Gary Slossberg For LA City Council District 13

When I first got involved, I was under the impression that the main function of the neighborhood council was to serve as a platform for neighbors to take real ownership of their community and not just rely on city servants to take care of everything.

Last week I was at Heliotrope and Melrose for an ArtCycle meeting. Heliotrope and Melrose is the hub for ArtCycle, a neighborhood-based, arts event that we are hosting in East Hollywood on 2/28/09. We hope ArtCycle will raise the profile of our neighborhood and ‘shed light’ on the developing arts businesses that have sprung up around East Hollywood.

After the meeting, just as it was starting to get dark, I walked over to introduce myself to one of the local businesses, a bicycle store, to see how the owner might want to participate in the event.

He said, “You’re on the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council? Let me show you something.”

He took me outside the front door of his booming business. “Look at these streetlights,” he said. By now it was fully dark and all the streetlights were dark too.

Ahhh wonderful, I thought. Here I am trying to promote an Art Crawl to this business owner and he’s showing me that until we take care of serious public safety problems this is no place to host an arts event. It’s too dark. We should host a light bulb changing event instead. In fact, at one of our planning meetings, a young woman seriously suggested we have a fund raiser at the ArtCycle to raise money for streetlight bulbs.

A year ago, a spokesman for the Department of Public Works came to an East Hollywood Neighborhood Council meeting. I think he was a bit surprised that board members and stakeholders were respectfully taking the opportunity to hold his feet to the fire. But it was worth it because it worked. For a brief period of 9 months or so, the lights went back on, the potholes were being repaired and when I called 311, it was as if they knew me.

Lightless in East Hollywood

Edgemont at Melrose, a street without light

Melrose between Vermont and Normandie is again blacked-out at night. Normandie between Rosewood on the South and Monroe to the North is also blacked-out. Normandie just South of Melrose, is totally dark. These dark streets are unsafe for motorists and pedestrians.

My initial impression that people around here needed the neighborhood council to help them take ownership of their space has changed. People from all over the neighborhood are calling, emailing and inviting City agencies to meetings. Although it is dark on the streets of East Hollywood, I can now see that it is the City who needs to take more ownership of this neighborhood. Nearly 4 acres of prime East Hollywood land are being used to house city lamp posts for the rest of the city. How do we motivate our city servants to fix the installed street lights so that the good people trying to run businesses, plan ArtCycles, walk and drive the streets of their neighborhood can get on with their work?

~Jennifer Moran

All the locations mentioned below are within two blocks of each other.

There’s a cute Spanish style multiplex up the street from where I live. And it’s boarded up with plywood and a chain link fence. Sort of detracts from the charm.

Charmless Spanish Style employs City’s own Design Standards.

Maybe this sounds like a symptom of a bad economy. But that’s not it. It’s been left this way for 7 years. It’s owned by Ronald McDonald House. They bought it in along with 5 other residential lots up the street in order to build a bigger hotel for guests who bring their sick children to the nearby Children’s Hospital. They built the hotel but left this particular parcel of land to waste away. (RMH is a worthy organization and what I am attempting to demonstrate is in no way belittling the important role they serve to the families of sick children.)

Understandably, the residing neighbor on the North side of this property is not a big fan of the dilapidated building. She takes excellent care of her property. She and husband are constantly painting over gang tags next door and hearing trespassers rustling around inside the units. The residing neighbor on the south side of the property says he hears people in there too from time to time doing, “…God knows what”.

Craftsman copies styles from the City’s nearby Light Yard.

A block away sits another abandoned property; a charming, old craftsman house on Virgil. It’s been abandoned for years. I could see inside before they nailed boards onto the windows and doors. The inside was covered in tags. Another neighborhood council member informed me that it was being used by squatters for prostitution and drugs. Now this house has a 9-foot tall chain link fence that surrounds its perimeter. One of the sides of the fence has a gaping hole.

Almost as unattractive as the City's Light Yard down the street.

A block in the other direction is a vacant double sized lot on a small, residential street. It’s been vacant with a breached chain link fence for the past 7 years. It sits there taunting the children who play in the street because there is no nearby park. Less than a block away from that vacant lot, is the DWP’s light yard which looks similar to a vacant lot only it is less attractive. The city thought that historic route 66, right across the street from a Carnegie Library, in one of the most densely populated areas of Los Angeles would be a great place to store light posts for the rest of the city. Behind a 12 foot high, razor wire fence that is patrolled nightly by a security guard, sits the worst offender of all: the light yard owned by the City of Los Angeles.

Child walks by city light yard on way to school.

Unidentifiable substance behind the fence. Hope it's safe for the children on their way to school.

If we can only hold landlords as accountable as we hold our own city agencies then I suppose things could get worse than they are now. It would be nice to think that property owners care about the community more than they do about their profits but this is not usually the case. But when the city’s own example of how to maintain property is such a hideous eyesore (located smack dab in the middle of 3 elementary schools no less), the standard for what everyone else needs to do to comply has been set. Why shouldn’t gangs and squatters look at this neighborhood and feel right at home. They can literally run recession proof businesses with no overhead and, at the same time blend in with the image the city puts forth in her own properties. Maybe the city’s plan is to attract all the crime to my neighborhood so it is more centralized.

As this week’s entries have made clear, there is a big gap between the rhetoric of Councilman Eric Garcetti and his actions while on the City Council.  From development to parks to fiscal responsibility, it’s evident that he is not being truly responsive to the community.

One shining example: For the past year, members of the East Hollywood community have complained about the vacant lot on Western and Carlton.  Although it is less than a block from Councilman Garcetti’s field office, it remained littered with trash and gang tagging.  Whenever residents contacted Garcetti’s office, they were told to contact the City, and the City would take care of.  Yet, after over a year, nothing was done to remedy the situation.

That was until one of the complaining residents brought her concern to one of the volunteers for my campaign.  My campaign contacted the City, arranged for the lot’s clean-up, and agreed to paint over any new graffitti that went up thereafter.

On both Saturday and Sunday, my campaign painted over fresh graffitti.  We then purchased a chain and lock to secure the gate to the lot in hopes of keeping away taggers.

As experience has shown, consistently painting over any new graffitti day after day is a great deterrent to tagging.  In many cases, the taggers evenutally realize that their efforts to tag that area are futile.  This morning as I walked to work, I was heartened to see that there was no more graffitti in the vacant lot.

It baffles me that what my campaign was able to accomplish with a few phone calls and persistence could not be accomplished by Garcetti’s office in over a year.  I understand that the demands of a Councilman are many, but if you are going to pride yourself on your reduction of graffitti in the community (as Garcetti does constantly through his newsletters), you may want to start by taking care of the graffitti that is right across the street from your Field Office.  I think this begs the simple question: Councilman Garcetti, when you make claims about your accomplishments for the community, are you telling us the truth?