That ‘Upscale Art’ Quality Claimed for L.A.’s Billboards Is Actually Litter on a Stick

Billboard lobbyists have a new tactic in their campaign to whitewash a dirty industry: portraying billboards as upscale art. In reality, billboards are an intrusive, down-scale medium that blights our neighborhoods and degrades our landscape.

Pictures on billboards can be beautiful, ugly or just ordinary. But when they are enlarged to 700 square feet, raised 100 feet in the air and randomly spread along every street, they become a form of litter--litter on a stick.

In Los Angeles, billboards dominate the landscape, overshadowing buildings and trees, marring the city’s scenic beauty, lowering property values, blighting neighborhoods.

The Sunset Strip is a brash symbol of Los Angeles’ commercial excess. Fine, preserve it. But ask yourself this: Should every street in Los Angeles look like the Sunset Strip? Should billboard companies be allowed to plug cigarettes and booze next to schools, churches and parks? Should you be forced to look at outdoor ads 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, everywhere you go?

There are no billboards in Beverly Hills, but inner-city black and Latino neighborhoods are being overrun with them. Research shows that there are more billboards in these neighborhoods and that a much higher percentage of them advertise tobacco and alcohol than other products.

Billboard lobbyists exalt the new foreign-language billboards but these ads take on a different light when you look closer. As health conscious middle-class consumers cut back on smoking, the tobacco lobby targets minorities and the poor to make up for lost sales. Billboards are the medium of choice for this carcinogenic campaign.

Billboards are a parasitic industry benefiting a small interest group at enormous cost to the public. Billboards rely on taxpayer-owned roadways to supply their captive audience. For an annual permit that allows them to gross up to $5,000 a month, per sign, they pay California cities a pittance in property taxes. In San Francisco, for example, billboards gross $60,000 a year each, but the city gets only $26,000 in property taxes for all of the city’s 1,000 billboards combined.

Most billboards have nothing to do with traveler information: The largest number advertise cigarettes and booze. Some do provide motorist information, but there are better ways to provide the same information without destroying our scenery. Small standardized logo signs do the same thing much more reliably and at less cost.

Tourism and property values go up--not down--where billboards are controlled. This is why almost all premier vacation resorts such as Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, Palm Springs, Lake Tahoe, Hilton Head and Martha’s Vineyard ban billboards. Hawaii banned them years ago, as have Alaska, Maine and Vermont. All have prospered.

Billboard regulation does not violate the constitutional right to free speech. In 1981 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a community may ban all commercial billboards.

So why are billboards still going up everywhere? Because billboard interests can lobby lawmakers faster than we can educate the public.

This is the lobby that in 1986 paid more money in honorariums to members of Congress than any other American industry, except defense and tobacco.

This is the lobby that regularly holds seminars on how to subvert local regulation.

This the lobby that employs a strategy of massive resistance to regulation of any kind.

This is the lobby that has opposed billboard control in Los Angeles for two decades, recently killing a proposed new ordinance by a single vote.

Right now the billboard business is hard at work trying to turn every city street into a continuous outdoor commercial.

Tolerate some billboards in Los Angeles, but clean up the clutter. A visit to the city should be more than a drive through the Yellow Pages.