Category: Links

“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.

Leave it to Los Angeles to make a law that will endanger small businesses, create more air pollution, inconvenience people, and waste gasoline. The “Taco Truck” ordinance will require these mobile restaurants to move around and will forbid them from staying in one location for more than an hour.

The NY Times reports how this started:

“They are a blight,” said Omar Loya of East Los Angeles who took his complaints about the trucks to the office of his county supervisor, Gloria Molina.

Ms. Molina’s policy director, Gerry Hertzberg, said the trucks had become “a big quality of life issue” in some neighborhoods.

“Businesses with a fixed place of business complain about unfair competition and the spillover effects mobile vendors have on the surrounding area,” Mr. Hertzberg said, citing litter, noise, public urination and excessive parking space hoarding as typical complaints.

I live in a neighborhood near Sepulveda and Victory without any taco trucks. Yet we also have litter, noise, public urination and excessive traffic.

Taco Trucks provide a cheap and easy way for people to feed themselves. They bring life to the sidewalk and neighborhood, far more than the ugly sight of the mini-mall restaurant that typically blights much of Los Angeles.

Just today, I ate a fresh shrimp Cerviche taco at the wonderful “Mariscos El Manglar” in East LA near E. Olympic and S. Downey Road. It cost me all of $3.00.

Next month, this wonderful business will spend half the day driving around, burning gas and adding to the air pollution in an already poisonously smoggy neighborhood.

Good work Ms. Molina.