Letter to the Editor:
Because of California’s 20th century “car culture”, the name “motel” was coined in San Luis Obispo during 1925 by Arthur Heinerman. Nowadays, vintage motels converted to residential rental properties are a fad with 21st Century LLC developers, especially in the City of Burbank. From 1974 until 1980, the TV series The Rockford Files annoyed the real-world’s corporate and LLC culture. Indeed, it is instructive to watch episodes filmed in old Burbank, affording glimpses of downtown, the Olive St. Bridge, sometimes even the Maui Apts, built by 1956, located at 1300-1304 W. Olive Ave. Like all other Burbank structures and buildings, the Maui Apts await the expected BIG ONE earthquake and its aftermath. Perhaps, as in Motel of the Mysteries, an amusing 1979 archaeology excavation’s fictional interpretive text set in AD 4022, where experts then find its preserved artifacts to be indecipherable.
Burbank’s present-day controversial “Rent Cap” policy argument is an inappropriate label for the discussion. It IDs an apparently contrived misimpression of the topic (actually, an official limit on legally allowable annual percentage of rent increases, not the capping aof all commercial property rents). It is an example of bureaucratic “Impression Management” which mis-instructs taxpayers as well as generating a linguistic “fog” obscuring the bureaucracy’s opaque activities. In fact, a near-lie that misrepresents future regulatory performance that exceeds the governmental legal capacity of do-ability. All Burbank tenants, exemplified by those at Maui Apts, enduring relentless renovation eviction actions, are a still-forming 2025 special interest group that is forced by connected developers and professional politicians to oppose powerful Los Angeles NGOs entities (AAGLA). In brief, opposing camps are trying to grasp control of Burbankers futures, and their culture. It’s an unnecessary fracture of our society.
Residential rentals can remain charming while also changing to accommodate geophysical and economic realities. However, inappropriate city planner policies have stymied the melding of marginalized Burbankers (renters, actually +50% of the City’s current population), all facing the consequences of impending and coming renovation evictions. “Rent Cap” is primarily used by both LLC developers–perhaps best characterized as “entrepreneur entrappers–and bureaucrats who employ this generated phrase as a semantic “wall” erected solely to frame the taxpayers outlook and future post-5 November 2024 visualizations of municipal legislative efforts! Dominance of vocabulary, including politicized urban planner’s jargon, offers few possibilities for taxpayers to discuss what is “better” and “for whom”.
It is impossible to make informed neighborhood housing projections based on feeble, unverified data or to reduce uncertainty by gathering some highly selected additional information, as Burbank’s bureaucracy has done so far. Uncertainty means urban planning and City Council decision-makers, along with all Burbank renters, likely cannot agree on different “Future Burbank Scenarios”. Renters, even those afflicted by predaceous LLCs, hope for some additional conformance of the City of Burbank’s enforced laws and regulations for rental housing that encompasses its adaptation to a more profound and enduring urban adjustment of the rental affordability aspect.
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
Burbank
