California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Tuesday that he had allocated $101 million in new spending on low-income housing in the areas devastated by the Palisades and Eaton Fires, confirming residents’ fears.
Residents have long worried that state and local authorities would use the opportunity provided by the fires to build low-income housing — perhaps even for the homeless population, or for housing for illegal migrants.
When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appointed Steve Soboroff as “chief recovery officer,” without any kind of public process, some residents suspected that Soboroff’s role would be to push for “affordable” housing.
Many residents felt that there was already “affordable” housing in the area, whether the trailer park near Pacific Coast Highway, or postwar bungalows that had once been cheap before rising dramatically in value.
Local developer Rick Caruso — who ran against Bass in 2022 — argued that Pacific Palisades should retain its pre-fire character, while Soboroff argued that state law required new low-income housing to be built there.
Some more conspiratorially-minded residents wondered whether the fire had been allowed to spread — or even set deliberately — to allow politicians to build low-income housing on what was once prime real estate.
Last week, Gov. Newsom signed a rollback of environmental regulations to allow low-income housing to be built more easily in urban areas. While hailed by many housing advocates as a deregulatory measure, the new law also paved the way for low-income housing to be built in fire zones.
Tuesday’s announcement by Newsom will add fuel to suspicions that the real goal of state and local leaders is not rebuilding, but redistribution.
The Center Square reported:
Six months after the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires, California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled $101 million in funding Tuesday for “multifamily low-income housing development” that will “contribute to a more equitable and resilient Los Angeles.” The priority is for “geographic proximity to the fire perimeters of the Eaton, Hughes, and Palisades fires.”
Earlier this year, The Center Square broke news that California state law and a local Los Angeles ordinance require fire-destroyed rent-protected housing — which includes all apartments in the city built before October 1978 — be replaced with low-income housing. Because the affordability requirements use county-level income data, not more local incomes, definitions for “low” and “very low” income housing reflect much lower incomes than the norm for the affluent Palisades community.
“Thousands of families – from Pacific Palisades to Altadena to Malibu – are still displaced, and we owe it to them to help,” said Newsom in a statement. “The funding we’re announcing today will accelerate the development of affordable multifamily rental housing so that those rebuilding their lives after this tragedy have access to a safe, affordable place to come home to.”
The push for “affordable” housing could also allow some developers to benefit at the community’s expense. For example, many residents oppose a proposal by the owner of a gas station that exploded during the fire to build a low-income tower in the center of Pacific Palisades.
The proposal would allow the property owner to make money, but he has portrayed his own motives as altruistic, while describing critics of the plan as selfish.
While Newsom promotes low-income housing, many residents are struggling to rebuild, thanks to the fact that many lost their insurance policies and were forced onto the California FAIR plan, on Newsom’s watch.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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