm finally slowing down and softening, simplifying. Finally. It feels great,

On top of a manic approach to work, I was a single parent from age 40 on and I couldn't just bake cookies now and then. I had to be a Stepford Single Mom, rushing through days determined that everything be perfect- except for my relationship with my children, but that's another blog post… At one point I was riding L.A. transit to Burbank every evening and working overnight at a transcription company then riding back to our apartment in Thai Town where I worked a second job from home. During this time I invented “power sleep” a way to get all the rest you need for the day in about twenty minutes. You find the minutes before sunrise that are the absolute darkest minutes of the night, then lie down flat and repose, intensely. Then twenty minutes later as the day breaks, get up and start another jam packed workaholic day. I used to do that. Around 2005 to 2008 or so I did that several nights a week. Then I added producing City of Angels Blog about the pedophile priests to my schedule, and wrote all those stories, a full time job in itself, for ten years. No wonder I'm tired. Rightfully tired.

Honest, starting at age 15: June 2022 post: I was a teenage anti Vietnam war activist. Memoir by Kay Ebeling, featuring Nancy Pelosi and the Black Panthers https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2022/06/encountering-black-panthers-and-nancy.html

-ke

Biden has won me over

Biden is so poised, controlled, and competent in the midst of international crises, he has won me over past few weeks. Yeah he talks like an old man and I don't agree with everything he says but I'm an old lady and I don't agree with most Democrats. What USA needs now is a smart President and Biden’s brain is obviously still sharp and active. He's capable and comfortable wielding the benevolent power of the United States now when it's needed.

KayE of Calif.

@CassandraofTro2

·

1s

Biden's poise, control, and competence in crises has won me over past few weeks. The world needs a smart U.S. President now, and Biden seems comfortable wielding the power of the United States, which can be benevolent, when it's needed.

Best place to get coverage of Middle East crises, I think, is Al Jazeera, available on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCNeDWCI0vo

-KE

revised version

If Jim Jordan becomes House Speaker, it shows that thousands of Catholic priests getting away with pedophilia did so much cultural damage, it penetrated America at its core and corrupted our nation's very foundation. I think 

The Twin Towers are still tumbling down

Between Congress having no speaker and all branches of US military incapacitated by Tuberville, I am FREAKING SCARED that USA is being set up for an attack from which we will not be able to defend ourselves. I'm stocking up on nonperishables meanwhile and staying alert...

Pedophile priests presaged USA self destructing

If Jim Jordan becomes House Speaker, it means the damage and moral sickness from thousands of priests getting away with pedophilia has penetrated into the American zeitgeist and is corrupting and destroying our nation's very foundation.