“I want to stress one word to you today, the word is opportunity.”

So said the man at the podium, to the audience of hundreds, including us, at the auction held yesterday at the Universal Sheraton. His company was selling 20 units of a condominium recently built on Acama Street.

The ballroom, gaudy, and badly furnished with patterned carpet, was filled with thousands of hopefuls, each carrying a $5,000 cashier’s check, hoping to get a bargain “in the greatest city in the nation, quite possibly the world”, in the auctioneer’s words.

Some were old, some were young, but all were lured here by low, low prices starting at $279,000 for a three-bedroom stucco sprayed unit near Vineland Avenue.

Heavily advertised, on TV, in print, and online, the property in exclusive Studio City, sits within lungshot of the Hollywood Freeway, whose deafening and poisonous roar has continued non-stop for the last 60 years. But not even the bad air, bad architecture and low groan of the carbon emitting monsters were enough to dissuade these potential buyers.

To attend one of these events is like going to Las Vegas. You imagine you will walk away much richer, and possibly set for life in either money or security or both. This event had all the fakeness and false promises of the upcoming American political conventions.

No sooner did the staccato Southerner start speaking into the microphone, then floor walkers pointed to each bidder, as the prices climbed within microseconds to half a million. Like Spring in Chicago, we missed the transition from low to high. A well-dressed Korean man and his family “won” the first unit at “only $510,000” plus 5% fee.

We sat and watched two more units sell within five minutes, and then we got up and left. There were no bargains here, only a crafty company unloading 10 million dollars worth of possibly valuable, probably overpriced, junk.

But we remember the opening speech well, as the speaker implored us to buy in the state “everyone in the nation, if not the world wants to live in.” We are supposed to believe in his words, partially because of his testimonial about buying a home in Orange County 15 years ago, that later bottomed out, and now is worth three times as much.

Yet there was no mention of California’s great San Bernardino or Stockton yesterday. I wonder why.