To the editor: Columnist Steve Lopez is correct: Los Angeles has requested residents to just accept the unacceptable (“On the blight facet, a stroll round Metropolis Corridor provokes the query: Can’t we do higher?,” April 11). However the blight he describes displays a deeper drawback: a political tradition unwilling to plainly title the forces driving a lot civic dysfunction. And if we is not going to title them, how will we remedy them?
Officers invoke “homelessness” as an intractable social drawback. However the time period has change into a well mannered abstraction that obscures what Angelenos really see day-after-day: extreme untreated psychological sickness, habit, open-air drug use and metropolis and county governments unwilling to intervene earlier than private crises flip into public violence. That euphemism is morally and politically handy. It avoids more durable conversations about remedy, enforcement and accountability, whereas sparing elected officers the backlash that comes with confronting actuality.
That avoidance has critical penalties for residents. Right here in downtown, Angelenos endure the predictable outcomes of concentrating susceptible folks and companies with out ample intervention in the midst of a dense residential neighborhood: erratic habits, assaults and unprovoked violent assaults.
This isn’t a name to criminalize sickness or habit. It’s a name to cease abandoning sick folks to deteriorate in public, untreated and unsafe, till disaster turns into tragedy.
In some unspecified time in the future, Angelenos should ask what we’re keen to tolerate. A metropolis can not get better whereas its leaders maintain enabling the circumstances eroding public life. Los Angeles is not going to start to heal till its leaders discover the braveness to say what is occurring is unacceptable — and act with urgency to revive order, uphold dignity and get folks off the streets and into care.
Leslie Ridings, Los Angeles
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To the editor: I agree with Lopez’s evaluation that the ecosystem that surrounds Metropolis Corridor has deteriorated — monuments, open house, the mall and native retail. Having run a enterprise district for a few years, I realized {that a} neighborhood doesn’t thrive with out folks. So it begs the query: Why are so many metropolis workers working at dwelling?
Metropolis Corridor and Metropolis Corridor East are ghost cities. Final I checked, the pandemic is over. Although indicators of human life would carry vitality to the sidewalks, I see the potential for one thing extra highly effective.
Show me mistaken, however I’m suggesting there’s a direct correlation between the decline in metropolis companies and the continuation of distant work. What’s sacrificed when so many are siloed at dwelling? Cross-departmental drawback fixing. Brainstorming “breakthroughs” that come from being in the identical room. No spontaneous lunchtime conversations, much less teamwork and sadly a decline in on-the-job mentoring.
Kerry Morrison, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Studying Lopez’s column concerning the deplorable situation of L.A.’s panorama prompted my settlement. It’s not simply downtown — the situation of the West Valley is appalling as properly. Not solely do folks use the streets as a public trash can, there may be full neglect. I might hope for beautification, however we don’t even get restore or alternative. Timber bursting their concrete collars, timber eliminated (or lifeless) and by no means changed, bike lane pylons knocked over or lacking, trash cans overflowing, bus shelters coated in graffiti. It didn’t all the time appear to be this. We will do higher.
James Morrison, West Hills
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To the editor: Lopez’s poignant Sunday California part front-page column describes the disgraceful blight and neglect in varied areas of downtown Los Angeles and rightly calls out these liable for this decades-old disgrace. He holds that there’s “no excuse for letting issues go to hell.” Sadly, this shame is widespread throughout our damaged metropolis.
Then on the Sunday Leisure part entrance web page is a full-page exterior {photograph} of a portion of the brand new zillion-dollar pristine LACMA constructing (“The brand new LACMA is divisive. It’s additionally bold, disorienting — and radically alive,” April 8). Within the photograph, the constructing seems, in all its grandeur, to gaze upon essentially the most pathetic-looking unkempt palm tree — similar to the numerous different pathetic-looking unkempt palm timber unfold throughout our metropolis.
Oh, the irony!
Babette Wilk, Valley Village
