To the editor: I’m a never-homeowner residing in an condominium constructing on a avenue filled with condominium buildings. I’m a contract author and pastry chef who qualifies for the Supplemental Vitamin Help Program. (“Los Angeles has to rezone the entire city. Why are officials protecting single-family-home neighborhoods?” Sept. 26)
I perceive why folks in single-family properties are not looking for their peaceable streets disrupted by higher-density housing. I additionally perceive why social justice teams need extra density.
What each side fail to understand is the artwork of empathy and compromise. What we have now here’s a case of competing, reputable wants from all stakeholders. If each side might dig of their heels much less, we might even see some progress on housing.
I dream of residing in a quiet residence with no shared partitions to compensate for extreme sound sensitivity because of neurodivergence. As a local of Los Angeles, I’ve numerous Latino and Black buddies raised in dense environments who’ve labored arduous to to maneuver to single-family neighborhoods. To take that away is an insult.
Elements of Los Angeles are awash in unused industrial buildings and warehouses. In my very own neighborhood, we get well being meals retailer after well being meals retailer, health club after health club, and we don’t want any of it. These industrial heaps can go to reasonably priced housing.
Is degrading the standard of life and property values of some Angelenos by constructing high-density housing in quiet neighborhoods the reply? Metropolis leaders ought to ask themselves this. Maybe we must always prioritize innovation and empathy.
But when there actually are not any options to rezoning residential neighborhoods, then it is smart to go that route.
Tracy Chabala, Los Angeles
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To the editor: We have to up-zone single-family neighborhoods to guard residents from bear assaults. Neighborhoods filled with single-family properties naturally appeal to bears. Clearly, the one factor that may push back this ursine menace is a mixture of small and mid-sized condominium buildings, which robotically repel bears.
Disclaimer: This isn’t true. There isn’t any proof that single-family properties appeal to bears. Identical to there isn’t any proof that constructing condominium complexes in single-family neighborhoods decreases property values. A number of research have discovered that residences don’t cut back the worth of neighboring properties.
Some owners select to not consider this truth, and native officers bend over backwards to appease them. Most just lately, the Los Angeles Planning Fee voted to exempt single-family neighborhoods from the town’s new housing plan. In the course of a housing disaster, the fee placated individuals who have chosen to consider in an simply disprovable falsehood.
L.A. policymakers are extra aware of folks’s delusions than precise info. Which is why I urge them to clear the way in which for heaps and many residences in single household neighborhoods earlier than all of us get eaten by bears.
Truman Capps, Studio Metropolis
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To the editor: The Occasions’ editorial board has but once more gone to battle in opposition to single-family neighborhoods, making them out to be the villain in our reasonably priced housing disaster. (“A test for Mayor Bass’ Planning Commission — support affordable housing or preserve single-family zoning?” Sept. 25)
This ignores the 1000’s of vacant and underutilized retail and industrial buildings that await redevelopment all through the town. It’s the job of the mayor and Metropolis Council to provide you with insurance policies and incentives that will make such commercially zoned parcels pencil out for builders.
As an alternative, The Occasions means that single-family neighborhoods be destroyed, ignoring the actual fact they supply social stability and a middle-class presence, to not point out valued property tax income and financial shopping for energy for metropolis coffers.
As soon as these middle-class single-family neighborhoods are gone, the unfavourable penalties are everlasting.
Eric Ritter, Los Angeles