Affordable Housing

William Fulton’s column (“Behind L.A.’s Homeless Crisis,” Opinion, Dec. 4) addresses one of the crucial issues facing the delivery of housing in our region, and indeed, the quality of life we are creating. What at one point may have been an ideal worth fighting for--single-family homes on separate lots--has now become an obstacle. As a region which will soon be home to 10 million people, we cannot even hope to house ourselves in suburban tract homes. Recognizing this--and creating city living patterns that will provide for it--is one of the tasks for our local officials. Yet, as Fulton points out, not only former City Councilman Zev Yaroslasvky but others hide their heads in the sand and assume that they can keep this outmoded ideal for at least some of their constituents--usually those that contribute the most--and let the others be damned. The growth will come, but it will not be pretty.

The affordable housing incentives ordinance is nothing more than common sense applied to the delivery of housing for a multimillion-person population, yet it has been languishing for over two years. City Council members who publicly call for quicker and cheaper development become, in fact, champions of NIMBYs when they balk at its passage. Our local leadership fiddles while the city simmers.

JAN BREIDENBACH

Executive Director, SCANPH

Los Angeles

The Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing is an association of affordable housing developers. * Fulton’s observations are not only highly relevant to public housing problems but also education and other major social ills facing Los Angeles and, indeed, the nation.

In this crushing climate of political correctness, too frequently lawmakers and public officials lose sight of social and economic reality and pursue unrealistic goals to assuage spokespersons for the needy rather than the needy themselves.

This political pandering has also forced public school educators to lower standards so that “everyone can graduate”--whether qualified or not--and to go to community colleges, also at taxpayer expense. Political correctness will also destroy the financial viability of our public health-care system if we continue to make it available to everyone from non-citizens to terminally ill people needlessly kept alive on support systems.

Let’s do everything we can to help the financially and intellectually underprivileged and the physically helpless, but let’s use common sense in providing the assistance they so critically need.

N. RICHARD LEWIS

Los Angeles