“We remain committed to seeing this tragedy through until every last person is back on their feet,” he said.
Almost a year had passed since the Los Angeles Police Department — in what can only be described as an appalling act of incompetence — accidentally blew up an entire neighborhood while trying to dispose of a giant cache of fireworks.
The explosion flipped cars, shattered windows and cracked foundations. Seventeen people were injured. Even worse, dozens of working-class Latino residents were displaced, forced to leave the modest homes they rented and owned for what the city said would be a temporary stay in a luxury hotel downtown.
And so Price doubled down: “We’re serious about not leaving until every family is served, until our community is restored.”
But that was June and this is February. And what is still morally righteous is now apparently politically inconvenient.
As my Times colleague Brittny Mejia reported, city officials are ready to evict the remaining 57 residents from their 20 rooms at the Level Hotel at the end of March, whether they have a home to return to or not. It seems the bill — now topping $2 million in taxpayer dollars — is getting a little too rich for the city’s blood.
Besides, according to Price, some of residents are “kind of gaming the system a little bit,” dragging out the repairs to their homes, and their work with the city and insurance companies — two institutions that are, of course, notoriously prompt.
Why would these residents do such a thing? To live crammed together in a luxury hotel room, of course!
“They’ve had it good living in the hotel rent-free for several months,” Price told Mejia. “They want that to last as long as it can.”
“We want to be sensitive to the needs that these families have, but we also have to be sensitive to the fact that this is not an open-ended project where people can just stay at a hotel free of charge until they are ready to leave,” he added.
As if the residents were more enamored with having minibars, hot tubs and big-screen TVs than the comforts of home, with their own bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and belongings.
I’m actually floored that Price would even say these words on the record to a reporter. As one of three Black members of the L.A. City Council and its president pro tempore, this isn’t a good look. In fact, it’s an absolutely terrible one for a man who represents a majority Latino district, which happens to be one of the poorest in the city.
It’s also a terrible look for Los Angeles. After all, we’re a blue city in a blue state, where liberal politicians love to go on and on about how they care about people, unlike those coldhearted, penny-pinching conservatives in red cities and red states.
What Price said actually reminds me of what former Vice President Mike Pence used to say when he was the governor of Indiana, trying to impose work requirements on poor people who received food stamps and other forms of government assistance. You know, people who were kind of gaming the system a little bit, buying lobster instead of government cheese?
In their defense, Los Angeles city officials insist that service providers have been assigned to work with every family still living at the Level Hotel to help them access resources and relocation help, including applying for Section 8 housing vouchers.
“The story should not be that families are on their own trying to make do after this terrible situation,” Price said. “We have insisted that they have a variety of services available to assist them.”
In other words, they’ve been funneled into the same terrible system that has consistently failed to get unhoused people into permanent housing and is so broken that we just had an entire mayoral election centered on fixing it.
Others who lived on the now boarded-up 700 block of East 27th Street have been left to try their luck with the rental market. It’s probably going to be bad luck because apartments are so expensive across Los Angeles County that more working-class people become homeless every day than get housed.
It’s no wonder then that residents like Cindy Reyes are fed up. Her family is waiting on the city to approve permits to begin substantive repairs to their home.
Others have been fighting with insurance companies and fighting with city officials about the repairs that are needed. Some, like Reyes, are waiting to hear back from the city about this or that, or from their lawyers about how not to lose even more than they already have, even as they continue to pay mortgages.
Meanwhile, their homes remain vacant, boarded up and uninhabitable.
“Why do I have to go through this struggle?” Reyes asked at a recent community meeting. “You guys blew up my home. Why do I have to do all this?”
In the sudden rush to evict these 57 residents, what Price and city officials seem to be forgetting is that they are victims — not of some natural disaster, but of a taxpayer-funded man-made one. Or two.
There’s the LAPD bomb squad that chose to pile too many fireworks, including the unstable homemade variety, into a containment vessel and detonate it in the middle of a neighborhood. And rather than be cautious and weigh the amount of explosives first, a bomb technician decided to guess — and guessed wrong.
And then there’s the city of Los Angeles that, for decades, has not made it a priority to build enough housing to keep prices affordable. And now these residents, many of whom were living in overcrowded housing to begin with on East 27th Street, have limited options on where to go next.
There’s no need to subject them to another man-made disaster with an eviction. These families deserve to be made whole. So far, the city has only reached settlements in 129 cases out of 414. There’s a long way to go.
Back in June, Price bragged that “since Day One, my office has been at the center of emergency relief efforts.”
Yeah, but what about tomorrow?