Who is on Trump's payroll at The Breeze?
The third article this week on the opening of the Trump National Golf Course. Why is a "public" golf course, getting so much ink from The Breeze? This isn't a place that 99% of us will ever have any use for, or even see the inside of, it's a massive waste of what could have been protected coastal lands, and a poke in the eyes to all of us who have treasured the remaining open spaces on our peninsula. Maybe tomorrow, they'll start posting the happy yuppies' scores in the sports section, and we can follow the action from afar (where we no doubt belong) every day.
26 Comments:
I missed that one. Looking at pictures of that place makes me remember how beautiful it used to be before Zuckermans and Trumps got their filthy paws on it.
Besides, I was too busy reading Donna Littlejohn's happy sunshine lollipop column on the new condos in More San Pedro. The usual witlessness, of course, only this time she gave much of it over to an email from some lady by the name of Bonnie Stoeppelman who has been gracing Pedro with her presence ever since 2004, and it was unintentionally hilarious in its unvarnished honesty: "In my opinion, the only way to get rid of crime is to replace bad areas with areas where 'yuppies' want to live." Hell, at least she admits that that's what it's all about.
And as for all these POLA naysayers, with all their talk of carcinogens and death zones and such, well, our Miss Bonnie deftly dismisses their concerns: "Do we want to be remembered as an obstructionist generation who did nothing but drag our feet using the guise of environmental issues?" Well, not when you put it like that, Bonnie! Heck no--I say full speed ahead! That's not micro-particulate pollution and stack gas you're smelling, folks, that's the smell of old-fashioned gumption!
Needless to say, Littlejohn found nothing objectionable about any of this. Clearly, we are all in good hands with Scoop Littlejohn on the port development beat.
I better wipe my feet, I don't wanna track gumption all over the caepet...
carpet. go to bed, phillip.
Make sure your gumption doesn't lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight.
Ha ha ha. I kill me.
AMEN!
Well, if we get a few thousand yuppies paying $500,000 a pop for condos in the death zone, maybe we'll get a little real movement on the issue when they figure it out and start screaming.
Or maybe they'll just go quietly, as Mike Lansing's and Herb Zimmer's, and, alas, S. David Freeman's, "silent majority" seem willing to do.
Plus - Thanks IMBG. There is no way to put it any better.
Has Freeman used the term "silent majority"? That suprises me.
Yeah, I'd like to know too whether Freeman is using that term. Up until now, I had associated that particular Nixonian argument with the Papadakis types, i.e. those who are openly and unabashedly in favor of megamalling the waterfront for the cruise ship terminals. If Freeman is using it in that context, that would suggest that the optimism accompanying his appointment was misplaced. Could Freeman be a Kool-Aid swallower like the rest of them?
At last week's meeting on the Port's "strategic plan", he said that he wished the he could find out what the "silent majority" of people who were too busy with their jobs and family lives to come to meetings or participate thought.
He prefaced his comment with some disclaimers about its political incorrectness, but he said it.
Naturally, those of us who scarifice from our jobs, businesses, and families in what we perceive to be self defense were somewhat disappointed, but we're not going away.
In defense of Freeman, I don't think he was using the term in a way resembling the Papadakis & Lansing crowd. From your description it sounds a lot more like he was questioning either the existence of any "silent majority" or that he was lamenting that most of the meetings in town are dominated by the same "meeting junkies", "activists" and "operators".
I'm certainly not going to count him in the same pack as Lansing and Papadakis based upon that statement. When they use the term, they are directly attemping to push an agenda regarding a specific project or projects. To my knowledge, Freeman isn't either in their pocket or on their team, so it jsut seems like a poor choice of words given the loaded nature that the already loaded term has taken in our local process.
The Daily Breeze couldn't have shone the spotlight on a worse cheerleader. I just don't get Stoeppelman's statement. It makes no sense. It's basically condos = good, crime = bad, yuppies = less crime (she's essentially right on that point), environmentalism = less condos?
Wha? Huh?
Still, I didn't read her comment on the 'obstructionists' as being directed at POLA naysayers, so much as those who are quick to justify their opposition to Pedro growth using environmental concerns. It's not like anyone wants to build an extra refinery. This is more housing we're talking about here, that just so happens to be commanding market rate.
(And while we're at it, don't be too eager for the housing bubble to burst. Such an economic event will inevitably screw the renters too by driving up the demand for rental housing and raising everyone's rents. Basically, everyone's gonna get shafted.)
Don't be too quick to get on her case for being a self-proclaimed yuppie (ok, her pluckiness was kinda corny). Pedro is predominantly made up of people in her tax bracket. You couldn't possibly hate them all, could you?
What are your solutions to the crime rate in San Pedro?
Oh, for chrissakes! Let the idiots play their $300 rounds of golf if they want. What's your real incentive for dissing on them?
You know, what really bugs us about you is just how arrogant you boys are, sitting there on your computers taking potshots at the 95% of people who fall outside your narrow little views of utopia and amusing yourselves with imagined coups on Palos Verdes. (Right, and we're gonna topple Uzbekistan, right after we finish this thrilling game of Axis and Allies). You think you can change the world by saying the word "wealth" in a sarcastic enough tone. The world isn't gonna get by on artists, activists, and longshoremen alone. You'd probably be happy if San Pedro were left to just you guys and your imaginary girlfriends. Those yuppies that you're so quick to dismiss -they're lawyers, researchers, educators, doctors, nurses, analysts, business people, technicians, architects, entrepeneurs, programmers, law enforcers, firefighters, sales people, engineers. And you know what? While you're pettily insulting them all for their buying habits and tastes in homes, clothes, music, recreation and cars, THEY AREN'T THINKING ABOUT YOU. THEY'RE BUSY DOING WHAT THEY DO.
And you - IMBG - you bore the shit out of us. We may not be the silent majority, but there are at least 4 of us here who think you're an unproven kid, dripping with entitlement, with a casual card and big fuckin' chip on his shoulder. Your ideas are good maybe 15% of the time, but any worth is totally buried under the whiny vitriol you spew the rest of the time. You think you can shock people into submission by unpleasantness alone. Well, Mr. Fight Club Wannabe/coward, your angle is totally transparent. You have all the conceit of a brat who respects just a handful of people, and yet somehow, against improbable odds, holds himself up among them. That's why you piss on everything and have nothing but pity or bile for the rest of us. We're calling you out. You can't really bring it cause you don't got it. So mellow the fuck out, at least until you've actually done something worthwhile with your life.
That's the royal "we," right, Sabella? Or is it the Silent Majoritarian "we," as in "me and the thousands of solid middle-class citizens in cloth coats who just so happen to agree with everything I say, and in whose humble names I speak"?
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. Normally when somebody bores the shit out of me, I don't compose a book-length rant telling him or her why, but different strokes and all that. Just out of curiosity, how many hundreds of words would you have devoted to me and my life story if you actually found me interesting?
Cali, I hope you're right about Freeman. It seemed out of character for him, which is why I asked. Irony doesn't always translate so well when somebody is being quoted in print.
Pedrochix (another plural? This silent majority schtick is starting to overwhelm me), my solution to Pedro's crime problem is hokey and unoriginal: better education for kids and decent jobs for adults(not to be confused with jobs selling snowcones to cruise ship tourists for $6 an hour). Obviously, neither of these things can come about overnight, and both will require systemwide changes well beyond the scope of Pedro or L.A., but I'll still take that over the velvet-gloved ethnic cleansing of gentrification any day.
Mull this over for a minute, Pedrochix: promoters of the Exciting New Changes In San Pedro® have lately been fond of talking about the need to "attract" information technology workers to San Pedro in order to spiff the place up and create a customer base for all the marvelous new businesses they propose to create. Do you not find it the least bit insulting that they seem to want to import those well-paid IT workers from other, more affluent communities, rather than pushing to bring real high-tech education to the local schools and create a generation of San Pedrans with marketable skills and the economic clout that those skills bring? Sure, the latter plan would take longer compared to simply importing yuppies from Redondo Beach, but who exactly are these Exciting New Changes® supposed to be benefitting--us or the developers? Do the boosters think that San Pedrans are ineducable?
Love,
I Might Be A Whole Bunch of Giants
(Hey, if you guys can do it, so can I...)
Sabella & gang:
I can only speak for myself here.
1) Why the course is being singled out for attention? I find it extremely sad that the Breeze has chosen to do so much puff coverage on the opening of the Trump National, as there are so many important things happening in the South Bay that are more important to more of their readers than an ultra-exclusive golf course. What are the priorities there that call for 3 articles in a row on the opening of niche sports facility?
2) I knew the Zuckerman family growing up. Even as a teenager, their desperation to build the course was apparent, I found it pathetic then. Right after it initially opened, I did some freelance art installation at the course, as both a favour to a friend, and as an opportunity to get inside and see the place. I can only say that I hope that Trump's people have re-built the entire building's structure. From my analysis, the scrabling Zuckermans built it on the cheap. I wouldn't want to be there in an earthquake, let alone a landslide.
3) I'm from Palos Verdes, I still live on the Peninsula (in the San Pedro portion, and I don't live imagining some invisible line of class seperates me from my friends and associates who live in and of the four other Peninsula cities). I've seen much of the native beauty of P.V. get eaten up by scrawl since the 80's, and I think that the golf course and associated housing development really put a negative impact on the character of the area.
4) I hate golf. I think it's a waste of space - my beef with golf is my own opinion, and it is one I hold both passionately and irrationally (although I think my reasoning is perfectly fine, of course). I'm aware that not everyone agrees with me on this. I just don't like golf. I've never gotten it as a sport, and I most likely never will. I'm also not keen on the impact that golf courses make on the environment, and I also consider them largely to be eyesores.
5) Look I don't have a jealous bone for people who indulge in expensive sports. I'm also a white collar professional who likes to throw my hard earned income at my recreational activities. My beef is with golf. My beef is that the venue for the expensive sport is a large swath of formerly beautiful coastal land. If someone wanted to build a super exclusive, $300 dollar a pop, semi-public bowling alley in a building in a developed part of town, I'd have no problem with it. People have a right to develop private property to serve the demographic of their choice.
6) I've never dismissed yuppies - I have stated here and elsewhere that Longshoremen are the yuppies of San Pedro. They have upper middle class incomes, they spend their money in ways similar to traditional yuppies and I view them as natural occupants for the condos being developed in San Pedro.
Oh and to the new posters, hello and welcome aboard. Hopefully you'll stick around.
Calimari wrote:
Longshoremen are the yuppies of San Pedro.
Oh, that does it. Pistols at dawn.
Will gentrification really have ethnic cleansing effects? I'm not so sure of that. L.A. no longer has enough white people to go around.
Also, as an IT worker, I can assure you that most high-tech folksies are NOT spiffy. In fact, most of them look more like that that Michael McDermott guy who shot all those people in a Boston office. Anyway, I don't think that the arrival of more IT workers in San Pedro would bar the education of the next generation of tech workers. I know folks from an IBM company town in Vermont, where everyone's dad was designing semiconductors or writing program code or working in a clean room. If anything, the older generation of skilled tech workers only encouraged tech savviness in the younger generation and led them to pursue higher educations. So I wouldn't expect more IT workers in Pedro TODAY would do more harm than good.
Pedrochix wrote:
Will gentrification really have ethnic cleansing effects? I'm not so sure of that. L.A. no longer has enough white people to go around.
I know that a lot of white folks feel threatened by not being a majority anymore, but let's not get carried away here. There are still plenty of white folks in LA. If you don't believe that gentrification results in ethnic cleansing, you must not have been to Adams Morgan in D.C., or Fort Greene in Brooklyn.
Also, as an IT worker, I can assure you that most high-tech folksies are NOT spiffy. In fact, most of them look more like that that Michael McDermott guy who shot all those people in a Boston office.
Well, you know that, and I know that, but...
Anyway, I don't think that the arrival of more IT workers in San Pedro would bar the education of the next generation of tech workers.
It wouldn't particularly, but it raises the question of why import them in the first place, except for the racial/economic cleansing effect. The would-be gentrifiers don't appear to be interested in doing anything for Pedro's current population; instead they seem to want to replace it.
Hell, if it's so important to some people that white and/or affluent people come downtown and spend money, a program like Calimari's "shop local" campaign would do more to accomplish that than building a bunch of new condos and hoping that yuppies come. There are already plenty of clean cut people here with money to spend, but most of them have swallowed the notion, with the rest of America, that it's more convenient to make a 45 minute drive to a mall and walk across a three-block-long parking lot than it is to take a five minute drive downtown and walk three blocks.
If you ask me, and I say this only half-jokingly, there are too many white guys in San Pedro - specifically the kind with the big pickups, mud tires and shaved heads who seem stuck in an East Texas time warp. If pressed, I'd rather see those guys and their inferiority complexes on wheels be the ones chased out of town, but only because I've seen too many of them acting/driving like assholes.
I'm just kidding about wiping them out. I'm sure many of them are perfectly nice people with tragically bad taste in transportation. They're definitely the most highly visible (no pun intended) element of the 'current population' to me. And they're not poor, or even particularly in the majority. Is it me, or is this just an utterly weird way to 'brand' our town? I'd hate to see a future San Pedro that was built to accomodate more of this bizarre cultural strain. So on the subject of development and gentrification, where do the monster truckers figure in?
There are already plenty of clean cut people here with money to spend, but most of them have swallowed the notion, with the rest of America, that it's more convenient to make a 45 minute drive to a mall and walk across a three-block-long parking lot than it is to take a five minute drive downtown and walk three blocks.
I have to disagree with the notion that San Pedro is 'consumer-ready' as is today, and most people are driving out of town out of necessity. I'd much prefer to drive downtown to get all my shopping done, but there aren't enough goods and services yet to constitute a decent selection. When I shop on the internet, I always look at 2 or 3 of the same or similar products before making my selection. I can't do that downtown, if I find anything to buy there at all. I dunno. I've tried to shop downtown and it's always just a bit of a letdown. I don't need a megamall, but I want to make purchases on my terms. Is there anything being done to attract new retail stores downtown? What's the climate towards big retailers like Borders or the Gap opening up downtown? (I have to confess, I live in t-shirts from there).
This stuff is great. Exactly the public discourse we need about the future of our community. Congratulations to all of you who are thinking so carefully about these issues.
All killer, no filler! We may not agree on every issue, but the discussion is priceless.
How about stepping out and sharing this stuff with MAV, Janice Hahn (JH) and the Harbor Commission (BHC)? If they get some letters that are as thoughtful as these comments, maybe they will pay some attention.
This is so far advanced from what went on at the Port's "scoping meetings", for example, that it is several orders of magnitude better.
At a minimum, I think that I will print this out and send it to all of the above.
Well done. Thanks especially to Calamari for sort of inciting these exchanges.
Pedrochix, I'm not a huge fan of the big truck / shaved head / "bad boy" wannabe culture either, although a lot of these guys are my coworkers and, as individuals, are perfectly decent dudes who would give you the shirts off their backs, if they were wearing shirts. Doesn't make their trucks any less obnoxious, though.
I'd hardly call this a Pedro thing, though, or worry too much about our little town in particular being "branded" by their tastes. This subculture seems to be everywhere these days, especially in the Valley and Orange County (where a writer for the OC Weekly a few years ago memorably gave them the collective label "Bro-Magnon Man").
No shopping in Pedro? Going to the mall out of "necessity"? Chicken and the egg. People think they "need" to go to the mall, so downtown businesses lose money and can't afford to keep a large stock of merchandise that may not sell, so people think they "need" to go to the mall, so downtown businesses lose money and...
I don't know how old you are, Chix, but you know those big department-store-looking buildings on Pacific Avenue? Those used to be department stores. To this day, my grandmother occasionally needs to be reminded that no, you can't go downtown and buy a nice suit or dress. In her day, you could, and you had your choice of places to go. My point isn't to wax nostalgic for a time way before I was born, but to point out that America's mall culture has screwed up people's perceptions to the point where they find it unimaginable that good, diverse shopping can be had in anything other than a mall or a row of big-boxes. Go to any medium-sized (not talking Paris, here) European city that hasn't been malled-up and you'll see all the goods that we associate with The Mall on display in the shop windows on the high street. It only seems weird to us because American shoppers a few generations ago collectively made a really bad choice and abandoned their downtowns for the more car-centric shopping centers and malls.
Peteraslocke: if you can't read well, at least read slowly. I never suggested that downtown's offerings are adequate to sustain an entire town's shopping needs. What I am saying flat-out is that if Pedroids, rich, poor and in between, can be persuaded to think out of the big-box long enough to come back downtown and explore what is there--the shops, bakeries, galleries etc. that Cali mentioned--it will give downtown's business owners a reason to start catering to them by stocking more (and more diverse) merchandise and offering more diverse services. If the current business owners are too shortsighted to do so, I guarantee you that upstarts will jump in to fill the breach.
Perhaps you've noticed a trend recently in the construction of new shopping centers: the enclosed Del Amo / Sherman Oaks Galleria model is out, and developers are trying to emulate organic neighborhood layouts with open-air construction, "sidewalks," benches and so on. They mostly do a lousy job of it; "City Place" in Long Beach, its shortcoming thrown into sharp relief by its proximity to Pine Street and the East Village district, is a good example. But the market force they're responding to is real. Americans, it seems, have been catching on over the last five or ten years to the disadvantages of the malls--the sterility and sameness, the floor plans and policies that discourage lingering and interaction, the fuller and fuller parking lots and the more and more gridlocked streets on the way there. Americans are starting to call for something more like the downtowns that they abandoned late last century, and that's what developers are trying to give them.
Well, the hell with that. We've got a real downtown here, and a Pacific Corridor stretching almost all the way down to the beach. We just have to learn how to use it again. A few pioneers, followed shortly by the crowd--that's how social changes happen.
It will require something of a sea change in how Pedrovites view their town, and their daily lives. But it's a funny thing about sea changes: they seem impossible--impossible!--until all of a sudden they seem inevitable.
You think you hate the truck-jock crowd. I've got them up at Angels Gate every afternoon after school, tearing up the place, driving down hillsides. Back when the school board property wasn't fenced off, they would spin donuts there in the rain for hours, drunk as skunks. Sometimes I even catch they bringing up trailers of off-road cycles or ATVs to have some fun. Recently, the Cultural Center's been putting up small barriers, and that seems to work. Recreation and Parks has made no effort to discourage the activity, why, I don't know.
IMBG is right about Pacific Avenue. Although I think the area will need more parking to support more sucessful businesses on Pacific, historically, it was packed with large department stores. When the ferry stopped running and the bridge was built, the lack of after work foot traffic killed downtown and Pacific Avenue, which has led to the sorry state of business in Pedro today. There is no reason why large stores couldn't return to Pacific Avenue right now, with restored facades and selling the exact same stuff you see in any mall in America (I may not want to buy that junk, but I'm sure most of Pedro does want to and is already buying that stuff at Del Amo). Look at New York, San Francisco or Paris - all of those cities have neighborhoods where older facades contain chain businesses, in walking neighborhoods (often served by light rail). There is no reason that Pacific Avenue couldn't develop in that fashion. It would require some agressive planning and regulation, but it's certainly within reach, and a much better idea than developing Ports 'O Call as an outdated mall while downtown continues to rot.
There's still a key issue regarding the growth of small or local businesses - who are the locals that will grab the reigns and bet their savings and future on the economic viability of their town.
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