To the editor: Roger Vincent and Itzel Luna’s story about downtown L.A. business owners’ demands that city officials adopt policies that help them make more money reads like an advocacy piece dictated to them by the business lobby (“Downtown L.A. businesses are in crisis. Owners want politicians to deal with it,” May 25).
It starts with a scary story of a crime (despite crime rates being at near-historic lows), then repeats the business lobby’s everlasting demand for more police to sweep away unhoused people. It cites “businesses in this part of L.A.” and makes claims about what they want. Then it quotes Nella McOsker of Central City Assn. without any explanation of what the organization is.
CCA is the powerful business lobby that represents banks, developers and other multinationals like Amazon. Despite support for a few local nonprofits, the guys with the shoe store and the gift shop aren’t what CCA is about.
CCA has a long history of advocating for criminalization of unhoused people and removal of poor people from downtown. Just ask anyone who lived on Skid Row during the Safer Cities Initiative of the 2000s when police, as advocated by CCA, were ticketing and arresting thousands of people for simply existing on the street.
CCA’s latest campaign, as filtered through this “news” story, is more of the same — more police to harass, ticket and banish unhoused people. What we need to end houselessness and make downtown and the city a better place is housing, nutritious food, healthcare and opportunities for all people.
Pete White, Los Angeles
This writer is the executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a homeless advocacy nonprofit.
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To the editor: In order to solve a problem, you have to understand what caused it. Many forget that before the pandemic, downtown L.A. was growing swiftly as a residential area — a phenomenon in that increasing numbers of people were choosing to live in a downtown area even while working elsewhere.
Then came COVID (and no, our public health officials didn’t overreact. The deaths of more than 1 million Americans were related to COVID. Thousands more Angelenos would have succumbed because of our high residential density had drastic measures not been taken). Some small businesses never fully recovered, a situation aggravated by the work-from-home trend even after the pandemic. This all took its toll on small downtown businesses and street traffic in general.
Downtown’s woes aren’t the result of a single politician’s missteps, as Spencer Pratt would like us to believe. And failed strategies like “throw the homeless in jail” and “broken-window policing” won’t solve them.
Thomas Bailey, Long Beach
