VOTE NO ON MEASURE S.
The sponsor of Measure S is a Michael Weinstein, founder and current chief executive of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the organization responsible for the billboards which appear throughout the Black community offering free HIV testing and promoting tolerance of gay Black men. Mr. Weinstein and his organization have done praiseworthy things in their efforts to combat both homophobia and AIDS. However, recently, Mr. Weinstein has devoted his energies to a not very praiseworthy effort to rid the city of Los Angeles of Black and Brown people through his dishonestly promoted initiative which is supposed to save “our” neighborhoods but which will, by design, result in the eventual displacement of the populations he has tried to trick into voting for Measure S.
The Save Our Neighborhoods Initiative has targeted the communities in Los Angeles where working class black and brown people live.
Yuppies who cannot afford to buy houses in neighborhoods north of the 10 Freeway want to see those neighborhoods where people of color live cleared out, so they can buy inexpensive houses without the nuisance of having neighbors who do not look like them.
The neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, West Adams-Leimert Park, Mid City have the largest number of still reasonably priced (for Los Angeles) desirable houses for families in the city. From the standpoint of the people behind Measure S, the only problem with those neighborhoods is the black and brown people who live in them. The solution to that problem has always been to get rid of them.
With Measure S, those who have long coveted the housing stock where Black and Latino people live have figured out a way to get uninformed and ignorant Black people to vote to remove themselves. Real estate professionals tell you that the determinant of a property’s value is Location, Location, Location. You have never heard any of them say that property value is determined by Current Residents, Current Residents, Current Residents. Think about the fate of the Native American population of this land. What happened to them is what Measure S is designed to make happen to you.
Los Angeles has the highest rents and the highest house prices of any city in the United States with more than one million people living in it. House prices and rents are higher in San Francisco, another city where the “liberals” and “progressives” who lie about their concern for minorities have established housing and land use policies which have forced almost all the Blacks and Latinos to move out of the city. Here in Southern California, Santa Monica and West Hollywood are perfect examples of what the supporters of Measure S want Los Angeles to look like: low wage people of color can use public transit to get to the service jobs which are available from them, but at the end of their work day, they are expected to get out of town, because living in those cities will be restricted, solely by high prices generated by limiting construction in the face of growing population, to high income residents, which the overwhelming majority of black and brown people are not.
The basic idea behind Measure S is to engineer residential segregation like that which existed in racist South Africa, by making it impossible for ordinary people who own houses and apartments use the homes they already own or may buy in the future to create more housing for their friends, families and neighbors. The supporters of Measure S are lying to you when they say they will block “greedy developers” from making your neighborhoods unaffordable for people like you. What they want is to make your neighborhoods unaffordable for you by raising the price of housing all over the city and forcing yuppie homebuyers into neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway to buy up all the housing in South L.A. with the help of the their family’s money.
The ultimate goal of the racists who came up with Measure S is very simple. With no new housing built on property that already has a house on it, and no new housing built on land that has not yet been developed, because there is almost none left in the city of Los Angeles, those who can afford to pay the higher prices which will result will be exclusively white or Asian, Chinese, Japanese, or Indians, along with the Arabs and Iranians who have bought up so much of Beverly Hills. People of color will be forced out of the city.
Since there are shortages of housing in every area of Los Angeles County, with the exception of the Antelope Valley (Lancaster area), and shortages or no affordable housing to be found in Orange and Ventura Counties, working class people of color are going to find themselves forced to move to the cities where the upper classes think their servants and menials should reside, far away from them, in San Bernardino County.
VOTE NO ON MEASURE S.
