Progressivism for L.A.

* What planet have Peter Dreier and Robert Gottlieb been living on (“A Multiracial and Multilingual Progressivism Is Born in L.A.,” Opinion, March 11)? Can’t they recognize that their “progressivism” is the same old “command” economics that condemned Russia and Eastern Europe, not to mention post-colonial Africa, to decades of poverty and misery?

If their ideal is the “progressive” movement in New York City, they might notice that people live in the subways there, while others who are well off live in spacious, rent-controlled apartments for a few hundred dollars a month. Indeed, there is more abandoned housing in New York City than there are homeless people who might fill it. Heaven help us if housing in Los Angeles ends up conducted, even more than it is now, on the basis of such a discredited ideology.

KELLEY L. ROSS

Van Nuys