Letter to the Editor:
The Hollywood-Burbank Airport’s shortest runway is 5802 ft-long, about 36% of the USA’s longest runway at Denver, CO. Where once Hollywood workers living in Burbank (and even those not but associated with major Hollywood corporations) had a big say in day-to-day civic operations of the city (still ridiculously dubbed with the indisputable PR-contrived lie) “Media Capital of the World”. With Hollywood’s ignominious nationwide decline in public respect as well as its obvious crashing financial prosperity, after 16 December 2024 a new group soon will shape Burbank to their liking. In other words, as Hollywood has rapidly transformed itself into an economically stranded asset, investors have cast their eyes at the City of Burbank.
While there is a latent willingness among Burbankrs to be involved in our city’s future development, self-interest and constrained perspectives in busy individuals are limiting factors for effective collaboration with developers and the City Council. Our real estate developer-dominated Burbank City Council has failed to properly assess the downstream effects of the ongoing financial re-calibration of the State of California. Briefly, it is now timely, considering the State’s huge deficits and Hollywood’s State subsidies from Sacramento, for the City Council to defy the Legislature’s laws forcing an enormous local increase in housing! To avoid overcrowding, taxpayers must restore our everyday control of the obvous character, heritage, and values of our urban landscape, to maintain its distinguishability from other Southern California locales.
Seize the moment Burbankers: the history of human life has never been without changes: change is the norm. Burbsnkers must strive to persuade the newest City Council members of the ominous liability of believing something is real–namely, so-called affordable housing–when it is not.” Developer-speak” is an unreasonable lingo of great political and financial consequence but of remarkably little linguistic accuracy. For example, “market-rate rent”, falsely alleges market-rate apartments help to subsidize the so-called affordable units, or so mythology says, a mythology prompted and promoted by politicians and property developers, loudly in every kind of media. Using algorithmic processing of their intentionally skewed survey data, developers boost “market-rate” rents by adding the “affordable rents”. In other words, all rents are artificially pushed upwards, making national economy-wide inflation all but inevitable.
A somewhat bizarre 2015-2019 TV series, set fictionally in Seattle, WA, iZombie featured a populace that had been pervasively infected with a corporation-invented virus. The series’ characters worked in a banal “present-day” wherein social and governmental organizations, laws and various bureaucracies continue to operate as before the plague’s onset. Each of the episodes revealed the continued production of a dangerous corporate product within a law and regulatory framework that secured the interests of the corporations and politicians. Now is the opportune time for Burbankers to assign culpability and to take voted measures to dismantle an elitist social structure that hinders our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness!.
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
