Here We Stand In Common Cause

An Open Letter to the Community

Fellow Residents:

 We are presently engaged in a struggle to save the precious and special nature of our City and our quality of life. The signature beauty and identity of our City is at stake. City Hall has chosen to partner with commercial developers who seek to maximize profits at the expense and to the detriment of substantial residential interests.

For too long at too great a cost to our quality of life, City Hall has embraced with obsequious deference the development community, while, with dismissive disregard, has ignored important and cherished residential interests and meaningful rights.

To keep in place our “village community” with notions to maintain acceptable levels of traffic, we, the residents, had required years ago that our City incorporate in our General Plan and codify, in our Municipal Code, the three story/45-foot height and density limits. Today, regretably, City Hall honors these significantly important height and density limitations in their breach.

If City Hall continues unabated to embrace excessive high-rise and high-density commercial projects, we will witness not only destination gridlock on our major boulevards and substantially increased traffic on our residential streets but also a morphing of our “village community” into an asphalt cavernous high-rise extension of the Wilshire corridor.

We are not prepared to sit idly by and witness and permit the slow undoing of our quality of life. We believe that profiteering developers are cunningly assisted by ex-Mayor lobbyist types, who with unique access to City officials trade and peddle their influence at City Hall.

If we choose to remain silent, City Hall will change forever the natural beauty, grace and charm of our City.

We stand at the crossroads at this watershed moment in our City’s history.

The following analysis will explain why and what we can do about it: