Community Meeting

I don't know if I've mentioned this before but I've had an office/rehearsal space for a year and a half or so. My good friend Vinny has this enormous office that he runs his photography business out of (Vinny did all of the photography for my record) and I rent out part of it to store my instruments, practice, etc. The spot is nice and big, I can have a full band rehearsal day or night. Carrie and I also have a lot of old baby stuff stored there.

Last week Vinny and I get a letter stating that the LAUSD (that is the Los Angeles Unified School District also my wife's employer) is looking to build a school in our area and our office building has been targeted as a potential site. You know what that means, bye-bye office.

Now let me just say while giving up the office would be a real inconvenience and a total drag at least its the LAUSD wanting to build a school instead of some corperation wanting to build a parking lot.

There was a community meeting about the site selection on Monday. I've never been to such a meeting so I was quite interested. Representatives from the LAUSD told us there were two sites they were targeting; one of them is at the end of our block and encompasses a parking lot and a condemmned high-rise that hasn't had anything in it for over a decade, the other site includes our building, another office building, and nine residential homes. Seems like a no-brainer right? One site contains nothing but a delapidated eye-sore and the other includes 40 small businesses and 9 homes. At the end of the meeting a few folks (including Vinny) stood up and spoke about what an inconvinience it would be to be forced to move and asked why our site would even be a consideration. I guess the condemmned tower is still prime real estate for more businesses but as I said there hasn't been a thing in the building for a long time and in all liklihood the only types of businesses that would occupy that sort of property would be corperate low-paying retail shops; in my opinion its much more important to keep small business owners around.

There will be more meetings as the LAUSD gets closer to making their decision.

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Published:
at 4:59 PM on Wednesday, December 12, 2007
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2 comments:

  1. KHM 5:38 PM

    If I could hazard a guess, it will all come down to which site will give the desired demographics for the school. Hang in for the ride; when my kids' new school was built a couple of years ago the boundary study was more explosive than any politics I ever witnessed. Speechless. It left me speechless. you wouldn't believe how petty and ugly it can get. Ooooh---that's when the "me first" people REALLY get fired up.

    Like, can you believe some of my neighbors didn't want their kids to move from a school where the demos were 40% White, 40% Asian, 10% other with median household income of about $150K to a lovely new school, nicely staffed, with demos reflecting what our county really looks like: 48% White (non-Hispanic), 22% African American, 22% Hispanic and Asian; median household income more like 120K (hardly poverty level, right)? Seriously---an elementary school. How could household income, parental education attainment possibly play out in the ES level millieu? Right here in our neighborhood? Craaaazy stuff. I want you to know that they had to have police officers at those meetings. People got nasty about things like the change in proportion of homes occuppied by owners versus renters, the proportion of families with more than one full-time parent employed outside the home...it was like...Agrestic.

     
  2. Lyman 5:42 PM

    Agrestic? HAH!

    Demographics won't be a factor, both of the potential sites are on the same block.

     

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