While three-fourths of the Pacific Palisades fire victims remain in temporary housing almost a year after the devastating fires, and local officials stall rebuilding approvals, Gov. Gavin Newsom is focused on building his socialist projects on the burned land.
Anyone who suggested that there were outright failures on the part of authorities and secretive plans for land grabs after the January Los Angeles fires was decried as a liar and a conspiracy theorist. Almost a year later, the truth is much nearer to the claims of the “conspiracy theorists” than to the claims of Democrat politicians. Surprise, surprise.
Indeed, last week the Santa Monica Observor reported, “Gov. Newsom Allocates $101M for Low-Income Housing on Burned Palisades Lots.” Newsom is claiming this will help victims, but many people are labeling it for what it is: a government land grab. Turns out those people who said officials were not approving rebuilds so they could use the land for their own projects were not so crazy after all.
This is not just about yet another government project that California cannot afford. What Newsom is doing is taking lots that used to have businesses or single-family homes and turning them into socialized government tenements. He is literally transforming Pacific Palisades, making permanent the fire’s destruction.
What makes it particularly shameful that Newsom is focused so much on his own plan to transform the Palisades in Marxist fashion is the following, reported last month by the Los Angeles Times:
• Roughly 75% of surveyed Pacific Palisades residents and 67% of surveyed Altadena residents are in temporary housing, a new report found.
• The report highlights that 1 in 5 of households that earn less than $100,000 a year have had to cut back on food; about 1 in 6 have had to skip medical care.
And it is highly unlikely that most of those people will ever be allowed to rebuild or capable of rebuilding again.
The red tape choking the rebuilding effort in the Los Angeles area has become infamous. As of July, for instance, only 31 out of 842 received building permit applications were approved, and only one of the approvals was for the Palisades, per the Pacific Research Institute. Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass received so much bad press that now Bass is pretending to care and just approved the first plans for an allegedly faster rebuild of the Palisades. Then again, she has been promising a faster rebuild for quite a while, so this could very well turn out to be another empty promise.
Speaking of fishy behavior, my colleague Victoria Taft wrote about the bombshell texts uncovered in October showing that Los Angeles firemen were ordered to leave the scene of the Palisades fire by their top brass despite knowing the fire wasn’t out. The rest is history written in fire and ash. The fire was also so spectacularly awful because California Democrats refuse to engage in conservation and fire prevention efforts that woke environmentalists condemn. Not to mention there was an empty reservoir and dry fire hydrants thanks to bureaucratic incompetence.
All of which is to say that the leftist authorities in California, from Newsom to Bass to the L.A. Fire Department, created the catastrophe and are now exploiting it to their advantage.
