HJCinLA

Finally finished the whole thing, and I wrote down a few notes while listening: - Solid performance for Raman, in a mildly hostile environment - It's an interesting path for Raman to be a 'centrist-progressive' because it might be enough to be elected mayor but she will have no chance on a state or national level. Then again, LA mayor has never been a springboard for anything. - @OppenheimJason, like many other RE people are going with Raman. We'll check how this plays out in 2 years More specific notes: - If LA is expensive, what prices would she consider affordable? What should a house cost? What should rent be? This question is never asked, ever - Homelessness is just assumed to be linked to housing costs, as if it's a given (not true) - Rent control on new homes - she keeps saying that but it's not true. There's rent control on brand new homes. LAHD is issuing rent control restrictions on brand new structures all the time. Many of the new apartment buildings in LA are deed restricted, which is similar to rent control. Plus she passed the JCO on all properties in LA - She supports ULA reform but not explanation why did she support ULA to begin with. Why should be trust her judgment when she could not see what we all saw when it was time to vote on it? - She talks about imbalance in eviction courts and giving tenants free lawyers evens the balance, which is hysterical. All the laws are tenant favored, the courts, the administration, new laws, the procedure, city hall, self help centers... And I don't mind the free lawyers, whatever. Saying there was imbalance in LA eviction courts is laughable. - She talks about a small number of bad tenants taking advantage of the laws - which is true as a whole, but it's the majority of tenants taking advantage of tenant protection laws in bad faith. Again, if I was facing eviction I would do the same thing, I don't blame the tenants or their lawyers, it's the system and the lawmakers - Interesting discussion when Graham asks Raman "why does a person deserves to live in Santa Monica" and Raman basically answers that it's her job to engineer some kind of society mix of poor and rich through legislation. As a concept I don't have an issue with that, the problem is - the costs to get there are severe. Many of the woes in the city can be traced to this baseline desire to engineer this kind of "diverse" community of income of all kinds. You can give a person free housing, but you then also have to give them free/discounted everything else because everything is 10-30% more expensive than say, Palmdale where land is cheaper. - This is basically the same argument advanced for unfettered mass immigration. "We need the cheap labor". People like Nithya say we need more workforce housing, we need blue collar labor force close by. The flip side of that is just higher wages, just sayin' - Graham mentions the 4th street project, at a cost of $1m+/unit. Raman supports the high costs and union labor. Does not say what premium she is OK on her end, just a generic statement she can bring the costs down with cutting red tape - Unlike other local races, Bass/Raman race is strictly local, no discussion over things non-LA related. There's barely any personal attacks, style arguments, affiliations, connections to people... It's basically as close to a policy differences as you can get.