Exit crime and poverty, hello happiness. : The Class That Money Can Buy

It comes as no surprise that the Los Angeles City Council hates crime and poverty. However, unlike many legislative groups that spend months and perhaps years attempting to alleviate their causes, L. A. has come up with what appears to be a quick, sure-fire method of eliminating them overnight: You simply send them someplace else.

This is implicit in a neighborhood renewal plan that would force 3,000 low-income Latinos out onto the street in Northridge to make way for renovation of the apartments they now occupy. This, in turn, would allow for an influx of, as proponents of the plan suggest, “a new class of tenants.”

Exit crime and poverty, hello happiness.

The way it works, see, is that by upgrading 30 buildings in question, the apartment owners could then raise the rent. This would effectively block the poor from moving back in. And once you get rid of the poor, you’re just naturally going to eliminate all the grubby street crime. People with money break the law on a higher, more sophisticated level.

South Africa has solved its racial problems in a similar manner by sending its blacks to the social equivalent of Someplace Else, and everyone knows how well it has worked in Johannesburg.

To thank for the L. A. proposal we have none other than Hal Bernson, God’s best friend on the City Council. Hal is a former T-shirt salesman and conservative Republican who represents the Northridge area.

His prior methods of solving social problems generally follow along the lines taken by his current plan to eliminate crime and poverty.

Three years ago, responding to the complaints of business interests, Bernson declared war on street vendors and, through the judicious use of the Department of Building and Safety, chased the vendors northeast into another district.

Earlier this year, responding to the complaints of real estate interests, he declared war on topless bars and dirty bookstores, demanding that they be driven out of his district and clustered in an industrial area someplace else.

And two weeks ago he began applying the Someplace Else Theory of social adjustment to crime and poverty.

The City Council, in a preliminary vote, approved the proposal that could soon become law, to the detriment of the poor but to the happiness of that New Class waiting just around the corner.

Bernson has been talking about doing this since October.

Fighting poverty by making money has always been the American Way. There just seems to be a little confusion about who ought to be making it, that’s all.

The councilman and his backers in the Instant Redevelopment Plan deny with some heat that there is anything racist about their intentions. It is simply a coincidence that the 3,000 tenants are mostly Latino. If they were mostly black they’d get thrown out just as fast.

Bernson explained at one point that he simply wanted “good” tenants in the area. Apparently, Latinos are not good tenants, an extrapolation of the national policy that has won us so many friends south of the border.

Members of the council who voted for Bernson’s Good Tenant Proposal, by the way, are now saying that they didn’t realize exactly what it involved and endorsed it only as a courtesy to a colleague. One can only be grateful that good old Hal wasn’t declaring war on Canada.

To someone with a city councilman’s limited perceptions, the idea of what-you-don’t-see-

can’t-hurt-you must be appealing. By shipping the poor and their taco-tinted crime wave out of Northridge, Bernson is, to the best of his intellectuality, solving the problem.

The poor Latinos may not like it, but then they aren’t the ones who contribute to good old Hal’s campaigns.

What struck me most as I walked through the neighborhood that Bernson wants to remake in his own image is not the condition of the apartments that so offends the councilman’s sense of Anglo aesthetics, but the great presence of children in the three-block complex.

Their voices ride the wind as they play in their yards, on the sidewalks and in the alleys behind their homes--homes, incidentally, that poor people around the world would die to possess.

The message the City Council imparts to them, whether intended or not, is a message of racism written for the sake of political expediency and temporary solutions. They don’t belong here, they belong in a Land of Someplace Else, out of sight and out of mind.

If good old Hal is allowed his way, that neighborhood of 30 apartment units will indeed be swept relatively clean of crime and poverty.

One can’t help but wonder, though, what new dangers await as the years pass and the children grow and the angry armies of Someplace Else call us to account for the arrogance and ignorance of a man who used to sell T-shirts.