A homeless housing project in West L.A., backed by Mayor Karen Bass and opposed by some neighborhood groups because of its proximity to residential homes, was approved by the Los Angeles City Council on Friday.
The council, with exception of one member who was absent, voted unanimously in favor of the 33-bed facility on a city-owned parking lot at Midvale Avenue and Pico Boulevard, across from the former Westside Pavilion. The council also decided that the project is exempt from a comprehensive environmental review.
Bass, Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky and other supporters argue the project will provide relief for the area’s unhoused population. It will also help the city comply with a legal settlement that requires it to add beds.
“The citywide issue of homelessness deserves a citywide response,” Bass said in a statement Friday. “We must continue to do all that we can to bring unhoused Angelenos inside and I thank Councilmember Yaroslavsky and the City Council for continuing the work to urgently confront the homelessness crisis.”
Yaroslavsky spoke ahead of the vote, promising residents and business owners who opposed the project that she would secure additional parking before breaking ground and would also develop a neighborhood safety plan with the Los Angeles Police Department and local homeless service providers.
“But let me be absolutely very clear, we need these beds,” said Yaroslavsky, who represents the area. “I know 33 beds doesn’t seem like a lot, because in all honesty, it’s not. It’s not nearly enough, considering the emergency we’re in right now.”
Right now, Yaroslavsky said, fewer than 100 of the city’s 16,000 homeless beds are in her district.
“What this means for my constituents, not only in Westwood but across the entire district, is that when we are trying to resolve an encampment and bring people inside, off the street and into housing, it’s nearly impossible,” she said.
The facility, which is projected to cost nearly $4.6 million, will include “sleeping cabins” with restrooms in each unit. There will also be on-site laundry facilities, storage bins and office space, according to a report from the city’s Bureau of Engineering. It’s expected to open in about a year, Yaroslavsky told The Times.
She said residents will have access to mental health and substance use disorder specialists, employment assistance and help finding permanent housing. There will be 24-hour security on-site. Most of the beds will be reserved for people who have ties to the area.
The Westside Neighborhood Council voted last week to oppose the project because it would be near homes and businesses along Pico Boulevard. The group also expressed “dismay that other sites were not being evaluated as alternatives.”
Controversy over the proposed facility ratcheted up earlier this week when Bass abruptly removed the president of the Transportation Commission days after he led his colleagues in delaying a vote on an environmental review waiver.
At a commission meeting, President Eric Eisenberg had expressed concern about the waiver and asked for a delay so the panel could hear more about the project from city representatives.
On Monday, Eisenberg said, he was informed by the mayor’s office that he was no longer a commissioner. Bass’ office has declined to explain why she removed Eisenberg.
At a special meeting on Wednesday, the Transportation Commission — now operating without Eisenberg — approved the waiver.
Bass has made reducing homelessness her top issue. Her Inside Safe initiative seeks to quickly move unhoused Angelenos into motels and hotels, and she has ordered city departments to hasten the construction of affordable housing and shelters.
Eisenberg, in a statement he provided to The Times, said he wasn’t convinced the project should be exempt from review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
A “project of thirty small homes, with sewage, plumbing lines, and trash disposal, [could] cause a situation, where the benefits of the project do not outweigh the hazards to the community,” he wrote.
Barbara Broide, a neighborhood council member, urged the City Council at a committee hearing on the project earlier this month to look at different sites, including one on Cotner Avenue.
“We’re here to tell you this is the wrong location,” Broide said. “It’s a good project for another place.”
Broide was one of several residents who hoped to address the City Council before Friday’s vote. But the council did not allow comments until afterward.
“I just wanted the council to know that it has shredded the faith that dozens of my neighbors have in their government,” said Meg Sullivan, who lives in the council district. “They came here today to let you know their very reasonable concerns, which I share, about putting housing on a much-needed public lot on Midvale, and yet they were not able to speak.”
Margaret Gillespie, a member of the Westside Neighborhood Assn., spoke in support of the project.
“I want to thank Councilmember Yaroslavsky for her leadership on this very difficult issue. It’s difficult because of all the misinformation that circulates and the false narratives about the homeless,” she said. “I support the project because 25 of the 30 units are reserved for people who live here.”
New York City has outlined draft rules for its new outdoor dining regime, launching a public comment period and putting the program on track for a spring 2024 rollout.
Permitted New York City restaurants can serve food in sidewalk seating year-round, and on city roads for eight months starting April 1 and lasting until Nov. 29, according to the new law.
The newly proposed rules for the program, which were created by the city Transportation Department, will be under review in a 30-day public comment period ahead of a public hearing, according to Adams’ office.
Under the proposed rules, street dining cafés cannot be fully enclosed, must be accessible for disabled New Yorkers and meet certain dimension parameters, based on their location.
Roadbed structures cannot be longer than 40 feet or wider than 8 feet, under the draft rules.
Courtesy of the City of New York
New York City has written its outdoor dining rules.
Roadbed structures — which the city permitted for free during COVID — have drawn rats, annexed space where cars once parked and forced waiters to wrestle with bike traffic. But they also saved restaurants during the pandemic.
The new program has been cast as a compromise to boost restaurants’ business and preserve popular outdoor dining that flourished during COVID while limiting the presence of unsightly and disruptive sheds.
A four-year license for sidewalk seating would cost $1,050. Roadbed seating fees would vary by location.
The restaurant industry has hailed the new program.
Long Island City is the latest neighborhood primed for rezoning, the city announced Tuesday, kickstarting the early stages of a process that’s expected to result in new housing and infrastructure upgrades for a swath of Western Queens.
The proposal, dubbed “One Long Island City,” includes LIC’s Industrial Business Zone and an area extending from the East River to Court Square and 23rd Street; and from Gantry Plaza State Park in the southwest to include Queensbridge Houses in the north.
While the proposal it still in its infancy, the rezoning shares the same goals of as other plans across the city, including the creation of new affordable housing and greenspace, enhanced transit, improved infrastructure, and greater economic development. The city also seeks to make these areas more climate resilient.
Handout
A map of the Long Island City Neighborhood Study area.
The rezoning effort seeks to create a more unified vision for an area that has been rapidly developing — and gentrifying — in recent years. Local Councilmember Julie Won described it as a more “holistic” approach than the individual site rezonings “that have been hurtful and divisive for so long in our community.”
The proliferation of such neighborhood-wide rezonings under Mayor Adams reflects the larger shift away from a “project by project” approach in favor of bigger-picture planning.
Tuesday’s announcement by Won and members of the Adams administration jumpstarts the preliminary community planning process. The months-long study period will include proposed land use changes to guide new development across Long Island City and solicit public input on issues such as transit, infrastructure, capital investments and open spaces.
“This comprehensive community plan invites the whole community to participate in identifying, defining and protecting important existing resources, while also developing a blueprint for future growth that ensures equity and resilience for all,” Won said at a press conference in Queensbridge Park. “Under our current developer-led process, we’ve seen-record high rents and have said goodbye to too many of our longtime neighbors who could no longer afford to live here. If we continue this route, we will continue to be exhausted, remain on the defense and battle this affordability crisis one luxury tower at a time.”
Téa Kvetenadze
Councilmember Julie Won speaks at a a press conference in Queensbridge Park to announce a new rezoning of Long Island City. (Téa Kvetenadze)
The process is being spearheaded by the Department of City Planning and will culminate in a final neighborhood plan, including zoning changes, to be voted on by the City Council by the end of 2025.
It’s the fifth neighborhood-wide rezoning under Mayor Adams and the second in Queens, after one was announced for Jamaica in May. The Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan each have their own local rezoning plans at various stages of the public review process.
A separate neighborhood study was also announced Tuesday that will encompass parts of Astoria, Sunnyside and Woodside. The “Heart of District 26” plan stretches from Queens Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue, respectively, to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Handout
A map of the Northern Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue Study encompasses multiple neighborhoods of Astoria, Sunnyside, and Woodside.
Unlike the “One Long Island City” plan, the Astoria plan will not lead directly to a rezoning. Instead, its findings “can be considered at a later time” and will serve as guidance for future development, Won said. It will be funded by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and led by the urban planning nonprofit Hester Street, which is expected to complete its plan by next June.
Long Island City’s population has grown by 78% in the past 30 years, per Won, and rents have soared with it: last year, one-bedroom apartments in the neighborhood went for an average of $4,114 a month, according to Zumper.
At one time it was poised to become home to a new Amazon headquarters, though that plan famously imploded following community pushback.
The 2001 rezoning of 34 blocks of the neighborhood kicked off the ongoing development boom that has transformed its skyline. But more recent attempts to rezone Long Island City have fallen through, including a proposal by the de Blasio administration.
On a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denver’s South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible was sponsoring a mayoral-candidate forum. Five candidates had been invited to attend. The moderator asked the usual questions about crime and public safety, homelessness and guns. Then came a question comprehensible only to a close observer of Denver politics: “Do you support releasing the city-owned conservation easement on the Park Hill Golf Course to allow the currently proposed redevelopment of this site?”
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Four candidates raised their hands, a couple only halfway, as if that sign of reluctance might lessen the coming disapproval. It didn’t. The crowd booed.
On April 4 of this year, voters declined to lift the easement. The split was 59–41, not exactly close. Some observers have taken this outcome as a signal that the people of Denver (or, at least, the fewer than 100,000 who voted down the proposal) reject new development. But in that same election, voters sent two candidates who supported the proposal to a mayoral runoff. Back in the 2022 statewide election, almost a quarter million Denver voters supported Democratic Governor Jared Polis, who campaigned on increasing housing supply and dismantling local roadblocks to construction in order to get a handle on Colorado’s housing-affordability crisis. Also that year, nearly 1.3 million Coloradans voted to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to increasing affordable housing. In Denver, the measure won 70–30. Deciding “what the people believe” is not so easy.
Colorado is short an estimated 127,000 homes. The Denver metro area alone is short nearly 70,000 homes. The housing shortage is the main driver of the region’s affordability crisis, and housing-policy experts—though they remain divided on many questions—are nearly unanimous in their belief that resolving it will require bringing many more homes to market. From 2012 to 2017, the region permitted only one new home for every 5.4 new jobs; over the same period, home prices in Denver jumped by 50 percent.
When someone who favors new development in theory opposes a specific project near where they live, we call them a NIMBY. NIMBYism is regularly characterized as a case of revealed preferences: Talk is cheap, and support for policies in the abstract is worthless. Voting for a candidate who champions pro-housing policies is one thing; agreeing to new development in your neighborhood is another.
Conflicting desires do not by themselves prove hypocrisy, however. Some people really do want to see more housing in general, even if they don’t want construction next door. The problem is that the local institutions charged with land-use decisions are attuned to parochial complaints, not large-scale needs.
The level of government at which we choose to resolve a conflict shapes public opinion and the eventual outcome. The same question posed at a town hall, at a county-council meeting, in the governor’s office, or by Congress will not be answered the same way in each venue. The tools available, the norms of debate, and the architecture of accountability change drastically from place to place. Americans believe that housing is a local issue. And it is a local issue. But it is also a regional issue, a state issue, and a national issue. By restricting the debate to the hyperlocal level, we’ve blocked out our big-picture values.
Across metro areas, in states led by Democrats and Republicans alike, the same pattern emerges: Local governments decide what gets built and where, and they use that power to ban multifamily housing, entrench economic segregation, and perpetuate a national affordability crisis.
It’s tough to admit, but sometimes NIMBYs have a point. In Denver, I spoke with dozens of community leaders, elected officials, and voters who live near the Park Hill Golf Course. Opponents of the project raised concerns about preserving open spaces, about gentrification, about the democratic process itself.
Former Mayor Wellington Webb told me he opposes developing the Park Hill site because it’s “the last piece of open space, land, in Denver.”
Leslie Herod, a Colorado state representative and an unsuccessful candidate in this year’s mayoral race, also opposes the proposal. She told me she had identified more than 80 underutilized city-owned lots already zoned for residential development where she would rather see housing built.
The Denver city-council member Candi CdeBaca made a version of the “other places” argument too, questioning why development efforts are never focused on wealthy neighborhoods. “We’re not talking about development in places where people have privilege,” she told me. “Those places are protected with their zoning, those places are protected with their level of engagement, those places are protected by the people they have elected to represent them.”
Some voters told me they simply distrusted the process. “There’s no guarantee that if the conservation easement is lifted that the [developer] will honor what they’ve said with creating a park, creating affordable housing,” a landscape architect with an antidevelopment yard sign said.
Of course, no project can solve every problem or skirt every concern. Comparison shopping for umbrellas is fine on a sunny day. When you’re caught in a torrential downpour, it’s wise to take what’s available and run for cover.
For their part, proponents of the Park Hill project, in their eagerness to win votes, tended to oversell what it could accomplish. Some described it as a blow against racism or climate change, or a way to help the working class. In my conversations with the plan’s backers, I sometimes had to remind myself that we were talking about a 155-acre lot, not the fate of the republic.
Land-use regulations and development patterns are a key driver of inequality, pollution, and financial strain. But whether or not the Park Hill plan was approved would have a negligible impact on these larger crises, which will require collective action beyond the scope of any one project. Asking a neighborhood or municipality to bear the responsibility for a housing crisis and its knock-on effects is asking for failure. Local government simply wasn’t built to do this.
Local government is about what you can do for me, right now. Because local officials have a narrow jurisdiction, engaged voters have a direct line to them and significant influence on their decisions. This tight relationship is good for handling issues like broken streetlights and potholes, but it doesn’t lend itself to managing society-wide problems, such as a housing crisis. This is why the political logic of building a lot more housing rarely carries the day at the local level.
Who would have lived in the Park Hill housing development, had voters approved it? No one knows. It could have been a recent University of Colorado at Boulder graduate or empty-nesters from the suburbs looking to downsize. Many of the people who would most benefit from the new housing don’t yet live in Denver—so they don’t have a vote.
Local housing-policy debates are thus asymmetrical. Construction projects have no readily identifiable beneficiaries, but they do levy clear harms, in the form of excessive noise and street closures and changing neighborhood aesthetics.
Just a small fraction of people even engage in local housing fights. Many of those who do are extreme voices or otherwise unrepresentative of the broader community. Look at Fort Collins, Colorado. After more than five years of community engagement, and many months of work by city planners, a 5–2 majority on the city council voted to liberalize land-use policies to allow more housing. But a small group of opponents pressured the council to reverse itself, gathering 6,500 petition signatures—this in a city of more than 160,000. And they won. The council voted again, this time 7–0 to repeal the change.
In interviews, both the head of the Colorado Municipal League, Kevin Bommer, and Denver’s current mayor, Michael B. Hancock, touted regional collaboration as a solution to the affordability crisis. But just as one town cannot ensure that the entire region maintains adequate green space while increasing density, it cannot force neighboring towns to work together to find the right balance. The incentive is too strong for an individual government to say to its neighbor, “You can have all the apartments—we’ll just keep our parks.”
In addition to the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado has several influential regional associations, including the Metro Mayors Caucus and Colorado Counties Inc. Yet greater Denver is still tens of thousands of housing units short of its needs.
The Denver metro area is particularly desperate for small multifamily dwellings (two to nine units) to meet the demand for affordable housing. According to Carrie Makarewicz, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, roughly 10 percent of homes in the region meet this criteria. By contrast, 85 percent of residentially zoned land is reserved for single-family homes. By this measure, too, the regional associations have come up short.
Collective-action problems require a body that can hold everyone accountable. Regional associations—which rely on voluntary participation—aren’t going to cut it.
The democratic process begins by defining the democratic body. And when it comes to housing, the body of concern does not end at a town’s boundary line. People moving to the Denver metro area look across the city and into the suburbs for a place to live. One suburb’s opposition to building more housing directly affects prices miles away, because it constrains the supply in a market that spans municipalities. Local governments, in seeking to satisfy local concerns, undermine statewide goals. At least, they do in the absence of state intervention.
State government is also about what you can do for me, but on average: That’s the electoral reality of representing voters across geographic constituencies. Governors and other statewide officials are forced to see the bigger picture because they’re accountable not only to the people who live in a particular community, but also to past residents priced out of and displaced from that community, and to future residents as well. (Nor are newcomers overwhelmingly from out of state, as many seem to believe; census data reveal that about 82 percent of moves happen within states.) Denver’s city council represents the people of Denver, not Aurora, and vice versa. The state represents them all. And in recent polling, 60 percent of registered voters supported eliminating local restrictions to allow for multifamily housing.
The Colorado state capitol is just a short drive from Park Hill and a brisk walk from city hall, but feels miles away from the thrum of local politics. I went there two days after the Indivisible forum to interview Governor Polis. From across a large round table in his office, Polis told me that “housing, transit, travel, roads: These are interjurisdictional issues because really, very few Coloradans live their whole lives in one jurisdiction.” Unencumbered by the need to defend any one project or developer, the governor reiterated a simple point: “Demand has exceeded supply for the last couple decades, and prices have gone up.” Colorado has to “create more housing now.”
Soon after providing that clean summary of what Colorado needs, Polis announced his best shot at providing it. Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, and Massachusetts have, to varying degrees, pulled authority for land-use decisions up to the state level. Following their lead, he proposed a bill compelling local governments to adjust their land-use policies to meet housing goals, a process that state officials would oversee. The bill addressed climate, infrastructure, and equity concerns; included provisions for increasing and preserving affordable and multifamily housing; encouraged development near transit; and removed onerous parking requirements.
I asked the governor how he would deal with the political opposition to his bill. “People across the board—Republican, Democrat, independent—housing costs is one of the top items of concern,” he replied. I asked again. “People understand that housing needs to be built,” he told me.
Polis’s original proposal was greeted by fierce opposition from local governments, though not because of objections to open space, affordability, or new parking rules. The fight was over where the power to make land-use decisions should lie.
Kevin Bommer, of the Colorado Municipal League, offered a pithy synthesis of local governments’ position: “Respectfully, get off our lawn,” he told me.
I asked Bommer about his policy disagreements with the governor, but he kept stressing the issue of local control. “My members statewide don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of [Polis’s] goals, but to start with saying that the state gets to set a model code and the state gets to regulate and the state will be in charge of land use going forward is a nonstarter,” he said.
Bommer pointed me to an old amicus brief filed in defense of a local moratorium on fracking by then-Representative Polis. It defended local government’s authority over land-use decisions as both a state-constitution matter and a policy matter. Polis wrote that local democracy allows for “widespread citizen input and broad stakeholder involvement,” as well as “more opportunities for public participation.”
The fact that Representative Polis disagrees with Governor Polis is exactly the point. A congressman represents his district; he has little reason to care that local control can harm the rest of the state. A governor has a wider remit. If Polis the representative was right, and localities really are the best transmitters of their residents’ housing preferences, then what explains clear, widespread discontent with the outcomes of those decisions? Colorado’s housing crisis is undeniable, and its land-use authority has rested with local government virtually unquestioned for decades.
Colorado’s legislative session ended on May 8. The bill died in the Senate without a final vote.
Afterward, the governor told me he intends to keep fighting. States that have passed land-use reforms, such as California and Washington, suffered multiple defeats before seeing a first victory. Polis told me he’s frustrated by communities that said, No, we should do it. “The thing is, they’re not doing it!” he said with a laugh. Polis returned again to his central argument: “It’s beyond the capabilities of [local government] even if there’s a city council or mayor with the best of intentions … We have to figure this out together.”
Two citywide votes, multiple lawsuits, and accusations of racism, classism, and harassment that divided Denver. What was the point? The property owner is now promising that the former golf course will become … an active golf course. (This despite the fact that the company has never developed a golf course; its founder told me they’re “doing research on it now.”) Well-meaning objectors judge proposals against a hypothetical better option, but in reality, the alternative to a decent project is often no project at all.
Kelly Brough, who supported the development project and was in the runoff to become Denver’s next mayor, is nevertheless hesitant to embrace state interference. “I can’t say Denver should not control its destiny … I’m just not ready to give it up yet.”
This power struggle is playing out across the country. It’s ostensibly a struggle over housing affordability, but it is also a fight over how we see voters. In polls and interviews, voters express deep empathy for people experiencing homelessness and deep frustration with widespread housing unaffordability. But that’s not the part of us that local government can hear. Instead local politics magnifies our selfish concerns: How will this affect my parking availability? What will this do to my view?
Everyone has a little NIMBY in them. It doesn’t have to be the part that wins.
This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “Local Government Has Too Much Power.”
NEW BUFFALO — Whether to allow the sale of marijuana in New Buffalo is now up to the City Council to decide.
The New Buffalo Planning Commission voted 3 to 1 last week to recommend approval of a zoning ordinance specifying where marijuana shops can locate in the city.
City Manager Darwin Watson said the council will begin the process next month of deciding whether to grant final approval to the proposed zoning ordinance, which would legalize the sale of marijuana in the city.
Unless amended, the zoning ordinance would allow marijuana shops to locate in select locations primarily on the far east and far south sides of the city.
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Communities were given the option to allow for the sale of marijuana after voters statewide in 2018 chose to make the drug legal for retail distribution in Michigan.
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Winter is here, and so, once more, are mask mandates. After last winter’s crushing Omicron spike, much of America did away with masking requirements. But with cases once again on the rise and other respiratory illnesses such as RSV and influenza wreaking havoc, some scattered institutions have begun reinstating them. On Monday, one of Iowa’s largest health systems reissued its mandate for staff. That same day, the Oakland, California, city council voted unanimously to again require people to mask up in government buildings. A New Jersey school district revived its own mandate, and the Philadelphia school district announced that it would temporarily do the same after winter break.
The reinstated mandates are by no means widespread, and that seems unlikely to change any time soon. But as we trudge into yet another pandemic winter, they do raise some questions. What role should masking play in winters to come? Is every winter going to be like this? Should we now consider the holiday season … masking season?
These questions don’t have simple answers. Regardless of what public-health research tells us we should do, we’ve clearly seen throughout the pandemic that limits exist to what Americans will do. Predictably, the few recent mandates have elicited a good deal of aggrievement and derision from the anti-masking set. But even many Americans who diligently masked earlier in the pandemic seem to have lost their appetite for this sort of intervention as the pandemic has eased. In its most recent national survey of health behavior, the COVID States Project found that only about a quarter of Americans still mask when they go out, down from more than 80 percent at its peak. Some steadfast maskers have started feeling awkward: “I have personally felt like I get weird looks now wearing a mask,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me.
Even so, masking remains one of the best and least obtrusive infection-prevention measures we have at our disposal. We haven’t yet been slammed this winter by another Omicronlike variant, but the pandemic is still here. COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all rising nationally, possibly the signs of another wave. Kids have been hit especially hard by the unwelcome return of influenza, RSV, and other respiratory viruses. All of this is playing out against the backdrop of low COVID-19-booster uptake, leaving people more vulnerable to death and severe disease if they get infected.
All of which is to say: If you’re only going to mask for a couple of months of the year, now is a good time. “Should people be masking? Absolutely yes, right now,” Seema Lakdawala, a flu-transmission expert at Emory University, told me. That doesn’t mean masking everywhere all the time. Lakdawala masks at the grocery store, at the office, and while using public transportation, but not when she goes out to dinner or attends parties. Those activities pose a risk of infection, but Lakdawala’s goal is to reduce her risk, not to minimize it at all costs. A strategy that prevents you from enjoying the things you love most is not sustainable.
Both Lakdawala and Popescu were willing to go so far as to suggest that masking should indeed become a seasonal fixture—just like skiing and snowmen, only potentially lifesaving and politically radioactive. Even before the pandemic, influenza alone killed tens of thousands of Americans every year, and more masking, even if only in certain targeted settings, could go a long way toward reducing the toll. “If we could just say, Hey, from November to February, we should all just mask indoors,” Lakdawala said, that would do a lot of good. “The idea of the unknown and the perpetualness of two years of things coming on and off, and then the confusing CDC county-by-county guideline—it just sort of makes it harder for everybody than if we had a simple message.” Universal mandates or recommendations that people mask at small social gatherings are probably too much to ask, Lakdawala told me. Instead, she favors some limited, seasonal mandates, such as on public transportation or in schools dealing with viral surges.
David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is all for masking season, he told me, but he’d be more hesitant to resort to mandates. “It’s hard to impose mandates without a very strong public-health rationale,” he said, especially in our current, hyperpolarized climate. And although that rationale clearly existed for much of the past two crisis-ridden years, it’s less clear now. “COVID is no longer this public-health emergency, but it’s still killing thousands of people every week, hundreds a day … so it becomes a more challenging balancing act,” Dowdy said.
Rather than requirements, he favors broad recommendations. The CDC, for instance, could suggest that during flu season, people should consider wearing masks in crowded indoor spaces, the same way it recommends that everyone old enough get a flu shot each year. (Although the agency has hardly updated its “Interim Guidance” on masks and the flu since 2004, Director Rochelle Walensky has encouraged people to mask up this winter.) Another strategy, Dowdy said, could be making masks more accessible to people, so that every time they enter a public indoor space, they have the option of grabbing an N95.
The course of the pandemic has both demonstrated the efficacy of widespread masking and rendered that strategy so controversial in America as to be virtually impossible. The question now is how to negotiate those two realities. Whatever answer we come up with this year, the question will remain next year, and for years after that. The pandemic will fade, but the coronavirus, like the other surging viruses this winter, will continue to haunt us in one form or another. “These viruses are here,” Lakdawala said. “They’re not going anywhere.”
Two Los Angeles City Council members embroiled in an explosive racism scandal are refusing to resign. Dismissing days of protests outside their homes and City Hall and rejecting demands from as high up as President Joe Biden to step down, Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo seem to be staying put.
“No, I will not resign because there is a lot of work ahead,” de León told Noticiero Univision Tuesday, which released a partial transcript of the interview.
He was one of four city officials secretly recorded engaging in a conversation that was recorded a year ago but released by The Los Angeles Times earlier this month. The since-resigned Council President Nury Martinez made several racist and crass remarks in it, such as calling the Black son of another council member “parece changuito” or “is like a monkey” ― playing into a racist trope.
Los Angeles City Council members Gil Cedillo, left, and Kevin de León, both Democrats, have been steadfast in their refusals despite immense pressure from the party.
When Martinez said that colleague, Mike Bonin, paraded his son around like an “accessory,” de León didn’t push back. Instead, he joined in on the cruel joke, saying Bonin handled his son the way Martinez carries her Louis Vuitton bag.
In another interview with CBS2 on Tuesday, de León confirmed he would not resign but conceded that he “shouldn’t have made that flippant remark.”
Cedillo, the other council member present for the taped conversation, has not spoken up since issuing an initial apology.
“Clearly, I should have intervened,” he said of his failure to speak up during Martinez’s racist rant. But Cedillo maintained in his apology that he didn’t truly “engage in the conversation” or make racist remarks.
Former leader of the California Senate de León told CBS2 that since the scandal broke, he has not been in touch with Martinez, Cedillo or former Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera ― who was also present for the conversation and was the first to resign from his position.
Cedillo and de León, both Democrats, have been steadfast in their refusals despite immense pressure from the party. Everyone from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to Biden has called for them to leave office like Martinez and Herrera. Acting Los Angeles City Council President Mitch O’Farrell removed both of them from all of their committee assignments on Monday, but that has not swayed them.
DEMOREST, Ga., August 19, 2021 (Newswire.com)
– With thousands of small cities and towns in the United States and scarce resources to oversee them behind the rose-draped sidewalks, corruption wreaks havoc on innocent citizens. But some citizens will not go quietly in the night to let unscrupulous behaviors go unchecked.
Vivian M. Fong’s book, TRICKING THE CITY, spotlights a year in the life of Demorest, Georgia, where municipal affairs are becoming as good of a plot as any for a Southern gothic novel. The only thing is, the author is a curator of the truth. Therefore, this is a biological work—and she will not stop writing until the truth sets her city free of corruption.
TRICKING THE CITY is appropriate and engrossing for any reader interested in, or desperate for, a helpful guide in bringing peace and order to their community.
All proceeds from this book will be donated to the Demorest Springs Park renovation project.
“If you could listen to the heartbeat of a city, you would hear the constant pounding from traffic, people, rattling of infrastructure, even nature vying for space among the innovative crevices of humankind. No wonder city dwellers are dreaming in New York City, sinning in Las Vegas, and falling in love in Paris. Cities are the pulse of life. I am a first-generation Asian American from Taipei, Taiwan, which has a strong heart, with gleaming structures among the tallest in the world, lightning-speed elevators, and bustling night markets. My home has been the city of Demorest, Georgia, for decades, however. Its heartbeat used to be pretty steady, never too fast, yet sometimes slow. More recently, its chambers are disrupted, damaged, and compromised.” –Vivian M. Fong
On Sale: August 23, 2021 Price: $18.99 ISBN: 978-1-7376189-0-4 Contact: mfong@prodigy.net
